Lessons from Lev Vygotsky on the Role of Educators and the Struggle for a New Society

Ivana Otero, Virginia Pescarmona and Federico Puy

 

In Educational Psychology Lev Vygotsky compiles lessons intended for educators and presents, clearly and accessibly, a conception of education and pedagogy based on his practical revolutionary experience as a teacher and researcher in a teacher-training school and other educational institutions in Gomel — southeast Belarus — after the Russian Revolution.

As we have noted elsewhere,¹That is, in Vygotsky’s works already published by IPS: The Historical Significance of the Crisis in Psychology (2022) and Lessons in Paedology (2024). See also Ivana Otero and Claudio Vilardo, “Vygotsky: In the Footsteps of a Revolutionary Life,” Ideas de Izquierda, October 19, 2023; Juan Duarte, “Vygotsky, the Russian Revolution, and Marxism: A First Approach,” Ideas de Izquierda, July 1, 2024; Juan Duarte, “A 100 años de la Revolución Rusa. Vygotski y el álgebra de la revolución” [100 Years after the Russian Revolution: Vygotsky and the Algebra of Revolution], La Izquierda Diario, August 11, 2017. All are available at https://www.laizquierdadiario.com., his work cannot be understood outside its historical context or the revolutionary action in which it was embedded. His interest in psychology related to education was driven by the need to think about social transformations in a society that, after the revolution of 1917, placed the working class and oppressed peoples for the first time in history at the helm of their own destiny.

The publication of Educational Psychology is great news for those interested in Vygotsky’s work and for those encountering it for the first time. It is also significant because, we believe, it helps bridge Marxist thought with education — something academia and government offices have repeatedly kept separate.

At a time when there is an overabundance of educational “proposals” from governments that rarely clarify their true perspectives or goals, having solid foundations becomes essential in today’s educational debate.

So, why Vygotsky today?

Because his work not only offers tools to understand learning processes but also invites us to transform society.

Education as a Class Question: Resisting Neoliberal Advance

The recovery of Vygotsky’s works, which we have been undertaking at Ediciones IPS, occurs in a context of global capitalist crisis, in which a reaction has emerged that questions several achievements or rights, including access to education.

Without denying differences in time or place, we present his concepts and elaborations for thinking about education today. In a world marked by the rise of what many have called the “international Right,”²These governments, represented by figures such as Donald Trump in the United States, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Javier Milei in Argentina, among others, often emerge as a result of the failure of so-called progressive governments, which, both in Latin America and Europe, did not set out to transform the structural conditions of the system. whose policies seek to replicate and deepen the neoliberal and individualist education model aligned with the interests of major capital and international organizations like the IMF, World Bank, and OECD, while incorporating a religious bias with obscurantist measures.

This logic reproduces itself in education through severe underfunding of public education. An entire orientation in educational policy and pedagogical proposals promotes or deepens dualistic, reductionist, and unilateral visions: instrumental cognitivism, mainstream cognitive neuroscience, a return to genetic determinism, and biologicist approaches to emotional education. Against this, thinking about the complex, dynamic, and dialectical development of childhood outside dualistic visions becomes a radical act.³It is insisted that teachers should be “facilitators,” as if their work were merely technical. But teaching has both a practical and an intellectual aspect. The knowledge we work with — collective and situated — is precisely what they are trying to take away from us, reducing it to standardized measurements. That is why this publication is a contribution to building foundations that, instead of adapting to these dominant trends, have as their horizon a dialectical and comprehensive view of childhood development. La Izquierda Diario, April 10, 2024, https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Novedad-editorial-Aportes-de-Vigotski-para-recuperar-una-vision-marxista-en-educacion .

We live in a world where billionaires and magnates claim they will travel to Mars and plan their lives on other planets while destroying this one with a civilizational climate and ecological crisis. They promote various technological forms of artificial intelligence being explored for use in education, questioning the role and even the need for teachers. They justify this as a necessity against supposedly outdated teaching staff relative to modern changes in the world. But the real goal is to divert attention and shift much of the blame onto teachers. While they aspire to conquer another planet, 333 million children worldwide live in extreme poverty, and millions have no access to any form of education.

In this turbulent global context and in each country in particular, decisive battles are still ahead. We prepare for a stage of more radical class confrontations, opening the path for the struggle for new ideas and ways of thinking. That is why the work we are rescuing, reconstructing, and appropriating from Vygotsky helps us counter these attacks, prepare better responses, and think about connecting this battle of ideas in a scenario where the activity and self-determination of the popular sectors are at stake, beginning with the need to deepen our class critique of capitalist education.

