Pedagogy as Science

While the previous chapter focused on parents and the study of early childhood, this chapter looks at the rise of institutions and practices devoted to the scientific study of the schoolchild population in the imperial era. It analyses how complex interactions between different professional groups—teachers, psychologists, and doctors—shaped new kinds of expertise in school-based child development and socialization. The analysis opens with a discussion of the crisis of the professional identity of Russian teachers who were arguably the most important constituency on which the rise of child science as a movement, in Russia and elsewhere, depended. It then examines efforts (especially those of psychologists Aleksandr Nechaev and Aleksandr Lazurskii) to turn pedagogy into a ‘science’, leading to the creation of novel research setups, especially in the context of teacher training. Of critical importance here was the promotion of new, applied forms of experimental psychology that sought simultaneously to innovate psychology as a science and articulate new scientific underpinnings of pedagogy. This led to the formation of novel disciplinary frameworks, most notably ‘experimental pedagogy’ and ‘pedology’, which were situated, unstably and controversially, across established professional and disciplinary jurisdictions. The chapter ends with an examination of the contemporaneous efforts by medical professionals to impose their own, distinctly medical, models of child science on schools and pedagogy. Of particular interest here is the rise of school hygiene in Russia and the efforts to enhance the expertise and power of the school doctor.