The Upbringing of Man

The chapter begins by discussing the culturally specific concept of vospitanie (‘upbringing’), which is placed in the context of the dialectics of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ and related to problems of social reproduction confronting the Russian educated strata in conditions of the empire’s modernization following the 1860s’ Great Reforms of Alexander II. In particular, the chapter examines the turning of vospitanie into a domain of knowledge, looking at the various constructions of a ‘science of upbringing’ (nauka o vospitanii). The latter was expected to be rooted in physiology and psychology, but in practice took on a number of different forms in the period between the 1860s and the 1900s. The core of this chapter focuses on the mobilization of parents from Russia’s educated classes into the scientific study of early child development. The chapter discusses: the construction of the figure of a pseudo-professional ‘mother-educator’ (mat′-vospitatel′nitsa) as a target of expert discourse; the rise of parents’ circles as frameworks for constituting new forms of expertise in child development that targeted the educated classes; the fostering in Russia of parent diaries as a method and genre for studying the earliest stages of child development; and finally, the attempt by the neuropsychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev in the 1900s–1910s to transpose the study of early childhood from the unreliable hands of ‘subjective’ parents to the ‘objective’ setting of a lab-nursery at his Pedology Institute.

Pedology at Work

This chapter analyses the evolution of Soviet pedology as a domain of occupational work in the context of the construction of the Soviet education system across the 1920s–1930s. Of particular interest is the role that pedological work played in combating ‘underperformance’ (neuspevaemost′) through the practice of streaming and referrals to special schools of those evaluated as performing below the norm. The chapter traces the origins of this policy in the 1920s, but its focus is on the expansion of the school pedology service under the Commissariat of Enlightenment during the 1930s. The role of this service was to carry out systematic monitoring and streaming of schoolchildren, to give expert advice and support to teachers and school heads. The chapter argues that Soviet pedology had in this last period of its existence, from 1932 to 1936 been reduced to a form of science-based expertise black-boxed into an applied instrument. The chapter concludes with an account of the demise of pedology in the mid-1930s, including the build-up to the notorious Communist Party decree against pedology, published on 4 July 1936, and the process of pedology’s institutional dismantlment and symbolic de-legitimation in the wake of the decree. The chapter argues that what was being abolished and dismantled in 1936 was principally pedology as occupational work rather than science as such.

Conclusion

The book’s conclusion discusses ways in which pedology and its legacies have been framed in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, while at the same time providing an overview of this book’s core contributions to the historiography and conceptualization of Russo-Soviet child science. The chapter begins with a summary of how pedology’s ‘ghost’ was treated in the late Soviet Union and how some of its strands ended up ‘haunting’ other institutional, disciplinary, or occupational frameworks. This is followed by a discussion of post-Soviet narratives about pedology and its fateful demise, especially constructions of pedology as a ‘repressed science’ (repressirovanaia nauka). The chapter critiques the rhetorical reification of pedology as a science that has developed in this context. It also considers the emergence in contemporary Russia of a number of movements focused on the scientific study of the child, which, in one way or another, make reference to the legacies of early twentieth-century Russo-Soviet child science (childhood studies, pedagogical anthropology, psycho-pedagogical diagnostics). The chapter ends with a summary of the book’s main conclusions, tying together key analytical points made across the preceding chapters. This section emphasizes the interest and importance that the history of child science presents for Russo-Soviet history more generally and revisits the question of where and how Russo-Soviet child science fits into a transnational history of this complex field.

The Making of Pedology

This chapter considers the institutionalization of ‘pedology’ as a Soviet ‘state science’ at the turn of the 1920s–1930s. It examines the shift in the field’s mobilization as pedology was turned into a framework of the field’s ‘integration’. In response to the failures of educational reformism, pedology was given the task of bolstering the construction of the Soviet education system. This prompted its leaders to define pedology as a discipline, though they still needed to negotiate its theoretical and methodological heterogeneity. They envisaged it both as a general science of human development and as a mediator between the plurality of specialist biopsychosocial sciences, on the one hand, and the teachers’ own professional expertise, on the other. Since pedology claimed to be charting the laws and norms of development, the field’s leaders became embroiled not only in debates about the nature of pedology as science but also the nature of development as such. The new context also required them to negotiate pedology’s relationship to pedagogy as the academic form of the education profession’s expertise. The latter half of the chapter focuses on the politics surrounding these developments. The period 1927–9 witnessed pedology’s enthusiastic institutionalization as a ‘state science’. From 1930, the demands of the First Five-Year Plan made themselves felt and the field was at this point subjected to a de facto ‘revolution from above’. The year 1931 marked a major turning point as 1920s’ progressive educational reforms were denounced as a mistake, while Soviet scientific institutions were subjected to stringent politico-ideological disciplining. Pedology managed to survive, but principally as a form of occupational work supporting the education system.

