Some Reflections Concerning Gal’perin’s Theory

Transferof trainingArievitch and Stetsenko have done us an excellent service. They have given us alucid account of Gal’perin’s theory of the relationship between instruction and develop-ment, a theory that is, in fact, also a theory about the origin of thinking in the concrete,overt activities of the child. The essence of his theory is that what we take to be the resultof inherent, spontaneously developing processes is essentially the result of formal andinformal instruction by adults. Unfortunately, according to Gal’perin, our instructionoften leaves much to be desired, which explains why the results of instruction are fre-quently unsatisfactory. Students tend to learn subjects by heart without really under-standing them, they show little or no ability to apply their newly acquired knowledge toeven slightly different topics, they display certain ‘age-bound’ inadequacies in theirthinking, and so on. Gal’perin’s provocative claim was that by introducing new, revolu-tionary methods of instruction we can significantly raise the level of students’ knowl-edge, ensure that they will be able to apply their knowledge and skills in other domains,and, in sum, enhance their intellectual potential. In other words, far more than ‘tradi-tional instruction’, adequate instruction stimulates or co-creates mental development.As Arievitch and Stetsenko explain, truly innovating (‘systemic-theoretical’) in-struction requires that students are thoroughly introduced into the essential characteris-tics of a certain subject. Essential for proper understanding is that in the preparatory,orienting stage of learning, the students are required to perform certain concrete opera-tions that reveal these essential characteristics. The concept of real number, forinstance, is introduced as the outcome of a measurement operation, and in order tograsp this fact, students are required to perform concrete measurement operationsthemselves. Subsequently, they gradually learn to perform certain operations without