Thinkers Timeline

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896-1934) was a Russian psychologist whose ideas about how children learn and develop have become central to education and developmental psychology worldwide. He was born in Orsha, in present-day Belarus, into a Jewish family. His father was a bank manager; his mother trained as a teacher. He grew up in the city of Gomel, where his early schooling was done partly at home because Jewish students faced restrictions in the Russian school system of that period. Despite these restrictions, he won a place at Moscow State University in 1913 through a lottery system that was one of the few routes open to Jewish applicants. He studied law at Moscow State while also taking courses in history, philosophy, and literature at the more liberal Shaniavsky People's University. He graduated in 1917, just as the Russian Revolution was beginning. For several years he taught literature and psychology in his home city of Gomel, where he also started research on the psychological foundations of learning. In 1924, at age twenty-eight, he gave a lecture at a psychology conference in Leningrad that attracted national attention. He was invited to Moscow and began his brief but extraordinary scientific career. Over the following decade he wrote an enormous amount — books, research papers, and reports — while leading research teams, treating patients, teaching, and helping to build Soviet psychology and special education. His most important book, Thought and Language, was published in the year of his death. He had suffered from tuberculosis since his twenties. His condition worsened in the early 1930s, and he died in Moscow in June 1934 at the age of thirty-seven. His work was banned in the Soviet Union in 1936 — partly because of his use of Western sources, partly because Stalin's regime preferred more mechanical theories of human development. His writings were rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s, first in the Soviet Union and then, through the efforts of his students and of Western scholars, internationally. By the 1980s his ideas had become central to education worldwide.

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was an American psychologist. He was born into a poor Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York, and described his childhood as lonely and unhappy. He studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin and spent most of his career at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He became one of the founders of humanistic psychology: a movement that argued that psychology should study not only mental illness and dysfunction but also human health, creativity, and the capacity for a full and meaningful life. He is best known for the hierarchy of needs, a model of human motivation that organises human needs from the most basic physical requirements for survival up to the need for self-actualisation: the full development of a person's potential. This model has been extraordinarily influential in psychology, education, management, and development. He died in 1970 still working on his ideas, convinced that he had only begun to understand human potential.