Restoring Teachers to Their Rights: Soviet Education and the 1936 Denunciation of Pedology

Abstract

In early 1937, one-third of sixth graders in a school near Leningrad were not passing their Russian-language course. Their teacher, Tomsinskaia, told the school director that the failures were due to circumstances beyond her control: children had received inadequate preparation in previous grades, textbooks were in short supply, and pupils had “weak reading habits.” Other teachers in the Krasnosel'skii district offered similar justifications for pupils' poor performance. Sakhanova claimed that low levels of achievement were due to “bad home conditions.” Velichko asserted that her seventeen failing pupils all suffered from inherited conditions such as “mental retardation,” “underdevelopment,” or “congenital laziness.” Semenovskii, who had completed higher education and considerable teaching experience, admitted he had no explanation why one-half of his pupils were failing every year.