Revisiting Vygotsky and Gardner: Realizing Human Potential

by Ninah Beliavsky


The two individuals who have had a tremendous influence on my own theories and my own philosophy of education are the Russian psychologist, intellectual, and social activist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934), and the leading American developmental psychologist Howard Gardner (b. 1944). The philosophies of Vygotsky and Gardner have much in common, even though their lives have been separated by different continents, different political regimes, different languages, different cultures, and almost a century of innovative research in the fields of psychology and education.