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

Abstract

This article charts the history of mental testing in the context of the rise and fall of Russian child science between the 1890s and the 1930s. Tracing the genealogy of testing in scientific experimentation, scholastic assessment, medical diagnostics and bureaucratic accounting, it follows the displacements of this technology along and across the boundaries of the child science movement. The article focuses on three domains of expertise – psychology, pedagogy and psychiatry, examining the key guises that mental testing assumed in them – namely, the experiment, the exam and the diagnosis. It then analyses the failed state-bureaucratic harnessing of mental testing in early Soviet attempts to manage mass education, discussing the peculiar dynamics of the (de)legitimation of testing, as it swung between black-boxing and instrumentalization, on the one hand, and scandal and controversy, on the other. The article argues that mental testing thrived in Russia as a strategically ambiguous and flexibly interpreted ‘boundary object’, which interconnected a highly heterogeneous field, enabling the coexistence and cooperation of diverse occupational agendas and normative regimes.

V. M. Bekhterev in Russian Child Science, 1900s–1920s: “Objective Psychology”/“Reflexology” as a Scientific Movement

“…At the turn of the twentieth century, Russian university psychology, based in philosophy departments, was slow to introduce experimental techniques on the model set by Wilhelm Wundt in Germany in the 1870s. Nechaev's SIM positioned itself as grounding Russian psychology in the natural scientific like “experiment.” His move included the introduction into Russian psychology not just of lab‐based research, but also, more controversially, mass experimental techniques, namely forms of mental testing (Byford, ).…”

“…Practically all other innovators in Russian psychology and child science at this time sought objectivity in the elimination of the subjectivism of the researcher . In the case of experimentation this was to be ensured by delegating the recording and processing of data from the fallible humans to the impersonal laboratory apparatuses, test cards, and the statistical calculus (Byford, ). As for objective observation, the elimination of subjectivism was to be ensured by observer discipline, achieved through detailed instructions and training, carefully standardized observational rubrics, and by inciting the observer to continuous self‐critique (Byford, , pp.…”

“…The effectiveness of the rhetorical tactics of Bektherev's “objective psychology” can be usefully contrasted with the very different rhetorical tactics of Nechaev's “experimental pedagogy.” Nechaev preserved all the familiar notions of (in Bekhterev's terms) “subjective psychology,” but turned a single term—“ experiment ”—into the hallmark of “scientificity” that his SIM was bringing to the fields he was seeking to transform—pedagogy and psychology. That tactic, because of its simplicity, proved (for a while at least) rather effective in mobilizing both specialist and nonspecialist support, although it was by no means uncontroversial, meeting with stiff opposition and criticism from university‐based psychologists as well as some more conservative teachers (Byford, , , , pp. 26–35).…”

“…Those participating in child science at PNI developed their own innovative methodologies, the most prominent being A. F. Lazurskii's “natural experiment”—a form of “objective psychology” on the boundary with “experimental pedagogy” (Byford , pp. 30–31).…”

Trauma and Pathology: Normative Crises and the Child Population in Late Tsarist Russia and the Early Soviet Union, 1904–1924

“…42 A statistical as well as a rhetorical creature, the "mass child" was a normative articulation, in the singular, of the (now total) Soviet schoolchild population. This notion was rooted in the positivist conception of the norm as a statistical average and emerged in the context of the remarkable expansion of mass mental and scholastic testing in the Soviet 1920s(much of it American in inspiration) 43.…”