4.4: Criticisms of Sociocultural Theory

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The writings of Vygotsky have been widely-criticized both during his lifetime and after his death. Vygotsky did not do empirical work to validate his findings instead relying on observation and testing. Social interaction is central to Vygotsky. However, he did not say what types of social interaction are best for learning.

One criticism is Vygotsky's view of active construction of knowledge. Some critics suggest that learning is not always a result of active construction. Rather, learning can occur passively or osmotically. Some children, regardless of how much help is given by others, may still develop at a slower rate cognitively. This suggests that there are other factors involved such as genetics.

Vygotsky's theory of language is not well-developed. Vygotsky, of course, died at age 37 and may have gone on to elucidate his theories had he survived. His theories rely a lot on cultural influences, for it is culture that helps to develop learners' language acquisition and cognitive development. Vygotsky states that little language acquisition and cognitive development come from biological factors. However, some psychologists dismiss the idea that cultural influences play a dominant role in development of language. Some children take years to learn basic skills despite plenty of social support. In some cases, children are unable to grasp certain concepts until they reach a level of maturity. This lends credence to Piaget’s view of cognitive development occurring in stages and children not being unable to learn some concepts until they reach a certain age.

Perhaps the main criticism of Vygotsky's work concerns the assumption that it is relevant to all cultures. Rogoff (1990) dismisses the idea that Vygotsky's ideas are culturally universal and instead states the concept of scaffolding-which is heavily dependent on verbal instruction-may not be equally useful in all cultures for all types of learning. Indeed, in some instances, observation and practice may be more effective ways of learning certain skills.

In addition, Vygotsky was criticized for the concept of the "zone of proximal development," referred to as "one of the most used and least understood constructs to appear in contemporary educational literature" (Palinscar, 1998, p. 370) and "used as little more than a fashionable alternative to Piagetian terminology or the concept of IQ for describing individual differences in attainment or potential" (Faukner, Littleton, & Woodhead, 2013, p. 114).

Vygotsky's work has not received the same level of intense scrutiny that Piaget's has, partly due to the time-consuming process of translating Vygotsky's work from Russian. Also, Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective does not provide as many specific hypotheses to test as did Piaget's theory, making refutation difficult, if not impossible.