No abstract

The article explores the Russian teachers' tortuous campaign at the beginning of the twentieth century to rise above the status of "semiprofessionals" by rooting the legitimacy of their professional expertise, training institutions, and working practices in the authority of "science." This involved a radical reshaping of traditional pedagogy and its fusion with new, controversial approaches to child psychology. It also led to a proliferation of teacher-training courses and conferences devoted to "pedagogical psychology," "experimental pedagogy," and "pedology." The article analyzes how the teachers' professional aspirations interacted with the conflicting agendas of rival groups of psychologists, who were themselves engaged in bitter squabbles over the legitimate identity of psychology as a scientific discipline.

This article charts the history of mental testing in the context of the rise and fall of Russian child science between the 1890s and the 1930s. Tracing the genealogy of testing in scientific experimentation, scholastic assessment, medical diagnostics and bureaucratic accounting, it follows the displacements of this technology along and across the boundaries of the child science movement. The article focuses on three domains of expertise – psychology, pedagogy and psychiatry, examining the key guises that mental testing assumed in them – namely, the experiment, the exam and the diagnosis. It then analyses the failed state-bureaucratic harnessing of mental testing in early Soviet attempts to manage mass education, discussing the peculiar dynamics of the (de)legitimation of testing, as it swung between black-boxing and instrumentalization, on the one hand, and scandal and controversy, on the other. The article argues that mental testing thrived in Russia as a strategically ambiguous and flexibly interpreted ‘boundary object’, which interconnected a highly heterogeneous field, enabling the coexistence and cooperation of diverse occupational agendas and normative regimes.

Secondary education is one key area in which academic disciplines build their identity and legitimacy in the public realm. The public image of a science is, of course, constructed by a variety of means and on different platforms, including the generalist media and the lively industry of scientific popularization. However, the school occupies a unique role in representations of science because of its greater degree of formal continuity with the academic environment. The successful institutionalization and maintenance of any discipline depends on it taking root, in some form at least, in the system of public instruction. Because education both fosters and depends on disciplinary reproduction, the concrete shape that school subjects take is of great consequence to the long-term development of related sciences.