Andy Byford

Turning Pedagogy into a Science: Teachers and Psychologists in Late Imperial Russia (1897–1917)

The article explores the Russian teachers’ tortuous campaign at the beginning of the twentieth century to rise above the status of “semiprofessionals” by rooting the legitimacy of their professional expertise, training institutions, and working practices in the authority of “science.” This involved a radical reshaping of traditional pedagogy and its fusion with new, controversial approaches to child psychology. It also led to a proliferation of teacher‐training courses and conferences devoted to “pedagogical psychology,” “experimental pedagogy,” and “pedology.” The article analyzes how the teachers’ professional aspirations interacted with the conflicting agendas of rival groups of psychologists, who were themselves engaged in bitter squabbles over the legitimate identity of psychology as a scientific discipline.

The mental test as a boundary object in early-20th-century Russian child science

This article charts the history of mental testing in the context of the rise and fall of Russian child science between the 1890s and the 1930s. Tracing the genealogy of testing in scientific experimentation, scholastic assessment, medical diagnostics and bureaucratic accounting, it follows the displacements of this technology along and across the boundaries of the child science movement. The article focuses on three domains of expertise – psychology, pedagogy and psychiatry, examining the key guises that mental testing assumed in them – namely, the experiment, the exam and the diagnosis. It then analyses the failed state-bureaucratic harnessing of mental testing in early Soviet attempts to manage mass education, discussing the peculiar dynamics of the (de)legitimation of testing, as it swung between black-boxing and instrumentalization, on the one hand, and scandal and controversy, on the other. The article argues that mental testing thrived in Russia as a strategically ambiguous and flexibly interpreted ‘boundary object’, which interconnected a highly heterogeneous field, enabling the coexistence and cooperation of diverse occupational agendas and normative regimes.

The Russian Diaspora in International Relations: ‘Compatriots’ in Britain

Abstract The article examines the harnessing of the contemporary Russian diaspora in certain domains of Russias international relations. It looks specifically at Russian officialdoms ambivalent efforts at developing and engaging with a global network of state-backed diaspora associations, especially as instruments of cultural outreach. The focus is on the relatively recent implementation of this strategy in the West. The first half of the article discusses the ideological ambiguities of this project in general terms; the second examines how it plays itself out in practice, on the example of the United Kingdom. The article suggests that analysing the ambiguities established in the relationship between state and diasporic structures in this context is vital to understanding the current role of the Russian state in the politics of Russian diasporisation.

Between literary education and academic learning: the study of literature at secondary school in late imperial Russia (1860s–1900s)

Introduction So far, research into the history of Russian education has been primarily concerned with the sociopolitical dynamics of the educational field—concretely, with government policies on education and science, with the social composition of the teaching and academic corps, and with the broadly ideological attitudes and activities of government officials, teachers, scholars and students. In this context, the professional self-understanding of Russian educators has been treated predominantly, if not exclusively, from a sociopolitical perspective. It could be argued that this prevailing interest in Russian schools and universities as political and ideological battlegrounds has overshadowed the examination of the ways in which the transmission of knowledge and education as such was structured and legitimized there. Consequently, comparatively little attention has so far been paid to the conceptualization of particular school subjects and to the organization of concrete educational activities in them. What has especially been neglected is the vital role that these subjectspecific concerns played in the professional self-understanding of Russian educators. In what follows I intend to explore this particular issue through the concrete example of literary studies in Russian secondary education in the period between the 1860s and the 1900s. The article will focus mainly, though not exclusively, on debates surrounding the study of literature in Imperial Russia’s male Classical gymnasia—the leading secondary schools that prepared the elite minority for university. The priority given to Classical gymnasia in this article is justified partly by the prestige and dominance of these schools as the principal sites of humanist secondary education in late nineteenth-century Russia. The conceptualization of literary studies in their curriculum undoubtedly influenced secondary-school literary education more generally (including female gymnasia, the Realschulen, vocational and military schools). In this sense issues raised in debates over the study of Russian literature in secondary education often went beyond the limits

Policies and Practices of Transition in Soviet Education from the Revolution to the End of Stalinism

This essay introduces the major themes of the special issue by presenting the period between 1917 and 1953 as a time of intense yet ambiguous ‘Sovietization’ of education, a complicated era of turbulent sociohistorical ‘transition’ that cannot be reduced to massive political U‐turns and definitive shifts in educational policy. The changes that the emergent Soviet education underwent in the course of these decades were characterized by surprising overlaps and reversals across commonly accepted historical boundaries. The essay brings together and analyses the arguments put forward in the main articles of the collection, placing them in the context of the general historiography of this period.

The Figure of the “Spectator” In the Theoretical Writings of Brecht, Diderot, and Rousseau

