Lev Vygotsky Quotes

In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

I've only got anywhere with Minecraft by getting my friends to explain it.

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

The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.

Divisional exercise is a great game of make-believe.

Every game has to teach you how to walk, run, talk, use.

Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

Learning and the exchange of ideas is dramatic.

What is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn?

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

The development of a child is guaranteed in his curiosity to discover the cause behind each and every incident.

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

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.

The only 'good' learning is that which is in advance of development.

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.

Once your mind stretches to a new level it never goes back to its original dimension

He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates his own to the stature of that he contemplates.

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.

It’s not whether children learn from television, it’s what children learn from television... because everything that children see on television is teaching them something.

I'm always talking to people. It's not that complicated. I just find somebody and say, "Do you have any ideas." If they do, we just start thinking things around.

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.

If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article. You will not improve as a reader if all you read are books that are well within your capacity. You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.