Vygotsky and Piaget: Outdated theories?

Donald Clark in Donald Clark Plan B can usually be trusted to cut through to the quick. His take on Vygotsky and Piaget will not endear him to educationists who hold them dear. Vygotsky especially is held in high regard by so-called progressive educators.

Donald Clark has the following to say about Vygotsky:

"Why have learning academics been so keen to resurrect an old Marxist theorist, dress up half-baked sociology and pretend it’s psychology? Having worked my way through 'Thought and Language' and 'Mind in Society' along with several other Vygotsky texts, I'll be damned if I can see what all the fuss is about. He is to the psychology of learning what Lysenko was to genetics. Indeed the parallel with Lysenko is quite apposite. Forgoing the idea of genetics he sees interventionist, social mediation as the sole source of cognitive development. Vygotsky is a sort of ‘tabla rasa’ Lamarkian learning theorist. ... Vygotsky puts learning before development - a sort of social behaviourist. This is in direct contradiction to almost everything we now know about the mind and its modular structure (this sentence used outside the original sequence). He is simply wrong."

He also does not spare Piaget:

"... there’s almost nothing left of his theories that is remotely useful to a new teacher. His four-stage theory of child development has been so completely wiped out by subsequent studies, that there’s nothing left. It’s merely an exercise in the history of science. What’s shocking is the way he’s still revered and taught in (such) courses. It’s like teaching Lamarck, not Darwin.

The good news is that his mistakes led to more rigorous studies that really did unravel child development, although one wonders why he is taught at all. The bad news is that the hole was filled by an even less rigorous and more flawed theorist, Lev Vygotsky. Don’t get me started on him!

What's worrying is the fact that teachers are coming out with a fixed view of child development based on 'ages and stages' that are quite wrong. This leads to amateurish teaching methods and a lack of understanding of when and how to teach numeracy and literacy. The 'whole-language' teaching fiasco in primary schools was the perfect storm of this amateurish approach.

The sad fact is that education and training is still soaked in this dated theory, as they suffer badly from 'groupthink'. The community literally thinks that theories are sound if a) they've been around for a long time (sorry, but in science, especially psychology, the opposite is true) b) everyone does it (that's precisely the problem)."

I'm not an expert on Vygotsky and Piaget, but I can't fault Donald Clark's conclusions. My concern is that these theories are often taught uncritically in education faculties at universities (at least in South Africa). As I've remarked in the past, critical and scientific thinking do not feature strongly in most teachers' training (in South Africa). Purveyors of scientifically questionable educational techniques often mention Piaget and Vygotsky as influences on their eclectic theories. This makes their theories seem more familiar to teachers and fool their bullshit detectors, which are rarely effective in any case. My solution? Teach student teachers the rudiments of critical and scientific thinking!