Commemorating the 125th Anniversary of the Birth of L.S. Vygotsky (1896–1934): L.S. Vygotsky as an Expert on Handicapped Children

Abstract

The 125th anniversary of L.S. Vygotsky’s birth, which was marked in 2021, was commemorated by various events in the scientific and cultural life of Russia and other countries. A major example is this issue of the journal, which is devoted to Vygotsky’s creation of a new school in the field of children with handicaps (corrective pedagogy) — a cultural-historical theory of children’s handicaps. As A.N. Leontiev aptly put it, Vygotsky was a psychologist, a pedologist, an expert on children’s handicaps, an expert on children’s handicaps, an educator, and a psychopathologist, while remaining a psychologist and merely contributing to these disciplines his own invigorating flow of psychological theory. The cultural-historical approach that Vygotsky devised in psychology, on the one hand, was based on research in the field of abnormal childhood, and on the other hand, helped to generalize it and make it into a well-organized theoretical system. This volume includes works by Vygotsky in the field of children’s handicaps as well as the results of research aimed at analyzing his contribution to the theory and practice of teaching and educating children with developmental deviations. The issue opens with Vygotsky’s article “On the Psychology and Pedagogy of Handicapped Children [K psikhologii i pedagogike detskoi defektivnosti],” published in 1924 in the anthology Questions in the Education of Blind, Deaf-Mute, and Mentally Retarded Children [Voprosy vospitaniia slepykh, glukhonemykh i umstvenno otstalykh detei]. This was Vygotsky’s first work on problems related to handicapped children. As Vygotsky writes in the foreword, the purpose of the anthology was to frame the problem of special schools for handicapped children as a problem of social education.