What a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow.

Lev Vygotsky

Psychologists

Lev Vygotsky

Belarusian-born Soviet psychologist (1896-1934) sometimes called the Mozart of psychology. In barely a decade of active work he opened developmental psychology, education research, the psychology of art and defectology, and left behind three concepts that still organize the field — the zone of proximal development, cultural-historical activity theory, and inner speech as the bridge from outer dialogue to thought. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-seven. Stalin's regime banned his work from 1936 until 1956, and the global rediscovery that followed in the 1960s and 1970s, led from Cambridge, Massachusetts by Jerome Bruner and Michael Cole, makes him one of the most influential psychologists of the late twentieth century.

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