Vygotsky! Vygotsky!! Vygotsky!!! =
Toronto! Toronto!! Toronto!!!

By Lem Londos Railsback

In August, I purchased a Greyhound-International Pass (a wonderful bargain for less than $400 American) for 15 days to tour the Mid-West, cross the international border into Toronto for the Carib Festival and our N.S.S.A. meeting, visit Niagara Falls, dash across the western provinces to Vancouver, and return to Laredo, Texas. Needless to say, I walked funny -- like I was molded into a chair, as one neighbor put it -- for the first few days after my return. However, my mind and my spirits are still soaring from the Toronto experience.
This year's Summer Seminar of the National Social Science Association in August was wonderful! As always. I visited with old friends, I made new friends, I saw new sights, and I learned a great deal. Because we met in Toronto, for the first time in our history, we found ourselves surrounded by many different languages, different foods, different styles of clothing, different musics, and interesting individuals. After all, Toronto, the largest city of the entire nation, is an international financial center, servicing Canada, North America, and the world. I arrived on the last day of the International Carib Festival. The music and the dances transported me immediately into my old days and nights in the Bay Islands of Honduras. Some of the dances and drum syncopations that I saw and heard in Toronto were the same that I had seen in La Ceiba and Coxen's Hole on Roi Tan Island nearly 20 years ago. I was amazed to find that festival participants had come from as far away as Atlanta and New Orleans (probably because of its proximity to the Bay Islands, New Orleans probably holds the largest Garifuna population in the United States), and, likely, various Caribbean sites. Needless to say, my first day and my first night in Toronto were spectacular!
The skyline of the city stretches far along the shore of Lake Ontario. Over time, ancient littoral drift deposits -- continuously moving sand bars, if you will -- originated up-river and moved westward to form a natural harbor between the great Lake Ontario and the Toronto shoreline. Inside that peninsula lie several islands, one of which was known by early European settlers of the area as "Hiawatha's Island." (I had to wonder if the "Hiawatha" that we knew in long-ago elementary school might be the same one that gave the island its name. Researching this could make for a great theme for an energetic high school student.)
On one of those double-decked boats that every lucky American gets to go on at least once in a lifetime, we went for a dinner cruise in and around the islands. From friendly local Torontonians seated at the next table, we learned that a great storm in the mid-1800s had ripped a large gap from the eastern part of the peninsula and transformed the former peninsula into a genuine island, known today as Toronto Island. Over time, on that island, several wealthy families had build summer homes, several hotels had been built at different times, and a baseball stadium had been constructed. Babe Ruth, according to the locals, hit his "first professional home run" in that stadium. As we drifted by the island, I was amazed by the number of ducks resting in the water. Like those pictures we see on television of the soaring birds of an African savannah, the ducks were soaring into the rays of the setting sun and coming back down to feed, to visit, and to sleep.
A couple in our party took the elevator trip in the CN Tower up to the 181st story. The wife got a special scare when she finally looked down because she had not realized that the "floor" of the main Observation Pod was made of a special transparent glass. For the last quarter of a century, this tower has enjoyed the distinction of being the "world's tallest building and free standing structure." As home to a large entertainment, shopping, and broadcasting center, the physical tower itself provides an amazing tour. However, because I was more interested in street scenes at the moment, I omitted the tour. When I return one day, I will surely go up the first few floors.
After the Seminar, I left Toronto for Niagara Falls on the Canadian side, one of the seven natural wonders of the world. Frankly, I was amazed. I finally understood a word that many of my students use often. "Awesome!" That was truly my word for the Falls. I am still amazed at where all that water must come from! I am simply amazed and awestruck at that wonderful place.
Both in Toronto and at the Falls, particularly along the shorelines, the many parks and manicured gardens trumpeted their colors and their scents. Only through long and thoughtful care do such plant embroideries live in all their multicolored splendors! Walking leisurely through one of these plazas/parks/gardens provides a feast for the eyes, for the nose, and for the psyche.
