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adults have at their disposal to convey knowledge to children. As learning progresses children's language itself becomes a learning tool that they internalise & "use in their heads" to think about the world. Piaget believed language was a by-product of thought where as Vygotsky believed that language is fundamental for cognitive development & identified the private speech aspect of early childhood play. Vygotsky sees private speech as the way a child sorts out or makes sense of what is happening in the world. Talking aloud fades out as the child transforms what is happening into thoughts & thinking. Once the child realises that every object has a name thought & language are inseparable.

VYGOTSKY VERSUS PIAGET (to summarise)
Piaget drew a sharp distinction between development & teaching. Development, he said is a spontaneous process that comes from the child. It comes from inner maturational growth & more importantly, from the child's own efforts to make sense of the world. The child, in Piaget's view, is a little intellectual explorer, making their own discoveries & formulating their own positions.

Piaget did not mean that the child develops in isolation, apart from the social world. Other people do have an impact on the child's thinking but they do not help the child by trying to directly teach then things. Rather, they promote development by stimulating & challenging the child's own thinking. This often occurs, for example, when children get into discussions & debates with friends. If a girl finds that a friend has pointed out a flaw in her argument, she is stimulated to come up with a better argument & her mind grows. But the girl's intellectual development is an independent process. For it is the girl herself not an outside person who must construct the new argument.

As a proponent of independent thinking, Piaget was highly critical of the teacher-directed instruction that occurs in most schools. Teachers try to take charge of the child's learning, acting as if they could somehow pour material into the child's head. They force the child into a passive position. Moreover, teachers often present abstract concepts in math, science & other areas that are well beyond the child's own grasp. Sometimes, to be sure, children appear to have learned something, but they usually have acquired mere "verbalisms"; they repeat back the teachers words without any genuine understanding of the concepts behind them. If adults want children to genuinely grasp concepts, they must give children opportunities to discover them on their own (Piaget, 1969).

In Vygotsky's view, spontaneous development is important, but it is not all-important, as Piaget believed. If children's minds were simply the products of their own discoveries & inventions, their minds wouldn't advance very far. In reality, children also benefit enormously from the knowledge & conceptual tools handed down to them by their cultures. In modern societies this usually occurs in schools. Teachers do, as Piaget said, present material that is too difficult for children to learn by themselves, but this is what good instruction should do. It should march ahead of development, pulling it along, helping children master material that they cannot immediately grasp on their own. Their initial understanding might be superficial, but the instruction is still valuable, for it moves the children's minds forward. (Theories of development: concepts & applications; Crain William C. 5th ed. p236)

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