Abstract
A revision in the principles of pedology. The application of the dialectical method in pedology. Idealistic and materialistic pedology. Pedological observation, experimentation, natural experiments, testing. Anthropometrics, somatoscopy, environmental study, document collection, and pedagogical research. Real and passport age. The concept of standards. Studying children en masse. Methods proper to pedology.
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Notes
- 1.
The attentive reader might notice that the list of contents for the first lesson used dashes and not periods after each heading, and this lesson uses periods and not dashes. This was Vygotsky’s work, not our own. Because this was written and published during the lifetime of the author, we follow the author’s apparent inconsistency without any editorial emendation.
- 2.
Blonsky uses the Russian word винeгpeт, or vinegret, which is a transliteration into Russian of the French word “vinaigrette”. In French “vinaigrette” refers to a dressing of oil and vinegar, which do not mix but form an unstable emulsion. In Russian, винeгpeт refers to a likewise heterogeneous salad of beets, potatoes, carrots, and pickles. Either way, Blonsky means that what is now called “inter-disciplinarity” (and generally permissible) cannot create an autonomous science, because it is theoretically and methodologically eclectic (and is therefore generally impermissible).
- 3.
Ernst Meumann (1862–1915) was a student of Wilhelm Wundt; he wrote a thesis on the aesthetics of rhythm, and then became a professor of philosophy at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. As Vygotsky says, his lectures centred on “experimental pedagogy”. He also wrote a lot about religion, militarism (which he supported) and aesthetics—so he is a good example of an inter-disciplinary and not a trans-disciplinary approach to child science.
- 4.
Vygotsky gives a Shakespeare quote well-known in Russian but a little hard to recognize when retranslated into English: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, 1.5.167-8).
- 5.
Vygotsky refers to диaлeктичecкoгo мeтoдa пoзнaния, and in Soviet sources this is usually translated as “the dialectical method of cognition”. However, in English, the term cognition includes things like perception, memory, and language acquisition, so it seems preferable to use “the dialectical method of understanding”. Vygotsky also refers, in the next sentence, to вo вcex ocтaльныx нayкax (“all the other separate sciences”), what is meant is the separate, autonomous, individual sciences based on analysis (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology) as opposed to transdisciplinary sciences of a natural whole such as geography, linguistics, and pedology.
- 6.
Eduard Spranger (1882–1963) was a student of Dilthey. Like many of the idealist philosophers, Spranger became a Nazi sympathizer, and the Nazis were fascinated by the strength and “will” of youth, which they saw as pure and quite separate essences. But Spranger became appalled by the cruelty and stupidity of Hitler and resigned in protest when they seized power. Disgusted by the waste of German youth in the war, Spranger went to Japan to teach. When he came back, he was apparently involved in a plot to kill Hitler, along with Max Planck’s son, who was hanged with piano wire. Spranger too was arrested, but the Japanese intervened in order to prevent his execution.
In psychology, Spranger was a Gestaltist, and believed that both body and soul were structures, but they were separate structures: one material and one purely cultural. So he wrote:
Just as in the physical organism every organ is conditioned by the form of the whole, and the whole only lives by the co-operation of all the partial powers, the soul is also a teleological context in which every single side derives its intelligibiity from the whole and the unity of the whole from its subdivisions and their individual functions. (Spranger, 1927, p. 9)
As Vygotsky points out in subsequent paragraphs, Spranger contends that the body is a structure—a whole, a Gestalt. But the soul is another structure: another whole, another Gestalt. So the child is not one structure, but two.
- 7.
Spranger, a staunch Hegelian, means the mental attitude typical of the moment, the spirit of the age, or “Geist” in Spranger’s original German.
- 8.
