Obukhova l f developmental psychology. Children's - developmental psychology - Obukhova L.F. Chapter I. Childhood as a Subject of Psychological Research

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Doctor of Psychology, professor at Moscow State University, full member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, laureate of the Presidential Prize of the Russian Federation, head of the Department of Developmental Psychology of the Faculty of Psychology of Education of the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education.

Education and professional activity.

She graduated from the psychological department of the philosophical faculty of Moscow State University (1960). Candidate of Psychological Sciences (1972), Doctor of Psychological Sciences (1996). Associate Professor (1977). Professor of the Department of Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology (1997). Laureate of the Russian President's Prize for his contribution to the development of an activity approach to the development of the psyche (1997). Full member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (1996). Member of the editorial board of the Moscow University journal Vestnik, Psychology series. Member of the editorial board of the journal Psychological Science and Education.

Participated in research studies mental development children; participated in many years of work with deaf-blind students of the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University. The topic of her Ph.D. thesis is Formation of the Elements of Scientific Thinking in a Child. Application of the method of systematic formation of mental actions by P. Ya. Galperin to analysis characteristic features children's thinking (the phenomena of J. Piaget) showed new opportunities in highlighting the problem of "Education and development" in childhood. Doctoral dissertation completed on the topic: "Ways scientific study child psyche in the twentieth century". L.F. Obukhova outlines the contour of child psychology as a system of possible interpretations of mental phenomena based on their genetic modeling understanding, including these phenomena in the context of the child's developing being and psyche. Two main ways of development of child psychology have been established, each of which implements one of the existing research paradigms. The paper conceptually generalizes the essential characteristics of the theories of the child's mental development within the framework of the cultural-historical and natural-scientific paradigm. A comparative analysis of theories of child development made it possible to reveal their continuity and establish the logic of the formation process. scientific knowledge about the driving causes of child development. The works are important for organizing research activities in the system of preschool education, for solving practical problems in the development of children's thinking, for diagnosing the levels of development of children's cognitive activity.

The works of L.F. Obukhova are important for organizing research activities in the system of preschool education, for solving practical problems in the development of children's thinking, for diagnosing the levels of development of children's cognitive activity.

Prepared 25 candidates of sciences.

Scientific interests:

child (age) psychology;
comparative analysis norms and pathologies of child development;
comparative analysis of the age and functional development of the child's psyche.

Training courses.

General course of lectures "Age psychology", special courses "Mental development in conditions of sensory defects", "J. Piaget's theory", "Actual problems of modern developmental psychology", "Fundamentals of general (genetic) psychology. Theory of P. Ya. Galperin ".

Materials of public lectures Obukhova L.F. within Scientific lecture hall MSUPE on problems of modern psychology:

"Psychology of Development" / May 4, 2011, Russia, Moscow

Publications

Child psychology: theories, facts, problems M.: Trivola 3rd ed., Sr. - M.: Trivola, 1998. - 352 p.: ill.
Age-related psychology. Textbook for SPO M.: Yurayt 2016
Age-related psychology. Textbook M.: Pedagogical Society of Russia. - 1999 - 442 s
Developmental psychology: Textbook for universities. M.: Higher education; MGPPU, 2006. - 460 p. - (Fundamentals of Sciences).
Child (age) psychology M .: Russian Pedagogical Agency, 1996, - 374 p.
Jean Piaget: theory, experiments, discussions M.: Gardariki 2001, 624 pages, with ill. Hard cover.

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L f Obukhova

Obukhova, l f

Child (age) psychology

L.F. Obukhova

Child (age) psychology

OBUKHOVA L. F., Doctor of Psychology.

Child (age) psychology.

This publication represents the first attempt in modern domestic psychological science creation of a textbook on child psychology. The content and structure of the textbook include existing foreign and domestic theories, a variety of factual material and problems solved by science and practice in the field of developmental psychology.

The textbook is intended for students of psychological faculties of universities, pedagogical universities and colleges, as well as all those who are interested in the mental development of children.

FOREWORD

Chapter I. Childhood as a subject of psychological research.

1. Historical analysis concept of "childhood"

2. Childhood as a subject of science

3. The specifics of the mental development of the child.

4. Strategies for researching the child's mental development

Chapter II. OVERCOMING BIOGENETIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE CHILD'S PSYCHE

1. Biogenetic principle in psychology

2. Normative approach to the study of child development.

3. Identification of learning and development

4. The theory of three stages of child development ..

5. Concepts of convergence of two factors of child development.

6. Approaches to the analysis of the internal causes of the mental development of the child.

Chapter III. PSYCHOANALYTICAL THEORIES OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT.

1. The theory of Sigmund Freud.

2. The development of classical psychoanalysis in the works of Anna Freud.

3. Epigenetic theory of personality development. Eric Erickson.

Chapter IV. SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY

1. Departure from classical behaviorism...

2. Education and development.

3. Critical periods socialization.

4. Encouragement and punishment as conditions for the formation of new behavior.

5. The role of imitation in the formation of new behavior.

6. Child and adult.

7. Family as a factor in the development of a child's behavior

Chapter V

1. Stages of scientific biography.

2. Key concepts of the concept of J. Piaget.

3. The discovery of the egocentricity of children's thinking

4. Discovery of the stages of a child's intellectual development.

Chapter VI. L. S. VYGOTSKY AND HIS SCHOOL

1. Change of scientific outlook.

2. Further steps along the path opened by L. S. Vygotsky.

Chapter VII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. THE PERIOD OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

1. Neonatal crisis

2. Stage of infancy.

3. Early age.

4. Crisis of three years

Chapter VIII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. THE PERIOD OF CHILDHOOD.

1. Preschool age.

2. The crisis of seven years and the problem of school readiness.

3. Junior school age.

Chapter IX. ADOLESCENT AGE IN THE LIGHT OF DIFFERENT CONCEPTS..

1. Influence of historical time.

2. Classic studies of the crisis of adolescence.

3. New trends in the study of adolescence (L. S. Vygotsky, D. B. Elkonin, L. I. Bozhovich)

Chapter X. UNFINISHED DISPUTES.

1. P. Ya. Galperin and J. Piaget.

2. On the patterns of functional and age-related development of the child's psyche.

3. Forms and functions of imitation in childhood.

4. The problem of general and specific patterns of mental development of a deaf-blind-mute child.

CONCLUSION

Annex 1. CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

Eternal gratitude to the teachers

FOREWORD

Currently, there are many textbooks on child psychology in the world. Almost every major Western university has its own original version. As a rule, these are voluminous, well-illustrated manuals summarizing a huge amount of scientific research. Some of them have been translated into Russian. However, none of these truly interesting books we do not find an analysis of the holistic concept of child development developed by L. S. Vygotsky and his followers, which is a true pride and a true achievement of Russian psychology.

The lack of knowledge about such an essential concept makes us believe that any foreign textbook does not fully reflect the current level of psychological knowledge about the development of the child.

Domestic textbooks on child psychology are small in volume and poor in illustrative material. In addition, they also have a substantive drawback: generalizing the experience accumulated in our science, they give a very poor idea of the achievements of modern foreign psychology. The book offered to the reader's attention was created mainly in order to fill these gaps and present in a balanced and complete in the form of diverse approaches to understanding the mental development of the child, which were developed in the 20th century, that is, for the entire period of the existence of child psychology as a separate scientific discipline.The presentation of the material is based on several basic principles.

This is, first of all, the principle of historicism, which makes it possible, as it were, to string on one rod all the most important problems of child development that arose in different periods of time. The book analyzes the historical origin of the concept of "childhood", traces the connection between the history of childhood and the history of society, shows the historical prerequisites for the emergence of child psychology as a science.

The second principle underlying the selection of the analyzed concepts of child development is associated with the development and introduction into science of new methods for studying mental development. Changes in ideas about mental development are always associated with the emergence of new research methods. “The problem of the method is the beginning and basis, the alpha and omega of the entire history of the child’s cultural development,” wrote L. S. Vygotsky. “To truly rely on the method, to understand its relation to other methods, to establish its strengths and substantiation and to develop a correct attitude towards it means, to a certain extent, to develop a correct and scientific approach to all further presentation critical issues child psychology aspect of cultural development. "It was this principle, this attitude of L. S. Vygotsky that made it possible to analyze the historical path of child psychology from the first naive ideas about the nature of childhood to the modern in-depth systematic study of this phenomenon. The biogenetic principle in psychology, the normative approach to the study of child development , the identification of development and learning in behaviorism, the explanation of development by the influence of environmental factors and heredity in the theory of convergence, the psychoanalytic study of the child, comparative studies of the norm and pathology, orthogenetic concepts of development - all these and many other approaches individually and collectively reflect the essence and illustrate the connection concepts of mental development and methods of its research.

The third principle concerns the analysis of the development of the main aspects of human life - the emotional-volitional sphere, behavior and intellect. The theory of classical psychoanalysis 3. Freud develops in the works of M. Klein and A. Freud, and then passes into the concept of psychosocial development life path personalities of E. Erickson.

The problem of development in classical behaviorism is rethought in the theory of social learning - the most powerful direction of modern American developmental psychology. Studies of cognitive development are also undergoing changes - there is a transition from the study of the epistemic subject to the study of a particular child in the real conditions of his life.

Against the backdrop of all these outstanding achievements of Western psychology, nevertheless, L. S. Vygotsky made a genuine revolutionary revolution in child psychology. He proposed a new understanding of the course, conditions, source, form, specifics, driving forces of the child's mental development; he described the stages of child development and the transitions between them, identified and formulated the basic laws of the child's mental development.

L. S. Vygotsky chose the psychology of consciousness as the area of his research. He called it "top psychology" and contrasted it with the other three - deep, superficial and explanatory. L. S. Vygotsky developed the doctrine of age as a unit of child development and showed its structure and dynamics. He laid the foundations of child (age) psychology, which implements a systematic approach to the study of child development. The doctrine of psychological age makes it possible to avoid biological and environmental reductionism in explaining child development.

Analysis of the concept of L. S. Vygotsky is the semantic core of this work. However, it would be a mistake to think that Vygotsky's ideas froze, turned into a dogma, did not receive a natural development and logical continuation. It should be noted that not only the merits, but even some limitations of the ideas of L. S. Vygotsky stimulated the development of Russian child psychology. A theoretical analysis of the ideas of L. S. Vygotsky and his followers shows that there is a completely different child psychology, still little known to most psychologists.

A large section of the textbook is devoted to characterizing the stable and critical periods of a child's mental development. Here, the analysis of the facts of child development is carried out on the basis of the teachings of L. S. Vygotsky on the structure and dynamics of age. The age structure includes a description of the social situation of the child's development, the leading type of activity and the main psychological neoplasms of the age. At each age, the social situation of development contains a contradiction (a genetic problem), which must be solved in a special, age-specific, leading type of activity.

The resolution of the contradiction is manifested in the emergence of psychological neoplasms of age. These new formations do not correspond to the old social situation of development, they go beyond its framework. A new contradiction arises, a new genetic task, which can be solved by building a new system of relations, a new social situation of development, indicating the transition of the child to a new psychological age. In this self-movement, the dynamics of child development is manifested. Such is the scheme for considering all age periods of a child's life from birth to adolescence, such is the logic of their development.

The final section of the book deals with some debatable problems of child psychology - about the reasons for the diversity of imitation in childhood, about the patterns of functional and age-related development of the child's psyche, about the general and specific in the development of a normal and abnormal child.

In our opinion, such a construction of the textbook will contribute not only to the assimilation of theory, facts, problems and methods of their study, but also to the development of scientific thinking in the field of child psychology.

This edition is close to the form of a textbook for students studying psychology and pedagogy. For each section, possible topics for seminars are indicated, which the teacher can develop in more detail. Themes for independent work aimed at expanding the general horizons of students. The recommended literature includes the most significant works in the field of child psychology. Reading them will deepen and expand the knowledge presented in the textbook.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude for various kinds of assistance to students and graduate students with whom I had the pleasure of working.

L.F.Obukhov. Child (age) psychology

OBUKHOVA L. F., Doctor of Psychology.

Child (age) psychology.

Textbook. -- M., Russian Pedagogical Agency. 1996, -- 374 p.

The textbook is intended for students of psychological faculties of universities, pedagogical universities and colleges, as well as all those who are interested in the mental development of children.

FOREWORD

2. Childhood as a subject of science

3. The specifics of the mental development of the child.

4. Strategies for researching the child's mental development

2. Normative approach to the study of child development.

3. Identification of learning and development

4. The theory of three stages of child development ..

5. Concepts of convergence of two factors of child development.

6. Approaches to the analysis of the internal causes of the mental development of the child.

Chapter III. PSYCHOANALYTICAL THEORIES OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT.

1. The theory of Sigmund Freud.

2. The development of classical psychoanalysis in the works of Anna Freud.

3. Epigenetic theory of personality development. Eric Erickson.

Chapter IV. SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY

1. Departure from classical behaviorism...

2. Education and development.

3. Critical periods of socialization.

4. Encouragement and punishment as conditions for the formation of new behavior.

5. The role of imitation in the formation of new behavior.

6. Child and adult.

7. Family as a factor in the development of a child's behavior

Chapter V

1. Stages of scientific biography.

2. Key concepts of the concept of J. Piaget.

3. The discovery of the egocentricity of children's thinking

4. Opening stages intellectual development child.

Chapter VI. L. S. VYGOTSKY AND HIS SCHOOL

1. Change of scientific outlook.

2. Further steps along the path opened by L. S. Vygotsky.

Chapter VII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. THE PERIOD OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

1. Neonatal crisis

2. Stage of infancy.

3. Early age.

4. Crisis of three years

Chapter VIII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. THE PERIOD OF CHILDHOOD.

1. Preschool age.

2. The crisis of seven years and the problem of school readiness.

3. Junior school age.

Chapter IX. ADOLESCENT AGE IN THE LIGHT OF DIFFERENT CONCEPTS..

1. Influence of historical time.

2. Classic studies of the crisis of adolescence.

3. New trends in the study of adolescence (L. S. Vygotsky, D. B. Elkonin, L. I. Bozhovich)

Chapter X. UNFINISHED DISPUTES.

1. P. Ya. Galperin and J. Piaget.

2. On the patterns of functional and age-related development of the child's psyche.

3. Forms and functions of imitation in childhood.

4. The problem of general and specific patterns of mental development of a deaf-blind-mute child.

CONCLUSION

Annex 1. CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

Eternal gratitude to the teachers

FOREWORD

Currently, there are many textbooks on child psychology in the world. Almost every major Western university has its own original version. As a rule, these are voluminous, well-illustrated manuals summarizing a huge amount of scientific research. Some of them have been translated into Russian. However, in none of these truly interesting books do we find an analysis of the holistic concept of child development developed by L. S. Vygotsky and his followers, which is a true pride and a true achievement of Russian psychology.

Domestic textbooks on child psychology are small in volume and poor in illustrative material. In addition, they also have a substantive drawback: generalizing the experience accumulated in our science, they give a very poor idea of the achievements of modern foreign psychology. The book offered to the reader's attention was created mainly in order to fill these gaps and present in a balanced and complete in the form of diverse approaches to understanding the mental development of the child, which were developed in the 20th century, that is, for the entire period of the existence of child psychology as a separate scientific discipline. The presentation of the material is based on several basic principles.

The second principle underlying the selection of the analyzed concepts of child development is associated with the development and introduction into science of new methods for studying mental development. Changes in ideas about mental development are always associated with the emergence of new research methods. “The problem of the method is the beginning and basis, the alpha and omega of the entire history of the child’s cultural development,” wrote L. S. Vygotsky. “To truly rely on the method, to understand its relation to other methods, to establish its strengths and substantiation and developing a correct attitude towards it means, to a certain extent, developing a correct and scientific approach to the entire further exposition of the most important problems of child psychology in the aspect of cultural development. It was this principle, this attitude of L. S. Vygotsky that made it possible to analyze the historical path of child psychology from the first naive ideas about the nature of childhood to the modern in-depth systematic study of this phenomenon. The biogenetic principle in psychology, the normative approach to the study of child development, the identification of development and learning in behaviorism, the explanation of development by the influence of environmental factors and heredity in the theory of convergence, the psychoanalytic study of the child, comparative studies of norm and pathology, orthogenetic concepts of development - all these and many others approaches individually and collectively reflect the essence and illustrate the connection between the concepts of mental development and methods of its study.

The third principle concerns the analysis of the development of the main aspects of human life - the emotional-volitional sphere, behavior and intellect. The theory of classical psychoanalysis 3. Freud develops in the works of M. Klein and A. Freud, and then goes into the concept of psychosocial development of the life path of the personality of E. Erickson.

The problem of development in classical behaviorism is rethought in the theory social learning- the most powerful direction of modern American developmental psychology. Studies of cognitive development are also undergoing changes - there is a transition from the study of the epistemic subject to the study of a particular child in the real conditions of his life.

The resolution of the contradiction is manifested in the emergence of psychological neoplasms of age. These new formations do not correspond to the old social situation of development, they go beyond its framework. A new contradiction arises, a new genetic problem, which can be solved by building a new system of relations, a new social situation of development, indicating the transition of the child to a new psychological age. In this self-movement, the dynamics of child development is manifested. Such is the scheme for considering all age periods of a child's life from birth to adolescence, such is the logic of their development.

This edition is close to the form of a textbook for students studying psychology and pedagogy. For each section, possible topics for seminars are indicated, which the teacher can develop in more detail. Topics for independent work are aimed at expanding the general horizons of students. The recommended literature includes the most significant works in the field of child psychology. Reading them will deepen and expand the knowledge presented in the textbook.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude for various kinds of assistance to students and graduate students with whom I had the pleasure of working.

Chapter I. CHILDHOOD AS A SUBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH.

1. Historical analysis of the concept of "childhood"

Today, any educated person, when asked what childhood is, will answer that childhood is a period of enhanced development, change and learning. But only scientists understand that this is a period of paradoxes and contradictions, without which it is impossible to imagine the development process. V. Stern, J. Piaget, I. A. Sokolyansky and many others wrote about the paradoxes of child development. D. B. Elkonin said that the paradoxes in child psychology are the mysteries of development that scientists have yet to unravel.

D. B. Elkonin invariably began his lectures at Moscow University with a description of the two main paradoxes of child development, embodying the need for a historical approach to understanding childhood. Let's consider them.

Man, being born, is endowed with only the most elementary mechanisms for maintaining life. According to the physical structure, organization of the nervous system, according to the types of activity and methods of its regulation, man is the most perfect creature in nature.

However, according to the state at the time of birth, a drop in perfection is noticeable in the evolutionary series - the child does not have any ready-made forms of behavior. Typically, the higher Living being in the series of animals, the longer his childhood lasts, the more helpless this creature is at birth. This is one of the paradoxes of nature that predetermines the history of childhood.

In the course of history, the enrichment of the material and spiritual culture of mankind has continuously grown. Over the millennia, human experience has increased many thousands of times. But during the same time, the newborn child has not changed much. Based on the data of anthropologists on the anatomical and morphological similarities between the Cro-Magnon and the modern European, it can be assumed that the newborn modern man does not differ in any significant way from a newborn who lived tens of thousands of years ago.

How is it that, under similar natural conditions, the level of mental development that a child reaches at each historical stage in the development of society is not the same?

Childhood is a period lasting from newborn to full social and, consequently, psychological maturity; This is the period of the child becoming a full-fledged member of human society. At the same time, the duration of childhood in a primitive society is not equal to the duration of childhood in the Middle Ages or today. The stages of human childhood are a product of history, and they are just as subject to change as they were thousands of years ago. Therefore, it is impossible to study the childhood of a child and the laws of its formation outside the development of human society and the laws that determine its development. The duration of childhood is directly dependent on the level of material and spiritual culture of society.

As is known, the theory of knowledge and dialectics must be made up of the history of individual sciences, the history of the mental development of a child, young animals, and the history of language. By focusing on the stories mental development of the child, it should be distinguished both from the development of the child in ontogenesis, and from the uneven development of children in various modern cultures.

The problem of childhood history is one of the most difficult in contemporary child psychology, since neither observation nor experiment can be carried out in this area. Ethnographers are well aware that cultural monuments related to children are poor. Even in those not very private cases, when toys are found in archaeological excavations, these are usually objects of worship, which in ancient times were placed in graves to serve the owner in afterlife. Miniature images of people and animals were also used for witchcraft and magic.

We can say that the experimental facts were preceded by theory. Theoretically, the question historical origin periods of childhood was developed in the works of P. P. Blonsky, L. S. Vygotsky, D. B. Elkonin. The course of the mental development of the child, according to J1 S. Vygotsky, does not obey the eternal laws of nature, the laws of the maturation of the organism. The course of child development in a class society, he believed, "has a completely definite class meaning." That is why he emphasized that there is no eternally childish, but only historically childish.

Yes, in literature XIX century there are numerous testimonies of the lack of childhood among proletarian children. For example, in a study of the situation of the working class in England, F. Engels referred to the report of a commission created by the English Parliament in 1833 to examine working conditions in factories: children sometimes started working at the age of five, often at six, even more often at seven, but almost all children of poor parents worked from the age of eight; Their working hours lasted 14-16 hours.

It is generally accepted that the status of the childhood of a proletarian child is formed only in XIX-XX centuries when child welfare laws began to prohibit child labor. Of course, this does not mean that the legal laws adopted are capable of providing a childhood for the workers of the lower strata of society. Children in this environment, and above all girls, still perform the work necessary for social reproduction (care for babies, housework, some agricultural work). Thus, although in our time there is a ban on child labor, one cannot speak of the status of childhood without taking into account the position of parents in social structure society.

The "Convention on the Rights of the Child", adopted by UNESCO in 1989 and ratified by most countries of the world, is aimed at ensuring the full development of the child's personality in every corner of the Earth.

