Lev Vygotsky Quotes

Learning to read and write makes little sense if you don't understand what you're reading and writing about. While we may have forgotten, most of our early learning came not from being explicitly taught but from experiencing. Kids aren't born knowing hard and soft, sweet and sour, red and green. When the child experiences those things, s/he transforms them into psychological understandings. When kids play with other kids, they learn about others and about themselves. Learning the basics of our physical and social reality is what early childhood is all about.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone

I'm not good with children," the god confessed. "Or people. Well, any organic life forms, really.

The more the father is involved, the more easily the child makes open, receptive, and trusting contact with new people in its life.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you. So, the best way to get them to read, is to read. The best way to get them to do anything is to do it yourself, and they will absolutely copy you. That way, you don't have to worry about what's supposedly age appropriate, a child will pick something up when the child is ready.

I think that there's a lot of anxiety out there in people wanting their children to be part of the mainstream, to achieve based on the well-worn yardsticks.

Being a person, I had come to realize, is a communal activity. Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people.

The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.

Children have an unerring instinct for knowing when they are being patronized. They go immediately on the defensive against head-patting adults who treat them like strange beings.

Children or babies learn to mimic the vibration of the adults who surround them long before they learn to mimic their words.

We've forgotten what it's like not to be able to reach the light switch. We've forgotten a lot of the monsters that seemed to livein our room at night. Nevertheless, those memories are still there, somewhere inside us, and can sometimes be brought to the surface by events, sights, sounds, or smells. Children, though, can never have grown-up feelings until they've been allowed to do the growing.

How hard would it be to ask children what they see in their heads? How big should the house be in comparison to the family standing in front of it? What is it about the anatomy of the people that doesn't look right? Then let them try it again. Teach them to learn how to see and ask questions.

The most revolutionary thing anybody can do is to raise good, honest and generous children who will question the answers of people who say the answer is violence. That's what the schools should be doing.

When the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to the activities of the young.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

Children pay little attention to their parents' teachings, but reproduce their characters faithfully

People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.

I was shy as a child. Now I'm not really shy any more, unless I'm with shy people. I find it contagious and I don't know what to say. But I don't think shyness is something one should feel apologetic about.

People are social beings and want interaction and social learning is the primary form of learning, just as word of mouth advertising is the highest form of advertising.

We must become the people we want our children to be.

One of the pre - requisites for children becoming proactive and responsible citizens is the availability of enough role models inside and outside the school.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

The children-my own and other people's-became the passion of my personal and professional life.

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong.