The Imperfect Child in Early Twentieth-Century Russia

Autor/in	Byford, Andy
Titel	The Imperfect Child in Early Twentieth-Century Russia
Quelle	In: History of Education, 46 (2017) 5, S.595-617 (23 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0046-760X
DOI	10.1080/0046760X.2017.1332248
Schlagwörter	Foreign Countries; Children; Social Attitudes; Pathology; Clinical Diagnosis; Political Issues; Classification; History; Disabilities; Russia + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Ausland; Child; Kind; Kinder; Social attidude; Soziale Einstellung; Pathologie; Politischer Faktor; Classification system; Klassifikation; Klassifikationssystem; Geschichte; Geschichtsdarstellung; Handicap; Behinderung; Russland
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. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2020/1/01