Historically, the concept of childhood is associated not with the biological state of immaturity, but with a certain social status, with the range of rights and obligations inherent in this period of life, with a set of types and forms of activity available to it. Many interesting facts was collected to confirm this idea by the French demographer and historian Philippe Aries. Thanks to his work, interest in the history of childhood in foreign psychology has increased significantly, and the studies of F. Aries himself are recognized as classics.

F. Aries was interested in how, in the course of history, in the minds of artists, writers and scientists, concept childhood and how it differed in different historical eras. His studies in the field of fine arts led him to the conclusion that until the 12th century, art did not appeal to children, artists did not even try to depict them.

Children's images in the painting of the XIII century are found only in religious and allegorical subjects. These are angels, baby Jesus and a naked child as a symbol of the soul of the deceased. The image of real children was absent from painting for a long time. No one apparently believed that the child contained a human personality. If children appeared in works of art, they were depicted as reduced adults. Then there was no knowledge about the characteristics and nature of childhood. The word "child" for a long time did not have the exact meaning that is given to it now. So, it is typical, for example, that in medieval Germany the word "child" was a synonym for the concept of "fool".

Childhood was considered a period of fast passing and of little value. Indifference towards childhood, according to F. Aries, was a direct consequence of the demographic situation of that time, which was characterized by high birth rates and high infant mortality. A sign of overcoming indifference to childhood, according to the French demographer, is the appearance in the 16th century of portraits of dead children. Their death, he writes, was now experienced as a truly irreparable loss, and not as a completely ordinary event. The overcoming of indifference to children takes place, judging by painting, not earlier than the 11th century, when for the first time the first portrait images of real children begin to appear on the canvases of artists. As a rule, these were portraits of children of influential persons and royal persons in childhood. Thus, according to F. Aries, the discovery of childhood began in the 13th century, its development can be traced in the history of painting of the 14th-15th centuries, but the evidence of this discovery is most fully manifested at the end of the 16th and throughout the entire 17th century.

According to the researcher, clothes serve as an important symbol of a change in attitudes towards childhood. In the Middle Ages, as soon as a child grew out of diapers, he was immediately dressed in a suit that was no different from the clothes of an adult of the corresponding social position. Only in the XV1-XVII centuries did special children's clothing appear that distinguishes a child from an adult. Interestingly, for boys and girls aged 2-4 years, the clothes were the same and consisted of a children's dress. In other words, in order to distinguish a boy from a man, he was dressed in a woman's costume, and this costume lasted until the beginning of our century, despite the change in society and the lengthening of the period of childhood. Note that in peasant families before the revolution, children and adults dressed the same. By the way, this feature is still preserved where there are no big differences between the work of adults and the play of a child.

Analyzing portraits of children in old paintings and descriptions of children's costumes in literature, F. Aries identifies three trends in the evolution of children's clothing:

Feminization-- a suit for boys largely repeats the details of women's clothing

Archaization- children's clothing in this historical time is late compared to adult fashion and largely repeats the adult costume of the past era (this is how the boys got short pants).

The use for children of the upper classes of the usual adult costume of the lower (peasant clothes).

As F. Aries emphasizes, the formation of a children's costume has become an external manifestation of profound internal changes in attitudes towards children in society - now they are beginning to occupy an important place in the lives of adults.

The discovery of childhood made it possible to describe the full cycle of human life To characterize the age periods of life in the scientific writings of the XV1-XVII centuries, terminology was used that is still used in scientific and colloquial speech: childhood, adolescence, youth, youth, maturity, old age, senility (deep old age ). But contemporary meaning these words do not correspond to their original meaning. In the old days, the periods of life correlated with the four seasons, with the seven planets, with the twelve signs of the zodiac. The coincidence of numbers was perceived as one of the indicators of the fundamental unity of Nature.

In the field of art, ideas about the periods of human life are reflected in the painting of the columns of the Doge's Palace in Venice, in many engravings of the 16th-19th centuries, in painting, sculpture. functions of people For example, in the painting of the Doge's Palace, the age of toys is symbolized by children playing with a wooden skate, a doll, a windmill and a bird; school age - boys learn to read, carry books, and girls learn to knit; the age of love and sports - boys and girls walk together at the festival; the age of war and chivalry is a man shooting a gun; maturity - a judge and a scientist are depicted.

The differentiation of the ages of human life, including childhood, according to F. Aries, is formed under the influence social institutions, that is, new forms of social life generated by the development of society. Thus, early childhood first appears within the family, where it is associated with specific communication - "tenderness" and "pampering" of a small child. A child for parents is just a pretty, funny baby with whom you can have fun, play with pleasure and at the same time teach and educate him. This is the primary, "family" concept of childhood. The desire to "dress up" children, "spoil" and "undead" them could only appear in the family. However, this approach to children as "adorable toys" could not remain unchanged for long.

The development of society has led to a further change in attitudes towards children. A new concept of childhood emerged. For teachers of the 17th century, love for children was no longer expressed in pampering and amusing them, but in a psychological interest in education and training. In order to correct a child's behavior, it is first necessary to understand it, and the scientific texts of the late 16th and 11th centuries are full of comments on child psychology. It should be noted that deep pedagogical ideas, advice and recommendations are also contained in the works of Russian authors of the 16th-17th centuries.

The concept of rational education based on strict discipline penetrates into family life in the 18th century. All aspects of children's life begin to attract the attention of parents. But the function of organized preparation of children for adult life It is not the family that takes over, but a special public institution - the school, designed to educate qualified workers and exemplary citizens. It was the school, according to F. Aries, that brought childhood beyond the first 2-4 years of maternal, parental education in the family. The school, thanks to its regular, orderly structure, contributed to the further differentiation of that period of life, which is indicated common word"childhood". The "class" has become a universal measure that defines a new marking of childhood. The child enters a new age every year as soon as he changes class. In the past, the life of a child and childhood were not subdivided into such thin layers. Class therefore became the determining factor in the process of differentiation of ages within childhood or adolescence itself.

Thus, according to the concept of F. Aries, the concept of childhood and adolescence is associated with the school and the classroom organization of the school as those special structures that were created by society in order to give children the necessary preparation for social life and professional activities.

The next age level is also associated by F. Aries with a new form of social life - an institution military service and compulsory military service. This is adolescence or adolescence. The concept of "adolescent" has led to a further restructuring of learning. Educators began to attach great importance to the form of dress and discipline, the education of stamina and masculinity, which had previously been neglected. The new orientation was immediately reflected in art, in particular in painting: "The recruit now no longer appears as a roguish and prematurely aged warrior from the paintings of the Danish and Spanish masters of the 17th century - he now becomes an attractive soldier, depicted, for example, by Watteau" - writes F. Aries. A typical image of a young man is created by R. Wagner in Siegfried.

Later, in the 20th century, the first World War gave rise to the phenomenon of "youth consciousness", presented in the literature of the "lost generation". “So, the era that did not know youth,” writes F. Aries, “was replaced by an era in which youth has become the most valuable age” ... “Everyone wants to enter it early and stay in it longer.” Each period of history corresponds to a certain privileged age and a certain division of human life: "youth is the privileged age of the 17th century, childhood is the 19th, youth is the 20th."

As we can see, the study of F.-Aries is devoted to the emergence of the concept of childhood or, in other words, the problem awareness childhood as a social phenomenon. But when analyzing the concept of F. Aries, it is necessary to remember the psychological laws of awareness. First of all, as JI said. S. Vygotsky, "in order to realize, one must have what must be realized." And further studying the process of awareness in detail, J. Piaget emphasized that there is an inevitable delay and a fundamental difference between the formation of a real phenomenon and its reflective reflection.

Childhood has its own laws and, of course, does not depend on the fact that artists begin to pay attention to children and depict them on their canvases. Even if we recognize the indisputable judgment of F. Aries that art is a reflected picture of morals, works of art by themselves cannot provide all the necessary data for the analysis of the concept of childhood, and one cannot agree with all the author's conclusions.

The study of F. Aries begins with the Middle Ages, because only at that time did picturesque scenes depicting children appear. But care for children, the idea of education, of course, appeared long before the Middle Ages. Already in Aristotle there are thoughts dedicated to children. In addition, the work of F. Aries is limited to the study of the childhood of only a European child from the upper strata of society and describes the history of childhood without regard to the socio-economic level of development of society.

On the basis of documentary sources, F. Aries describes the content of the childhood of noble people. Thus, the children's activities of Louis XIII (beginning of the 17th century) can serve as a good illustration for this. At a year and a half, Louis XIII plays the violin and sings at the same time. (Music and dance were taught to the children of noble families from an early age.) Louis does this before a wooden horse, a windmill, a top (the toys that were given to children of that time) attract his attention. Louis XIII was three years old when he first participated in the celebration of Christmas in 1604, and already from this age he began to learn to read, and at the age of four he knew how to write. At five he played with dolls and cards, and at six he played chess and tennis. The playmates of Louis XI11 were pages and soldiers. Louis played hide-and-seek and other games with them. At the age of six, Louis XIII practiced riddles and charades. Everything changed at the age of seven. Children's clothes were abandoned, and upbringing took on a masculine character. He begins to learn the art of hunting, shooting, gambling and horseback riding. Since that time, literature of a pedagogical and moralistic type has been read to him. At the same time, he begins to visit the theater and participates in collective games with adults.

But many other examples of childhood can be cited. One of them is taken from the 20th century. This is a description of Douglas Lockwood's journey deep into the Gibson Desert (Western Australia) and his encounter with the aboriginal Pintubi tribe ("lizard eaters"). Until 1957, most of the people of this tribe had never seen a white man, their contacts with neighboring tribes were insignificant, and thanks to this, the culture and way of life of the Stone Age people were preserved to a very large extent. The whole life of these people, passing in the desert, is focused on finding food and water. Pintubi women, strong and hardy, could walk for hours in the desert with a heavy load of fuel on their heads. They gave birth to children, lying on the sand, helping and sympathizing with each other. They had no idea about hygiene, did not even know the reason for childbearing. They did not have any utensils, except for wooden vessels for water. There were two or three more spears in the camp, several sticks for digging up yams, millstones for grinding wild berries, and half a dozen wild lizards - their only food supplies ... Everyone went hunting with spears, which were made entirely of wood. In cold weather, nudity made life unbearable for these people... No wonder their bodies bore so many marks from smoldering sticks from camp fires... D. Lockwood gave the natives a mirror and a comb, and the women tried to comb their hair with the back of the comb. But even after the comb was put into his hand in the correct position, he still did not fit into his hair, since they had to be washed first, but there was not enough water for this. The man managed to comb his beard, while the women threw their gifts on the sand and soon forgot about them. “Mirrors,” writes D. Lockwood, “also did not succeed; although these people had never seen their reflection before. The head of the family knew, of course, what his wives and children looked like, but he never saw his own face. Looking in the mirror , he was surprised and intently examined himself in it ... The women in my presence looked in the mirror only once. Perhaps they mistook the image for spirits and therefore were frightened.

