The Diagnostics of Development and Pedological Clinical Care for Difficult Children

Abstract

The article “The Diagnostics of Development and Pedological Clinical Care for Difficult Children” was written by L.S. Vygotsky in 1931 for the anthology Voprosy pedologii trudnogo detstva [Issues in the Pedology of Difficult children]. It has not been published before for technical reasons and is now being issued as a separate booklet. This article presents a new interpretation of the problem of difficult children and develops principles and a theoretically grounded program for the examination of difficult children. The theoretical and methodological postulates set forth in this work represent one of the stages in Vygotsky’s scientific journey. He began to work in the field of special-needs children and the pedology of difficult children from his very first steps in scientific activity. And right away in his first articles dealing with special-needs problems, Vygotsky displayed his characteristic depth of theoretical thought and a fresh, original approach to fields that had been covered in the dust of age-old traditions. The paper he read at the Second Congress on the Social and Legal Protection of Minors opened a new phase in special-needs theory and practice and displayed the extremely broad prospects for work on educating and teaching physically handicapped and mentally retarded children. The principles of the pedagogy of handicapped children set out by Vygotsky in the paper formed the basis for the construction of special-needs schools in the Soviet Union. To counterbalance the primitive, elementary treatment of the problem of handicapped children, Vygotsky put forth a number of postulates that showed the entire complexity and depth of the problems of the psychology of handicapped children and transferred the solution of these problems from a narrowly biological context to the social-psychological realm. The psyche of physically handicapped and mentally retarded children had been previously viewed in its static state, as the mechanical difference