Although Vygotsky does not place this in quotation marks, the words are self-evidently those of Spranger and not his own. This explains the deprecatory remarks about Jews and the statement that the Russian soul is geographically proximal (to Germany) but psychologically distant. At the outset of Types of Man (1928), Spranger sets out to provide a Linnaean taxonomy of human types. He ridicules the idea that all human beings belong to a single species called “homo”. This in itself shows that Spranger doesn’t actually understand the Linnaean system he is aspiring to: “homo” is not the name of our species but rather the name of the genus. Homo sapiens on the other hand is not the name of a genus but that of a single species; any sapient member of the species can marry any other suitable member of it and produce healthy children. So Spranger’s “types” are in no real sense Linnaean, but are instead defined by putative life-goals, something not entirely clear in the case of children and even adolescents. Spranger’s types are: the theoretical type of person (goal: “truth”), the economic (“usefulness”), the aesthetic (“beauty”), the social (“love”), the political (“will to power”), and the religious (“unity with God”).
- 9.
Stepan Stepanovich Molozhavy (Cтeпaн Cтeпaнoвич Moлoжaвый, 1879–1937) was a professor at the Second Moscow State University which existed from 1918 until 1930. This was the university which published Vygotsky’s book and used it as a correspondence course. Molozhavy was the author of many works on children’s collectives, preschoolers, and on worker education, and as Vygotsky said he was the creator of an observational protocol for studying how children adapted to the environment. He worked with juvenile delinquents, whom he considered disadvantaged rather than morally evil. As part of the criticism of pedology, he was forced to recant his views on adaptation and replaced them with the Piagetian idea of “equilibration” (see van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991, pp. 321–324). He died soon after pedology was abolished in the USSR.
Mikhail Yakovlevich Basov (Mиxaил Якoвлeвич Бacoв, 1892–1931) was a student of Bekhterev, Wagner, and Lazursky and hence a psychoneurologist. He was one of the founders of pedology, and was one of the first of Bekhterev’s students to question reflexology. He was particularly interested in the “mental pace” of school activity. Denounced in the first wave of criticism against pedology, he was sent to a factory to be re-educated by the workers, where he died.
- 10.
Alexander Feodorovich Lazursky (Aлeкcáндp Фёдopoвич Лaзýpcкий, 1874–1917) was the student of Bekhterev and Pavlov and later the teacher of Basov (see Footnote 8). After training as a doctor and working in physiology, he became interested in personality while studying with Carl Stumpf and Wilhelm Wundt in Germany. As a result, there is quite a bit of Cartesian dualism and German idealism in his work (he writes, for example, that the object of study in psychology is the soul). He wrote an important book on educational psychology in 1910, based on his ideas of “natural experimentation” (watching children while they were doing the special tasks of schoolwork). However, his academic work was later criticized as speculative, and he left academia to become a psychiatrist. In 1925, Vygotsky and Luria wrote a critical but very respectful preface to his textbook, which they were still using to teach.
- 11.
James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944) was a student of Wilhelm Wundt, who supervised his thesis on intelligence testing. He was also a strong believer in eugenics: he offered his children one thousand dollars apiece if they would marry professors! A good deal of his work in psychometrics was devoted to proving that intelligence and personality were inherited. One of Cattell’s first intelligence tests was made mandatory for all freshmen at Columbia University, where he was teaching. Unfortunately for him, Clark Wessler, who was a Ph.D. student of Cattell's, showed that it had not relationship to how students subsequently performed at Columbia. This is still a very big problem with psychometric tests in general. Of course, they test something. But they tend to be very poor predictors of academic performance, unless they are actual academic tests.
- 12.
Alfred Binet (1857–1911) was a largely self-taught psychologist who created the first practical IQ tests. He became interested in intelligence by writing about the development of his two daughters, (Marguerite the “objectivist” and Armande the “subjectivist”). In 1904 the group he belonged to “The Free Society for the Study of Child Psychology” was asked to prepare a mental scale that could decide which children in schools needed remedial help. He developed a scale of thirty tasks, e.g. following a beam of light with your eyes, pointing to named body parts, repeating back numbers and sentences, and defining words like “house”, “fork” or “mama”. From this, he calculated the relationship between the child’s score and the average score for the child’s age. Binet himself stressed the limitations of his test—he thought there could be no such thing as “general intelligence” and he wanted the test to be used only to diagnose which children needed extra help with certain tasks. But the American H. H. Goddard was convinced the Binet test would prove the superiority of white people. Binet denounced this as “brutal pessimism”. Vygotsky writes that we do not know what the Binet tests really measure, how they measure it, or what it means. Binet would probably have agreed.