The natives slept, lying on the sand, without blankets or other covers, clinging to two dingoes curled up for warmth. D. Lockwood writes that a girl of two or three years old, while eating, put into her mouth either huge pieces of a cake, or pieces of meat from a tiny guana, which she baked it myself in hot sand. Her younger half-sister was sitting next to her in the mud and was cracking down on a can of stew (from the expedition's stocks), pulling the meat out with her fingers. On a pale morning, D. Lockwood examined the jar. She was licked to a shine. Another observation by D. Lockwood: “Before dawn, the natives lit a fire to protect them from the cold gusts of the southeast wind. By the light of the fire, I saw how a little girl, who still did not know how to walk properly, made a separate fire for herself. head, she fanned the coals so that the fire spread to the branches and warmed her. She was without clothes and probably suffered from a cold, and yet she did not cry. There were three small children in the camp, but we never heard them cry. "

Observations like these allow us to take a deeper look at history. In comparison with the analysis of works of art, with folklore and linguistic studies, ethnographic material provides important data on the history of childhood development.

Based on the study of ethnographic materials, D. B. Elkonin showed that at the earliest stages of the development of human society, when the main way of obtaining food was gathering with the use of primitive tools for knocking down fruits and digging up edible roots, the child very early joined the work of adults, practically assimilating ways of obtaining food and using primitive tools. "Under such conditions, there was neither need nor time for the stage of preparing children for future labor activity. As emphasized

DB Elkonin, childhood occurs when the child cannot be directly included in the system of social reproduction, since the child cannot yet master the tools of labor due to their complexity. As a result, the natural inclusion of children in productive labor is pushed back. According to D. B. Elkonin, this elongation in time does not occur by building a new period of development over the existing ones (as F. Aries believed), but by a kind of wedging of a new period of development, leading to an “upward shift in time” of the period of mastering the tools of production . D. B. Elkonin brilliantly revealed these features of childhood in the analysis of the emergence of a role-playing game and a detailed examination of psychological features primary school age.

As already noted, the question of the historical origin of the periods of childhood, the connection between the history of childhood and the history of society, the history of childhood as a whole, without the solution of which it is impossible to form a meaningful concept of childhood, was raised in child psychology at the end of the 20s of the 20th century and continues still being developed. According to the views of Soviet psychologists, to study child development historically means to study the child's transition from one age stage to another, to study the change in his personality within each age period that occurs under specific historical conditions. And although the history of childhood has not yet been sufficiently studied, the very formulation of this question in the psychology of the 20th century is important. And if, according to D. B. Elkonin, there is still no answer to many questions of the theory of the mental development of the child, then the path to the solution can already be imagined. And it is seen in the light of the historical study of childhood.

2. Childhood as a subject of science

The science of the mental development of the child - child psychology - originated as a branch of comparative psychology at the end of the 19th century. The starting point for systematic research into the psychology of the child is the book of the German Darwinist Wilhelm Preyer, The Soul of the Child. In it, V. Preyer describes the results of daily observations of the development of his own son, paying attention to the development of the senses, motor skills, will, reason and language. Despite the fact that observations of the development of the child were carried out long after the appearance of the book by V. Preyer, its indisputable priority is determined by the appeal to the study of the earliest years of the child's life and the introduction into child psychology of the method of objective observation, developed by analogy with the methods of the natural sciences. V. Preyer's views from a modern point of view are perceived as naive, limited by the level of development of science in the 19th century. He, for example, considered the mental development of the child as a particular variant of the biological one. (Although strictly speaking, even now there are both hidden and explicit supporters of this idea...). However, V. Preyer was the first to make the transition from an introspective to an objective study of the child's psyche. Therefore, according to the unanimous recognition of psychologists, he is considered the founder of child psychology.

The objective conditions for the formation of child psychology, which had developed by the end of the 19th century, are associated with the intensive development of industry, with a new level of social life, which created the need for the emergence of a modern school. Teachers were interested in the question: how to teach and educate children? Parents and teachers stopped considering physical punishment as an effective method of education - more democratic families appeared. The task of understanding the child was the turn of the day. On the other hand, the desire to understand oneself as an adult has prompted researchers to treat childhood more closely - only through the study of the psychology of the child is the way to understand what the psychology of an adult is.

What is the place of child psychology in the light of other psychological knowledge? I. M. Sechenov wrote that psychology cannot be anything other than the science of the origin and development of mental processes. It is known that the ideas of genetic (from the word - genesis) research penetrated into psychology a very long time ago. There is hardly a single outstanding psychologist who has dealt with the problems general psychology who at the same time somehow would not be engaged in child psychology. Such world famous scientists as J. Watson, V. Stern, K. Buhler, K. Kofka, K. Levin, A. Vallon, Z. Freud, E. Spranger, J. Piaget, V. M. Bekhterev, D. M. Uznadze, S. L. Rubinstein, L. S. Vygotsky, A. R. Luria, A. N. Leontiev, P. Ya. Galperin, etc.

However, investigating the same object - mental development - genetic and child psychology are two different psychological sciences. Genetic psychology is interested in the problems of origin and development mental processes. She answers questions "how this or that psychological movement occurs, manifested by a feeling, sensation, idea, involuntary or voluntary movement, how those processes occur, the result of which is thought "(I.M. Sechenov). Genetic psychology or, what is the same, developmental psychology, analyzing the formation of mental processes, can rely on the results of studies performed on children, but children themselves do not constitute a subject study of genetic psychology.Genetic studies can also be carried out on adults.A well-known example of genetic research is the study of the formation of pitch hearing.In a specially organized experiment in which the subjects had to adjust their voice to a given pitch, it was possible to observe the formation of the ability to pitch difference .

To recreate, to make, to shape a psychic phenomenon is the basic strategy of genetic psychology. The path of experimental formation of mental processes was first outlined by L. S. Vygotsky. “The method we use,” wrote L. S. Vygotsky, “can be called the experimental genetic method in the sense that it artificially causes and creates the genetic process of mental development ... An attempt at such an experiment is to melt every frozen and petrified psychological form, to turn it into a moving, flowing stream of individual moments replacing each other... The task of such an analysis is to present experimentally any higher form of behavior not as a thing, but as a go not from a thing to its parts, but from a process to its separate moments.

Among many researchers of the process of development, the most prominent representatives of genetic psychology are L. S. Vygotsky, J. Piaget, P. Ya. Galperin. Their theories, developed on the basis of experiments with children, belong entirely to general genetic psychology. The well-known book by J. Piaget "Psychology of the Intellect" is not a book about a child, it is a book about the intellect. P. Ya. Galperin created the theory of the systematic and gradual formation of mental actions as the basis for the formation of mental processes. The experimental study of concepts carried out by L. S. Vygotsky belongs to genetic psychology.

Child psychology differs from any other psychology in that it deals with special units of analysis - this is age, or a period of development. It should be emphasized that age is not reduced to the sum of individual mental processes, it is not a calendar date. Age, according to L. S. Vygotsky, is a relatively closed cycle of child development, which has its own structure and dynamics. The duration of the age is determined by its internal content: there are periods of development and in some cases "epochs" equal to one year, three, five years. Chronological and psychological age do not coincide, Chronological or passport age is only a reference coordinate, that external grid against which the process of the child's mental development and the formation of his personality takes place.

Unlike genetic psychology, child psychology is the study of the periods of child development, their change and transitions from one age to another. Therefore, following L. S. Vygotsky, it would be more correct to say about this area of psychology: child and developmental psychology. Typical child psychologists were L. S. Vygotsky, A. Vallon, Z. Freud, D. B. Elkonin. As D. B. Elkonin figuratively said, general psychology is the chemistry of the psyche, and child psychology is rather physics, since it deals with larger and in a certain way organized "bodies" of the psyche. When materials from child psychology are used in general psychology, they reveal the chemistry of the process and say nothing about the child.

The distinction between genetic and child psychology indicates that the very subject of child psychology has changed historically. At present, the subject of child psychology is the disclosure of the general patterns of mental development in ontogenesis, the establishment of the age periods of this development and the reasons for the transition from one period to another. Progress in solving the theoretical problems of child psychology expands the possibilities of its practical implementation. , a new area of practice has arisen. This is control over the processes of child development, which should be distinguished from the tasks of diagnosing and selecting children in special institutions. Just as a pediatrician monitors the physical health of children, a child psychologist must say: is the child’s psyche developing and functioning correctly, and if wrong, then what are the deviations and how they should be compensated for.All this can be done only on the basis of a deep and precise theory that reveals the specific mechanisms and dynamics of the development of the child's psyche.

3. The specifics of the mental development of the child.

What is development? How is it characterized? What is the fundamental difference between development and any other changes in an object? As you know, an object can change, but not develop. Growth, for example, is a quantitative change in a given object, including a mental process. There are processes that fluctuate within "less-more". These are processes of growth in the proper and true sense of the word. Growth occurs over time and is measured in terms of time. Main characteristic Growth is a process of quantitative changes in the internal structure and composition of the individual elements included in the object, without significant changes in the structure of individual processes. For example, when measuring the physical growth of a child, we see a quantitative increase. L. S. Vygotsky emphasized that there are phenomena of growth in mental processes as well. For example, the growth of vocabulary without changing the functions of speech.

But behind these processes of quantitative growth, other phenomena and processes can occur. Then the growth processes become only symptoms, behind which are hidden significant changes in the system and structure of processes. During such periods, jumps in the growth line are observed, which indicate significant changes in the body itself. For example, the endocrine glands mature, and profound changes take place in the physical development of the adolescent. In such cases, when there are significant changes in the structure and properties of the phenomenon, we are dealing with development.

Development, first of all, is characterized by qualitative changes, the emergence of neoplasms, new mechanisms, new processes, new structures. X. Werner, L. S. Vygotsky and other psychologists described the main signs of development. The most important among them are: differentiation, dismemberment of the previously single element; the emergence of new aspects, new elements in development itself; restructuring of links between the sides of the object. As psychological examples, one can mention the differentiation of the natural conditioned reflex to the position under the chest and the revival complex; the emergence of a sign function in infancy; change during childhood of the systemic and semantic structure of consciousness. Each of these processes corresponds to the listed development criteria.

As L. S. Vygotsky showed, there are many different types of development. Therefore, it is important to correctly find the place that the mental development of the child occupies among them, that is, to determine the specifics of mental development among other developmental processes. L. S. Vygotsky distinguished: /^reformed and non-reformed types of development. A preformed type is one in which, at the very beginning, both the stages that the phenomenon (organism) will pass through and the final result that the phenomenon will achieve are set, fixed, and fixed. Here everything is given from the very beginning. An example is embryonic development. Despite the fact that embryogenesis has its own history (there is a tendency to reduce the underlying stages, the newest stage affects the previous stages), but this does not change the type of development. In psychology, there has been an attempt to represent mental development on the principle of embryonic development. This is the concept of St. Hall. It is based on Haeckel's biogenetic law: ontogeny is a brief repetition of phylogeny. Mental development was considered by Art. Hall as a brief repetition of the stages of mental development of animals and ancestors of modern man.

