The Great Psychologist: K.D. Ushinsky as a Methodologist of Psychology

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the Great Russian teacher and psychologist K.D. Ushinsky, whose contribution to the development of pedagogy and psychology is undeniable. However, the psychological component of the creativity and legacy of the great scientist and innovator remains largely underestimated: in modern Russian textbooks on the history of psychology, K.D. Ushinsky's psychological research is not given any significant attention, also in foreign ones Ushinsky's psychological works are not mentioned at all. The article states that one of the main achievements of the scientist is the methodology of substantiation of scientific psychology. Even though Ushinsky was not a psychologist, did not position himself as a psychologist, he developed the scientific foundations of psychology to build scientific pedagogy. Psychology as a science simply did not exist at that time, so the development of a system of psychology was a means of solving its main task. Russian pedagogue's solution to Ushinsky's problem, however, represented a unique achievement of world psychological science, and the solution of the Russian pedagogue was original, since the project was focused on the development of practical psychology for teachers. The article provides an analysis of reasons for such underestimation of Ushinsky’s project by scientific community — objective (traditions of considering psychology and public expectations) and subjective (Ushinsky positioning himself exclusively as a teacher and belittling his contribution to psychology). It is mentioned that B.G. Ananyev (1945), who called the Russian scientist a “great psychologist, but the assessment of the classic of Soviet psychology has not become generally accepted, noticed Ushinsky’s contribution to the creation of the original system of psychology. The article analyzes the reasons for the lack of resonance of the publication, among which the main ones are ideological and socio-cultural, related to the uncertain status of psychology itself in the early 1950s, after the session of the two academies, when the proximity to the physiological teaching of I.P. Pavlov and the materialism of the concept became the determining factor. The article gives an outline of K.D. Ushinsky's methodological concept, which allows asserting that Ushinsky proposed a project of scientific psychology, the first practice-oriented project of psychological science in the history of world psychology.