- 13.
Grigorii Ivanovich Rossolimo (Гpигopий Ивaнoвич Poccoлимo, 1860–1928) was a classmate, colleague, and close friend of Anton Chekhov. He was a neurologist, and some of his neuropathological tests are still used today famous Russian neurologist. He was a founder in both defectology and pedology, and created a system of “psychological profiles” based on questionnaires for the assessment of will, attention, comprehension, visual memory, verbal memory, numerical memory, understanding, comprehension, combination, wit, imagination, and powers of observation.
- 14.
Vygotsky uses the Russian term мeтoд aнкeт, metod anket which is simply a transliteration of the French “methode d'inquete”, from the work of Durkheim. This was a quantitative sociological approach much favoured by Zalkind: a social worker surveyed a population, determining how many newspapers are read, how many times the children change their underwear, and how many square feet per bedroom were at the disposal of children, etc.
Théodule-Armand Ribot (1839–1916) was the founder of scientific psychology in France. Like Binet, he was self-taught, mostly reading English empiricist psychology (Hume, Lock, Bain, and John Stuart Mill). Unlike Binet he became a very successful academic, eventually becoming the first professor of psychology at the College de France.
Ribot’s success in France was probably due to the merciless rationalism of his approach: he emphasized the physiology of mental life at a time when psychology was still part of philosophy and even theology (and in fact Ribot himself had studied philosophy as a student). For all of Ribot’s rationalism, a good deal of his psychology is simple speculation, e.g. his “curve” of idealism versus realism. He was a pessimist, believing that child idealism and imagination were doomed to contradict and be crushed by adult realism and rationalism.
For G. Stanley Hall, see Footnote 1, Chap. 1.
- 15.
Somatoscopy and anthropometrics both mean the observation and measurement of the human body. The difference, as Vygotsky said in differentiating the clinical method from the method of psychometric testing (3), lies in the goal.
With somatoscopy, the goal is studying variation over time, so somatoscopy tends to focus on one feature of the body. A somatoscopic chart of head size by Quetelet (1870) showed how the proportion of head to body changed as a child grew.
With anthropometrics, the goal is to establish differences between populations. This means comparing body measurements in large populations. From these different goals, different methods arise: anthropometrics is a static, cross-sectional method, while somatoscopy is a dynamic, diachronic one.
- 16.
Previously, Vygotsky distinguished between “mental age” and “passport age”. Here he distinguishes between “bone age” and “passport age”. Bone age is a good example of growth rather than development. Of course, as Vygotsky points out here, it involves qualitative transformation as well as quantitative increase: the bones change in density (from cartilage to ossified bone).
- 17.
Pre-Soviet (and also post-Soviet) one-ruble coins have a double-headed eagle on one side and a “bar” on the other.
- 18.
Vygotsky uses the Russian term мaccы, which translated literally would be “masses”, but it is really impossible to translate this literally into English without unwanted connotations from physics or politics, so we have translated it slightly innacurately as “population”.
- 19.
Karl Groos (1861–1946) was a German professor of philosophy and comparative psychology who taught in Switzerland. As Vygotsky says he was interested in comparing psychological functions in animals with their forms in humans, and he was best known for his work on play, to which Vygotsky refers in Chap. 3. He was an “instrumentalist”: that is, he believed that play had to have a function. He wrote two books: on play in animals, where he argued that play had an evolutionary function, and on play in man where he argued that it formed aesthetic tastes. In this we can see Groos illustrating Vygotsky’s point: when we compare, we must note not only similarities but also differences.
References
Spranger, E. (1927). Psychologie des Jugendalters. Verlag Quelle & Meyer.
Spranger, E. (1928). Types of men. Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Quetelet, A. (1870). Anthropometrie. Bruxelles: C. Muquardt.
Van der Veer, R. and Valsiner, J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky. Cambridge MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (2022). The Methods of Pedology. In: L. S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works, Volume 3. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 11. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2972-4_2
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