The 125th anniversary of L.S. Vygotsky’s birth, which was marked in 2021, was commemorated by various events in the scientific and cultural life of Russia and other countries. A major example is this issue of the journal, which is devoted to Vygotsky’s creation of a new school in the field of children with handicaps (corrective pedagogy) — a cultural-historical theory of children’s handicaps. As A.N. Leontiev aptly put it, Vygotsky was a psychologist, a pedologist, an expert on children’s handicaps, an expert on children’s handicaps, an educator, and a psychopathologist, while remaining a psychologist and merely contributing to these disciplines his own invigorating flow of psychological theory. The cultural-historical approach that Vygotsky devised in psychology, on the one hand, was based on research in the field of abnormal childhood, and on the other hand, helped to generalize it and make it into a well-organized theoretical system.
This volume includes works by Vygotsky in the field of children’s handicaps as well as the results of research aimed at analyzing his contribution to the theory and practice of teaching and educating children with developmental deviations.
The issue opens with Vygotsky’s article “On the Psychology and Pedagogy of Handicapped Children [K psikhologii i pedagogike detskoi defektivnosti],” published in 1924 in the anthology Questions in the Education of Blind, Deaf-Mute, and Mentally Retarded Children [Voprosy vospitaniia slepykh, glukhonemykh i umstvenno otstalykh detei]. This was Vygotsky’s first work on problems related to handicapped children. As Vygotsky writes in the foreword, the purpose of the anthology was to frame the problem of special schools for handicapped children as a problem of social education.
In 1927 the anthology Mental Retardation, Blindness, and Deaf-Muteness [Umstvennaia otstalost’, slepota i glukhonemota] included Vygotsky’s article “Handicaps and Overcompensation [Defekt i sverkhkompensatsiia],” which was later publihed in the collected works under the title “Handicaps and Compensation [Defekt i kompensatsiia].” The article critically analyzed the perception that had evolved by that time that handicaps were exclusively a result of inadequate development and set the goal of inculcating a sense of having full social value through overcompensation: Vygotsky argued that the view of handicaps not only as a weakness but also a strength was a psychological truth.
The article “Pedological Principles of Working With Mentally Retarded and Physically Handicapped Children [Pedologicheskie osnovy raboty s umstvenno otstalymi i fizicheski defektivnymi det’mi]” was written especially for the Pedagogical Encyclopedia [Pedagogicheskaia entsiklopediia] and was published in 1928.
The article “Developmental Diagnostics and a Pedological Clinic for Difficult Childhoods [Diagnostika razvitiia i pedologicheskaia klinika trudnogo detstva],” written in 1931, came out as a separate pamphlet in 1936. L.V. Zankov notes in the Foreword that the work provides a new interpretation of the problem of difficult childhoods and presents principles for a scientifically based program of studying difficult children. Vygotsky writes about the culture of developmental diagnostics, which assumes the discovery of internal patterns in a child’s development and a search for the nature of the developmental abnormalities that are characteristic of various types of difficult children. He is convinced that a substantive, scientific study of the children will produce a blossoming of curative pedagogy and of the entire system of individual pedagogical activities.