“Does God sleep like us?” Diaries about children’s religiosity

Abstract

The article deals with the diaries of mothers who monitored their children according to a clear plan, which was developed for them by the famous teacher and pedologist Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rybnikov (1880-1961). For the first time in Russian science, he suggested that the most effective is biographical research, which should be longitudinal, and documents of personal origin should serve as sources for analysis. The Diaries give us a lot of information - from descriptions of progressive women to n. XX century before the formation of the personality of the child. Pedology had its own target audience, on which it relied - intellectual circles, which were open to new trends in science. On the other hand, we see that such circles were, if not prosperous, at least quite well off. After the October Revolution, pedology lost its social and economic base; its defeat was a matter of time. If we touch directly on issues related to the history of psychology, then, undoubtedly, we have a unique document before us. Such observations allow us to reconstruct the development of children at the beginning of the 20th century and conduct a comparative analysis; he shows us the differences in the assessment of the development of children in the course of the history of psychology and pedagogy; it allows us to reconstruct the religious ideas of children at the beginning of the 20th century and to identify how they differ from modern ideas.