The unpreformed type of development is the most common on our planet. It also includes the development of the Galaxy, the development of the Earth, the process of biological evolution, the development of society. The process of mental development of the child also belongs to this type of processes. The unpreformed path of development is not predetermined. Children of different eras develop differently and reach different levels of development. From the very beginning, from the moment the child is born, neither the stages through which he must go, nor the end he must reach are given. Childhood development is an unpreformed type of development, but it is a very special process - a process that is determined not from below, but from above, by the form of practical and theoretical activity that exists at a given level of development of society (As the poet said: "Only born, already Shakespeare is waiting for us." This is the nature of child development. Its final forms are not given, but given. Not a single process of development, except ontogenetic, is carried out according to a ready-made model. Human development follows the pattern that exists in society. According to L. S. Vygotsky, the process of mental development is the process of interaction between real and ideal forms. The task of the child psychologist is to trace the logic of mastering ideal forms. The child does not immediately master the spiritual and material wealth of mankind. But outside the process of assimilation of ideal forms, development is generally impossible. Therefore, within the unpreformed type of development, the mental development of the child is a special process. The process of ontogenetic development is a process unlike anything else, an extremely unique process that takes place in the form of assimilation.

4. Strategies for researching the child's mental development

The level of theory development determines the research strategy in science. This fully applies to child psychology, where the level of theory forms the goals and objectives of this science. At first, the task of child psychology was to accumulate facts and arrange them in a temporal sequence. This task corresponded surveillance strategy. Of course, even then, researchers were trying to understand the driving forces of development, and every psychologist dreamed about it. But there were no objective possibilities for solving this problem... The strategy of observing the real course of child development under the conditions in which it spontaneously develops led to the accumulation of various facts that had to be put into a system, to single out the stages and stages of development, in order to then identify the main trends and general patterns of the development process itself and, in the end, to understand its cause.

To solve these problems, psychologists used strategy of natural-scientific ascertaining experiment, which allows you to establish the presence or absence of the studied phenomenon under certain controlled conditions, to measure it quantitative characteristics and give a qualitative description Both strategies - observation and ascertaining experiment - are widespread in child psychology. But their limitations become more and more obvious as it turns out that they do not lead to an understanding of the driving causes of human mental development. This happens because neither observation nor ascertaining experiment can actively influence the process of development, and its study proceeds only passively.

A new research strategy is currently being intensively developed -- strategy for the formation of mental processes, active intervention, construction of a process with given properties Precisely because the strategy of the formation of mental processes leads to the intended result, one can judge its cause. Thus, the success of the formative experiment can serve as a criterion for identifying the cause of development.

Each of these strategies has its own history of development. As already mentioned, child psychology began with a simple observation. Huge factual material on the development of the child in early age was collected by parents, well-known psychologists as a result of long-term observations of the development of their own children (V Preyer, V. Stern, J. Piaget, N. A. Rybnikov, N. A. Menchinskaya, A. N. Gvozdev, V. S. Mukhina, M . Kechki and others). ON THE. Rybnikov in his work "Children's Diaries as Material on Child Psychology" (1946) gave a historical outline of this basic method of studying the child. Analyzing the significance of the first foreign diaries (I. Ten, 1876;

Ch Darwin, 1877; V. Preyer, 1882), the appearance of which became a turning point in the development of child psychology, N.A. Rybnikov noted that Russian psychologists can rightfully claim primacy, since A.S. Simonovich already in 1861 conducted systematic observations of the speech development of the child from his birth to 17 years.

Long-term systematic observation of the same child, daily recording of behavior, a thorough knowledge of the entire history of the development of the child, closeness to the child, good emotional contact with him - all this makes up positive sides observations made. However, the observations of different authors were carried out for different purposes, so it is difficult to compare them with each other. In addition, as a rule, in the first diaries there was no unified observation technique, and their interpretation was often subjective. For example, often during registration, not the fact itself was described, but the attitude towards it.

The Soviet psychologist M. Ya. Basov developed a system of objective observation, which, from his point of view, was the main method of child psychology. Emphasizing the importance of the naturalness and commonness of the conditions of observation, he described as a caricature such a situation when an observer comes to the children's group with paper and a pencil in his hands, fixes his gaze on the child and constantly writes something down. "No matter how much the child changes his position, no matter how he moves in the surrounding space, the gaze of the observer, and sometimes he follows him with his whole person and looks out for something, while he is silent all the time and writes something" M. Ya. Basov correctly believed that research work the teacher himself, who educates and educates children in a team in which the observed child is a member, should lead the children.

At present, most psychologists are skeptical about the method of observation as the main method of studying children. But, as D. B. Elkonin often said, "a sharp psychological eye is more important than a stupid experiment." experimental method the remarkable thing is that he "thinks" for the experimenter. The facts obtained by the method of observation are very valuable. V. Stern, as a result of observing the development of his daughters, prepared a two-volume study on the development of speech. A. N. Gvozdev also published a two-volume monograph on the development of children's speech based on observations of the development of his only son.

In 1925, in Leningrad, under the leadership of N. M. Shchelovanov, a clinic for the normal development of children was established. There, the child was observed 24 hours a day, and it was there that all the main facts characterizing the first year of a child's life were discovered. It is well known that the concept of the development of sensorimotor intelligence was built by J. Piaget on the basis of observations of his three children. A long-term (for three years) study of adolescents from the same class allowed D. B. Elkonin and T. V. Dragunova to give a psychological description of adolescence. Hungarian psychologists L. Garai and M. Kechki, observing the development of their own children, traced how differentiation occurs social position child in a family setting. V. S. Mukhina for the first time described the development of the behavior of two twin sons. These examples can be continued, although it is already clear from what has been said that the method of observation as the initial stage of research has not outlived its usefulness and cannot be treated with disdain. It is important, however, to remember that this method can only reveal phenomena, external symptoms of development.

At the beginning of the century, the first attempts were made to experimentally study the mental development of children. The French Ministry of Education ordered famous psychologist A. Binet development of a methodology for selecting children in special schools. And since 1908 it begins test examination child, there are measuring scales of mental development. A. Binet created a method of standardized tasks for each age. A little later, the American psychologist L. Theremin proposed a formula for measuring the IQ.

It seemed that child psychology had entered a new path of development - mental abilities with the help of special tasks | (tests) can be reproduced and measured. But these hopes were not justified. It soon became clear that in the examination situation it was not known which of the psychic faculties was being examined by the tests. In the 1930s, the Soviet psychologist V. I. Asnin emphasized that the condition for the reliability of a psychological experiment is not the average level of problem solving, but how the child accepts the task, what task he solves. In addition, the IQ has long been considered by psychologists as an indicator of hereditary giftedness, which remains unchanged throughout a person's life. To date, the concept of a constant intelligence quotient has been greatly shaken, and in scientific psychology it is practically not used.

A lot of research has been done in child psychology using the test method, but they are constantly criticized for always presenting the average child as an abstract carrier of psychological properties characteristic of the majority of the population of the corresponding age, identified using the cross-sectional method. With this measurement, the development process looks like a uniformly increasing straight line, where all qualitative new formations are hidden.

Noticing the shortcomings of the slicing method for studying the developmental process, the researchers supplemented it with the method longtime("longitudinal") study of the same children for a long time. This gave some advantage - it became possible to calculate the individual development curve of each child and determine whether his development corresponds to the age norm or whether it is above or below the average level. The longitudinal method made it possible to detect turning points on the development curve at which sharp qualitative shifts occur. However, this method is not free from shortcomings. Having received two points on the development curve, it is still impossible to answer the question of what happens between them. This method also makes it impossible to penetrate behind the phenomena, to understand the mechanism of mental phenomena. The facts obtained by this method can be explained by various hypotheses. There is a lack of precision in their interpretation. Thus, with all the subtleties of the experimental technique that ensure the reliability of the experiment, the strategy of ascertaining does not give an answer to main question: what happens between two points on the development curve? This question can be answered only by the strategy of experimental formation of mental phenomena.

We owe the introduction to child psychology of the strategy of formation to L. S. Vygotsky. He applied his theory of the mediated structure of higher mental functions to form his own ability to remember. According to eyewitnesses, L. S. Vygotsky could demonstrate to a large audience the memorization of about 400 randomly named words. For this purpose, he used aids- associated each word with one of the Volga cities. Then, following the river mentally, he could reproduce each word in the city associated with it. This method was called by L. S. Vygotsky the experimental genetic method, which makes it possible to reveal the qualitative features of the development of higher mental functions.

The strategy of the formation of mental processes eventually became widespread in Soviet psychology. Today, there are several ideas for implementing this strategy, which can be summarized as follows:

Cultural and historical concept of L. S. Vygotsky, according to which the interpsychic becomes the intrapsychic. The genesis of higher mental functions is associated with the use of a sign by two people in the process of their communication; without fulfilling this role, a sign cannot become a means of individual mental activity.

The theory of activity of A. N. Leontiev: every activity appears as a conscious action, then as an operation, and as it forms, it becomes a function. The movement is carried out here from top to bottom - from activity to function.

The theory of the formation of mental actions by P. Ya. Galperin:

the formation of mental functions occurs on the basis of an objective action and proceeds from the material performance of the action, and then, through its speech form, passes into the mental plane. This is the most developed concept of formation. However, everything that is obtained with its help acts as a laboratory experiment. How do the data of a laboratory experiment correlate with real ontogeny7 The problem of the correlation of experimental genesis with real genesis is one of the most serious and still unresolved. Its importance for child psychology was pointed out by A. V. Zaporozhets and D. B. Elkonin. A certain weakness of the formation strategy lies in the fact that it has so far been applied only to the formation of the cognitive sphere of the personality, and the emotional-volitional processes and needs have remained outside the experimental study.

Concept learning activities-- studies by D. B. Elkonin and V. V. Davydov, in which a strategy for the formation of personality was developed not in laboratory conditions, and in real life- by creating experimental schools.

The theory of "initial humanization" by I. A. Sokolyansky and A. I. Meshcheryakov, in which the initial stages of the formation of the psyche in deaf-blind-mute children are outlined.

Strategy for the formation of mental processes- one of the achievements of Soviet child psychology. This is the most adequate strategy for modern understanding of the subject of child psychology. Thanks to the strategy of the formation of mental processes, it is possible to penetrate into the essence of the mental development of the child. But this does not mean that other research methods can be neglected. Any science goes from a phenomenon to the disclosure of its nature.

TOPICS FOR SEMINARS

Childhood as a sociohistorical phenomenon

Reasons for the emergence of child psychology as a science

Historical changes in the subject of child (age) psychology

The concept of "development" and its criteria in relation to the development of the child

Strategies, methods and techniques for studying the development of the child.

TASKS FOR INDEPENDENT WORK

Pick up examples of the specifics of childhood in the national culture.

Consider the "Convention on the Rights of the Child" from the standpoint of a historical approach to the analysis of childhood

Give specific examples of the use of different strategies and methods in child research

LITERATURE

Lenin V.I. On the Conditions for the Reliability of a Psychological Experiment An Reader on Developmental and Pedagogical Psychology. Part I, M., 1980.

