Criticisms of North American "Vygotskian" legacy
A critique of the North American interpretation of Vygotsky's ideas and, somewhat later, its global spread and dissemination appeared in the 1980s. The early 1980s criticism of Russian and Western "Vygotskian" scholars continued throughout the 1990s. Thus, different authors emphasized the biased and fragmented interpretations of Vygotsky by representatives of what was termed "neo-Vygotskian fashions in contemporary psychology or "selective traditions" in Vygotskian scholarship. Characteristically, the most fashionable "Vygotskian" phraseology in wide circulation in Western scholarly and educational discourse—such as the so-called "zone of proximal development"—in the critical literature of this period were referred to as "one of the most used and least understood constructs to appear in contemporary educational literature", the construct that was "used as little more than a fashionable alternative to Piagetian terminology or the concept of IQ for describing individual differences in attainment or potential". Other authors also suggest clearly distinguishing between original Vygotsky's notion of "zona blizhaishego razvitiia" (ZBR) and its later Western superficial interpretations known under the umbrella term "zone of proximal development" (ZPD). The criticism continued and reached a peak in the 2000s. Most often these critiques address numerous distortions of Vygotsky's ideas, mere "declarations of faith", "versions of Vygotsky", the "concepts and inferences curiously attributed to Lev Vygotsky", "multiple readings of Vygotsky", some of which—for instance, "activity theory"—are referred to as "dead end” for cultural-historical psychology and, moreover, for methodological thinking in cultural psychology. Some publications question "if anyone actually reads Vygotsky’s words", whether it is "too late to understand Vygotsky for the classroom", and suggest "turning Vygotsky on his head." Inconsistencies, contradictions, and at times fundamental flaws in "Vygotskian" literature were revealed in the ocean of critical publications on this subject and are typically associated with—but certainly not limited to—the North American legacy of Michael Cole and James Wertsch and their associates. These criticisms contributed significantly to the increasing awareness of numerous "challenges of claiming a Vygotskian perspective".
Criticisms of available Vygotsky's texts
A relatively recent trend in Vygotskian science emerged in the 1990s. This trend is typically associated with growing dissatisfaction with the quality and scholarly integrity of available English translations of the texts of Vygotsky and members of Vygotsky Circle made from largely mistaken, distorted, and even in a few instances falsified Soviet editions, which raises serious concerns about the reliability of Vygotsky's texts available in English.[51] However, unlike critical literature that discusses Western interpretations of Vygotsky's legacy, the target of criticism and the primary object of research in the studies of the revisionist strand are Vygotsky's texts proper: the manuscripts, original lifetime publications, and Vygotsky's posthumous Soviet editions that most often were subsequently uncritically translated into other languages. The revisionist strand is solidly grounded in a series of studies in Vygotsky's archives that uncovered the previously unknown and unpublished Vygotsky's materials.
Thus, some studies of the revisionist strand show that certain phrases, terms, and expressions typically associated with Vygotskian legacy as its core notions and concepts—such as "cultural-historical psychology", "cultural-historical theory", "cultural-historical school", "higher psychical/mental functions", "internalization", "zone of proximal development", etc., -- in fact, either occupy not more than just a few dozen pages within the six-volume collection of Vygotsky’s works or even never occur in Vygotsky's own writings. Another series of studies revealed the questionable quality of Vygotsky's published texts that, in fact, were never finished and intended for publication by their author, but were nevertheless posthumously published without giving proper editorial acknowledgement of their unfinished, transitory nature and with numerous editorial interventions and distortions of Vygotsky's text. Another series of publications reveals that another well-known Vygotsky's text that is often presented as the foundational work was back-translated into Russian from an English translation of a lost original and passed for the original Vygotsky's writing. This episode was referred to as "benign forgery".