THE PROBLEM OF THE SPECTATOR in theoretical discourses on the theater is riclf in history and complexity. Due to the dominance of the rhetorical tradition, the audience and its response constituted for centuries the central concern of poetic and theatrical theory. Given the emphasis in pre-Romantic poetics on the social and moral functions of art, the “audience” frequently served as an image of society or humanity at large, both in its relation to art and to itself. The “spectator” was thus a key point of intersection between concerns of aesthetics, on the one hand, and moral and political philosophy on the other. The French Enlightenment’s obsession with the spectator in terms of the latter’s perceptual experience of and affective response to artistic and theatrical representations can be seen as the culmination of this tradition. Writing nearly two centuries later Brecht produced a discourse on the theater that problematized with similar force the interplay and tension between the “aesthetic” and “ideological” dimensions of theatrical performance. In his writings the “spectator” also emerges as a pivotal figure around which tend to revolve most of his theories, including those primarily concerned with the actor. The power that the figure of the “spectator” acquires as a discursive tool in both Brechtian and Enlightenment texts lies in the fact that it functions as the hallmark of the theatrical itself. The spectator automatically evokes the entire set of theatrical relations, including the staged spectacle and the figure of the actor. In eighteenth-century France, debates on the theater extended well beyond the boundaries of art. They gave expression to a wider moral concern about “the theatrical” in society while at the same time turning theater into the model of human and social relations. The theatrical and the social were related in multiple and varied ways. The boundary between theater and society remained highly problematic, especially in the conflict between theater conceived as a framework within society and theater seen as the framework of society. The ambivalence of most discourses on the theater of this time revealed itself precisely in the contradictory attempts both to eliminate or blur this distinction and, at the same time, reinforce it on another level.’ On the one hand, relations inherent in the theatrical framework, namely the functions of the spectator and the actor, were used to inform certain socially

Lechebnaia pedagogika : the concept and practice of therapy in Russian defectology, c. 1880–1936.

Therapy is not simply a domain or form of medical practice, but also a metaphor for and a performance of medicine, of its functions and status, of its distinctive mode of action upon the world. This article examines medical treatment or therapy (in Russian lechenie), as concept and practice, in what came to be known in Russia as defectology (defektologiia) – the discipline and occupation concerned with the study and care of children with developmental pathologies, disabilities and special needs. Defectology formed an impure, occupationally ambiguous, therapeutic field, which emerged between different types of expertise in the niche populated by children considered ‘difficult to cure’, ‘difficult to teach’, and ‘difficult to discipline’. The article follows the multiple genealogy of defectological therapeutics in the medical, pedagogical and juridical domains, across the late tsarist and early Soviet eras. It argues that the distinctiveness of defectological therapeutics emerged from the tensions between its biomedical, sociopedagogical and moral-juridical framings, resulting in ambiguous hybrid forms, in which medical treatment strategically interlaced with education or upbringing, on the one hand, and moral correction, on the other.

The imperfect child in early twentieth-century Russia

Abstract The article discusses the role that conceptualisations of child ‘imperfection’ played in the rise and fall of Russian ‘child study’ between the 1900s and the 1930s. Drawing on Georges Canguilhem’s ideas on ‘the normal’ and ‘the pathological’, the article analyses practices centred on diagnosing subnormality and pathology in the Russian child population in the late tsarist and early Soviet eras. It first examines mutually competing normative regimes that framed categorisations of ‘imperfection’ among Russia’s children in the context of the empire’s accelerated, yet ambivalent modernisation during the 1900s–1910s. It then charts the expansion of this diagnostics in the first decade or so of the Soviet regime, following its shift in focus from the early-1920s’ ‘delinquent child’ to the late-1920s’ ‘mass child’. The article concludes with a discussion of the emergence, over this same period, of the Russian field of medicalised special education known as ‘defectology’. It argues that defectology’s disciplinary specificity crystallised in 1936 around a purposely restrictive concept of ‘imperfection’, understood as individualised and clinically established pathological ‘impairment’. The latter conceptualisation became fixed at the height of Stalinism as a strategic counter to the expansive flux in which the diagnostics and conceptualisation of child ‘imperfection’ had otherwise been over the first three decades of the twentieth century in the context of the remarkable rise of child study during this period.

Trauma and Pathology: Normative Crises and the Child Population in Late Tsarist Russia and the Early Soviet Union, 1904–1924

Abstract:Focusing on the major sociopolitical upheavals of the first quarter of the twentieth century in Russia, this article examines the key contexts in which children became objects of mass intervention in the midst and aftermath of a succession of wars and revolutions. It ties together the following cases in the history of childhood in Russia: (1) the “epidemic” of child suicides diagnosed in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution; (2) public concern over the psychological effect of war on children during the First World War; and (3) the early Soviet efforts to deal with the problem of mass child “delinquency” in the aftermath of the revolutionary civil war.

V. M. BEKHTEREV IN RUSSIAN CHILD SCIENCE, 1900S-1920S: "OBJECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY"/"REFLEXOLOGY" AS A SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT.

In the early 20th century the child population became a major focus of scientific, professional and public interest. This led to the crystallization of a dynamic field of child science, encompassing developmental and educational psychology, child psychiatry and special education, school hygiene and mental testing, juvenile criminology and the anthropology of childhood. This article discusses the role played in child science by the eminent Russian neurologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev. The latters name is associated with a distinctive program for transforming the human sciences in general and psychology in particular that he in the 1900s labelled “objective psychology” and from the 1910s renamed “reflexology.” The article examines the equivocal place that Bekhterevs “objective psychology” and “reflexology” occupied in Russian/Soviet child science in the first three decades of the 20th century. While Bekhterevs prominence in this field is beyond doubt, analysis shows that “objective psychology” and “reflexology” had much less success in mobilizing support within it than certain other movements in this arena (for example, “experimental pedagogy” in the pre‐revolutionary era); it also found it difficult to compete with the variety of rival programs that arose within Soviet “pedology” during the 1920s. However, this article also demonstrates that the study of child development played a pivotal role in Bekhterevs program for the transformation of the human sciences: it was especially important to his efforts to ground in empirical phenomena and in concrete research practices a new ontology of the psychological, which, the article argues, underpinned “objective psychology”/“reflexology” as a transformative scientific movement.