Vygotsky L. S. Collected Works. T.3, M, 1983, p. 641

Galperin P Ya. The method of "slices" and the method of phased formation in the study of children's thinking // Questions of Psychology, 1966, No 4. Convention on the Rights of the Child (see Appendix)

Klyuchevsky 8 O. Portraits of historical figures. M, 1993

Elkonin B D Introduction to developmental psychology M., 1995.

Chapter II. OVERCOMING BIOGENETIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE CHILD'S PSYCHE

1. Biogenetic principle in psychology

Pedagogy constantly turned to child psychology with questions about what the process of child development is and what are its basic laws. Attempts to explain this process, made by child psychology, have always been conditioned by the general level of psychological knowledge. At first, child psychology was a descriptive, phenomenal science, incapable of revealing the inner laws of development. Gradually, psychology, as well as medicine, moved from symptoms to syndromes, and then to a real causal explanation of the process. As already noted, changes in ideas about the mental development of the child have always been associated with the development of new research methods. "The problem of method is the beginning and foundation, the alpha and omega of the entire history of the child's cultural development," wrote L. S. Vygotsky. It is important to emphasize that we are talking about method.because a specific technique, according to L. S. Vygotsky, can take various forms depending on the content of a particular problem, on the nature of the study, on the personality of the subject.

Big influence the emergence of the first concepts of child development was influenced by the theory of Charles Darwin, who for the first time clearly formulated the idea that development, genesis, obeys a certain law. In the future, any major psychological concept has always been associated with the search for the laws of child development.

Early psychological theories include recapitulation concept. E. Haeckel formulated a biogenetic law in relation to embryogenesis: ontogenesis is a short and quick repetition of phylogenesis. This law was transferred to the process of ontogenetic development of the child. American psychologist St. Hall believed that the child in its development briefly repeats the development of the human race. In his opinion, children often wake up at night in fear, even in horror, and after a long time they cannot fall asleep. He explained this as an atavism: the child falls into a long a bygone era when a man alone slept in the forest, exposed to all sorts of dangers, and suddenly woke up. Art. Hall believed that the child's play is a necessary exercise for the complete loss of rudimentary and now useless functions; child is exercising. them like a tadpole that constantly moves its tail so that it falls off. Art. Hall also assumed that the development of children's drawing reflects the stages that the fine arts went through in the history of mankind.

These provisions of Art. Hall, naturally, drew criticism from many psychologists. So, S. L. Rubinshtein emphasized that such analogies are untenable: an adult, no matter how primitive he may be. was, enters into a relationship with nature, into the struggle for existence as a ready, mature individual; the child has a completely different relationship with the surrounding reality. Therefore, what seems to be similar is due to other causes, is a different phenomenon. "It would be anti-evolutionary to force a child to experience all the delusions of the human intellect," another scientist, P. P. Blonsky, wittily remarked.

However, under the influence of the works of St. Hall, the study of child psychology attracted many and took on an unusually large scale. "In America they like to do everything in a big way!" - wrote the Swiss psychologist E. Claparede. In order to achieve the desired goal faster and obtain a large amount of factual material, the development of various questionnaires began, the benefits of which were often doubtful. Teachers did not have time to answer the questionnaires sent out by pedagogical magazines, and for this they were condemned, considering them backward. “But science is not created as quickly as cities are built, even in America, and the mistakes of this feverish and artificial activity soon made themselves felt,” E. Claparede stated already at that time ..

The theoretical inconsistency of the concept of recapitulation in psychology was recognized before the critical attitude towards this concept appeared in embryology. I. and. Schmalhausen showed that in phylogenesis a decisive restructuring of the entire embryogenesis as a whole takes place, and decisive moments of development descend downward. E. Haeckel's criticism, based on vast factual material, raises the problem of the history of embryogenesis.

Despite the limitations and naivety of the concept of recapitulation, the biogenetic principle in psychology is interesting in that it was a search for a law. As D. B. Elkonin emphasized, this was an incorrect theoretical concept, but it was precisely theoretical concept. And if it weren't there, there wouldn't be other theoretical concepts for a long time. In the concept of St. Hall, for the first time, an attempt was made to show that there is a connection between historical and individual development, which has not yet been sufficiently traced.

The theory of recapitulation did not remain in the focus of scientists for long, but the ideas of St. Hall had a significant impact on child psychology through the studies of two of his famous students - A. Gesell and L. Theremin.

2. Normative approach to the study of child development.

A. Gesell, like many other major psychologists, received a pedagogical and medical education and then worked for more than thirty years at the Yale Psychoclinic, on the basis of which the now well-known Gesell Institute of Child Development was later created. To this day, the ontogeny of the psyche is being studied there, clinical and pedagogical research is being carried out. A. Gesell's contribution to child psychology is significant. He developed a practical system for diagnosing the mental development of a child from birth to adolescence, which is based on systematic comparative studies (forms and different forms pathology) with the use of film-photo registration of age-related changes in motor activity, speech, adaptive reactions and social contacts of the child. For the objectivity of observations, he was the first to use semipermeable glass (the famous "Gesell's mirror").

A. Gesell introduced into psychology the method of longitudinal, longitudinal study of the mental development of the same children from birth to adolescence. He studied monozygotic twins and was one of the first to use the twin method to analyze the relationship between maturation and learning. IN last years A. Gesell studied the mental development of a blind child in order to more deeply understand the features of normal development. In clinical practice, the Atlas of Infant Behavior, compiled by A. Gesell, is widely used, containing 3200 (!) Photos that capture motor activity and social behavior child from birth to two years of age.

However, in his research, A. Gesell limited himself to a purely quantitative study of comparative sections of child development, reducing development to a simple increase, "increase in behavior", without analyzing qualitative transformations during the transition from one stage of development to another, emphasized the dependence of development only on the maturation of the organism. Trying to formulate a general law of child development, A. Gesell drew attention to the decrease in the rate of development with age: what younger child the faster the change in behavior occurs. But what lies behind the change in the pace of development? It is difficult to find an answer to this question in the works of A. Gesell. This is understandable, because the result of the cross-sectional (transverse and longitudinal) methods of research used by him was the identification of development and growth.

The works of A. Gesell were critically analyzed by L. S. Vygotsky, who called the concept of A. Gesell "the theory of empirical evolutionism", revealing social development the child as a simple variety of the biological, as the adaptation of the child in his environment. However, A. Gesell's call for the need to control the normal course of the child's mental development and the phenomenology of development (growth) he created from birth to 16 years of age have not lost their significance so far.

L. Theremin in 1916 standardized the tests of A. Binet on American children and, having expanded the scale, created a new version of tests for measuring mental abilities, introduced the concept of intelligence quotient (1Q) and tried to substantiate the proposition that it remains constant on the basis of facts throughout life. With the help of tests, he obtained a curve of the normal distribution of abilities in the population and launched numerous correlation studies that aimed to identify the dependence of intelligence parameters on age, gender, birth order, race, socioeconomic status of the family, and parental education. L. Termen carried out one of the longest longitudinal studies in psychology, which lasted for fifty years. In 1921, L. Theremin selected 1,500 gifted children with an IQ of 140 or more, and traced their development. The study ended in the mid-70s after the death of L. Termen. Contrary to expectations, this study did not lead to anything significant, except for the most trivial conclusions. According to L. Termen, "genius" is associated with better health, higher mental performance and higher educational achievement than the rest of the population.

Theremin considered a gifted child with a high IQ. Psychologists of the younger generation (J. Guilford, E. Torrens, etc.) pointed out deep differences between the indicators of intelligence and creativity. The basis for this distinction was Guilford's description of convergent and divergent thinking.

Convergent thinking is solving a problem that has one correct answer. Divergent thinking is the solution to a problem that has many answers in the case when none of the answers can be considered the only correct one. The most important components of divergent thinking: the number of answers within a certain period of time, flexibility, originality.

Based on the ideas of Gilford, Torrens and his colleagues developed tests at the University of Minnesota creative thinking(MTTM) and applied them in a study of several thousand schoolchildren. These studies have shown that creative children may have significantly lower IQs than their peers. If you evaluate the degree of creativity of children on the basis of intelligence tests, stressed Torrens, you will have to exclude from consideration about 70 percent of the most gifted children. This percentage indicator is stable and practically does not depend either on the method of measuring intelligence or on the educational level of the subjects.

An extensive talent research project was developed. Research program: study of the relationship between intelligence and creativity; identification of personality traits of creative children; the study of environmental factors influencing the development of creative abilities: the relationship between parents and children, birth order and gender differences; relationships between gifted children and their peers; social and cultural factors.

As a result of a huge amount of work, it was only possible to establish with certainty that creativity manifests itself unevenly: with an interval of four years (5.9, 13, 17 years), researchers unanimously note a decline in creativity in the subjects and associate it with social and biological factors.

Orientation towards achieving success, the desire for stereotyping and conformity in behavior, the fear of asking questions, the opposition of work as a serious activity and play as entertainment - all this hinders the development of creativity.

Use of reward for unusual answers, competition between children, special training and exercise mental abilities stimulates her.

In addition to Termen's opinion, who believed that a gifted person is characterized by perseverance in bringing things to an end, purposefulness, self-confidence and freedom from unnecessary, aggravating experiences, Torrance notes that gifted children are more socially sociable, friendly, cordial and at the same time more lonely. They have a much brighter self-awareness and a sense of humor. These children are more reactive to stimuli, independent and alien to conformity, resistant to stress and more susceptible to the oedipal complex.

All this taken together paints a complex picture of the mental organization of a gifted child, "and, as the American authors themselves note, this picture is still somewhat incoherent and vague. Hence the need to further develop creativity tests to improve their predictive value, to identify indicators of future creative abilities already in infants, to study more deeply the influence of social, cultural and situational (personal characteristics of parents, their "lifestyle", home environment) factors that, interacting with innate characteristics, stimulate or suppress the child's creative self-expression.

The contribution of A. Gesell and L. Theremin to child psychology lies in the fact that they laid the foundation for the formation of child psychology as a normative discipline that describes the achievements of the child in the process of growth and development and builds various psychological scales on their basis. Noting the important results of the studies of these scientists, it should be emphasized that they focused on the role of the hereditary factor in explaining age-related changes.

The normative approach to the study of child development is, in essence, the classic American trend in the study of childhood. Within the framework of the normative tradition, one should look for the origins of American psychology's interest in the problems of "role-taking" and "personal development": for example, it was the first study of such important developmental conditions as the sex of the child and birth order. In the 1940s and 1950s, normative studies of emotional reactions in children were begun (A. Jerseyld et al.).

A new interest in the normative study of children of different sexes arose in the mid-70s (E. Makobi and K. Jacqueline). The world-famous studies of the intellectual development of the child, carried out by J. Piaget over several decades, were tested, comprehended and assimilated within the framework of the American normative tradition (J. Bruner, G. Beilin, J. Woolville, M. Lorando, A. Pinard, J. Flavell , D. Elkind, B. White and others).

