Helena Antipoff e a Escolologia

Schoolology, defined as the science of the school, is a proposal initiated by the Russian-Brazilian educator and psychologist Helena Antipoff, developed at the School for the Improvement of Teachers in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, during the 1930s, whose object of study was the school and everything related to it. Through a documental study, the theoretical and methodological foundations that anchored the proposal were investigated: the perspective of the New Education movement, in which the child is considered the center of the pedagogical process; the psychology of the child; Edouard Claparède’s experimental pedagogy, and Alexander Lazursky’s method of natural experimentation. Antipoff has innovated by choosing the school as a psycho-sociological unit considered as a totality composed by multiple factors that, in interaction, could influence the students’ learning and developmental processes, such as the family, social, cultural and economic environment; the choice of teaching methods and the organization of school management. Schoolological studies introduced scientific methods of investigation into teacher education, aiming at making pedagogy an experimental science.