RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF DEFECTOLOGY OF THE USSR ACADEMY OF PEDAGOGICAL SCIENCES

A.I. Meshcheryakov

DEAF-BLIND CHILDREN

DEVELOPMENT OF THE PSYCHE

IN THE PROCESS OF BEHAVIOR FORMATION

MOSCOW

"PEDAGOGY"

PREFACE

*

The names of deaf-blind people who have achieved high levels of development are widely known. intellectual level, is, first of all, Elena Keller in the USA and Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova in our country. The scientific community also knows the names of their teachers: Anna Sullivan and Professor I.A. Sokolyansky. What is less known is that nowadays teaching children with profound visual and hearing impairments has ceased to be isolated cases and has become a matter of everyday pedagogical practice. The founder of education for the deaf-blind in our country was Professor I.A. Sokolyansky, who back in 1923 organized in Kharkov a training group for children deprived of sight, hearing and speech. IN Research The Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR continued a long-term pedagogical experiment on teaching deaf-blind children.

The proposed work is the first attempt at a systematic presentation of the pedagogical experiment conducted in the experimental group of deaf-blind students at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR from 1955 to 1970 and in the Zagorsk orphanage for the deaf-blind from 1963 to 1970. Until 1960, this work was carried out under the leadership of I. .A. Sokolyansky, the founder of Soviet typhlosurdopedagogy, my teacher, who died in 1960.

The uniqueness of deaf-blindness as a research problem is determined by the fact that the lack of vision and hearing and the muteness associated with the lack of hearing deprive the child of the opportunity (without special training) to communicate with people around him. As a result of loneliness, a deaf-blind child does not develop mentally. When teaching such a child, a unique task arises of the purposeful formation of the entire human psyche. And it is known that where the task of purposefully shaping a phenomenon arises, favorable conditions are created for establishing its laws. The idea of ​​this book is precisely to try to show some patterns of the emergence and development of human behavior and the psyche in general using specific experimental and theoretical material on the formation of the behavior and psyche of deaf-blind children.

Of course, not all features of the mental development of a deaf-blind child can be transferred to the norm. The development of a deaf-blind person also has its own specifics, but the study focused on patterns that are common to the norm.

We see the theoretical significance of the results of work on the education and training of deaf-blind people in the fact that they prove with experimental purity dialectical-materialist ideas about the social nature of the human psyche.

The proposed book may be useful not only to defectologists raising abnormal children, but also to a wide range of readers interested in problems of mental development normal child.

I take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude for the help in conducting the research and collecting material to the teachers and educators of Zagorokiy orphanage for the deaf-blind, and also to the staff of the laboratory for the study and training of deaf-blind children at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR.
^

Part one. Problems of deafblindness

Chapter I. Problems and research methods

Teaching deaf-blind people is a kind of experiment in the field of psychology and special pedagogy. The content of this experiment is to clarify and practically implement in the process of special training the possibilities of developing mental functions in children with simultaneous absence of vision and hearing, and due to the absence of hearing, speech.

Identification of patterns of development of a deaf-blind child cannot be achieved using average statistical research methods. If normally seeing and hearing children are characterized by individual rates of development, then deaf-blind children have individual rates and characteristics of their development to an even greater extent. The peculiarities of the development of deaf-blind people are determined primarily by the fact that each of them suffered a disease as a result of which vision and hearing were lost. These diseases were different in different children and proceeded differently. In addition, the lifestyle that developed after past illness, the children were not the same. In each individual case, this depended on the different attitudes of adults in the family towards the child’s defect: in some families the child was overprotected, delaying his development, in others, he was taught to be independent to some extent. As a result of all this, there are no two deaf-blind children who would be identical both in pace and in the general nature of development.

At the same time, of course, there is a certain logic in the development of deaf-blind people. It manifests itself in individual development patterns of specific children.

The disadvantages of the method of average statistical research in the study of deaf-blind people cannot be overcome by the so-called cross-section method, which consists in establishing development levels at different age periods child. This method is of little use in studying deaf-blind people, since it does not provide an opportunity to adequately understand the dynamics of development and, what is especially important, does not provide materials for understanding qualitative transitions in the development of the child’s psyche.

The main method of our work is the so-called clinical trial. Its content in this case was to trace the development of the same child throughout long period. This method includes recording the characteristics of the activities of the children being studied, characterizing their relationships with people around them, but in principle it should include taking into account those factors. which form and develop the basic mental neoplasm in a child for each period of development.

To understand the characteristics of deaf-blind children in one or another period of their development, it is necessary to trace the development of the same child over a long period of time. This study must include taking into account the prerequisites that were formed in the period preceding the period being studied, the study of mental shifts in the process (the period directly under consideration, and the recording of prerequisites, the emergence of which will determine the formation of those mental new formations that will become major in the subsequent period of the child’s development.

The students we talk about in this book have been studied by us for varying amounts of time. We began tracking the development of some of them, such as Liya V., Serezha S., Yura L., Natasha K., Natalia Sh., long before the opening of a special educational institution for them, but most children have been studied only since the opening of the Zagorsk orphanage in 1963.

However, not all the data collected during the study of children are presented, but only those that, to one degree or another, relate to the issues raised. Thus, there is no mention at all of the problem of mastering school subjects, despite the fact that a group of older students, having received secondary education, are currently successfully studying in a higher educational institution. The problems of developing the personality of a deaf-blind person, the formation of his worldview and others were also not reflected, despite the fact that a lot of materials have been collected on these issues. Analysis and synthesis of these materials is the task of further research.

This book contains mainly a study of the problems of mental development of a deaf-blind child in the process of forming his initial human behavior. The development of the psyche in the process of communication will be discussed in the next book.

The main mental neoplasms, the emergence and development of which occur in the initial period of education and training of deaf-blind children, are formations of a systemic type. First of all, these are the first human needs that develop along with the acquisition of skills of objective-practical everyday behavior, which motivate behavior, and the first images that regulate objective actions and are formed into a system of figurative-effective thinking, understood as an internal reflection of the child’s practical action. The next most important systemic formation is thinking that occurs in the activity of communication between a child and an adult using signs (gestures and words), understood as an internal reflection of the child’s practical communication with the people around him regarding objects and actions with them.

The named mental neoplasms are formed in a deaf-blind child in the process of performing the corresponding joint activities of the teacher and the pupil. Imaginative and effective thinking arises in the process of restructuring organic needs into human needs under the influence of mastering the methods of action that make up the system of everyday behavior in the objective environment. Therefore, the main pedagogical task of this period of raising a child is to develop his everyday behavior and self-care skills.

Thinking using gestures and words is formed as children master the means of communication. And the main pedagogical task in this case is the formation and development of communicative activities that include the child in human society and allow him to master social experience on the basis of sign systems.

It should be especially noted that, calling one of the mental formations “thinking using gestures and words,” we deliberately do not qualify it as “verbal thinking,” since we are convinced that “real thinking” never comes down to operating with symbols, which in a certain sense, are gestures and words, and always involves operating with images of objects and actions.

In the process of carrying out the work, it became clear that it is inappropriate to use the example of one particular child to describe the entire developmental path, since in some children the formation of one mental neoplasm took place more prominently and clearly than in others, and in others - another. And accordingly, in the research materials, some children showed one period of development in more detail and more clearly, while others showed another. Therefore, to describe a particular period of development, we took as an example the child in whom the corresponding activity was most developed and its patterns appeared most consistently and clearly expressed.

The book summarizes the results of training of more than 50 pupils of the Zagorsk orphanage for the deaf-blind and mute and students of the experimental group of the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR. Training of pupils at the Institute of Defectology under the leadership of I.A. Sokolyansky was started in 1955, mass training deaf-blind people in the Zagorsk orphanage - since 1963.

However, even before the start of extensive research on the development of children in the learning process, it was necessary to solve many practical problems: first, to identify and take into account deaf-blind people who are capable of learning; secondly, to organize a special educational institution that could take on the task of educating and training deaf-blind people. The third organizational task was the training of teachers and the development of educational materials - programs and manuals that would allow them to begin the process of teaching deaf-blind children. For. To solve the first problem, we contacted all regional departments of social security of the RSFSR, schools for the blind and schools for the deaf with a request to report on deaf-blind children and deaf-blind adults known to them. As a result of processing the information received, 340 deaf-blind and deaf-blind people were identified, of which 120 people were under the age of 20 years. Upon further research, it turned out that this number included people who, in addition to visual and hearing impairments, also suffered mental retardation to varying degrees.

