The downfall of pedology as the demise of an occupation (1935-36)

Even though pedological work was in full swing during the early 1930s, the service was not immune to criticism (Ewing, 2001; Byford, 2020, p. 244). Yet the dispersed, local and routine nature of ground-level pedological work, which featured as merely a functional component of a more general system of operations through which schools were managed by Narkompros, protected the pedology service from more systematic and sustained political scrutiny. This did not, however, last forever. Crucial to the eventual downfall of pedology in the summer of 1936 was the suddenly much closer attention that pedological work started to receive from the very top of the Party in 1935.

Up until 1935, what pedologists did on a daily basis in schools had not been watched particularly closely by Party structures, not least since the highest echelons of the Party had not been expressing any great interest in pedology since the 1931— 32 campaign to politically subordinate the field’s academic leadership. However, over the course of 1935, a few politically sensitive incidents taking place in schools were brought to the attention of the Politburo prompting the Part)’ to start to scrutinize much more closely what Narkompros was doing to keep control over the schoolchild population (on what follows see especially Rodin, 1998; Byford, 2020, pp. 244—248). A number of commissions, each headed by a leading Party figure, were formed to look into the matter at different educational levels, with Leningrad Party boss Andrei Zhdanov becoming responsible for high schools. Although pedology itself was not the focus of enquiry, the work of these commissions led their members to become much better acquainted with the work of the pedology service as a key instrument in Narkompros’s approach to managing discipline and delivering educational targets. In this context, the commissions approved, in fact, the policy of removing disruptive pupils from the regular classroom, deeming this both necessary and effective. However, there were aspects of the work of the pedology service which raised alarm bells. For example, it was argued that pedologists must ensure that referrals did not display bias against children from working class or ethnic minority backgrounds. Of particular concern was also the pedologists’ routine collection of detailed personal and medical information about the children’s parents and families more generally. Zhdanov saw this as something highly sensitive from a political point of view and ordered that the practice be stopped.

The findings of these commissions did not in themselves threaten the pedology service. However, the key consequence of their work was that local Party structures were now suddenly on alert and began to observe the activities of ground-level pedologists much more closely than had been the case before, considering them to be of interest to Party bosses. At the start of 1936, the section for schools of the Leningrad-area Party committee alerted Zhdanov that local pedologists did not appear to be listening to the directives that he had issued only a few months earlier. Zhdanov’s attention was drawn to extensive surveys that the Leningrad Pedology

Institute was at that time conducting among the families of schoolchildren in the Pskov district. Zhdanov was clearly annoyed: on 4 April 1936 he gave a speech at the meeting of the Leningrad Party bureau where he denounced pedologists for going around prying into people’s private affairs, seeking out negative aspects of family life, and investigating not just the children but also their parents and grandparents, asking questions concerning class origins, while seemingly only looking for defects and anomalies in people’s family histories. Zhdanov at first appeared to be targeting only the Leningrad Pedology Institute. However, by the sheer logic of campaigns designed to impose Party control across a particular domain of state operations, the errors of this Institute came to serve as merely an example of a much wider and deeper problem. The torch was suddenly shone very brightly on the pedology' service more generally, as an instrument that Narkompros was relying on to manage the efficiencies of the education system. Zhdanov was at the forefront of this campaign of critical scrutiny and his vocal disapproval began to attract and concentrate various previously isolated complaints and grievances about pedological work.

Among the most problematic issues to emerge was the pedologists’ role in referring so many children to special schools. Zhdanov condemned the readiness with which children were being taken out of regular classes, arguing that such a policy disincentivized teachers from trying to improve pupils’ performance and behaviour using their own methods and techniques. Moreover, the speed at which schools for the underachieving and the misbehaving were mushrooming had produced some unintended effects. The overall percentage of those relegated (somewhere in the region of 2%) was not huge, especially if one’s understanding of underachievement was relatively fluid. However, by grouping such children into larger cohorts, and especially when they formed entire schools, these populations suddenly appeared much bigger. Moreover, managing schools populated entirely with the underperforming and the disruptive was a challenge, not least since providing such schools with additional resources and expertise, as was recommended by leading pedologists who promoted this type of triage, was not, in fact, within the state’s means. The whole matter was made worse by the way in which such children were labelled. Though individual cases varied, they were invariably categorized using terms that carried stigma, not just for the children, but also their families, and ultimately the state. Zhdanov complained about the impression that the mass nature of such referrals gave of Soviet society as supposedly experiencing ‘degradation’ (degradatsiia) and he blamed this on tests, describing them as pseudoscientific instruments that produced spurious diagnoses of ‘backwardness’.