Child Science in Revolution

The chapter explains the rapid development of the child science network in the early Soviet era in the midst and aftermath of the post-revolutionary civil war. All-out ‘struggle’ with ‘delinquency’ and ‘defectiveness’ associated with millions of child vagabonds (besprizorniki), was crucial to the initial phase of expansion. The institutionalization of ‘defectology’, which built on the pre-revolutionary ‘curative pedagogy’, saw particular growth at this juncture. A parallel cause of expansion, which became more dominant from around 1923–4, was the imperative to adjust norms of educational development in order to create an education system for a mass child population that was, for the most part, still being brought up in contexts of exceptionally low levels of literacy and schooling. This took place through progressive educational experimentalism, based on both native and imported models, while at the same time prompting the rooting of the legitimacy of pedagogical innovations in a new science of child development. The chapter also places the expansion of the Soviet sciences of the child in the context of the Bolshevik early 1920s’ ‘revolutionization’ of the human sciences, notably psychology. The analysis concludes by scrutinizing two particularly prominent programmes of innovation in the human sciences of this era—‘reflexology’, based on the neuroscientific paradigms of both Vladimir Bekhterev and Ivan Pavlov; and ‘psychoanalysis’, billed as ‘Freudo-Marxism’. Both thrived in the contexts of trauma and transformation that defined the first half of the Soviet 1920s; though both also failed to survive state-enforced accelerated industrial modernization, which, by the end of the 1920s, introduced new priorities—institutional centralization, political alignment, and social discipline.

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.

Introduction

The book’s introduction sets out the historical, social, cultural, and political background, linking the rise of child science in Russia and elsewhere with processes of rapid modernization characteristic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter begins by relating the emergence of the sciences of the child at this particular historical juncture to the expansion of the professional middle classes, highlighting the role that the concept of development played in the latter’s social self-understanding, which in turn helped shape the ideologies of the rising welfare/warfare states. The historical roots of the child study movement are identified in an evolving post-Enlightenment biopolitics of childhood. The chapter stresses the normative nature of the sciences of child development and outlines the different kinds of norms that came to shape this field’s interests and priorities. Next, the chapter dwells on the multidisciplinary and inter-professional character of child science, elaborating how this both influenced and problematized its mobilization and self-identification as a movement. Also highlighted is the transnational nature of this movement. An analysis of the positioning of Russians within it is followed by a discussion of the path that child science took in the Soviet Union in the interwar era. The concluding section is a review of extant historiography on Russo-Soviet child science and a brief outline of the content and approach of the present study.

The Imperfect Child

This chapter examines the crucial role that the diagnostics and treatment of ‘imperfections’ in the child population played in the formation and growth of Russian child science. It emphasizes the plurality, indeterminacy, and intermixing of diagnostic regimes, which led to ambiguity and vagueness in the definition of infringements of the norm in child development. Analysis opens by considering the emergence of mental testing in Russia as a new means of measuring development and diagnosing deviations from the ‘normal’. It first looks at the fostering of mental testing as a purported ‘scientific’ substitute for school assessments and thus, potentially, a new way of framing educational norms. It then scrutinizes the use of mental testing on the boundaries between neuropsychiatric and psycho-educational diagnostics. The chapter then shifts from problems of diagnostics to those of therapeutics, by looking at the creation of special establishments for ‘defective’ children in the late tsarist period. While medical discourse dominated this domain, it ultimately generated hybrid forms of therapeutics, institutionalized as ‘curative pedagogy’, which stretched across medical, pedagogical, and correctional domains. The chapter concludes with an examination of pathologizations of children in the context of large-scale social upheavals, such as revolution and war. It examines two exemplary case studies in this context—the ‘epidemic’ of ‘child suicides’ in the wake of Russia’s 1905 revolution and the moral panic surrounding the effects of total war on the psychology of the Russian child during the First World War.