Rice. 1. Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova with her teacher prof. I.A. Sokolyansky.

We understood that the data we had identified on the number of deaf-blind people was incomplete, but the materials we received gave us the opportunity to raise the question of organizing a special institution for their education. After such permission was received 1, the question arose about the urgent training of teachers for the new educational institution. From August 1, 1962 to May 1963, courses were organized at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR to train teaching staff for teaching deaf-blind people. All leading researchers at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR gave lectures at these courses.

By the beginning of training sessions (September 1, 1963), the staff of the laboratory for the study and training of deaf-blind children at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR prepared and published the necessary educational materials on a rotator. In addition to the author (A.I. Meshcheryakov - Ed.), O.I. took part in the development of educational materials. Skorokhodova, R.A. Mareeva, G.V. Vasina, V.A. Wachtel.

The results of children's learning were recorded every day in special notebooks-diaries; in addition, for each student at the end of each academic quarter, a detailed characteristics, teachers' reports on educational work in each group were analyzed. To solve individual research questions, students were given topics for essays, questionnaires, and specially organized conversations were held. For more detailed study Some questions involved a laboratory experiment. In particular, when studying the formation of communication through verbal language, we used the method of a laboratory experiment using a version of the cyclographic technique that we developed, which made it possible to analyze the perception of language elements both in its “spoken” (for the deaf-blind - dactyl) and in written (Braille) forms.

In order to more contrastingly and clearly present the essence of our approach to the problem of the development of deaf-blind children, an excursion into the history of their education and short description modern foreign experience in this area.

The originality of the practice of educating and training deaf-blind people, in which the task of forming the human psyche is posed and solved in a specially organized pedagogical process, allows us to pose and discuss from a somewhat new point of view some important problems that go beyond the narrow framework of deaf-blindness itself, such as the formation of the human psyche in ontogenesis, the determination of the content of the psyche, the relationship between the social and the biological in the formation of the human psyche, and some others.

The study of the development of deaf-blind people is not only important for understanding the characteristics of the children themselves and the correct organization of their education and upbringing, but is also a unique method for understanding certain patterns of development of ordinary normally seeing and hearing children. It is known that the formation and development of the behavior and psyche of a normal child is not limited to a specially organized pedagogical process. The entire set of factors that in one way or another influence a child and shape his psyche is extremely large, diverse and, as a result, difficult to fully take into account. A child learns a lot not in a specially organized pedagogical process, but in ordinary life. For example, he is not specially trained oral speech, thinking, representation, perception, and he, however, assimilates all this. A huge number of child behavior skills, his feelings, personality traits are not at all the products of special training, but arise as if by themselves in everyday life, in everyday communication with parents, in games on the street, in joint activities with other children.

It is, of course, impossible to take into account and trace the impact on a child of all the diverse factors of his environment. Due to the diversity and complexity of these factors, it is impossible to record them with any significant completeness or trace their action. To study the significance of any factor, it would be necessary to artificially isolate it from others and trace its isolated action. In the normal process of development of a normal child, this is impossible to do, because it is impossible to isolate the child from the diversity of the environment - such isolation would be simply technically impossible and completely unacceptable pedagogically. That is why it is difficult, given the normal development of a child’s psyche, to identify the true significance of this or that factor. Due to the huge variety of difficult to take into account and seemingly invisible factors influencing the child, the formation of basic, especially initial, mental new formations under normal conditions occurs so imperceptibly that we have the opportunity to see only the final result of this development, while the process of formation itself eludes our attention. At the same time, the objectivity of research in the study of behavior and psyche is determined, in particular, by the completeness of taking into account the impact on the child.

The most complex mental functions and processes that arise in a child seem simple and ordinary, because they are too familiar and observed every day. Sometimes only a violation of a function or a delay in its development shows how complex it is.

In a child deprived of vision, hearing and speech, the variety of environmental factors affecting the body is terribly narrowed. This catastrophic narrowing of the influences of the external world in deaf-blindness is so great that conditions are created for their control and recording in a significantly to a greater extent, than usual. In case of deaf-blindness, the possibility of accounting and control increases so much, compared with normal external influences on the child, that practically this control extends to all significant, i.e., development-determining factors. Along with control over influences, there is also the possibility of a very complete account (especially in the first stages of development) of the results obtained, i.e., mental new formations, the child’s knowledge, and the level of his development. Teaching a deaf-blind child and tracking his development, while in itself a necessary and humane task, at the same time creates conditions for studying a much more complete and accurate relationship between the factors influencing the child and his mental development. The problem of deaf-blindness is complex and unique. The development of deaf-blind children differs not only from the development of normal sighted-hearing children, but also from the development of children who have one defect - blindness or deafness.

If a child was born with impaired hearing or lost hearing in early childhood, then naturally, that is, by imitation, he will not learn to speak. But such a child sees. He visually perceives gestures and learns to imitate gestures. With the help of gestures he expresses his desires. Perceiving with the help of vision the behavior of the people around him, he begins to imitate them. And then speech is taught using a special method.

If a child was born without vision or lost it due to illness in early childhood, he will, of course, be deprived of visual impressions. But his hearing will help him out. He will hear the steps of his mother approaching him and will perceive her words by ear. By imitating the sounds of speech, he will learn to speak. With the help of speech, he will develop the ability to communicate with the people around him. And in this communication, a child deprived of vision will form human behavior and develop the human psyche.

And a completely different matter is a deaf-blind child.

The uniqueness of deaf-blind children comes down to two main features.

The first feature, the most obvious, is that a deaf-blind child forms all his ideas about the outside world through touch.

Second, less obvious, but most important feature The development of a deaf-blind child is that such a child is deprived of the usual ways of communicating with the people around him, and if this communication is not specially organized, then he is doomed to absolute loneliness. In this case, his psyche does not develop. Therefore, the main difficulty and originality in teaching a deaf-blind child lies in the need to take into account all the richness and complexity of human behavior and psyche, in the ability to form and develop the child’s behavior and psyche with the help of specially created methodological techniques.

I.A. Sokolyansky, characterizing deaf-blind children, writes: “A deaf-blind child has normal brain and has the potential to fully mental development. However, his peculiarity is that, having this opportunity, he himself never achieves even the most insignificant mental development through his own efforts. Without special training, such a child remains completely disabled for the rest of his life” (I.A. Sokolyansky, 1959, p. 121).

And if in normal children a lot of things arise outside of special pedagogical intervention and control, then in deaf-blind children every mental acquisition should be a special goal specifically directed pedagogical activity. The peculiarity of this task creates significant difficulties in the work of the educator and teacher of a deaf-blind child, forcing him to develop unique teaching and upbringing techniques.

If during education an ordinary child a pedagogical error or omission can be corrected by life outside school, by practice, but in cases of deaf-blindness such corrections are impossible. And if the teacher does not take into account something from the complex arsenal of the human psyche and does not make this “something” a special task, solved by a special didactic technique, this “something” will remain unemerged and undeveloped. And this cannot but create disharmony in all development.

A child who is deaf-blind and mute from birth or who has lost hearing and vision at early age, deprived of normal human communication. He becomes lonely. This loneliness is the cause of underdevelopment or degradation of the psyche. Therefore, a deaf-blind-mute child is a creature without a human psyche, but with the possibility of its full development.

This creates a unique task of purposefully shaping human behavior and psyche with the possibility of almost complete consideration of all factors affecting the child.

And with this purposeful, specially organized education and training, conditions are created for an in-depth study of human consciousness. Famous psychologist A.N. Leontyev wrote in a review of O.I. Skorokhodova’s book “How I Perceive the world"(1947): "The idea that forms the leitmotif of the book under review is that deaf-blind people are people who, with proper care for their upbringing, can learn a lot and find their place in life; that if nature has taken away their sight and hearing, then they have other ways of understanding the world - touch, vibration sensations, etc., which must be fully used in defectology. This is an absolutely true and important thought, important in the sense that it forces us to treat those who at first glance are hopelessly doomed to the most miserable existence with more attention, with greater care and faith in success.

