Education and Nature: Lessons from the Zagorsk Experiment

Abstract

The Zagorsk experiment on the formation of personality in deaf-blind children is considered in the context of confrontation between the naturalistic psychology and the cultural-historical one. From the point of view of the naturalistic psychology, the essence of man is concealed in his genome, and all the diversity of human abilities comes down to a set of genetic “norms of reaction” to external stimuli. And the cultural-historical theory understands the essence of man as “ensemble of social relations” (Marx). The founder of cultural-historical psychology L.S. Vygotsky argued that experimental work with deaf-blind children makes it possible to uncover the regularities of educaton of any ordinary child, just as the artificial synthesis of chemicals in the laboratory allows us to understand the processes of forming them in nature. In the course of the Zagorsk experiment, E.V. Ilyenkov tried to discern the moment of birth of human personality within “natural” psyche: the personality is born in the process of communication, mediated by cultural objects. Ilyenkov regarded the inability of a deaf-blind child to search-orienting activity in the surrounding world as complete absence (“zero”) of psyche. He compared the formation and development of personality with the flow of the river: this process is 100%, from the beginning to the end, determined by the “relief” of culture, and not by the chemical composition of water. The central part in the theory of interiorization, or “enrooting” (Vygotsky’s term) of the human person inside the natural psyche, is assigned to jointly-divided activity – first of all, to “practical communication” (A.I. Meshcheryakov) of educator and child. Its purpose is to form in child the need for cultural behaviour and the ability of autonomous acting with cultural objects.