Reviews for Restructuring the Baltic Economies: Disengaging Fifty Years of Integration with the USSR

The average rating for Restructuring the Baltic Economies: Disengaging Fifty Years of Integration with the USSR based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-05 00:00:00 Hans Wielinga Note: review based on two chapters I've been able to finish with other stuff I've picked up along the way from articles I've been reading on Mr V. One of the best things about my masters has been getting re-introduced to Vygotsky. Now, Vygotsky is such an interesting theorist that I'm going to take a bit of time out of my studies to write this review. I first bumped into him when I was doing my graduate certificate in adult literacy a million years ago. Actually, I had probably nodded at him as he bounced passed in Oliver Sacks' Seeing Voices - such a wonderfully fascinating book. Sacks says something to the effect that the fact Vygotsky was not discovered in the West for so long held back Western psychology by decades. Big statement, right? Vygotsky was a Marxist, although, not really a plan and simple Marxist. You see, like Christians there are Marxists and there are Marxists - and just as there are Christians who have never read the Bible... There was a wonderful scene in a comedy show I watched once where some young people were sitting around trying to read Capital and then they sais, "This is boring and all too hard, let's just go kill someone instead." That isn't the kind of Marxist that Vygotsky was. He was a Marxist who had read his Hegel. We need to start with Engels. Engels (I think in 'The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man') said that what makes humans essentially human isn't so much that we are social animals or that we have language or even that we are logical - but that we make tools and use those tools to create environments that suit our needs. Those new environments then change how we relate to the world and so we make new and other tools which again change our environment and so it goes on. Notice that there is no end to this process. We have development and we have new ways of engaging with the environment and then we have a new environment and then we have more development and so on. Notice also that learning leads development - we learn how to use a new tool and then we end up with a new environment and we have developed. Vygotsky says much the same thing about learning in general - that is, that learning leads development. For Engels an important point in this cycle is the dialectical interplay between our mental development and how we develop tools and then how those tools change the environment we live in. A dialectical relationship isn't a simple causal relationship. If you push one thing it generally pushes back - change one thing and it changes you in turn. Then there is Vygotsky and he wants to figure out how kids learn. There are behaviourists, like Skinner, who say that it is a waste of time trying to get inside the heads of anyone else, you simply can't do it - what you need to do is look at what inputs you are providing someone and how they respond to those inputs. At around the same time there were people like Piaget who were saying that there were developmental phases kids have to go through to function as fully rational adults and so we ought to structure tasks so that the tasks are appropriate to the level of intellectual development of the learner. He also points out that if you want to engage a kid in learning you really need to trouble the kid - snap the kid out of its equilibrium. This, as you'll see, is very much similar to Vygotsky's ideas. Or there was Dewey, who felt that kids learnt best when they were presented with engaging tasks that sparked their aesthetic sense. Dewey was also influenced by Hegel and this shows up in how difficult he can be to read at times. I'm likewise becoming fascinated by Dewey, but mostly because he is so prescient. I've just finished a wonderful book called the Literacy Wars and, to be honest, it might as well have been written by Dewey 100 years ago. Vygotsky, kicking around in the 1920s, was worried that all of these theories of learning were presenting psychology with a bit of a dog's breakfast of facts and counter-facts. So, what to do? Well, the most interesting thing he did was to come up with what he called the Zone of Proximal Development, and which, I and everyone else in the universe, calls the ZPD. What do we normally do when we want to see how intelligent a child is and how well the child is likely to go on learning - that is, to test what is their current 'potential' as learners? Well, the first thing we do is sit them down and give them a standardised test. Let's, for sake of argument, say that the standardised test is an IQ test - they all amount to much the same thing. So, I get a couple of eight year-olds and I give them an IQ test and they both get 103 - that is, pretty much average. Is that all we can say about them? How much does that actually tell us? For Vygotsky it tells us something, but not terribly much. It tells us what these two children have successfully completed and matured in with their learning. To answer a question on the test the child must have fully understood that particular field of knowledge. So if there is a maths question like what does 9x5 equal - and the child hasn't mastered multiplication, then the child is not going to be able to answer that question and the child's deficit is clear. But is that the full story? To Vygotsky this is barely the beginning. He said that what two kids had fully assimilated was only half of the story. Take the same two kids and this time give them questions, but also a little bit of help. That help may a bit of a hint or a tool they can use that might assist them with their nine times tables - and the strange thing is that some eight year-olds might be able, with a little assistance, to solve questions you would only expect a twelve year-old to solve and others might only be able to solve questions a nine year-old could solve. This difference in the problems that can be solved is not trivial, it amounts to how 'ready' each child is to learn. Also, a child that can solve problems with assistance that only a twelve year-old ought to be able to do is clearly at a better advantage than one that can only solve problems of a nine year-old. Even if they both have the same IQ. This difference between what they can achieve without assistance and what they can achieve with assistance is called the Zone of Proximal Development - our old friend the ZPD. What is a teacher's task then? Basically, it is to work out what the ZPD is for the students - and why? Because setting tasks for the students that are at or near the boundary of the student's ZPD is the best way to motivate the student. The task is not so far beyond the student that its solution seems unimaginably difficult and not so easy that there is no challenge. The ZPD then provides the optimal learning environment for students. The other interesting thing about this is that, like Engels and his view of the development of society, the ZPD doesn't go away just because people become 'adults'. There is always more to learn and so there is always more development to achieve. As someone who really isn't terribly fond of the whole idea of labels and psychological phases, I much prefer the idea of a ZPD than a Piagetian level of development like the 'concrete operational'. Nevertheless, Vygotsky was very fond of Piaget. The best of this book, which is rather turgid at times, is that it covers Vygotsky remarkably well and is written from the perspective of left-wing types who get the connection to Marxism and Hegel, although, they are better with the connection to Marx than to Hegel. I was fascinated by Vygotsky's work with intellectually disabled students (and therefore this work's relevance to mixed ability classrooms) and also his focus on peer-to-peer learning. The social nature of learning is always stressed - as is the social nature of language and the importance of 'self-talk' in learning - which is pretty much how I'm going to end this review. I've been rather swamped by all of the reading and tasks I've had to do for my Masters - it has been almost amusing just how much work they have given us to do. Anyway, I've found myself talking to myself much more than usual. I'll rabbit on to myself normally, more than other people do, which is probably symptomatic of living alone for quite so long - but lately this has gone completely over the top. I was just noticing this and thinking that it might well be time to check myself into some nut-farm when I read Vygotsky who says that one of the most obviously ways in which we work out how to structure new ideas is through self-talk. In fact, he used to create study situations where he would drag people to the edge of their ZPD and then record what they would say out loud about the tasks they were engaged in to themselves. It is nice to think I'm not quite as abnormal as I assume I am. The absolute final thing is what he has to say about games play. And that is that when we play games we are generally right at the edge of our ZPD - and that is what keeps us interested. As soon as the game gets too close to our comfort zone we immediately lose interest. As soon as it gets too far beyond our comfort zone we give up in frustration - and if that isn't as good a definition of the joys of learning as I know, then it is hard to say what is.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-03 00:00:00 Craig James Fun Fact: I finished the last ten pages while stuck in a traffic jam. As someone who knows little to nothing about contemporary russian history, this was a good way to jump in and have some information stick in my memory, because the information was attached to the stories of the people living in the vysotka. I think my favorite was Galina Yevtushenko, who admitted she maybe never loved her husband and definitely didn't like his poetry.