To N.S.S.A., I presented a professional theoretical construct on Vygotskian learning theories. Lev Semyonovich Vygodsky (spelled later in the West as "Vygotsky") was born in 1896 to a middle-class Jewish family in Russia. Well-educated in private school, he graduated at the age of 17 and applied to the university. At that time, only three per cent of the Jewish population was allowed admittance to the university (eight decades before the Clinton "rainbow" percentages!). Eventually accepted, Lev proved to be a very accomplished student/scholar/original thinker and graduated during the Revolution. Interested in psychology, philosophy, art and aesthetics, sociology, psycholinguistics, and pedagogy, he excelled in all of them. Alexander Romanovich Luria, an accomplished world-class researcher in his own right, cited Vygotsky as the greatest genius he had ever known. Alexev Leontiev, who with Luria and Vygotsky formed the "troika of Russian psychology," called Vygotsky "the Mozart of psychology" for his versatility in observation, analysis, and theory-building in all of his interests. Lev was a contemporary of Lenin, Lenin's wife Krupskaya -- with whom he worked at the Commissariat for Education, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov -- whom Vygotsky admired greatly, Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Koffka, B. F. Skinner, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget -- with whom he corresponded and differed on the role of language in the development of the mind, and Alfred Binet -- whom Vygotsky chided for the "static I.Q." (Vygotsky characterized the then-new "I.Q." construct of the French Binet and the American Terman as measures of the fruit already grown rather than the buds and their potential growth. As a precursor of constructivists like Jerome Bruner, Noam Chomsky, Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg, and Krashen, Vygotsky proposed his socio-cultural version of "reconstruction." Lev described the interplay between the societal environment and its words in the development of the mind of a child. Lev's dynamic Zone of Proximal Development still inspires teachers today. The current revolution a la Vygotsky in today's Russian schools and the emerging professional consciousness in the West of Vygotsky's contributions and road maps for our teachers underscore the shared treasure of Lev's thought and language. However, true to form, the societal leaders of Lev's day -- the Stalin thugees -- arrested Lev for his thinking and for his talking and for his writing -- in short, for his over-whelming intellectuality. (Sound familiar? Never happen in this country!) Overworked, frustrated, and worried, Lev, only 37 years old, died in 1934 before he was to be brought to trial. Two years later, the national government, wishing to protect the state from Lev's ideas, banned his books.
Gita L. Vygodskaya observes, "Even though so many years have passed, Vygotsky's thoughts, ideas, and works not only belong to history, but they still interest people. In one of his articles, A. Leontiev wrote of Vygotsky as a man decades ahead of his time. Probably that is why that he is for us not a historic figure but a living contemporary." In the same vein, Lev and I have been talking and listening since 1958 -- vicariously, of course. And I have been following his road-maps since that same year, my very first year of teaching. I have made a few wild turns along the career way, but only because I myself misread the road-maps in every single mis-turn. F. Allen Briggs, my intellectual father and patient mentor since 1955, first introduced me to Shakespeare, Hayakawa, Skinner, Pavlov, and Vygotsky, along with a host of other giants. As I have taught all these years, I have enjoyed the advantage of being able to turn to my friends Allen (American), Willy (English), Sammy I. (Canadian), B. F. (American), Ivan (Russian), and Lev (Russian) for assistance whenever I needed. Like Gita, Lev's daughter, I consider them to be my constant companions and guides for life. For me, they are my contemporaries.
Our friend Lev articulates "wild" ideas about parents, certain peers, and some professionals serving as significant others. His "far out" vision of cooperating students in pursuing relevant common goals is nearly six decades ahead of American learning theorists and nearly nine decades ahead of today's American schools' instructional practices. Some of our educational provincials -- rural, urban, suburban -- still don't "get" Lev's recommendations. Lev's "social reconstruction" notion that each generation re-creates its own culture and language dynamically frames the human condition, regardless of century and regardless of location anywhere in the world. With his multicultural emphasis, Lev would feel right at home in 21st century Toronto. Lev's staunch defense of the freedom of each individual to create that human's reality mirrors the free interactions and celebrations of Toronto today. I suspect strongly that Lev would love to serve today as a teacher-intern supervisor and mentor in the multilingual, multicultural Toronto schools and in the neighboring Montreal schools. After all, the school systems of both metropolitan centres are Vygotskian miracles-in-progress.

(Lem Londos Railsback is a professor at Texas A&M International University's College of Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.)