ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the issues of orientation, interests, attention, memory, and relevance in education. Each plays an important role in students' engagement with their studies. Vygotsky's writing in this vein, at the outset of the Soviet Union, is optimistic and idealistic. The chapter begins with the broad social context that helps to shape one's orientation to school and then moves the lens closer to see how, within that general stance, students engage with a curriculum through their attentive involvement with relevant interests. Avid engagement in turn promotes their memory of what they learn. His emphasis on grounding school in students' orientations and interests is a goal worthy of pursuing. He advocated for authentic learning, child-centered classrooms, learning driven by integrated conceptual understandings, a rejection of examinations to assess learning, and other features also available in the work of Dewey. This outline would warm the hearts of progressive educators committed to student-centered learning, a form of affiliation that might require attention to how Vygotsky viewed Marxist notions of egalitarian societies, how progressive schooling was developed in the US capitalist system, and how broader forces shape educational ideologies and possibilities.