But there is another side to the education of deaf-blind people, which we consider extremely necessary to specially highlight and emphasize. This is the enormous philosophical and psychological significance of working with deaf-blind people, to which the attention of our entire scientific community should be drawn. In one of his letters, Alexei Maksimovich Gorky wrote to Sko-rokhodova that the study of man cannot be achieved by experiments on dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs. “What is necessary,” said Gorky, “is an experiment on man himself...”

Deaf-blind muteness is the most acute experiment on man, created by nature itself, an experiment that allows one to penetrate into one of the most difficult and majestic problems - into the problem of the internal mechanism of the formation of human consciousness, into the objective relationships that give rise to it" (A.N. Leontyev, 1948 , p. 108).

General psychological characteristics of deaf-blind children

Pre-contact period

The period of objectively active thinking

The period of emergence of natural gestures

General psychological characteristics of deaf-blind children.

The psychology of the deaf-blind is an area of ​​research that will constantly attract the attention of psychologists, because it poses especially acute key problems, the solution of which determines whether a particular living person will become a fully developed personality or not. Moreover, it is an area of ​​research in which major problems are addressed normal development. Here, behind the external specifics of mental development, there are general patterns of development, the analysis of which our work is devoted to.

The very facts of disproportionate development, discrepancies between chronological and psychological ages observed in deaf-blind people are of great psychological significance. They are important for understanding the general patterns of development. These facts are directly related to the question of the spontaneity of mental development, to the idea of ​​the immanent laws of this process. These facts refute this idea. It is obvious that the development of different aspects of the psyche depends on the tasks that life sets for the subject.

Similar to the development of the psyche of a sighted-hearing child, mental development for a deaf-blind child, it begins long before special education and largely proceeds without intentional, much less complete control.

The child is in a world of objects that are revealed to him through another person. Even before mastering speech, a deaf-blind child, not yet able to act purposefully, begins to “use” the hands of an adult. Before a deaf-blind child masters specific actions with objects, he identifies an adult among the objects and phenomena of the surrounding world as a condition and means for satisfying his needs. So, he leads an adult or directs his hand to the desired object, not yet being able to perform the action independently.

First, in the joint activity of an adult and a child, the indicative and executive parts of any action are organized and carried out by the adult with minimal participation of the child. Outwardly it looks like this: the child’s hands are on the hands of the adult performing the action. Obviously, at this time the child is already forming a schema for the indicative basis of action.

Then, when the adult’s hands are placed on the child’s hands, the execution function passes to the child, and precise orientation and control is still carried out by the adult. From the moment when both the indicative and executive parts of the action are completely carried out by the child himself, objective activity in the proper sense of the word begins. The gradual separation of the indicative part of the action from the executive part is the main development trend. It manifests itself both during a spontaneous path of mental development and during a specially controlled one. Only in a deaf-blind child this process takes longer than in a sighted-hearing child. As an adult, a deaf-blind person expects approval and sanction from the teacher when performing even a simple action in a learning situation.

During the period of formation of objective actions, called by I. A. Sokolyansky the period of “initial humanization,” the most favorable conditions arise for the development of speech, thinking, will and other higher mental functions.

It is important to note that in the process of forming objective activity at the pre-speech stage of development, the child for the first time assimilates the attitude towards himself and his actions that an adult shows towards him. This is how something on the basis of which self-consciousness arises is born. And although the philosophical stage of reflection is still very far away, the child begins to look at himself from the outside - through the eyes of another person.

A study of the mental development of a deaf-blind child has discovered the earliest, initial stage in the formation of self-awareness - it arises much earlier than is commonly thought. This happens at the stage of mastering objective actions, that is, before playing and even speaking.

Let us now consider how speech is formed in a deaf-blind child, or rather, how the word arises and develops. For a deaf-blind person, the word arises from an action - first in the form of a gesture - indicative, figurative, conventional.

Then the gesture is replaced by dactylic words; they are introduced gradually, and the child does not notice that he begins to speak in words. At the same time, the child is taught the alphabet of the blind and sound speech.

Whatever the form of speech, the word of a deaf-blind child is inextricably linked with action. It functions as a signal to action and further serves to describe the situation in which the action is carried out.

The first words that a deaf-blind child uses in speech for a long time are words in the imperative mood: “Give”, “Go”, “Bring”, “Eat”, “Sleep”, etc. The first true self-constructed sentences also indicate actions that need to be performed immediately.

Like sighted-hearing children, a deaf-blind child does not play without guidance from adults. This was noted back in 1962 by I. A. Sokolyansky, who wrote that deaf-blind children themselves will never learn to play with dolls, just as they cannot create a game at all. However, direct teaching not only never leads to play in itself, but does not even contribute to its emergence. At first glance, this fact may seem paradoxical. And again we find his explanation in I. A. Sokolyansky. “Moreover, teaching them to play, especially with dolls, is almost a hopeless task. Any game is a reflection of social experience, and even more so playing with dolls. The social experience of deaf-blind children is formed extremely slowly, and a deaf-blind child cannot yet reflect it in early childhood ".

The emergence of play in a deaf-blind child is due to the development of objective activity and speech. This process has the same patterns that were revealed by F.I. Fradkina when studying the development of play in a normal child. In the study of T. A. Basilova, the following stages are highlighted:

The stage of specific manipulation with an object, in contrast to the earlier “non-specific” manipulation, when the child performs monotonous actions with objects (waving, knocking, throwing, etc.).

The child’s independent reproduction of individual elementary actions or a series of actions. Children typically imitate the actions of an adult in a similar, but not identical situation, and transfer the action to other objects. In the behavior of a deaf-blind child, the actions of feeding the doll and putting it to sleep, consisting of many operations, are often repeated many times. However, this is not a game yet. So, for example, having thrown away the teddy bear, a deaf-blind girl, taking off her shoes, lies down in a doll’s bed (box), covers herself and rocks herself to sleep. She repeats these actions many times and alternately.

PRE-CONTACT PERIOD

The pre-contact period is characterized by the absence of conscious contact of children with the environment and people. It is with this period that the epithets that were awarded in the past to deaf-blind people are associated: “inert masses”, “moving plants”, “living lumps”, “fierce animals”. In behavior they really do not resemble human children. A deaf-blind child cannot understand the chaos of sensations that befall him; he is unable to distinguish between sensations coming from the internal organs and sensations coming from the outside. His own “I,” like that of an ordinary child, has not yet been isolated from the environment, since isolation is associated with movement. Only in movement and when moving around does the child begin to gain autonomy and form an idea of ​​himself. It is with movement, upright posture, and hand work that the emergence of a system of psychophysiological mechanisms is associated. But deaf-blind children, without outside help, in most cases do not show independent motor activity, the desire for purposeful actions, or communication. They cannot even assume human poses, walk or use household items.

All objects, even those through which their immediate needs are satisfied, are not clear to such children; they cannot connect them with the satisfaction of their immediate needs. If you place a spoon in the hands of an untrained deaf-blind child before feeding, he will not even try to manipulate it in the plate, but will limply unclench his fingers and release the spoon. He does not know the functional purpose of objects. A child will not put bread or meat into his mouth, even if you put it in his hand. More often the opposite is observed: deaf-blind people resist feeding. This happens because parents at home or teachers in a childcare center feed the child in a hurry or too insistently, and resort to violent actions, pouring or pushing food into the mouth while the child is completely passive.

A deaf-blind child does not know that there are people around him, that they eat food to satisfy their hunger. The world for him is empty and pointless, the paths to independently mastering the functional purpose of objects by imitating him are cut off. Usually, deaf-blind children sit in their beds, making pendulum-like obsessive movements - this is how the biological energy accumulating in the body finds a way out, and the motor reflex is realized.

The pre-contact period can drag on for a very long time in families where there are no learning factors, where loved ones see their task only as serving the child and satisfying his biological needs. Protecting a deaf-blind child from possible bruises and falls, trying to avoid damaging furniture, parents sometimes keep such children in a fenced-off corner or bed. Thus, adults deprive the child of mobility, muscle training, interfere with the development of orienting activity, the ability to isolate himself from the environment, i.e., they inhibit his already slow physical and mental development.

