Surely Castillo Is Left-But Is It Right or Wrong

If Otto Rene Castillo is our poetic political visionary, Vygotsky is our scientific methodologist. Lev Vygotsky, a brilliant Russian/Soviet Jew, lived only 37 years (1898-1935) before dying of tuberculosis. His research, much of it on human learning and development, was suppressed by Stalinist censorship and it was not until the I970s and '8os that most of the world began to appreciate this genius from Gomel. Lois Holzman, formerly the director of the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research (one of a grouping of independent radical collectives that gave birth to the Castillo Center in 1989) was among the first U.S. developmental psychologists to discover Vygotsky. In the I970s she worked with Michael Cole, Ray McDermott, and others at Rockefeller University in New York City to create the conception of ecological validity out of the persistent practical application of Vygotskian-inspired ideas to the learning situations of children in New York City schools. What Holzman, et al., uncovered experimentally (not simply abstractly) was that the traditional laboratory methodology of orthodox developmental and educational psychology was profoundly biased. In presuming that learning activities occurred within the individual child (or adult) traditional psychology developed theories and practices which reinforced this bias. But those theories and practices were ecologically invalid-they did not really help us to understand how children learn and fail to learn-because the learning activity is fundamentally social, not private. Thus it was necessary, according to Holzman, et al., to validate our scientific studies of learning outside the laboratory (and laboratory methodology) free of the individualistic prejudices of traditional approaches. Meanwhile Castillo's sister organizations, the East Side Center for Social Therapy and the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, were evolving a clinical approach (primarily a group therapy) which was

Developmental psychology · Genius · nobody · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Educational and Psychological Assessments · Law · Psychology

• We Need More Lumumbas”

  Brian Mullin•TDR/The Drama Review•2010

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