In June 1936 Zhdanov orchestrated a meeting with Leningrad teachers and pedologists billed ‘The Audience ofTeachers and Pedologists of Leningrad Schools with Comrade Zhdanov’. At this meeting he gave a speech titled ‘On the Pedological Distortions in the Narkompros RSFSR’ (‘O pedologicheskikh izvrashche-niiakh v Narkomprose RSFSR’) announcing that the question of the future ofpedology had, thanks to his personal initiative, been placed on the agenda of the next meeting of the Politburo. Two days later, the Politburo discussed the agenda item tabled by Zhdanov and formed a commission made up of Komsomol leader A. V. Kosarev, Commissar of Education A. S. Bubnov, Commissar of Healthcare G. N. Kaminskii, and Zhdanov himself. Their task was to prepare a decree on the matter of pedology on behalf of the Party’s Central Committee. This became the now infamous decree ‘On the Pedological Distortions in the System of the Narkompros’, issued on 4 July 1936. In it, the Party’s Central Committee accused ‘the so-called “pedologist’” of using pseudoscientific tests and questionnaires to justify the exclusion of large numbers of children, especially those from working class and minority backgrounds, from regular schooling, while apparently blaming poor performance and indiscipline in a deterministic way on innate pathologies and the family’s social background.

Even though the decree denounced pedology wholesale as a ‘reactionary pseudoscience’, its core charges focused on the occupational work of ground-level pedologists. Indeed, what followed was first and foremost the rapid and comprehensive dismantlement of pedology’s occupational network, starting with the mass redeployment of school pedologists to other posts available in the system (Ewing, 2001). This process began already on 7 July 1936, as Commissar Bubnov sent a telegram to all local educational administrations with the order to relieve every pedologist of their duties with immediate effect. Most pedologists were swiftly re-employed as teachers, while some were given posts in the educational administration. Those with medical degrees were turned into school doctors. By August 1936 over half the staff had been successfully allocated a new role. This is not to say that the summer was not a period of grave uncertainty for former pedologists who had every right to worry about becoming targets of more serious reprisals. In the wake of the Party decree, the press caricatured ‘the pedologist’ as an evil scientist sabotaging the Soviet education system. However, this was a caricature of a particular kind of occupational work, rather than of concrete individuals who held this job title. In other words, it was the role that needed to go, not the person fulfilling it. As a result, there were no mass repressions and punishments more typically included the loss of the right to claim the years spent in the post as part of one’s pensionable employment.

The Party’s anti-pedology decree also entailed the condemnation of and blanket ban on all the key instruments that pedologists used in their daily work, especially tests, questionnaires and family surveys. Schools were simultaneously ordered to remove from pupils’ school files all biopsychosocial data that had been collected by the pedologists. However, the most important aspect of the dismantlement of pedology as an occupation was the denunciation of the policy of streaming and referrals, in which the pedology service had played such an instrumental role. This included not only putting the brakes on the practice, but reversing it, i.e. transferring children back from special schools to regular ones or, in some cases, simply re-categorizing an entire school from special to normal (Ewing, 2001).

However, it was not sufficient simply to abolish the post of pedologists, to ban the tools of their trade, and to dismantle the institutional structure of their operations. It was also essential to replace the very functions of pedological work — that of monitoring and managing all-round biopsychosocial development in the Soviet schoolchild population — by the work of another occupation. One of the key points made by the Party’s decree was that the occupational work of pedologists had been in conflict with the occupational work of another profession — namely, teachers. More specifically, the work of pedologists was said to have been trespassing on what was supposed to be the rightful territory of professional educators, while apparently actively undermining their work as pedagogues. It was argued, for example, that the prioritization of referrals entailed a lack of trust in the teachers' pedagogical expertise, and that the privileging of tests as modes of evaluation implied a distrust of the teachers’ own practices of measuring development. This was not a difficult argument to make given the return of formal school marks and standard, scholastic modes of assessment following the 1931 educational reform.

During the latter half of 1936, teachers were swiftly mobilized into the campaign of pedology’s political denunciation. Throughout that school year they were expected to lambast the former pedology service from their own perspective, playing the part both of its victims and of witnesses to its harmful effects on Soviet children, parents and education more generally. More important, however, was that the occupational role of ‘the teacher’ was hereby being lined up to replace that of ‘the pedologist’. This was framed as the ‘reinstatement’ of teachers in their rightful occupational role (Ewing, 2001). Teachers were now recast as the true heroes of the future successes of Soviet education, not least by being expected to take on full professional responsibility for the task of monitoring, managing and directing the development of future Soviet generations into productive, disciplined and patriotic citizens.