Revolution, Polytechnic Education, and Socialist Values

As part of the struggle for a revolutionary vision of education, in chapter 4 of Educational Psychology, Vygotsky analyzes how educational systems throughout history have essentially responded to the ideals of the ruling class and the economic and social structure of each era:

It is enough to observe educational systems in their historical development to notice that the objectives of education were always concrete and vital, and always responded to the ideals of the era, the economic and social structure that determines the entire history of an era. If these ideals were always formulated with different words, it was due either to the scientific incapacity of the thinker or the class hypocrisy of the time.⁴Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 242.

While many of his concepts help us understand the different stages of capitalism and its relationship with education, he develops certain problems of education in a society transitioning to socialism after the revolution in greater depth. He notes that “the objectives of education were always concrete and vital,” linked to the interests of the society in which they develop. He controversially claims that education has always been class based, even if it is not always recognized as such by those promoting it. For Vygotsky, education is a fully social function, always directed toward the interests of the ruling class. Revisiting this definition does not deny the relative autonomy of teachers but helps us understand the connection between a system of exploitation and oppression and the ways it is instilled, spread, and sustained.

Vygotsky’s ideas are deeply tied to the experience of the Russian Revolution, where education was a fundamental pillar. In November 1917, shortly after the Revolution began, Commissar of Public Education Anatoli Lunacharsky published the Decree on Popular Education, which made a key distinction: teaching is the transmission of already-defined knowledge from teacher to student, while education is a creative process. Throughout life, a person’s personality is “educated,” extended, enriched, affirmed, and perfected.⁵A. V. Lunacharsky, “Decree on Popular Education,” November 11, 1917, quoted in John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS, 2017), 345.

With this decree, Lunacharsky emphasized that the popular masses, including workers and peasants, sought not only literacy and scientific instruction but also an education that reflected their own social reality, one different from that of the ruling classes. The working class was not to passively receive culture created by intellectuals but to construct its own worldview, reflecting collective experience:

The working masses — workers, soldiers, peasants — burn with the desire to learn to read and write, to be initiated in all sciences. But they also aspire to an education that cannot be given by the state or intellectuals … only by themselves. They have their own ideas, born of their social situation, very different from those of the ruling classes and intellectuals who have been the creators of culture until now. Each in their own way, the city worker and the country worker will build their own luminous conception of the world, imbued with the thought of the working class. This will be the most magnificent and beautiful phenomenon witnessed and enacted by future generations: the construction, by worker collectives, of their rich and free collective soul.⁶Reed, Ten Days, 345.

The Russian Revolution not only expropriated capitalists and nationalized the economy but also drove radical transformations in various areas of social life. The Soviet Union was the first country in which domestic labor was socialized, homosexuality was decriminalized, divorce was permitted, and abortion rights were guaranteed.

As historian Wendy Goldman notes,

The Bolsheviks argued that only socialism could resolve the contradiction between work and family. Under socialism, domestic labor would be transferred to the public sphere: tasks performed at home by millions of unpaid individual women would be entrusted to paid workers through communal dining halls, laundries, and childcare centers. Women would be freed to enter the public sphere on equal terms with men, without the constraints of the home. Women would receive the same education and salary as men.”⁷Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS, 2010), 29.

Nadezhda Krupskaya, a Bolshevik leader and key educational figure, together with Lunacharsky, proposed a mixed school, common for boys and girls, without distinction of social sector or gender. Schools were built nationwide, exams and traditional punishments were eliminated, as they were seen as mechanical methods fostering obedience based on fear or self-interest.⁸Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 242.

Revolutionary education aimed at equality and collective construction. In Educational Psychology, Vygotsky criticized gender-separated education for reinforcing predetermined gender roles and hindering bonds of companionship and solidarity. He argued that such separation relied on a sexist view of women, primarily as sexual objects, reducing their social role. In bourgeois society, educational dynamics reinforced fixed gender roles: “Different vocations were assigned to which children were prepared in bourgeois schools. The ideal of education mirrored life, which in the future men and women were supposed to lead.”⁹Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 128.

