This book contains the first complete translation of the first half of the Pedology of the Adolescent by the Soviet thinker, educator, and teacher L.S. Vygotsky. It was the longest work published in his lifetime and was a correspondence course written by Vygotsky for teachers across the Soviet Union. The book is a sustained argument about the borders of pedology, the nature of the transition between childhood and adulthood, and the concrete character of the distinction between the lower psychological functions that we largely share with animals and those that are specific to fully socialized humans. After an initial methodological introduction, three kinds of maturation-general anatomical, sexual, and sociocultural-are explored.

This book will be followed by a companion volume covering pedology of the transitional age as a psychological and social problem.

Autorentext

L.S. Vygotsky was a teacher, writer, and thinker in the early Soviet Union who worked in the fields of psychology, "defectology" (special education), and "pedology" (the holistic study of the child). In a meteoric career that lasted little more than a decade, he was able to lay the foundations of what has become cultural-historical psychology today. By analyzing the specifically human, cultural-historical roots of higher mental functions and emphasizing the role that language plays in development, Vygotsky provided a research method that is monist, non-reductionist, and dialectical.

About the Translators: Nikolai Veresov is currently an associate professor at Monash University. He has published widely on Vygotsky in many languages, including Vygotsky's native Russian. He is the author of Undiscovered Vygotsky (1999) and the translator of Vygotsky's "Consciousness as a Problem in the Psychology of Behaviour" (1999) and "The Role of Play in the Development of the Child" (2016). He has also translated D.B. Elkonin's work on periodizing child development (2000).

David Kellogg is an assistant professor at Sangmyung University in Seoul, South Korea, where he teaches courses on language and linguistics. He and his former students have published more than twelve volumes of Vygotsky translations in Korea. He is the author of The Great Globe: Narrative and Dialogue in Story-telling with Halliday, Vygotsky, and Shakespeare.