Pedology in Russia: the essence and historical destiny

The article discusses the origins of interest to the scientific and comprehensive study of childhood, history of evolvement of pedology in Russia. The article highlights the main principles on which the latter runs its activities. The author describes the work of the First Congress on pedology (1927), which played a major role in foreign and national formalisation of pedology as a scientific and practical discipline. However, the logic of the development of pedology on the background of social development logic of the country led to the growth of contradictions within the science itself. Analyzing them, the author identifies five major reasons that led to the formal prohibition of the science. Pedagogy emerged as a response to the growing interest in social scienses and humanities and spread the ideas of humanism, which came to Russia from the West, but in the prevailing social and political conditions it was crushed by ideological pressure of the Soviet era, in connection with which the interdisciplinary study of childhood has been suspended for a long time.