The leading role in the expression of the internal state of these children belongs to emotional factors, affective attacks associated with an increase in tension from unsatisfied natural needs. These biological, unconscious signals from the child’s body inform others about his urgent needs for food, thirst, protection from cold, movement, and excretory reactions.

If you do not promptly resort to special education for a deaf-blind child, the matter may become even more complicated. I. A. Sokolyansky described a 24-year-old deaf-blind man with intact intellect, whose human psyche was not formed. He couldn’t even walk, as he constantly sat in his own bedroom. From time to time he stood up on his hands upside down, thereby satisfying the body's need for movement.

PERIOD OF OBJECT-ACTIVE COMMUNICATION

The period is characterized primarily by the formation in a deaf-blind child of a system of images of objects (animate and inanimate) and actions. But this only happens if there were favorable conditions in the family, that is, the child was in humanized space and time, and the adult, although not specially teaching, served the child, without suppressing his initiative, and gave him freedom of movement. We know of examples where, even before special training, elements of the human psyche were formed in deaf-blind children. It can be argued that the loss of vision and hearing at the same time is not just the loss of two of the analyzers available to a person, but the loss of two main distant analyzers. We should not forget that the sense of touch has the broadest potential for compensating for these losses. But the sense of touch is not only our hands, it’s our whole skin. The most delicate organs of touch are the lips and tongue. Therefore, even if the parents do not specifically teach the child to perform independent actions, such as eating, he still forms images of the spoon that he touches with his lips, the food that he grabs with them, and his own organs involved in holding and chewing food. A system of interacting images is created that are significant for the child because they lead him to satiation and give him reinforcement. -If we add to this the inevitable touches associated with preparing the child for feeding (tying an apron, sitting on a high chair, etc.), then the system of images expands, filling not only space, but also time. However, if measures are not taken to further stimulate the child’s own activity, his development will stop at a level close to zero. For the normal process of development of a deaf-blind child, systematic and purposeful formation of his activity is required. Without guiding help from the outside, it will go slowly, at times dying out completely. It is necessary to create favorable conditions for the child in which he is allowed to move freely, his interest in the actions of his elders is encouraged and his desire to imitate is supported. Under such conditions, the system of images that are significant for the child becomes very extensive.

We call this stage in the development of a deaf-blind child the period of objective-effective communication. Why? After all, there is no communication in the form we are accustomed to. It turns out that communication does occur: when serving a child, satisfying his organic needs dozens, hundreds of times in an instrumental way with the help of a plate, spoon, clothes, pot, etc., the mother or teacher communicates with the child. For the child, these objects become significant; he has practically learned their useful functional purpose; in connection with this, he formed images of these objects and learned to recognize them. Therefore, when an adult touches a child’s lips with a spoon, he conveys to him not only food, but also a signal of the result of the action, that is, a thought associated with the upcoming satiation. The fact that this idea has been accepted is evidenced by the child’s response to grab food.

Deaf-blind children, whose developmental conditions are favorable, not yet mastering special means of communication, often resort to objective-effective communication in the form of showing objects that can satisfy a need, or through which an urgent need can be satisfied. In such cases, a deaf-blind child takes his mother or teacher by the hand and leads him to the place where the cup usually stands if he wants to drink, or to the bread bin if he wants to eat, to the place where the pot stands if he has already learned its functional purpose. During this period, affective attacks can no longer be only signals from the body expressing a reaction to an uncomfortable situation, but also indicators of the child’s readiness to communicate. They may arise due to the fact that adults do not understand his communicative actions.

During this period, the totally deaf-blind student had not yet developed active communication skills, and he could not express his indignation in words or gestures that were understandable to those around him.

Only the subsequent development of communication skills and means will allow affective outbursts to be completely eliminated.

THE PERIOD OF THE APPEARANCE OF NATURAL GESTURES

Direct display is not yet a gesture, but already a qualitatively new stage, which is intermediate between objective-effective communication and a system of natural gestures.

Based on the system of tactile images, a deaf-blind child may have the prerequisites for the formation of natural gestures. For example, a hungry child, touching his own lips with his finger, tries to evoke sensations similar to those that repeatedly preceded satiety when eating. He does not understand that sensations on the lips alone are not enough to satisfy organic needs; food is necessary. His actions do not have a communicative function. Soon he stops doing this, making sure that irritation of the lips, not accompanied by food intake, does not lead to satiety. But if an adult notices these actions of the child and gives them reinforcement in the form of food, then by systematically reinforcing unconscious actions, you can easily translate them into a communicative plan and form a natural gesture “eat.” This is just one way to form natural gestures in a child. It is important that they are all born in the interaction of a child and an adult in the process of joint service of the former. Outside of interaction, outside of the social environment, gestures do not arise.

It is very important to begin forming images in a deaf-blind child in early childhood, to create everything for this the necessary conditions, for it is not without reason that they say that from two to five years a child learns more than from five to 50. This is the period of so-called imprinting, i.e. the easiest and fastest “imprinting” of information into the child’s brain. The course of his further development depends on what information is introduced into his brain during this period.

We examined three periods of development of a deaf-blind child before special education. Each of these periods, including the first, can be the last: it all depends on the conditions in which the deaf-blind child finds himself. But in any case, he will never be able to take advantage of the arsenal of knowledge accumulated by humanity, and will not receive high intellectual development, unless it ends up in the field of special education. Only the word, verbal speech, can provide him with such development. However, the formation of verbal speech must be preceded by the child’s objective activities to satisfy his needs. In the process of joint activity with the teacher, he will learn the functional purpose of objects, the meaning of actions, he will have formed a behavioral system and the human psyche. At all stages of the upbringing and education of a deaf-blind child, as well as in his subsequent life, substantive activities in the field various types labor will retain its enduring developmental and corrective significance.

Bibliography:

Apraushev A.V. Typhlosurdopedagogy: Education, training, labor and social rehabilitation of deaf-blind people.

Obukhova L.F. Child (age) psychology.

Characteristics of mental development of deaf-blind children

The development of a child with a combination of visual and hearing defects follows a completely different path than that of the blind or deaf. This feature mainly lies in the fact that the ability of a deaf-blind child to communicate with the people around him is catastrophically reduced.

The mental development of deaf-blind people relies on intact analyzers (olfaction, kinesthetic, tactile and vibration sensitivity) and intellectual functions. Education plays a major role in the development of deaf-blind children.

A deaf-blind child, before the start of his special education and upbringing, is characterized as completely helpless and lacking the ability of human behavior and thinking. Early detection of visual and hearing impairment in children makes it possible to provide assistance at the right time. psychological assistance family, start raising a child in a timely manner and significantly improve the prospects for his development.

The famous French deaf-blind person from birth, Marie Ertin, at the age of nine behaved “like a wild animal”; she was taken out of a school for the deaf and mute, and from a school for the blind, as an “idiot”, and placed in solitary confinement. psychiatric hospital. With special intervention, it was revealed that her brain was normal, and she herself was quite learnable.

Those children whose deaf-blindness is not congenital, but acquired in early childhood, find themselves in a similar situation. When a child loses hearing and vision, he usually loses all the behavioral skills he previously acquired.

Gofgardt, in a report at the IV Congress on education, spoke about the girl Ragnhild Kaata, who lost her hearing, sight, taste and smell in the third year of her life. Until the age of 14, she lived at home, and only at the age of 15 was she accepted into a school for the deaf and dumb. She was not much like a person: she could sit whole days in one place, not showing the slightest interest in what was happening around her, only occasionally making sounds similar to a heavy groan. If anyone approached her, she began to stomp her feet, roar and scratch herself like wild animal. During training, her development progressed faster than that of the average deaf-mute child.

The case of the deaf-mute Spaniard Ionocencio Reyes is also indicative in this regard. Having lost his sight at the age of 6, he completely degenerated into mental health, forgot how to walk, fell into a stupor, which lasted until the beginning of his education - until the age of ten.

