June 11: the day of death of Lev Vygotsky, the psychologist who created the science of the "new man"
On June 11, 1934, Lev Vygotsky died of tuberculosis in Moscow. He was 37 years old. He had created an entire field of psychology and pedagogy, which after his death was declared pseudoscience and expunged from Soviet academia for twenty years.
It's not hard to be a materialist in physiology - just try being one in psychology.
Provincial polymath
Lev Vygotsky was born in 1896 in the Mogilev province to a Jewish family. His father was a tradesman, and his mother was a teacher. The family was prosperous, and the boy received an excellent education. One of his teachers practiced the Socratic method: instead of providing ready-made answers, he helped students find the truth through dialogue and leading questions.
At the gymnasium, Vygotsky mastered Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, and Esperanto. At 17, he entered the medical faculty of Moscow University, soon transferring to the law faculty while simultaneously attending lectures in the history and philosophy department.
Teacher, critic, psychologist
At the age of 23, after the establishment of Soviet power in Gomel, Vygotsky entered the teaching profession. He taught at a labor school, in retraining courses for educators and teachers, for cultural workers from villages, at the people's conservatory, and at the workers' faculty. He also worked for the local department of public education, helping select theatrical repertoire, and published around 80 theater reviews.
In 1923, he changed one letter in his surname: his original name was Vygotsky, but he was confused with his famous cousin, the literary critic and translator David Vygotsky. Together with his brother, in the early 1920s, Vygotsky founded a public city library and reading room, where he lectured on science and art. He also opened an experimental psychology department at the Gomel Pedagogical College.
In 1924, at a congress of psychoneurologists in Petrograd, he met the secretary of the Institute of Experimental Psychology, Alexander Luria, who invited him to Moscow.
The Science of the "New Man"
Vygotsky spent the last ten years of his life in Moscow. He developed an idea that revolutionized psychology: the human psyche—abstract thinking, logical memory, attention—is formed not only biologically but also through the social environment. Based on this, Vygotsky studied child development at the intersection of psychology, biology, and pedagogy—a field known as pedology.
His views on education were revolutionary for his time. He believed that obedience in education was greatly overvalued.
From a psychological point of view, obedience is devoid of any moral and educational power, because it presupposes an unfree and slavish attitude towards things and actions.
Juvenile delinquency not only does not indicate any defect in the child’s psyche, but, on the contrary, it fits in and very easily coexists with great general giftedness.
To educate means to organize life; in a correct life, children grow up correctly.
Good children usually represent, in a moral sense, a striking example of mediocrity, because they are most often sluggish and limited children, following the line of the easiest adaptation to the environment - those who do not need much or who in their earliest childhood have grasped the secret of a prosperous existence and value it above all other blessings.
Harassment and ban
Even during Vygotsky's lifetime, in the 1930s, his ideas were harshly criticized by the Party for their sympathy for psychoanalysis and "bourgeois influence." Despite this persecution, shortly before his death, he was invited to the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine to establish a psychology department. Vygotsky didn't make it.
He spent his entire life battling tuberculosis unsuccessfully—he is believed to have contracted it in 1918 while caring for his ailing brother and mother. He studied until his final days and died as a third-year medical student at the Kharkiv Psychoneurological Institute. His last words were, "I am ready."
In 1936, after Vygotsky's death, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) issued a decree "On Pedological Perversions in the System of People's Commissariats of Education," declaring pedology a pseudoscience. The works of Vygotsky and his students were removed from libraries and placed under an unofficial ban for twenty years.
Nowhere does a person feel so alone as in a crowd with which nothing connects him