A major obstacle was extreme illiteracy, which exceeded 70 percent of the population. The revolution mobilized the masses in a massive literacy campaign, involving anyone who was literate. At the same time, the organization of education soviets was promoted, a form of organization where the direction of education was not imposed from above but organized by the working people themselves. As Lunacharsky put it, “We want the people to run the country and be its own masters. Our job is to really help the people take their destiny into their own hands.”¹⁰Quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Lunacharsky and the Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts (1917–1921) (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1977), XX.

The arrival of a figure such as Vygotsky from his native Gomel to Moscow to join the Moscow Institute of Experimental Psychology (IPEUM) and begin his short but brilliant career in psychology was closely linked to the needs of the revolution in addressing these tasks.¹¹Cf. R. Van der Veer and J. Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

As Trotsky noted, “The mere fact that the October Revolution taught the Russian people, the dozens of peoples of Tsarist Russia, to read and write is incomparably more important than all previous restricted Russian culture.” ¹²Leon Trotsky, “In Defense of the October Revolution,” lecture in Copenhagen, November 1932, in October: Writings on the Russian Revolution (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS, 2013), 279.

School Self-Management and Polytechnic Education

Following the spirit of bottom-up participation, this new pedagogy places students at the center. It is a scientific approach that challenges the traditional conception in which students are mere tabula rasa and teachers are simply executors of prefabricated concepts. In this sense, Vygotsky affirms, “Until now, the student has always been on the teacher’s shoulders. He looked at everything with the teacher’s eyes and judged with the teacher’s mind. It is time to put the student on their own feet.”¹³Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 380.

For this reason, Vygotsky emphasizes student self-organization: “Self-management in school, the organization by the children themselves, is the best means of moral education.”¹⁴Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 281

He warns, however, that it should not be limited to simple imitation of adult structures or reduced to formal compliance:

Organizing the social environment in school means not only creating the school leadership statutes, regularly calling children to general assemblies, holding elections, and observing all forms of sociability children enjoy from adults. Rather, it means cultivating genuinely social bonds within that environment. Starting with intimate and friendly relationships in small social groups, then expanding to larger peer-based unions, and finally to broader movements of children, the school must permeate and envelop a child’s life with thousands of social bonds. ¹⁵Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 281–82.

For Vygotsky, “to educate means to organize life,” since individual growth is deeply connected to the social environment. Education cannot be separated from its context; therefore, “the problems of education will only be definitively resolved when the problems of the social order are definitively resolved.”¹⁶Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 282.

As long as societal contradictions persist, they will affect even the most well-intentioned educational efforts:

Any attempt to construct educational ideals in a society with contradictions is a utopia because, as we have seen, the only educational factor establishing new reactions in the child is the social environment, and as long as this contains irresolvable contradictions, these contradictions will cause cracks in even the best-planned and inspired education.¹⁷Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 282.

Another central axis was polytechnic education. In debate with those who sought education solely to prepare for a specific profession, it was argued that knowledge should be linked to production and preparation for managing society. This discussion ran throughout the Russian Revolution. For Vygotsky, education needed to connect with the needs and aspirations of the working people, allowing a child of an industrial worker to become a factory worker, an industry director, or a member of the Academy of Sciences, without early vocational restriction. This implied universal, general education, at both primary and secondary levels, rejecting early professional specialization.

Vygotsky develops this not only practically, in terms of “educational policy” and curriculum, but also scientifically through psychology: “The child contains in potential an infinity of future personalities; he can become this, that, or the other. Education produces the social selection of the external personality.”¹⁸Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 108.

This polytechnic proposal does not mean a “plurality of trades” or combining many specialties in one person, but rather understanding the general foundations of human work.¹⁹Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, p.236 Work becomes scientific knowledge, and to acquire necessary skills, one must master the accumulated knowledge of nature as applied to each technical improvement.

According to Vygotsky, the most important aspect is the purely educational action carried out during work: it becomes conscious work par excellence, combining intellectual and manual labor, demanding maximum focus and attention, and elevating ordinary labor to the heights of human creative work.

Vygotsky emphasizes that education is complex and must be grounded in scientific knowledge and method. This implies,

first, studying individually all the particular properties of each student. Second, individually adapting all educational methods and social influences to each student. Measuring everyone by the same standard is the greatest pedagogical error. The main principle requires individualization — consciously determining each student’s educational objectives.²⁰Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 264.

Another developed aspect is aesthetic education, which understands art as a human activity and creation as an expression of human development, with its limits and potential: “As with all intense experiences, aesthetic experience creates a strong orientation for future actions and, of course, leaves a mark on future behavior. Many rightly compare poetic work to an energy accumulator, which later expends that energy.”²¹Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 299.

