Restoring Teachers to Their Rights: Soviet Education and the 1936 Denunciation of Pedology

Abstract

In early 1937, one-third of sixth graders in a school near Leningrad were not passing their Russian-language course. Their teacher, Tomsinskaia, told the school director that the failures were due to circumstances beyond her control: children had received inadequate preparation in previous grades, textbooks were in short supply, and pupils had “weak reading habits.” Other teachers in the Krasnosel'skii district offered similar justifications for pupils' poor performance. Sakhanova claimed that low levels of achievement were due to “bad home conditions.” Velichko asserted that her seventeen failing pupils all suffered from inherited conditions such as “mental retardation,” “underdevelopment,” or “congenital laziness.” Semenovskii, who had completed higher education and considerable teaching experience, admitted he had no explanation why one-half of his pupils were failing every year.

Deconstructing Vygotsky’s victimization narrative

“…Anchored primarily within the fields of psychology and education, this pioneering group of Russian pedologists, like their European and North American counterparts, drew upon the disciplines of psychology, sociology and pediatric medicine to define a new approach to the study of the character and development of children (Ewing, 2001;Petrovsky, 1990). Following the October Revolution, pedological activity assumed a new dimension, as the newly established political climate within the Soviet Union fostered childstudy research efforts and advocated the reformulation of educational systems upon 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 materialistic, empirical and scientific foundations (Hoffmann, 2011).…”

The Culture of Vygotsky

“…The Decree declared pedology to be "false science," eliminated university departments in the field, and dismissed or arrested its scientists. Ewing (2001) pointed out that the Decree was designed to purge the thinking that had produced tracking in Soviet schools through the assessment and classification of students by segregating students according to results of formal assessments. According to Ewing, the Central Committee charged that pedologists' "pseudoscientific experiments" had called excessive attention to "the most negative influences and pathological perversions" in children, their families, and surrounding environment.…”

“…Yet other agendas were at work. Political leaders, Ewing (2001) noted, were concerned that pedologists were "displaying 'pedological distortions,' succumbing to 'class-hostile elements,' and engaging in 'wrecking' activity with 'anti-Leninist' objectives" (p. 472), suggesting that the welfare of children was viewed and interpreted within the framework of the state's ideology. The Decree's recommendations, he found, were made as part of a broader move toward more repressive policies and government intervention in both science and daily life in the Soviet Union.…”

The mental test as a boundary object in early-20th-century Russian child science

“…These tests became one of the principal means of evaluating poorly performing and disruptive children, who would then be referred to a fast-growing number of special schools. This 'sorting of the wheat from the chaff ' was increasingly linked to the pressures put on schools to deliver on the new programmes and targets, with many teachers being more than happy to see the back of pupils who slowed things down (Ewing, 2001).…”

“…Yet what became important for the Stalinist state in this period was less the evaluation of pupils as part of streamlining the pedagogical process itself, and more the search for effective tools of bureaucratic, as well as broadly disciplinary, control over the work of teachers and educational bureaucracies, with a focus on the delivery of ambitious labour targets, determined by Stalinist 'socialist construction ' (Anan'ev, 1935). Increasingly, though, statistics on 'subnormal' children came to serve as a bureaucratic measure of educational and managerial inefficiency pointing to the highest levels of the Soviet educational administration -the Commissariat of Education (Ewing, 2001).…”