Observations by I. A. Sokolyansky (1927, 1962) show that deaf-blind people, deprived of training, can spend many years in bed, in a fenced-off corner of the room, without communicating with people and objects, without developing mentally at all, without learning to walk or walk. -humanly eat and drink.

Meshcheryakov describes the following situation: “When selecting a school for the deaf-blind, we examined a group of pedagogically neglected children who came to us from their families. Some of them were absolutely incapable of independent existence. Since they were always in their mother’s arms, they did not even develop independent body thermoregulation. In this sense, they could hardly be considered independent organisms; rather, they were appendages to the mother’s body. They could not sleep separately from their mother at night; they could not be without her for a minute during the day. It was extremely difficult to tear them away from their mother, to teach them to sleep separately, not to be held, and to eat on their own.

One of the boys, who came to us at the age of 6, was distinguished by the fact that he could suddenly seem to freeze and remain motionless for a long time. It turned out that there was no one in his family to leave him at home with and he was left alone. And over the past three years of forced solitude, he had become “accustomed” to waiting for hours for someone to approach him. He had no interest in anything except food. He didn’t know how to take care of himself at all; he couldn’t even use a potty. With systematic training with him, he very quickly mastered the skills of self-care and orientation.

Children who came to us from children's invalid homes were similar to this boy. Some of them could not walk, others walked only in a narrow circle of familiar space. They did not know how to feed themselves, even hold a spoon, use a potty, dress or undress. Their usual pastime is sitting in bed or on a rug and monotonous pendulum-shaped swinging of the body. These children do not pick up or feel any objects. They don’t know toys and don’t understand what they are. There is no need for communication. They react negatively to all attempts to touch: the adult’s hands move away or push them away.

The entire psyche of such children comes down to a feeling of the simplest organic needs and to the experience of simple pleasure from their satisfaction and displeasure.

In fact, they have no behavior whatsoever. It has been replaced by the stereotypical physical activity allowing them to waste energy.

Thus, deaf-blind muteness under unfavorable external conditions, excluding all the usual forms of human communication of a child with other people, dooms him to loneliness and a semi-animal existence. The development of the human psyche in these cases does not occur at all, despite the fact that the child’s brain, from a medical point of view, may be completely normal and physiologically suitable for performing all higher mental functions.”

Thus, the development of the psyche of such children is impossible without the intervention of specialists.

The mistake of most of the deaf teachers of the past was that they began teaching their students with attempts to form speech. They proceeded from the position that the main difference between humans and animals is the “gift of speech,” and they tried to form this speech in oral, written or dactyl (finger) form. However, this “speech,” not relying on a system of direct (figurative) reflection of the surrounding world, hung in the air and could not serve as the basis for the child’s mental development.

The practice of teaching deaf-blind people shows that the task of forming a child’s speech is not and cannot be solved as the first task of the development of the human psyche.

The child’s psyche is formed and develops as a result of his interaction with the world of things and the world of people. The things that a child interacts with are products of human labor. The essence of interaction with things and people is that in both cases it is interaction with the human factor. Expressed with a certain degree of paradox, we can say that an individual’s relationship to other people is carried out through a thing, and his relationship to a thing is through his relationship to another person. A child, in the process of learning to behave in the world of things, mastering actions with things, learns their social meaning; the social meanings of things turn out to be their objective properties, expressing their essence in their totality.

The world for a deaf-blind child before his education begins is empty and pointless. For him, the objects that fill our lives do not exist, that is, they may be for him in the sense that he can come across them, but they do not exist for him in their functions and purposes.

It is clear that such a person has only one path to understanding the world - through a tactile-motor analyzer. It would seem that the situation is simple: objects must be placed in the child’s hands, he will feel them, and in this way he will create unlimited a large number of images of surrounding objects.

However, the practice of raising deaf-blind children shows that this is not feasible. After all, deaf-blind children, before the start of their special upbringing and training, are completely devoid of any features of the human psyche - they only have the possibility of its formation and development (until the very high level), but on initial stages During this process, they have neither the need to understand the world nor the skills of orientation and research activities.

If such a child is given objects to “inspect,” he immediately drops them, without even trying to get acquainted with them. This is understandable, since the objects given to the child are insignificant for him. And no matter how new the tactile irritations are when trying to place various objects in the child’s hands, they do not cause an indicative reaction in him.

The first acquaintance with the objects of the surrounding world occurs in the process of activities to satisfy the simplest natural needs.

Thus, for a deaf-blind child in the first stages of development, the humanizing appropriation of social experience must be associated with specific practical activities to satisfy his actual (first organic, and then other, developing in activity) needs.

When satisfying natural needs, for example, while eating, a person uses a number of “tools” - a spoon, fork, plate, etc. This is used to initially familiarize a deaf-blind child with objects. An adult, while feeding a child, holding his hands in his own, teaches him to use a spoon, plate, and napkin.

Observations of young children with congenital deafblindness have shown great potential for the sense of touch and smell in the development of cognitive activity. “If you do not interfere with the development of the intact activity of such a child and promote his timely grasping, sitting, upright walking and independence in everyday activities, you can achieve completely free orientation in the room and the development of full-fledged objective actions.”

Sensation and perception in deaf-blind children has a number of features.

Since deaf-blind children cannot navigate in space using vision and hearing, “Skin sensitivity and motor memory become a special way for deaf-blind children to understand the world around them.” I.A. Sokolyansky described how easily deaf-blind children find windows and doors even in an unfamiliar room due to the skin’s perception of the movements of the air wave and the temperature emitted by the window.

Therefore, the development of movements of a deaf-blind child from early childhood should be given great importance. If you do not interfere with the development of the intact activity of such a child and promote his timely grasping, sitting, upright walking and independence in everyday activities, you can achieve completely free orientation in the room and the development of full-fledged objective actions. Such a child is able, already in early childhood, to move completely freely around a familiar room, recognize people close to him by smell, characteristic movements and by feeling his feet and shoes, take out objects and toys he likes and act with him in accordance with their purpose. People who are deaf-blind are characterized by tactile perception of the properties of the floor, soil, etc. with their feet. Memory for the unevenness of the ground under their feet often helps them remember the road in a certain direction.

Tactile sensitivity allows you to perceive objects only by touching and acting with them in direct contact. However, a person deprived of sight and hearing can receive information from others at a distance, remotely. Deaf-blind people have an unusually subtle sense of smell. The sense of smell allows almost all deaf-blind people to find a familiar or familiar person at a distance. stranger, find out the weather outside by smells from an open window, determine the features of the premises and look for the necessary objects in them.

Thanks to tactile-vibrational sensitivity to sounds produced by the movement of objects and people, a child can sense what is happening around him also at a certain distance. With age, deaf-blind people are able to identify approaching people at a distance by their gait, recognize that someone has entered the room, listen to the sounds of music with their hands, determine the direction with their feet loud sounds, produced in the house and on the street, etc. Vibration sensations can become the basis for the perception and formation of oral speech in a deaf-blind child. “For example, at the St. Petersburg school, deaf-blind children were taught to perceive oral speech with the palm of their hand from the speaker’s throat and control their own speech in a similar way.”

Along with preserved capabilities of olfactory, gustatory, tactile, tactile and vibration sensitivity, deaf-blind children must use residual vision and hearing. Audiometric examination and selection of hearing aids (for both ears) up to cochlear implantation can significantly expand and develop the hearing capabilities of a number of deaf-blind children. Development classes visual perception in deaf-blind children with residual vision (up to light perception), can give them the skills to use minimal remnants of vision to navigate the world around them.

We publish an interview with the organizer of the experiment, Alexander Ivanovich Meshcheryakov, and critical remarks about Meshcheryakov and Ilyenkov expressed by biologist Alexander Aleksandrovich Malinovsky.

Preface of the magazine "Nature"

In the ancient city near Moscow - Zagorsk - since 1963 there has been the only boarding school in the world where children deprived of sight, hearing and speech are brought up. A specially organized educational process, led by the Laboratory of training and education of deaf-blind children at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, has given outstanding results. Senior pupils of the Zagorsk school not only learned to speak in dactyl (finger) form, read and write using the Braille (dotted) alphabet, not only received various everyday and professional skills: deaf-blind children successfully master the program high school, and some of them are preparing to enter universities.

