How a nugget from Belarus discovered the psychology of the XXI century - and it was not accepted in the XX

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

When you retell the ideas of the outstanding Soviet psychologist Vygotsky on how to raise children with various developmental disabilities, you come across the fact that people perceive them as “modern”, “urgent”, “tolerant” and even… “American”. However, Vygotsky was born and raised in Belarus, not the United States, and wrote down his ideas in the early Soviet years. How did he manage to be so ahead of time?

Nugget from Gomel

When a Jewish youth from the outskirts of the Russian Empire came to conquer Moscow, it seemed that he immediately found his calling: articles about literary novelties soon began to appear under the name of Vygotsky. In addition to literary premieres, young Lev did not seem to miss a single theatrical one. In general, everything tended to ensure that he would forever fit into the bohemian world.

In fact, even then Vygotsky began to think about psychological problems. While still a schoolboy, he read the book of the legendary Potebnya "Thought and Language". She made him look at literature in a new way, but not only at it, becoming the beginning of a great journey. But so far, Vygotsky had just left for Moscow to write articles and study, and then, picking up the ideas of a total educational program after the revolution, he returned to his native Gomel to teach literature - and always in a new way. After all, it is very important how we talk about art, for how we perceive it, so - down with the old-school lesson plans.

Vygotsky is noticed and lured to the Pedagogical College. It was there that Lyova, however, is already an adult Lev Semyonovich, and creates his own unique room of experimental psychology, on the basis of which he is actively engaged in research work. This moment is worth remembering - it became a turning point not only for Soviet and Belarusian, but also for the entire world psychology. It was as a result of the work of this cabinet that Vygotsky was lured to Moscow.

These ideas are not outdated - they just came into force

Vygotsky expressed many ideas, which over time were adopted by psychology and pedagogy and which are now even more relevant than in the days when they were barely understood. For example, that organized communication with adults, motivation give the child for development more than the mechanical inculcation of conditioned reflexes and "education". He was the first to express and develop the theory that heredity and social factors equally affect the development of personality - something that has been proven over and over again in our time, with the development of genetics and the ability to trace heredity, and not just social factors.

It was Vygotsky who experimentally proved that the greatest opportunities for the development of children with physical and mental problems are provided by the use of their preservation functions, the fact that they can still do well, and not attempts to oust "ordinary" children from them, ignoring their problems and demanding to overcome them by force will. He achieved tremendous success working with children with mental retardation or deaf-blindness. It was Vygotsky who discovered and substantiated that the level of development of thinking depends on the formation and development of speech.

He believed that a child, even with the biggest problems, himself seeks to compensate for them and integrate into ordinary, social life - teachers should only find a way to help him and not kill his motivation. At the same time, Vygotsky opposed any violence, pressure when working with such children. Perhaps the movie "Temporary Difficulties" would have horrified him.

He was generally against defining a child through "defects". Anomalous development is primarily a consequence of both an incorrect pedagogical approach and the entire interaction of society with a person, he said. One should look at a child through what he can, and not what he is not given - such statements are now commonplace, but at the beginning of the twentieth century they sounded revolutionary.

Not in time

How did the career that began so brilliantly continue? In the thirties, attitudes towards many innovative psychologists changed. They have ceased to fit into the agenda. Lev Semyonovich was accused of ideological perversions, including the fact that he deliberately denies the leading role of the collective (and collective uniformity) in the development of children with any problems - although who did not deny the influence of the collective, it is Vygotsky. From rejection, the scientific community quickly took a step to outright harassment.

Vygotsky was very hard on the persecution. His health deteriorated - he had been sick with tuberculosis for a long time. In 1934, at the age of thirty-seven, he died - leaving behind about two hundred scientific papers. His discoveries influenced not only psychology, but also ordinary and defectological pedagogy, philosophy, art history and linguistics. Only in our time were they able to fully appreciate his genius.

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