The 1960s saw new developments in normative research. If earlier the efforts of scientists were aimed at finding an answer to the question: "How does the child behave?" Now new questions have arisen: "Under what conditions^","What are consequences development?" Changing aspects of the study, the formulation of new questions led to the deployment of empirical research, which led to the discovery of new phenomena in the development of the child. slowdown cognitive activity. The relationship between mother and baby was studied not only in humans, but also in animals (monkeys). But the abundance of new facts has not yet led to the solution of the main normative questions: how and under what conditions does the mental development of the child occur? In the opinion of the American psychologists themselves, the questions became even more insoluble; in their solution, according to R. Sears, there was no light in sight.

3. Identification of learning and development

Another approach to the analysis of the problem of development, which has a history no less long than the one just outlined, is associated with general attitudes behaviorism. This trend has deep roots in empirical philosophy and is most consistent with American ideas about a person: a person is what his environment, his environment, makes of him. This is a direction in American psychology, for which the concept of development is identified with the concept learning, acquiring new experience. The ideas of IP Pavlov had a great influence on the development of this concept. In the teachings of I. P. Pavlov, American psychologists adopted the idea that adaptive activity is characteristic of all living things. It is usually emphasized that in American psychology the Pavlovian principle of the conditioned reflex was assimilated, which served as an impetus for J. Watson to develop a new concept of psychology. It too general idea. The very idea of conducting a rigorous scientific experiment, created by IP Pavlov to study the digestive system, entered American psychology. The first description by I.P. Pavlov of such an experiment was in 1897, and the first publication by J. Watson was in 1913.

Already in the first experiments of IP Pavlov with the salivary gland brought out, the idea of a relationship between dependent and independent variables was realized, which runs through all American studies of behavior and its genesis, not only in animals, but also in humans. Such an experiment has all the advantages of a real natural scientific research, which is still so highly valued in American psychology: objectivity, accuracy (control of all conditions), availability for measurement. It is known that IP Pavlov persistently rejected any attempts to explain the results of experiments with conditioned reflexes by referring to the subjective state of the animal. J. Watson began "his" scientific revolution, putting forward the slogan: "Stop studying what a person thinks; let's study what a person does!"

American scientists perceived the phenomenon of a conditioned reflex as a kind of elementary phenomenon, accessible to analysis, something like a building block, from the multitude of which a complex system of our behavior can be built. The genius of I.P. Pavlov, according to his American colleagues, was that he managed to show how simple elements can be isolated, analyzed and controlled in the laboratory. The development of I. P. Pavlov’s ideas in American psychology took several decades, and each time one of the aspects of this simple, but at the same time not yet exhausted phenomenon in American psychology, the phenomenon of a conditioned reflex, appeared before the researchers.

In the earliest studies of learning, the idea of a combination of stimulus and response, conditioned and unconditioned stimuli, came to the fore: the time parameter of this connection was singled out. This is how the associationist concept of learning arose (J. Watson, E. Gasri). When the attention of researchers was attracted by the functions of the unconditioned stimulus in establishing a new associative stimulus-reactive connection, the concept of learning arose, in which the main emphasis was placed on the value of reinforcement. These were the concepts of E. Thorndike and B. Skinner. The search for answers to the question of whether learning, that is, the establishment of a connection between a stimulus and a response, depends on such states of the subject as hunger, thirst, pain, which have received the name drive in American psychology, led to more complex theoretical concepts of learning - the concepts of H Miller and K. Hull. The last two concepts raised American learning theory to such a degree of maturity that it was ready to assimilate new European ideas from the fields of Gestalt psychology, field theory, and psychoanalysis. It was here that there was a turn from a strict behavioral experiment of the Pavlovian type to the study of the motivation and cognitive development of the child.

Later, American scientists turned to the analysis of the orienting reflex as a necessary condition for the development of a new neural connection, new behavioral acts. In the 1950s, these studies were significantly influenced by the work of Soviet psychologists, and especially by the studies of E. N. Sokolov and A. V. Zaporozhets. Of great interest was the study of such properties of the stimulus as intensity, complexity, novelty, color, uncertainty, etc., carried out by the Canadian psychologist D. Berline. However, D. Berline, like many other scientists, considered the orienting reflex precisely as reflex -- in connection with the problems of neurophysiology of the brain, and not from the standpoint of the organization and functioning of mental activity, from the standpoint of tentative research activities.

Another idea of the Pavlovian experiment was refracted in the minds of American psychologists in a special way - the idea of constructing a new behavioral act in the laboratory, in front of the experimenter's eyes. It resulted in the idea of "behavior technology", its construction on the basis of positive reinforcement of any act behavior chosen at the request of the experimenter (B: Skinner). Such a mechanical approach to behavior completely ignored the need for the subject to orient himself in the conditions of his own action.

The mechanistic interpretation of human behavior, brought to its logical end in the concept of B. Skinner, could not but cause violent indignation of many humanistically minded scientists.

"Skinner? Oh, that's the one who thinks people are rats in cages;

According to Skinner, we are all under control, puppets, and some master's mind is pulling our strings;

Skinner does not accept human feelings and emotions, he is too cold-blooded. Besides, he says there are no such things as freedom and dignity."

famous representative humanistic psychology K. Rogers opposed his position to B. Skinner, emphasizing that freedom is the realization that a person can live on his own, "here and now", according to his own choice. It is the courage that makes a person able to enter into the uncertainty of the unknown, which he chooses for himself. It is the understanding of meaning within oneself. A person, K. Rogers believes, who expresses his thoughts deeply and boldly, acquires his own uniqueness, responsibly "chooses himself." He may have the happiness of choosing among a hundred external alternatives, or the misfortune of having none. But in all cases his freedom nonetheless exists.

The attack on behaviorism and, especially, on those aspects of it that are closest to developmental psychology, which began in American science in the 60s, took place in several directions. One of them concerned the question of how the experimental material should be collected. The fact is that B. Skinner's experiments were often performed on one or more subjects. In modern psychology, many researchers believe that patterns of behavior can only be obtained by sifting through individual differences and random deviations. This can only be achieved by averaging the behavior of many subjects. This attitude has led to an even greater expansion of the scope of research, the development of special techniques for quantitative data analysis, the search for new ways of studying learning, and with it development research.

4. The theory of three stages of child development ..

Researchers in European countries were more interested in analyzing the qualitative features of the development process. They were interested in the stages or stages in the development of behavior in phylo- and ontogenesis. So, after the works of I. P. Pavlov, E. Thorndike, W. Keller, the Austrian psychologist K. Buhler proposed the theory three stages of development: instinct, training, intelligence. K. Buhler associated these stages, their emergence not only with the maturation of the brain and the complication of relations with the environment, but also with the development of affective processes, with the development of the experience of pleasure associated with action. In the course of the evolution of behavior, the first transition of pleasure "from the end to the beginning" is noted. In his opinion, the first i stage - instincts - are characterized by the fact that pleasure comes as a result of satisfying an instinctive need, that is, after performing an action. At the level of skills, pleasure is transferred to the act itself. There was a concept: "functional pleasure". But there is also an anticipatory pleasure that appears at the stage of intellectual problem solving. Thus, the transition of pleasure "from the end to the beginning", according to K. Buhler, is the main driving force behind the development of behavior. K. Buhler transferred this scheme to ontogeny. Carrying out experiments on children similar to those that W. Köhler conducted on chimpanzees, K. Buhler noticed the similarity of the primitive use of tools "in anthropoid apes and a child, and therefore he called the period of manifestation of the primary forms of thinking in a child "chimpanzee-like age". The study of the child with the help of a zoopsychological experiment was an important step towards the creation of child psychology as a science. Note that not long before this, W. Wundt wrote that child psychology is generally impossible, since self-observation is not available to the child.

K. Buhler never considered himself a biogeneticist. In his works one can even find criticism of the biogenetic concept. However, his views are an even deeper manifestation of the concept of recapitulation, since the stages of development of the child are identified with the stages of development of animals. As L. S. Vygotsky emphasized, K. Buhler tried to bring the facts of biological and socio-cultural development to the same denominator and ignored the fundamental originality of the development of the child. K. Buhler shared with almost all contemporary child psychology a one-sided and erroneous view of mental development as a single and, moreover, biological process in nature.

Much later, a critical analysis of the concept of K. Bulsra was given by K. Lorenz. He pointed out that K. Buhler's idea of the superstructure in the process of phylogenesis of the higher levels of behavior over the lower ones is contrary to the truth. According to K. Lorenz, these are three lines of development, independent of each other, arising at a certain stage of the animal kingdom. Instinct does not prepare training, training does not precede the intellect. Developing the thoughts of K. Lorentz, D. B. Elkonin emphasized that there is no impassable line between the stage of intellect and the stage of training. A skill is a form of existence of an intellectually acquired behavior, so there may be a different sequence of behavior development: first the intellect, and then the skill. If this is true for animals, then it is even more true for a child. In the development of a child, conditioned reflexes occur in the second or third week of life. You can't call a child an instinctive animal - a child must be taught even to suck K. Buhler deeper than St. Hall, stands on the positions of the biogenetic approach, as it extends it to the entire animal world. And although the theory of K. Buhler today no longer has supporters, its significance lies in the fact that, as D. B. Elkonin rightly emphasized, it poses the problem childhood stories, history of postnatal development.

The origins of mankind are lost, and the history of childhood is also lost. Monuments of culture in relation to children are poor. True, the fact that peoples develop unevenly can serve as material for research. Currently, there are tribes and peoples that are at a low level of development. This opens up the possibility of conducting comparative studies to study the patterns of a child's mental development.

Studies by anthropologists and ethnographers of the 19th-20th centuries show that a child from the earliest childhood is, in the true sense of the word, a member of society. He early becomes a real part of the productive forces of society, and he is treated as a worker. For example, the well-known researcher of Australian aborigines, Frederick Rose, reports that the girls of some Australian tribes get married at the age of 8-9 years, that is, before puberty. This paradox is explained by the fact that the natives have a completely different attitude towards marriage than Europeans. F. Rose wrote that the reason for the marriage of a man to a girl who had not yet reached puberty was economic. The girl was part of the team of wives and learned from them to perform the economic functions assigned to her. The purpose of including the girl at such an early age in the wives' collective was not to immediately provide her husband with additional sexual contacts, but to train her by older wives in the environment where she was to fulfill social and economic tasks in the future. In the same way, a large family, as D. B. Elkonin emphasized, had not only biological, but also social reasons. The content of childhood, he believed, is determined by the position that the child occupies in the system of social relations, it is different in different historical eras.

The historical origin of the periods of childhood testifies to the impossibility of applying the biogenetic principle to the characterization of childhood. Overcoming biogenetic approaches to the psyche and its development in a child took quite a long time.

5. Concepts of convergence of two factors of child development.

In the experiments of E. Thorndike (the study of acquired forms of behavior), in the studies of I. P. Pavlov (the study of the physiological mechanisms of learning), the possibility of the emergence of new forms of "behavior" on an instinctive basis was emphasized. It was shown that under the influence of the environment, hereditary forms of behavior are overgrown with acquired skills and As a result of these studies, there is a certainty that everything in human behavior can be created, if only there are appropriate conditions for this.But here again the old problem arises: what in behavior from biology, from instinct, from heredity and what -- from the environment, from the conditions of life? The philosophical dispute between nativists ("there are innate ideas") and empiricists ("man is a blank slate") is connected with the solution of this problem.