True, cases were known before when deaf-blind people reached a high level of intellectual development. The deaf-blind American woman Helen Keller was called a miracle of the 20th century. She was a Ph.D. and wrote books. Many in our country and abroad know another deaf-blind person - Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova - candidate psychological sciences, poetess, writer, author of the book “How I Perceive and Imagine the World Around me.” However, these vivid biographies have not yet served as proof that every child, deaf-blind and mute from birth or who lost sight and hearing in early childhood, has access to deep knowledge of the world. The existence of the Zagorsk school proves this.

In June 1969, the head of the Laboratory of training and education of deaf-blind children A.I. Meshcheryakov spoke at a meeting of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His report on a unique experiment in the field of psychology and special pedagogy, which is carried out by the Zagorsk school, was met with great interest. According to the scientists who took part in the discussion of this report, the results obtained at the Zagorsk School provide extremely valuable material for various fields of knowledge. However, some conclusions reached by A.I. Meshcheryakov, raise objections from biologists. Therefore, we asked several scientists to speak on the pages of our magazine.

What attracts you most about your difficult and noble work?

My teacher, Professor Ivan Afanasyevich Sokolyansky (1889 - 1960), who is rightfully considered the creator of Soviet pedagogy for deaf-blind people, infected me with love for my profession. I met him in 1955, when Ivan Afanasyevich already had vast experience behind him. In 1923, in Kharkov, he organized a small clinic school, where for the first time in the history of education for the deaf-blind, a scientific system of their education was developed and began to be put into practice. The war interrupted the work of the clinic, many of its students died. However, the upbringing of O.I. Skorokhodova, which began in Kharkov, I. A. Sokolyansky managed to complete. Now O.I. Skorokhodova is a researcher at our Laboratory, and together we continue the work of I.A. Sokolyansky.

I managed to register 340 deaf-blind people currently living in the RSFSR. This may not be an entirely accurate number. But still, it gives an idea that deaf-blindness, fortunately, is a rather rare case. This, naturally, does not detract from the importance of the profession to which I dedicated my life. I won’t talk about humanistic motives: this is clear to everyone. I want to emphasize something else. The work on the formation of the psyche of a deaf-blind child is a unique scientific experiment that allows us to strictly trace the most important patterns of development of the human psyche in general, starting from the moment of its emergence. In a normal child, it is impossible to completely disentangle the diverse factors under the influence of which his psyche is formed; it is impossible to trace and record their action. Many behavioral skills, feelings, personality traits develop as if on their own, in the process Everyday life. Another thing is deaf-blind children. The initial formation of higher mental functions in them occurs in “pure conditions”, i.e. at complete absence psychogenic effects on the brain beyond the control of the teacher. The teacher literally “constructs” a person. And the success or failure of this work acts as a criterion for the correctness of the initial ideas. You called our profession difficult. But every business has its difficulties. I.A. Sokolyansky, a lover of paradox, often said that it is easiest to teach deaf-blind children, more difficult to teach deaf children, even more difficult to teach blind children, and even more difficult to teach ordinary, “normal” children.

In the first case, all the driving belts of the child’s psyche are in the hands of the teacher. He can program a personality and educate it in accordance with this program.

A deaf-blind-mute child is separated from the things around him and from society by a continuous wall of silence and darkness. He can receive all his ideas about the outside world only through touch. Deprived of the usual ways of communicating with people, doomed to complete loneliness, deaf-blind children do not develop mentally. Even their facial expressions are not adequate to their condition: they cannot smile or frown like human beings. The energy of these children can find outlet in undirected movements. All this gives the impression of deep brain pathology. In reality the situation is different. A deaf-blind-mute child is a creature without a human psyche, but he has the ability to develop it to the highest level. To do this, you need to organize the child’s communication with the outside world. But how? After all, this world for a deaf-blind person before the beginning of his training is empty and pointless, and the things that fill our lives do not exist for him in their functions and purposes. It is clear that such a child has only one path to understanding the world - through the tactile-motor analyzer.

It would seem that the situation is simple: objects must be placed in the child’s hands, he will feel them and he will create an unlimited number of images of surrounding objects. However, practice shows that until special education and training, deaf-blind children do not strive to understand the world at all. If such a child is given objects to “inspect,” he immediately drops them, without even trying to get acquainted with them, since these objects are insignificant to him. And no matter how new the tactile stimuli may be, they do not cause any indicative reaction in him. Where is the way out? The solution is to create conditions under which knowledge of objects would become necessary for the child. Only then will it be possible to begin the formation of his orienting activities. A deaf-blind child needs food, protection from cold, pain, etc. At first, these simplest natural needs in themselves are not yet genuine needs in the psychological sense of the word. They cannot become drivers of behavior, therefore, at the first stage, behavior, in the usual sense of the word, does not exist. A deaf-blind child begins to become familiar with the objects around him only when the teacher tries to teach him the simplest self-service skills to satisfy these natural needs. The child is taught to use a spoon, a plate, sit on a chair, at a table, go to bed in a crib, put his head on a pillow, cover himself with a blanket, etc. Weeks and sometimes months pass before it is possible to achieve progress in teaching the child even the simplest actions . It takes a lot of time and patience to reduce the degree of its resistance. But here it is very important not to weaken your efforts, to gently overcome resistance day after day, feeding or dressing the child with his own hands. It can be difficult, even physically difficult.

Finally, the child begins to make timid attempts to make movements on his own, for example, to bring a spoon to his mouth. Now the main thing is not to miss, not to extinguish these first manifestations of activity. As soon as a child masters a skill so much that he can independently achieve a result (for example, putting on a stocking), he begins to do it willingly, and the formed skill is consolidated. If this initial task is successful, everything else is relatively easy. And teaching language - first sign language, then finger (tactile), and eventually verbal, and skills logical thinking, and moral and aesthetic principles. All this is instilled on the basis of an already created everyday culture of behavior. Of course, a lot depends on pedagogical technology. Every day for 15 hours, i.e. the entire time the children are awake, a teacher or caregiver is with them. We make groups of three students. Each group is assigned two teachers and one teacher. In total, for 50 students we have 50 educators and teachers.

What are the basic pedagogical principles on which the education of children at the Zagorsk school is based?

One of the main principles is following individual interests and individual pace. It is very important to catch the first, faintest glimpse of a child’s interest in any object or action. Let’s say the teacher thought that the boy who came to us, indifferent to everything around him, was showing interest in tea. The teacher takes a closer look, makes sure that he is right, and then the starting point of learning is found. The child's first gesture will mean: “Give me some tea.” He will learn this gesture faster and easier than others. First, with the help of an adult, placing his small hands on the hands of the teacher, he learns to drink from a cup, then he does it on his own. Then he is taught gestures: sugar, cup, saucer, spoon. He willingly allows himself to be washed before he is given his favorite tea, then he begins to “help” the teacher with his hands when washing, and finally learns to wash himself. This is how the formation of individual self-service skills begins, motivated first by the simplest organic needs of the child, then developing by human needs. They gradually become more complex: the child learns to clean and mend clothes, care for shoes, wash and iron small items. Then he - together with his comrades - cleans the room, is on duty in the dining room, works in the garden, takes care of the plants and animals. A child’s desire to master independent skills and thus understand the world around him is limitless. And throughout this carefully organized process, the principle of following individual interests is strictly and carefully observed. In this regard, it is not the teacher who leads the child, but the child who leads the teacher. A deaf-blind boy was noticed to be interested in keys. They began to let him feel different keys, then introduced him to their purpose. He learned to lock and unlock the locks himself. It soon turned out that he loved all sorts of hardware and metal mechanisms. Later, his favorite game became a construction set, and his favorite job was working in production workshops. The boy successfully masters school curriculum. Maybe he will become a skilled worker, or maybe an engineer...

