Development of the child depends on many conditions, and to clear them out is a main task for many sciences; psychology, physiology, and pedagogy, among others. Within this formation of the child, to establish the regularities of his psychic development, not just pointing at a simple description of his achievements and characteristics, but also establishing their conditioning causes and factors, and the reason why the transit from one stage of development to another takes place, is what really constitutes the most important in its study.
Within this psychic development, to determine what may correspond to biological structures and functions that are genetically given, and what may correspond to living conditions and education, mean the central axis of any conception in this respect. And, consequently, of what can be done to enable the highest development of all the psychic potentialities of the individual.
A great number of experiences have pointed to try to define which of these aspects, the biological, or the social, is the principal, or determinative, for development. In other experiences, the facts of reality have been interpreted to sediment or consolidate one or the other position, and this has led to the establishment of theoretical positions, sometimes irreconcilables. Thus, research works as the one carried through by the Russian psychologist Ladiguina Kots, who raised a baby chimpanzee in the very same life conditions and education in which she raised her own son during the first three years of life; or the findings of the Indian psychologist Rid Singh, who during the first decades of the XX century reported the case of the wolf-girls Kamala and Amala, later confirmed by a similar case in a year so close as 1986 when the world knew of the death of Ramu, a preadolescent also subjected to such savages conditions, have made possible to establish two essential conclusions:
• Without the existence of a human brain, the emergence of human psychic qualities is not possible.
• The human brain in itself does not determine the emergence of human psychic qualities.
That is, human psychism can not emerge without human living conditions. The reality is that the main existing trends at present in relation to conceptions of the psychic development, coincide and point as a whole to the consideration that in human psychic development, the internal, constitutional, and biological-functional structures play a role as important as that of the external, social, cultural, and educational conditions. The divergence lies then in the appraisement of which of these conditions are the determining ones, and this groups the scientists in two big fields; those who consider the internal factors as the fundamental, and those who, in opposition, point out that external factors are the determining ones, in last instance, of the psychic development of the human being.
Historically many theorists of the psychological science have tried to base one position or the other, which have gone from extreme positions, that have polarized either the internal, as in the case of the theory of the instincts of Mc Dougall, the psychoanalytical of Freud, or the maturationism of Gessell; or the external, as the sociologism of Durkheim or the behaviorism of Watson and Skinner. Others have assumed a more temporizing position stating the double consideration of inheritance and environment, of what is inherited and what is acquired, and that have given origin to a number of approaches that can be summed up in three big versants:
• Stern´s theory of convergence.
• Piaget´s conception of adaptation.
• Vigotski´s historic-cultural approach.
Authors that coinciding in the acceptance of both factors, however differ in which one they consider is the determining one.
It is not the objective of this paper to try to determine who is right, or to support either other conception, although the author recognizes his historic-cultural position. The essential thing is to try to value to what extent the biological and the social are interrelated in the education of the child, in what sense the internal factors, basically constituted by the central nervous system and the higher nervous activity, exert an influence upon what is determined by the external factors, and in which education plays a role of crucial importance.
That means that even assuming the historic-cultural trend that states the external, social, life, and education conditions as the determining ones, the importance and need of the material, organic, and physiologic substratum that founds the psychic phenomenon, can not be evaded: the human psyche is the result of a material organ, the human brain, and human psychical activity can not be conceived without the presence of a human brain. It is in this way, under the action of the stimuli of the external and internal environment in the cerebral cortex, that arise one and the other nervous processes, which constitute the physiological mechanism of the formation of the process of reflection of reality.
However, in the education process of the child, sometimes influenced by the preponderance that this more scientific conception of development is slowly gaining in the educational activity or by other positions that also give emphasis to the external conditions as the main ones, it is evaded in the best of cases, or not known in the worst, the influence that the internal factors play in the behavior of the child, mainly those related to his higher nervous activity, and it is not rare to find educators that assume that the education process is completely alien to these internal physiological conditionings. This antidialectical position, that tends to see these internal and external factors separately is as negative as the one that polarizes either one or the other extreme, and leads to a less scientific approach of the educative labor |
