The Science of the Child: The lost Soviet pedology movement and its echoes today

This essay details the assumptions behind the field of pedology, also known as the “Science of the Child,” which originated in the U.S. and Europe in the late 1800s and was taken up in the new Soviet Union in the early 1920s. This field aspired to investigate all aspects of human biology and social life to inform the creation of schools, and from these disparate investigations produce a whole understanding of situated human development, especially in childhood and adolescence. This ambitious educational research program lasted from the launch of the Soviet Union through the Pedology Decree of 1936, when it was outlawed during Stalin's Great Terror or Great Purge, and its practitioners were banished or put to death. This essay situates the Science of the Child in the context of Soviet Marxism and Stalinist totalitarianism, outlines its tenets, and reviews the ferocious critiques that Soviet authorities, including leading psychologists, used to obliterate the movement. The essay concludes with lessons available from this effort to create a comprehensive program of developmental research, and a reflection on how political bureaucracies may control educational research and practice through the imposition of ideological imperatives.