Zagorsk experiment

Why was this experiment a question of philosophy?

How can a child who can neither see nor hear learn human speech and thought? The question, familiar from the story of Helen Keller in the United States, was a problem of education and of philosophy alike. Where does the human mind, the capacity to think, speak and be conscious of oneself, come from? Is it a soul breathed in by God and awakened by "the Word", is it written in the genes and simply unfolds, or is it built from the ground up in activity shared with other people?

A child who has lost both sight and hearing presents the question almost as in a laboratory. Ordinary children absorb information from the world around them endlessly, so it is hard to tell step by step how mind arises. A deafblind child, unless an educator guides it directly through the hands, is almost cut off from the world, and so, it was thought, one could check one by one what must be taught in what order for a mind to grow. Soviet Marxist psychology and philosophy saw this education as decisive proof of their theory that human beings become human through labour and activity with objects. In Russian these children were called слепоглухонемые, the "blind-deaf-mute"; this entry uses the present-day term "deafblind".

Who taught them, and how?

The starting point was Ivan Sokolyansky (1889–1960), who in the 1920s ran an institution for deafblind children in Kharkov in Ukraine; his pupil Olga Skorokhodova became the first deafblind person to work as a research scientist. In May 1950 Sokolyansky organized a laboratory for the study and education of deafblind children at the Institute of Defectology in Moscow. Lev Vygotsky too took an interest in his methods.

His work was continued by Alexander Meshcheryakov (1923–1974). Born into a peasant family and badly wounded in the war, he studied psychology at Moscow University and in 1950 became a graduate student of Alexander Luria. In 1960 he set up a laboratory for the study and education of deafblind children at the Institute of Defectology of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and in 1963 he founded a special educational institution for deafblind children at Zagorsk.

Teaching began not with words but with everyday movements. First came self-care: eating, dressing and washing. At first the adult held the child's hands and performed the action together with it, then gradually left more of it to the child; this was called "joint-divided activity". While learning to handle objects such as spoons, plates, stairs and clothes, the child was shown before each action a gesture word for the object. Once a child used several dozen gesture words, it was taught the finger alphabet and then Braille. Speech was practised by feeling with the hands the position of the teacher's muscles and the vibration of the throat. To make space easier to master, things were always kept in the same places.

Обучение детей методом совместно-раздельной деятельности должно было подтвердить тезис марксистской философии о возникновении человека благодаря общественному труду и о том, что человеческая психика возникает в результате предметно-практической деятельности.

In "The Human Psyche under the 'Magnifying Glass of Time'", written in 1970 for the popular-science journal Priroda, Ilyenkov reported that the senior pupils of the Zagorsk school "master the secondary-school curriculum at roughly the same pace as their sighted and hearing peers". He stressed that at Zagorsk the education of the mind began not with teaching language but with drawing the child into a human way of life, first everyday life, then the norms of labour and morality.

Ученики старших классов школы-интерната для слепоглухонемых в Загорске усваивают программу средней школы примерно теми же темпами, что и их зрячеслышащие сверстники

Who were the "Zagorsk Four"?

In February 1971 Meshcheryakov formed an experimental group of four deafblind young people from Zagorsk: Alexander Suvorov, Yuri Lerner, Sergei Sirotkin and Natalya Korneeva. They had long been taught in the laboratory, were on good terms with Meshcheryakov and could speak well enough to be understood by others. The government gave them places outside the competition but required them to take the entrance examinations. Suvorov studied as a trainee at the Moscow University philosophy faculty in 1971 and then, from 1972 to 1977, at the psychology faculty together with the other three.

The university provided special conditions. Each student had a personal interpreter who spelled the lectures into the palm with the finger alphabet and transcribed the literature into Braille; in seminars a device called the teletactor converted between print and Braille for discussion. The four finished the course in six years, one year longer than ordinary students. In 1975 their reports to the academic council of the psychology faculty were printed in Voprosy filosofii no. 6.

After Meshcheryakov died of heart failure in 1974, Ilyenkov unofficially guided the four's studies, and Dean Leontiev also backed the experiment. In 1977 Ilyenkov wrote in the party's theoretical journal Kommunist, in "The Formation of Personality: On the Results of a Scientific Experiment": "I saw how, step by step, this almost incredible mystery was accomplished, the miracle of the birth of a soul and the formation of talent." In 1981 Meshcheryakov and Sokolyansky were posthumously awarded the USSR State Prize for creating a scientific system for educating deafblind children.

Я видел, как шаг за шагом совершалось это почти неправдоподобное таинство — чудо рождения души и формирования таланта.

What was it meant to prove, and how was it criticized?

The experiment had a clear ideological aim: to show that the human mind and personality are not an immaterial soul present from birth and awakened by the word, but are built from the ground up through education. Ilyenkov said the experiment overturned the Gospel proposition "In the beginning was the Word": practice with objects comes first and language arises on top of it. On this basis he argued that every normal child can grow into a talented person and that differences of talent are differences not of heredity but of social conditions of education. It was the practical counterpart of his contemporary brain-and-mind controversy with David Dubrovsky.

Criticism existed while the experiment was still running: Dubrovsky (1968) and the biologist Alexander Malinovsky (1970) argued that it underrated genetic and biological factors in the formation of personality. But for ideological reasons full criticism became possible only under perestroika, and among the critics was one of the participants, Sergei Sirotkin.

The critics' main points were these. First, none of the four was deafblind from birth; all could speak before losing sight and hearing, and some kept residual sight or hearing into adulthood. Second, none had grown up at Zagorsk from birth, so it cannot be said that their minds were first created by the school. Third, uncontrolled influences, above all the children's contact with one another, could not be excluded. Fourth, besides the four there were about fifty congenitally deafblind children at Zagorsk, none of whom reached a high level of socialization or even mastered verbal language. The critics therefore concluded that the experiment could not yield a scientific conclusion.

Более того, в Загорском интернате, кроме четырёх участников эксперимента, жили ещё около пятидесяти других детей, которые являлись слепоглухими именно с рождения

Ilyenkov's pupil, the philosopher Sergei Mareev, replied that total loss of sight and hearing is rare and some residual sense always remains, and that words have meaning because things have meaning in people's joint activity: words are the "money" of the spirit, worth something only insofar as they represent the value of things. The debate continues; in the 2010s Russian philosophers even published papers asking whether the experiment had been falsified.

What became of the participants?

The four's lives bear witness to what the experiment achieved. Suvorov (1953–2024) continued his research with Ilyenkov as supervisor, became a doctor of psychological sciences, a professor at the University of the Russian Academy of Education, president of the Society of Families of the Deafblind, and a poet. Sirotkin (1949–2021) became a candidate of philosophical sciences and chaired the council for work with the deafblind of the All-Russian Society of the Blind. Lerner (1946–2003) became a sculptor and worked at the Zagorsk school, and Korneeva (born 1949) worked as a researcher at the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education. In 2015 a Museum of the History of the Zagorsk Experiment opened in Sergiyev Posad.

How should it be read today?

The Zagorsk experiment shows that Soviet science was a stage of ideological competition: the propaganda value of showing that socialist society opens unlimited prospects of development even to people with disabilities was one reason it was so widely publicized. Yet with the ideology stripped away, the achievement remains of showing in practice that deafblind children who receive suitable education can take part in scholarship and public life. And the question it posed, how far the human mind is a product of social activity and how far it depends on biological conditions, is still open in developmental psychology, special education and disability studies.