What I find particularly hard in reading Vygotsky is the gaps in my knowledge. It’s not just the obscure terms translated, or not translated, from the Russian. It’s not just that I haven’t read the philosophers and psychologists on whom his work builds, so there’s a yawning gap before him. It’s also that there’s a yawning gap after him.

I’m reading about the ‘forbidden colours’ experiment. Leonte’ev takes children of various ages and tells them that in the following interview they are not to mention two particular colours (eg red and blue) and that they are to mention all other colours only once. He gives them cards of each different colours, so they can use them as tools to mediate their memory (they won’t necessarily directly remember which colours they have mentioned, but their arrangement or use of the cards will jog their memory). Then he asks them a series of questions like ‘Have you ever been to the theatre’, interspersed with colour questions like ‘what colour is a tomato’, ‘what colour is the sky’. The older children get, the more likely they are to use the cards and to succeed in the task. In the accounts I am reading, Vygotsky appears to take this as evidence that you develop your ability to use mediating devices to support your memory.

But to me it doesn’t say that at all. It tells me that children develop a more sophisticated view of adults and of how adults behave. How many seven year olds, faced with a research scientist and asked what colour a tomato is are going to fail to say red? In their experience, adults who ask that sort of question get angry and think you stupid if you give them the wrong answer.

If you told them that in their computer game they couldn’t use the red or blue keys and they could use each colour key only once or they’d lose a life, they’d soon use mnemonic devices to sort that out.

So to me that experiment is profoundly flawed. Now, this may be my fault, because I haven’t understood it correctly, or because I have read incomplete accounts of it. On the other hand, it may be that everyone who has read of it thinks of it as a flawed experiment. I just don’t know. And it takes SO long to find out.