Paul Goble
Staunton,
July 24 – Pedology, the use of metrical measures to understand children and
guide their education, was banned by Stalin on July 4, 1936 for its
“perversions” and those who practiced it were killed or sent to the camps,
effectively ending this approach to childhood and putting the Soviet primary
educational system far behind the West.
This
particular field of inquiry was important not only for the guidance it provided
for teachers but also for the way it provided a place for Russian sociologists
in the 1920s to go after the Soviet authorities banned that field as “a
bourgeois pseudo-science,” where under the guise of explaining pedological test
results, they produced impressive scholarship.
(For
background on this and citations to many of their works between 1906 and 1936,
long ignored in both the Soviet Union and the West, see this author’s master’s
thesis, Soviet Marxism and the Russian Experience with Intelligence Testing
(University of Chicago Department of Political Science, 1972, 481 pp.).)
Russian
scholars revived sociology after the death of Stalin, but until very recently,
they did little to bring back pedology. There have been occasional articles and
books about its seminal figures like Pavel Blonsky and Vladimir Bekhterev; but
the field itself has remained without significant developments.
Now,
as a result of the work of Inna Anitpkina, a scholar at the Moscow Institute of
Education of the Higher School of Economics, that is changing. She and other
scholars in the Russian Federation are now focusing on psychometric research in
the West and on pedology in the USSR (iq.hse.ru/news/299614539.html).
Antipkina says that a field of
research that was “banned in the USSR” is now on its way to becoming “a
profession of the future.” One can only hope that this new profession will not
neglect its roots in the Soviet and Russian past but will draw on the
impressive works of the scholars of the 1920s and early 1930s.
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