How Should We, as Educators, Understand the Nature of Human Behavior

Vygotsky wanted to answer what kind of behavior is uniquely human, and which characteristics make our behavior different from that of other species. As educators, the most direct manifestation of our practice is shaping or constraining certain behaviors in children. We therefore must have a sufficiently serious understanding of human behavior itself; otherwise we will lose our judgment and take irresponsible action.

Vygotsky held that we first need to abandon the botanical model, that is, understanding the emergence and development of children's behavior from a "maturation" perspective, because this implies a kind of "passive waiting." But the evolution of a behavior from its appearance to its complexity is not a process of passively waiting for something to happen.

Vygotsky then criticized the zoological model, that is, understanding children's behavior through animal (chimpanzee) experiments. The most important progress made by this research paradigm was the recognition that children's cognitive development originates in practical intelligence (technical thinking), that is, the formation of the child's ability to use tools to achieve goals gives rise to the emergence of language ability. However, it did not acknowledge that there is a close connection between children possessing practical intelligence and speech intelligence at the same time. It held that the subsequent development of children's practical intelligence is based on extensive imitation of adults' action and of different models of activity until they are skillfully mastered, and that children's development consists in repeatedly mastering as many activity schemas as possible.

But this view cannot explain what exactly the difference is between the changes in a child's cognition in this process and an adult's mastery of a certain action through repetition. Later, they began to acknowledge that a relationship exists between behavior and speech, but this relationship was one in which speech replaces the imitation of behavior. Vygotsky, however, affirmed that the real function of speech is to help children form new structures of activity in the imitation of practical activity. That is, children develop practical intelligence by imitating adults' activities, but speech, in this process, reshapes this practical activity, introducing new changes rather than a completely identical imitation. And the difference between the practical intelligence possessed by the chimpanzee and that of humans, which is the difference between animal and human behavior, lies in whether behavior and speech are integrated: because the chimpanzee has no speech function, its practical intelligence is equivalent to that of a human with aphasia.

Language is essentially a kind of sign, so we can say that the uniqueness of human behavior lies in this: the occurrence of our behavior is based on our sign and symbolic operations, rather than on direct, pure behavioral imitation like that of the chimpanzee.

Therefore, the uniqueness of human behavior lies in the fact that, through speech, we make our behavior (practical intelligence) never able to be completely identical with those of another individual, because our behavior is not the mere imitation and replication of movements; in this process, we use the cognitive function of speech to make certain unavoidable adjustments to the internal structure of concrete practical activity. It is like following the same score and the same way of using the piano, yet the music we ultimately play has a different texture.

‍ ‍This insight is crucial for understanding human behavior, especially for acknowledging and applying this principle in the field of education, and it is also, in some sense, the essential reason for the establishment of the principles of freedom and democracy, just as, for example, setting uniform educational assessment standards or practicing micromanagement in leadership is a negation of the essence of human behavior.

This understanding stops us from viewing many real-life cases through a mistaken perspective that exists universally in the form of almost "common sense." For example, when children begin to use nouns to refer to a concrete object or use numbers to describe quantity, it is not because some predetermined maturation program exists within them that led them to discover, at a certain point in time, that symbols can represent meaning. Such mistaken "common sense" is widespread in practice; even practitioners within the education system have such "unreflective" conversations with parents in this way, although they have no improper intentions.

Thus people always separate children's behavioral development and language development and treat them individually, and are unable to truly understand the essential characteristics of children's behavior, that is, the essential characteristics of human behavior, namely regarding humans as intelligent beings, what intelligence actually means. Vygotsky's research, however, explains how practical intelligence and verbal intelligence continuously integrate and influence each other in the process of children's development, forming uniquely human intelligence.