When teaching deaf-blind children in the secondary school curriculum, the same principle of following individual interests and individual pace remains in force. Therefore, the child progresses faster in some subjects and slower in others. He can take literature in the tenth grade, and physics in the seventh, and vice versa. But the subjects are absorbed deeply, and interest in learning does not decrease. We do not have a “problem of laziness” and no coercion is required. The second most important pedagogical principle, without which it would be difficult to organize the education of deaf-blind children, is the strict dosage of pedagogical assistance. Help should not be so great that the child completely renounces independence, but sufficient to achieve desired result. Each skill consists of movements of varying difficulty. It is more difficult for a child to scoop soup into a plate with a spoon and much easier to bring the spoon to his mouth. When washing, the child quickly learns to run his palms across his face from top to bottom and masters the technique much more slowly. in a circular motion. The teacher analyzes each skill, breaks it down into its component parts and builds the learning process in such a way as to give independence to the child in those movements that he has already mastered, to help where necessary, and to perform for the child those movements that he cannot yet do. . “Under-help” or “over-help” means losing the child’s activity.

Are there any features in your approach to the education of deaf-blind people that significantly distinguish the methodology developed by I.A. Sokolyansky and you, from the methods that you used earlier?

Of course have. It would be more accurate to say that it is fundamentally different. Historically, attempts to educate deaf-blind people for a long time were closely associated with religion. Children deprived of sight and hearing were often brought up within the walls of monasteries, they were taught to bow and pray, and subsequently such “healing” was declared a miracle of God. This idea, of course, in a transformed form, migrated to literature. The idea of ​​the spontaneity of the psyche, the independence of its development from external environment, is carried out in most of the books I know about the education of deaf-blind people. In 1890, a monograph by the German psychologist W. Eruzalem (W. Jerusalem. Laura Bridgman. Eine Psycho-logische Studie) was published, dedicated to Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind person trained in America. Another German psychologist W. Stern described in 1905 the story of the upbringing of Helen Keller (W. Stern. Helen Keller). There is also a well-known monograph by W. Wade (W. Wade. The Blind-Deaf. 1903), which contains 83 cases of education of deaf-blind people. L. Arnoul’s book “Souls in Prison,” which tells about the education of deaf-blind children in a monastic community, is still being republished in France (L. Arnoul. Ames en prison). In these books, as in some later ones, the development of the psyche of a deaf-blind child is considered as “the release of internal content.” Even then it was known how much work it would take to bring a deaf-blind-mute child out of his “semi-animal” state. Moreover, cases were described in which normally developed children, who lost their sight and hearing as a result of illness, underwent reverse development and turned into creatures leading a half-animal, half-vegetative lifestyle. But the authors who talk about this in some incomprehensible way still took the position of the spontaneous development of the “inner essence.” The role of the push that awakens this “inner essence” was assigned to the word.

The mistake of most of the deaf teachers of the past was that they began teaching their students with attempts to form speech. They proceeded from the fact that the main difference between a person and an animal is the “gift of speech” and tried to form this speech in oral, written or dactyl (finger) form. However, this “speech,” not based on a system of direct (figurative) reflection of the environment, hung in the air and could not serve as the basis for the child’s mental development. Practice shows that before learning to think, a deaf-blind child must go through, as I. A. Sokolyansky said, a period of “initial humanization,” i.e. learn self-service and human behavior skills in their simplest form. When teaching self-service skills, the first division of labor arises - the adult begins some action, and the child continues it. The need for communication is being formed, although there are no special means of communication yet. To put the child on his feet, the teacher takes him under the arms and lifts him up. At first the child is passive. Then, when repeating these actions, he begins to show some independence. And finally, the teacher just needs to place his hands under the child’s armpits - and he gets to his feet. This is very significant event: touch becomes a signal for action. And after this they appear special means communication - gestures that seem to repeat actions or palpating movements. Then the gestures become more and more conventional. It is gestures, not words, that are the first language of a deaf-blind child. They provide an opportunity to form an understanding of the idea of ​​designation. In the future, verbal language training is built on this. If a deaf-blind child does not speak sign language at all, it is impossible to teach him words.

How can we explain that some of the deaf and deaf teachers of the past, who, as you say, expressed the erroneous idea of ​​self-development of the psyche and began the education of deaf-blind people by teaching them speech, still sometimes achieved good results?

The fact is that the educators of the deaf-blind themselves, having proclaimed the idea of ​​“releasing internal potency,” were in fact forced to forget about it. They followed the only possible path - from a concrete practical action to a gesture, and then to a word, but they did it unconsciously, spontaneously, which made their task extremely difficult. Some interpreters have also greatly confused this issue. This primarily applies to the description of the works of a pioneer in the field of teaching deaf-blind children, a famous American doctor and progressive public figure Samuel Gridley Howe.

Dr. Howe was the director of the Perkins School for the Blind. In 1837, he began his first experiment in teaching deaf-blind people. His student Laura Bridgman learned to write a diary and could conduct simple conversations using the finger alphabet. At that time these were unheard of results. Bypassing in silence the first most important stages in the formation of the psyche of a deaf-blind girl, philosophers, psychologists and writers created an atmosphere of mysticism around this incident. To the practical work of S.G. This has nothing to do with Howe. His merits are very great. He was the first to combine the relief alphabet of the blind and the finger alphabet of the deaf-mute and thus created the necessary “toolkit” for teaching literacy to the deaf-blind.

A similar story happened with another deaf-blind person, Helen Keller. This is truly an outstanding case, which had no precedent and received worldwide fame. But Anne Sullivan, teacher of the deaf-blind, and Helen Keller herself make many inaccuracies and errors in describing the process of mental formation. The main fabric of Helen Keller’s book “The World I Live in,” as our Leningrad psychologist A.V. correctly noted. Yarmolenko consists of literary reminiscences and theological digressions, in which the objective facts of self-observation of the deaf-blind author are drowned. In addition, they are so literary that they largely lose their objectivity.

Anne Sullivan associated the mental awakening of her pupil with the word “water.” This fact has been described many times in the literature on Helen Keller as a “sudden insight.” By the way, he is also present in the play “The Miracle Worker” by the American playwright Gibson, which is being performed on the stage of the Moscow Theater. Ermolova. In fact, the mental development of Helen Keller, as shown by a critical study of what she and Anne Sullivan wrote, followed the only possible path - from the formation of everyday objective behavior to its ideal reflection. And the idea of ​​“sudden insight” was only a tribute to the point of view widespread in psychology and pedagogy of that time.

What is the situation with the education of deaf-blind children abroad at present?

I had the opportunity to take part in two international conferences(in 1962 and 1967), at which issues of recording the deaf-blind, diagnosing and selecting children for education, programs and methods of their education were discussed. It turned out that not a single country has complete statistics of deaf-blind people. The American Foundation for the Blind indicates that there are 252 deaf-blind children in the United States. school age. In providing this information, the Foundation for the Blind stipulates that we're talking about only about described and recorded cases. The fact is that such children are not easy to identify - untrained deaf-blind people can easily be confused with mentally retarded children. But even of the identified deaf-blind children, only a small part is brought up in special institutions. There are very few such institutions, and there are not enough specially trained teachers. In 1931, in the USA, a department for teaching deaf-blind people was opened at the Perkin School for the Blind. In this institution, training was conducted exclusively by the “Tadoma method,” i.e. by oral speech method. If a child could not learn spoken language within a certain time, he was considered unteachable and expelled from school. It is not surprising, therefore, that in 1953 there were only four students left there. Language teaching by the Tadoma method is based on the perception of the teacher's oral speech with the student's fingers applied to the lips and larynx of the speaker. The current director of the Perkin School, Dr. Waterhouse, said that in order to assimilate and pronounce just the word “milk,” the teacher of a deaf-blind child repeated this word more than ten thousand times. Naturally, it is difficult to expect rapid language acquisition and knowledge accumulation with this method of teaching.

I know of the successful experience of teaching language to one boy from the Perkin School. The teacher taught her only student from sunrise to sunset, not knowing any days off or holidays. Over eight years of such ascetic labor, the student mastered the language and program primary school. True, he achieved great virtuosity in the perception of oral speech. Putting his hand on the top of the teacher’s head, he vibratedly perceived what she was telling him. However, such virtuosity was manifested when perceiving the speech of only one person - the teacher.

