Durkheim and Vygotsky's theories of knowledge and their implications for a critical educational theory

Abstract

This paper is part of the ongoing work of the author and others in developing a social realist theory of knowledge for educational studies. It contrasts Durkheim and Vygotsky's theories and why both are important for educational theory. It begins by emphasizing the similarities between them; that knowledge has to be understood in terms of its historical development in human societies and that the acquisition of knowledge is the primary goal of formal education. In contrasting the ideas of the two writers the paper develops the distinction between ‘structure’ for Durkheim and ‘activity’ for Vygotsky and explores some of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. It then examines how the ideas of the two writers have been developed by their leading followers in sociology and psychology‐ giving particular consideration to the work of Basil Bernstein and Yrjo Engestrom. It concludes with some broader issues concerning theories of knowledge in educational studies.

Notes

1. For Durkheim, as Paul Fauconnet says in his introduction to the original version of his Education and sociology, ‘the transmission [of knowledge] through the teacher to the pupil, the assimilation by the child of a subject, seemed to him [Durkheim] to be the condition of real intellectual formation. …Forms [of the mind] cannot be transmitted empty. Durkheim, like Comte, thinks that it is necessary to learn about things, to acquire knowledge’ (Fauconnet in Durkheim, 1956, p. 48). In a similar manner, Vygotsky expresses the crucial role of knowledge transmission in the way he links the development of higher forms of thought to the pedagogic relationship between ‘everyday’ and ‘theoretical’ concepts.

2. More space in this paper is given to Durkheim's work than that of Vygotsky. This is for two reasons. Firstly, as a sociologist I am more familiar with Durkheim's work. Secondly, the issue of knowledge, although often neglected by sociologists of education in their discussion of Durkheim, is at the centre of his work and only indirectly addressed by Vygotsky.

3. I am using ‘social realist’ in the sense that for Durkheim and Vygpotsky, knowledge and society were realities, independent of individual actions and beliefs.

4. Social activity is not used in this paper in the specific sense that is associated with sociocultural activity theory, the tradition that specifically derives from Vygotsky's work. ‘Social activity’ is used in this paper in its broader materialist sense that is more akin to Marx's idea of the labour process. It refers to the ways people in history have engaged in collective activities (initially in forms such as hunting and gathering) to appropriate the natural world for their survival needs and later for the creation of wealth. In contrast social structure as applied to Durkheim refers to the features of a society that can be conceptualized independently from the activities of individual men and women.

5. The point about Vygotsky having a social theory of knowledge is especially significant as it has been largely neglected in the psychologically oriented tradition of activity theory through which his work has become available to those working in educational studies.

6. Durkheim argued that origins of the main assumption of modern logic—that it is necessary to be able to decide whether or not something is a member of a class or group—lies in a structural feature of clan societies that you were either a member of one clan or another.

7. Durkheim's distinction can be seen as the precursor, as Joe Muller (University of Capetown) pointed out to me, of Bernstein's distinction between vertical and horizontal discourses (Bernstein, 2000).

8. For both Needham (1970) and Worsley (1956), Durkheim's claim for the ‘epistemological priority’ of society is the least convincing element of his theory of knowledge.

9. This issue about the roots of knowledge is raised by Roger Penrose (Penrose, 2005) when he suggests that even the most abstract mathematics such as the pattern of the primes appear to have a physical as well as a conceptual basis (Young & Muller, 2007).

10. Many would include the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. However my view is that Bourdieu was a sociologist primarily interested in the question of power. Knowledge itself was only a secondary concern for him—or as he might have put it, just another field within which power struggles are played out.

11. In stressing the weaknesses of Vygotsky's theory, Davydov may be giving it too much importance given that one can find very similar problems in education systems in which Vygotsky's ideas have hardly been heard of.