Reflection leads him to argue that art transforms reality not only through fantasy constructions but also through the real reworking of objects, situations, and daily life: housing, clothing, conversation, reading, school celebrations, and even posture — all can serve as material for aesthetic elaboration.²²He will also reflect on aesthetic education, which he will define as important for introducing aesthetic reactions into life itself. For Vygotsky, “Beauty must become, from something rare and festive, a requirement of everyday life. And creative effort must permeate every movement, every word, every smile of the child.” Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 306.

Contemporary Relevance of the Teacher’s Role and the Struggle for Socialism

Many of Vygotsky’s concepts in Educational Psychology remain relevant for addressing educational challenges today, including childhood and adolescent development and the role of teachers. This perspective is crucial because it provides concrete definitions of educational work: on the one hand, children and adolescents are active subjects in formation, not blank slates; on the other, it is essential to distinguish individualization of education — attending to times, interests, and trajectories — from educational individualism, which fragments, isolates, and holds the student solely responsible for schooling outcomes.

These debates, sometimes seen as outdated, remain fully relevant today, reactivated by currents linked to neuroscience and “emotional management,” which exacerbate individualism and reinforce meritocratic logics.

According to our reading, Vygotsky’s approach envisions a socialist society and a pedagogy of cooperation, aimed at fully developing human potential through the self-management of collective life, forming subjects capable of consciously governing and planning collective activity. From this broader perspective, the teacher’s role is far from serving as a mere transmitter or “gramophone” of official knowledge. On the contrary, educators must organize the social environment where learning occurs, seeing themselves as a key part of a critical reeducation, one whose vision extends beyond classroom walls. Our starting point must be questioning education’s deep subordination to capitalist logic.

Unlike governments that require teachers to fulfill roles as caregivers, social workers, psychologists, etc., Vygotsky presents an integrated vision of the teacher whose work is inherently linked to social and creative activity and the struggle for a better life: “The teacher must be a teacher to the end and, at the same time, must be not only a teacher — or, better said, must be something more than a teacher.”²³Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, 383.

This potential role, along with Vygotsky’s emphasis on school self-management and polytechnic education in the socialist struggle, can guide reflection in current debates and struggles. Socialists envision education that prepares working-class children to become leaders of a new society.

Given constant attacks aimed at erasing this role and the precarization of teachers’ working conditions, it is essential that educators connect educational conflicts to broader societal struggles. Schools can become key spaces for community organization and resistance, linking teachers’ immediate demands with the material needs of working-class families and education itself. A critical pedagogy based on solidarity and cooperation is vital for this connection.

In the 21st century, tensions between capitalists and workers are increasingly stark. Business leaders and international credit institutions demand longer working hours for higher profits while producing technologies that serve their interests rather than humanity’s needs, in what they call the era of robotics and AI. The demand to reduce working hours and have time for life — which could be spent on education, playing a creative role, and developing human capacities — marks the horizon for a society without exploitation or oppression.

Our struggle today is for technological development and knowledge accumulation — produced by society but monopolized by a handful of capitalists — to serve human emancipation and a harmonious relationship with the planet. Many students with diverse capacities and potential in classrooms are crushed by capitalism, left only to fight for a plate of food to survive.

Spoiler alert: Vygotsky concludes the book by synthesizing the historical aspirations underlying revolutionary educational thought with a quote from Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, emphasizing that pedagogy, broadly and profoundly, will become the dominant form of social thought after the revolution, alongside technological development. This transformation will open debates, generate currents of thought, and provoke lively exchanges. Vygotsky was contemplating the transition from capitalism to socialism.

Similarly, we believe that, as Vygotsky wrote, in the struggle for socialism,

The infinite potential for the creation of life in its infinite diversity reveals itself to the teacher. Not within the narrow confines of his own personal life and personal affairs will he become a true creator of the future. It is then that pedagogy, as the creation of life, will assume the foreground.

What we have presented are only some possible reflections on Vygotsky’s work. We hope it sparks enough interest and questions for readers to engage with Educational Psychology, circulating in classrooms, hallways, libraries, workshops, and academic, political, and union meetings, as well as schools and beyond. We do not propose a linear, singular, or closed reading. The debate is open. The struggle to transform the world in order to achieve a new education, as part of the broader struggle for global transformation, is on. Let’s get to work.

Originally published in Spanish on May 18, 2025 in La Izquierda Diario.