How we improve as a people

Or baby steps to being an independent

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with a new man lately.

Sadly, he’s been dead for almost a century. Thankfully, he left many words to read.

He is one of those people I know if we had met, even with language barriers, we would have found a way to share thoughts and ideas because of the passion I read in his essays.

Lev, he is called, was born in Belarus at the turn of the last century. His stance on individual development of abilities is one that I admire and have seen in the world around me within my lifetime.

Not enough is known about his early life to understand why he moved to Psychology and study people. Still, when he did, he brought forward thoughts that are being considered but perhaps not used enough in our current world.

I think part of the reason I so admire him is because, like me, he was interested in diverse subjects and, unlike me, was able to spend time in research and theoretical expansion of ideas. I am enamored with his work on language and thought development, but I am spending more and more time thinking about his ideas around sociocultural environments - or, more simply put - how connection and action shape a child, a person, and a community.

Whether we call it the hive mind or ancestral knowledge, I have always been interested in how we bring knowledge forward from generation to generation and why such enormous gaps sometimes have nothing to do with learning capability. Lev puts it simply: think about riding a bicycle. You can see it and identify it, but until you interact with another being that helps you up and onto your first set of wheels and shows you how to master the skill, only then will you “know how.”

This, to me, is a significant cornerstone of human development that deserves more of our time. Parents instinctively used to know this. Spend time with your children doing things you usually do and they will learn and then give the child space to figure out things. From that space of, say, learning to hold a pencil, a child mimics at first but then finds their own style and rhythm until, eventually, they have not only mastered holding the pencil but have adapted it for themselves personally and possibly, hopefully, improved upon it.

Slow connection gives us these tools and allows us to teach each other things from everyday basics to more complex tasks like cooking and beyond.

I am happy to see so many people cooking for themselves from videos that can be watched over and over again. Perhaps this is the improvement? But I still thirst for the human component.

For more information about Lev, check out: Lev Vygotsky