Popkewitz

Popkewitz on Dewey and Vygotsky

According to Popkewitz, Vygotsky was all about language (based on Russian symbolism). Thinking is active, rather than passive, and language was a means to individual knowledge that then led to an individual’s will to learn. Dewey was all about community (described as a hybrid between Protestant bourgeois society and science in terms of social progress). However, according to Popkewitz, neither of them really impacted schooling very much. Other people did that. Yet, now, they are “no longer marginalized in contemporary scholarship.” His argument, apparently, is this: “The ideas of Dewey and Vygotsksy are given value and structure today within a social context that embodies principles of governing the individual and “citizen” quite different from those that existed at the turn of the century.”

There is a lot of mention of the "individual," and Vygotsky and Dewey did have a lot to do with that. "The human sciences were expected to spread modernity by giving focus to the microprocesses by which individuals became self-motivated, self-responsible, and "reasonable." Thus enters psychology and modernization...and then..."...the site of contemporary pedagogy is still the governing of the soul."
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