The question of whether the theory of empiricism or the theory of nativism is justified in explaining the phenomena of child development was of interest to one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, K. Koffka. In his studies of child development, K. Koffka opposed vitalism K. Buhler and mechanism E. Thorndike. In his opinion, the system of internal conditions together with the system of external conditions determines our behavior. Therefore, development consists not only in maturation, but also in learning. K. Koffka believed that behavior will only be fully described when both sides of it are known, and only such a description will allow one to proceed to an explanation of behavior. According to K. Koffka, it is necessary to study not only what the child does, his external behavior, but also his inner world - the world of his experiences. This is the main research method of K. Koffka, which he called psychophysical.

Vchtalism - the doctrine of irreducibility higher forms behavior towards inferiors. K. Buhler considers development as "a series of internally unrelated steps that cannot be covered by a single principle." Mechanism - reduction of complex to simple. E. Thorndike believes that new behavior arises on the principle of random actions, which are selected in accordance with the law of effect.

The psychophysical method has the form of an experiment. The researcher creates a situation, if possible, measurable, that is, corresponding to the requirements of a natural-science experiment. Then he studies the behavior of the subject, systematically changing the situation and exploring changes in his behavior. In addition to this, the experimenter must take into account the experiences reported to the subjects that he had during the experiment.

To explain psychological phenomena, K. Koffka introduced a new principle - structural principle. He, from the point of view of K. Koffka, is equally applicable for revealing the essence of instinct, training and intelligence. K. Koffka discovers it in the behavior of animals and in the behavior of a child. With this principle, he covers the simplest reflexes of a newborn, and the complex forms of children's play, and learning in school age... The enumeration here can be stopped, because when such heterogeneous phenomena are explained by the same principle, it becomes meaningless and practically explains nothing. As L. S. Vygotsky wrote, “Koffka overcomes mechanism by introducing an intellectualistic principle. Koffka overcomes mechanism by making concessions to vitalism, recognizing that the structure is primordial, and vitalism by making concessions to mechanism, because mechanism means not only reducing man to a machine, but also man to animal." “Nevertheless,” L. S. Vygotsky emphasized further, “the structural principle turns out to be historically more progressive than the concepts that it replaced in the course of the development of our science. Therefore, on the way to the historical concept of child psychology, we must dialectically deny the structural principle, which means at the same time: to preserve and overcome it.

The dispute of psychologists about what predetermines the process of child development - hereditary giftedness or Environment-- led to convergence theory these two factors. Its founder is V. Stern. He believed that mental development is not a simple manifestation of innate properties and not a simple perception of external influences. This is the result of the convergence of internal inclinations with the external conditions of life. V. Stern wrote that one cannot ask about any function, any property: does it occur from the outside or from the inside? The only legitimate question is: what exactly takes place in it from the outside and what from within? Because in its manifestation both are always active, only each time in different proportions.

Behind the problem of the correlation of two factors that influence the process of a child's mental development, most often lies a preference for the factor of hereditary predetermination of development. But even when researchers emphasize the primacy of the environment over the hereditary factor, they fail to overcome the biologist approach to development if the environment and the entire process of development are interpreted as a process of adaptation, adaptation to living conditions.

V. Stern, like his other contemporaries, was a supporter of the concept of recapitulation. His words are often mentioned that a child in the first months of the infantile period with still unreasoned reflex and impulsive behavior is at the stage of a mammal; in the second half of the year, thanks to the development of grasping objects and imitation, he reaches the stage of the highest mammal - the monkey; in the future, having mastered the upright gait and speech, the child reaches the initial stages of the human condition; in the first five years of play and fairy tales, he stands at the level of primitive peoples; this is followed by admission to school, which is associated with the mastery of higher social responsibilities, which, according to V. Stern, corresponds to the entry of a person into culture with its state and economic organizations. The simple content of the ancient and Old Testament world is most adequate in the first school years to the children's spirit, the middle years bear the features of fanaticism. Christian culture, and only in the period of maturity is spiritual differentiation achieved, corresponding to the state of culture of the new time. It is appropriate to recall that quite often puberty is called the age of enlightenment.

The desire to consider the periods of child development by analogy with the stages of development of the animal world and human culture shows how persistently researchers were looking for general patterns of evolution.

The search for the causes of child development was just as intense. Therefore, disputes about what determines child development, which of the two factors is of decisive importance, have not ceased to this day; only now they are transferred to the experimental sphere. According to a number of researchers, a change in the proportion of heredity and environment opens up a method for studying twins. However, the data obtained using this method is not represented sufficiently

Name: Children's - developmental psychology.

This publication represents the first attempt in modern domestic psychological science to create a textbook on child psychology. The content and structure of the textbook include existing foreign and domestic theories, diverse factual material and problems solved by science and practice in the field of developmental psychology.
The textbook is intended for students of psychological faculties of universities, pedagogical universities and colleges, as well as all those who are interested in the mental development of children.

Currently, there are many textbooks on child psychology in the world. Almost every major Western university has its own original version. As a rule, these are voluminous, well-illustrated manuals summarizing a huge amount of scientific research. Some of them have been translated into Russian. However, in none of these truly interesting books do we find an analysis of the holistic concept of child development developed by L. S. Vygotsky and his followers, which is a true pride and a true achievement of the national
psychology.

CONTENT
FOREWORD
Chapter I. CHILDHOOD AS A SUBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH
1. Historical analysis of the concept of "childhood"
2. Childhood as a subject of science
3. The specifics of the mental development of the child
4. Strategies for researching the child's mental development
Chapter II. OVERCOMING BIOGENETIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE CHILD'S PSYCHE
1. Biogenetic principle in psychology
2. Normative approach to the study of child development
3. Identification of learning and development
4. Theory of three stages of child development
5. Concepts of convergence of two factors of child development
6. Approaches to the analysis of the internal causes of the mental development of the child
Chapter III. PSYCHOANALYTICAL THEORIES OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT
1. Theory of Sigmund Freud
2. The development of classical psychoanalysis in the works of Anna Freud
3. Epigenetic theory of personality development. Erik Erickson
Chapter IV. SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY
1. Departure from classical behaviorism
2. Education and development
3. Critical periods of socialization
4. Reward and punishment as conditions for the formation of new behavior
5. The role of imitation in the formation of new behavior
6. Child and adult
7. Family as a factor in the development of a child's behavior
Chapter V
1. Stages of scientific biography
2. Key concepts of the concept of J. Piaget
3. The discovery of the egocentricity of children's thinking
4. Discovery of the stages of intellectual development of the child
Chapter VI. L. S. VYGOTSKY AND HIS SCHOOL
1. Change of scientific outlook
2. Further steps along the path discovered by L. S. Vygotsky
Chapter VII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. EARLY CHILDHOOD
1. Neonatal crisis
2. Stage of infancy
3. Early age
4. Crisis of three years
Chapter VIII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. CHILDHOOD
1. Preschool age
2. Crisis of seven years and the problem of school readiness
3. Junior school age
Chapter IX. ADOLESCENT AGE IN THE LIGHT OF DIFFERENT CONCEPTS
1. Influence of historical time
2. Classic studies of the crisis of adolescence
3. New trends in the study of adolescence (L. S. Vygotsky, D. B. Elkonin, L. I. Bozhovich)
Chapter X. UNFINISHED DISPUTES
1. P. Ya. Galperin and J. Piaget
2. On the patterns of functional and age-related development of the child's psyche
3. Forms and functions of imitation in childhood.
4. The problem of general and specific laws of mental development of a deaf-blind-mute child
CONCLUSION
Annex 1. CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD
Appendix 2. DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD (1959)

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Obukhova L.F., Child (age) psychology. Textbook. -- M., Russian Pedagogical Agency. 1996, -- 374 p.

The textbook is intended for students of psychological faculties of universities, pedagogical universities and colleges, as well as all those who are interested in the mental development of children.

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FOREWORD

Chapter I. CHILDHOOD AS A SUBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH.

1. Historical analysis of the concept of "childhood"

2. Childhood as a subject of science

3. The specifics of the mental development of the child.

4. Strategies for researching the child's mental development

Chapter II. OVERCOMING BIOGENETIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE CHILD'S PSYCHE

1. Biogenetic principle in psychology

2. Normative approach to the study of child development.

3. Identification of learning and development

4. The theory of three stages of child development ..

5. Concepts of convergence of two factors of child development.

6. Approaches to the analysis of the internal causes of the mental development of the child

Chapter III. PSYCHOANALYTICAL THEORIES OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT.

1. The theory of Sigmund Freud.

2. The development of classical psychoanalysis in the works of Anna Freud.

3. Epigenetic theory of personality development. Erik Erickson

Chapter IV. SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY

1. Departure from classical behaviorism...

2. Education and development.

3. Critical periods of socialization.

4. Encouragement and punishment as conditions for the formation of new behavior.

5. The role of imitation in the formation of new behavior.

6. Child and adult.

7. Family as a factor in the development of a child's behavior

Chapter V

1. Stages of scientific biography.

2. Key concepts of the concept of J. Piaget.

3. The discovery of the egocentricity of children's thinking

4. Discovery of the stages of a child's intellectual development.

Chapter VI. L. S. VYGOTSKY AND HIS SCHOOL

1. Change of scientific outlook.

2. Further steps along the path opened by L. S. Vygotsky.

Chapter VII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. THE PERIOD OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

1. Neonatal crisis

2. Stage of infancy.

3. Early age.

4. Crisis of three years

Chapter VIII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. THE PERIOD OF CHILDHOOD.

1. Preschool age.

2. The crisis of seven years and the problem of school readiness.

3. Junior school age.

Chapter IX. ADOLESCENT AGE IN THE LIGHT OF DIFFERENT CONCEPTS..

1. Influence of historical time.

2. Classic studies of the crisis of adolescence.

3. New trends in the study of adolescence (L. S. Vygotsky, D. B. Elkonin, L. I. Bozhovich)

Chapter X. UNFINISHED DISPUTES.

1. P. Ya. Galperin and J. Piaget.

2. On the patterns of functional and age-related development of the child's psyche.

3. Forms and functions of imitation in childhood.

4. The problem of general and specific patterns of mental development of a deaf-blind-mute child.

CONCLUSION

Annex 1. CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

Obukhova l f developmental psychology. Children's - developmental psychology - Obukhova L.F. Chapter I. Childhood as a Subject of Psychological Research

L f Obukhova

Obukhova, l f

Child (age) psychology

Chapter I. Childhood as a subject of psychological research.

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Obukhova l f developmental psychology. Children's - developmental psychology - Obukhova L.F. Chapter I. Childhood as a Subject of Psychological Research

L f Obukhova

Obukhova, l f

Child (age) psychology

Chapter I. Childhood as a subject of psychological research.

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