Currently, there are 30 children studying in the deaf-blind department of the Perkin School, who are taught by 3 senior teachers, 19 teachers and 14 assistant teachers. In addition, the Perkin School, in collaboration with Boston University, trains teachers for the deaf-blind. There are also year-long courses where teachers from Great Britain, Norway, Iceland, France, and Switzerland receive appropriate training. As you can see, this is a kind of international center for training teachers for the deaf-blind.

I also became acquainted in detail with the experience of studying in the English group of deaf-blind students, which is located at the Condover School for the Blind. This is the only department for the deaf-blind in England, which was founded in 1952. Its leadership was entrusted to a teacher who received a one-year special training at the Perkin School in the USA. Naturally, the training began with the application of the Tadoma method. This cost the Condover School dearly. After several years spent trying to teach spoken language to the first four students, two of them were found to be unteachable.

Happened in this school instructive story with one of the students - with David Broome. When he was taken to Condover School, he was 4 years old. Until the age of ten, they tried to teach him using the Tadoma method without noticeable success. But chance came to David's aid. A boy entered school who was deaf and then began to lose his sight. This boy knew the finger alphabet. He began to show David Broom finger (dactyl) letters, which he quickly memorized. This gave teachers the idea of ​​trying the dactylic alphabet in teaching deaf-blind people. We tried it. And they were immediately shocked by the student’s success. His progress in both grammatical structure and vocabulary, according to his teachers, was phenomenal. For the next two years, David Broome's main method of communication and teaching was fingerprinting. He insistently demanded that teachers show him the names of all subjects on their fingers. Without much difficulty, he mastered written speech for the blind - Braille alphabet.

However, when teaching deaf-blind people in the USA, England and a number of other countries, the Tadoma method still prevails. We believe that not only oral speech, but verbal speech in general cannot be the first task in teaching deaf-blind people. Verbal speech with its dissected grammatical structure should crown complex system figurative, direct reflection of the surrounding world of things and a developed system of direct (non-verbal) communication of a deaf-blind person with other people.

As for the methods of forming verbal communication itself, there is a significant difference between our system and the system prevailing abroad. We believe that verbal language should first be acquired in finger form, and only then in sound form. However, some typhlosurd teachers from other countries are also beginning to lean towards this point of view.

Tell us how the pupils of the Zagorsk school master verbal speech.

We use a method that we call among ourselves “Trojan horse”. We replace some gestures that denote well-known and frequently encountered objects in everyday life with finger (dactyl) words. To do this, the deaf-blind student is shown with gestures that a given object should be designated not in the same way as it was previously designated, but in a different way - and a dactyl word is given.

For the student, this is still the same gesture, albeit in a new, unusual configuration for him. This gesture, which bears no resemblance to the object being designated, is understandable to a deaf-blind person because it replaces a well-known gesture. The use of dactyl words is constantly encouraged by educators. The student gets used to it, of course, without suspecting that he has already mastered a word made up of individual letters. Thus, teaching a deaf-blind child verbal language begins not with individual letters, but with holistically perceived words included in the system of semantic context. Gestures continue to be the semantic context for the first words.

Only after practical mastery of several dozen words denoting well-known specific objects can a deaf-blind child be given individual dactylic letters, which he already practically masters. Mastering the dactylic alphabet occurs without much difficulty. In parallel with the dactyl name of the object, the child is shown the Braille outline of the word, associating each Braille letter with a dactyl. This is how learning happens writing in Braille form. A deaf-blind child gets the opportunity to read books published for the blind, “listen” to lessons, and then lectures with the help of special teletactor installations. And then a wide path of knowledge opens before a deaf-blind person.

And yet doubt remains: is a deaf-blind child really capable of correctly and fully perceiving the world around him and verbal speech?

We can judge the adequacy of the representation of specific objects in the first stages of training, in particular, by modeling from plasticine (see photo). Later, when verbal communication is established, this problem almost ceases to exist. A deaf-blind person is capable of understanding everything that we can explain to him. At the same time, in educational process Our students use various aids to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge. We have relief globes, city models, stuffed animals, dummies, etc.

Children learn a lot in the process industrial training. They have sewing machines at their disposal and work in production workshops. Pupils of the Zagorsk school learn to ski, skate, and learn to dance. Special teachers teach them oral speech. All this makes their life more complete and helps them come closer to us in terms of the depth of its perception. Remaining biologically deaf-blind, a person gains access to all spheres of human knowledge, aesthetics and morality. After all, we also do not see the ultraviolet rays that the ant “sees,” and yet we know about them. However, how fully our students are aware of themselves in their surroundings can be judged at least from Natasha Korneeva’s note, which she made after the first lecture on philosophy given by E.V. Ilyenkov:

“...Today I learned that philosophy is a completely earthly, accessible science, even close to me. How often do I listen to what is happening in my head, trying to trace the origin of a thought, understand where and how it comes from, how the brain thinks besides me. It’s surprising and incomprehensible - the brain and I are, as it were, different things, and yet I am the brain. What am I anyway? My body, my brain, but where am I? Something turns out to be such a mess that I don’t really want to deal with it, but it’s so interesting! And one more thing - what will happen to me after death? I know that I will rot, that there will be nothing left, no soul or spirit, but it still doesn’t fit in my head - I was and I am not! Well, the body will die, stop moving, feeling, thinking, but where will I go? I don’t dare go too far into such reasoning for now, otherwise there will be a lot of unnecessary stuff. But in general, I understood that these thoughts of mine about what I am and how the brain is me and yet it works besides me - these are philosophical thoughts.”

At the discussion of your report at the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Acad. P.L. Kapitsa asked you a question in what area could deaf-blind people achieve greater professional mastery than people with sight and hearing. For example, blind people are good musicians. Maybe deaf-blind tasters would be just as talented?

Many people think that in the absence of one sense organ, supernormal development of other sense organs occurs. But that's not true. Special studies were carried out at the Institute of Defectology, which showed that the hearing thresholds of the blind are not lower than usual, that is, their auditory sensitivity is at least the same as that of the sighted. This applies not only to absolute, but also to differential sensitivity. The fact that blind people often become musicians is not proof of their increased ability due to blindness. The point here, apparently, is that blindness limits the scope of their activity, narrows the range of professions available to them and thus, as it were, “predetermines” their fate. When we measured the sensitivity of touch in deaf-blind people, it turned out that it was not higher than normal, but lower, since the skin on their fingers had become rough from reading Braille books. The same can be said about vibrator sensitivity. When you see how deaf-blind people perceive speech by placing their hand on the speaker’s larynx, the idea may arise that they are hypersensitive to vibrations. But measuring the thresholds of vibrator sensitivity in deaf-blind people shows that it is not increased.

The apparent hypersensitivity of the blind and deaf-blind to certain stimuli is explained by the fact that these stimuli have a greater signaling value for them than for us. We have many other opportunities for obtaining information. For example, I don’t notice how the floor shakes when a car drives down the street, but O.I. Skorokhodova notices. Of course, we must not forget that training refines perception.

What scientific problems, from your point of view, will be helped by the data you have?

There are a lot of such problems. I will try to list only a few of them: the relationship between the biological and the social in a person; the problem of the emergence and development of the human psyche; the essence and structure of the human psyche; structure of thinking; relationship between image and word (sign); the relationship between action and thinking; ensuring the adequacy of the reflection of the world with a minimum of information about environment; formation of a micro-team and personality within it; teaching language as the interpretation of experience; features of sensory hunger; interaction of analyzers.

One of the fundamental conclusions we came to is related to the first of these problems. The development of a deaf-blind child shows that all the diversity of the human psyche is not innate and does not develop spontaneously, but arises in the process of communication with other people. The purposeful formation of the psyche of deaf-blind people provides a unique opportunity to experimentally study this and many other issues that should be of considerable interest to psychologists, biologists, teachers, philosophers and sociologists.

Read also on this topic:

Dactyl sensations are sensations of touch.

Typhlosurdopedagogy (from the Greek typhlos blind and Latin Surdos - deaf) is a branch of pedagogy that deals with the training and education of deaf-blind people.

A.V. Yarmolenko. Essays on the psychology of the deaf-blind. Publishing house of Leningrad State University, p. 147.

S. Aleron Tadoma-method. “J. except, children”, 1945, II.