213 “Sky and Water II” 214 Alexander Meshcheryakov (standing) with his pupils
Alexander Suvorov, Sergei Sirotkin and Natasha Korneyeva

p Reflex, the way we use it, reminds me very much of the story of Kanetverstaan, the name a poor foreigner heard in Holland every time he asked a question: Whose funeral is that? Whose house is this? Who just drove by? and so on. In the simplicity of his heart, he concluded that everything in that country was done by a certain Kanetverstaan, whereas in fact, the word meant that the Dutchmen had not understood his questions.

p The “reflex of goal" or “reflex of freedom" could easily attest to a lack of understanding of the phenomena being studied. It is clear that it is not a reflex in the conventional sense—such as the salivary reflex—but a mechanism of behaviour differing from it in structure. Only if one brings everything to a common denominator can one say that this is the same: it is a reflex, just like Kanetverstaan. The word reflex loses any meaning in such an approach.

p Lev Vygotsky

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p MESHCHERYAKOV, Alexander (1923-1974), Dr. Sc. (Psychology), prominent Soviet specialist in the education of the deaf, dumb, and blind.

p Meshcheryakov was born into a .peasant family in the village of Gumenki in the Ryazan Region. After finishing secondary school in 1941 he went straight to the Soviet Army and throughout the war was an infantry soldier in an armoured corps. He was heavily wounded in 1943 fighting for the liberation of Byelorussia.

p In 1945 he entered the Psychological Sector of the Philosophy Department at Moscow University and went on to graduate studies there.

p He began his scientific work at the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery under the guidance of Professor Luria. His speciality was localisation of psychic functions in the brain.

p In 1952 he joined the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped, first studying, under Professor Luria’s guidance, the problem of oligophrenia, and beginning in 1955, the theoretical basis of the education of the deaf, dumb, and blind under Professor Sokolyansky. After . Sokolyansky’s death, Meshcheryakov succeeded him as head of research work in the field, becoming head of the laboratory for the study and training of deaf, dumb, and blind children.

p The theoretical conclusions of Meshcheryakov’s many years of experiments were successfully realised in the country’s only school for deaf, dumb, and blind children in Zagorsk, set up in 1963. In 1971 he defended a Doctoral dissertation on "Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Children".

p Meshcheryakov’s work proved that intellectual development of children deprived of sight and hearing can be 216 brought to a very high level. Under his supervision, four graduates of the Zagorsk school for the deaf, dumb, and blind graduated from the Psychology Department at Moscow University.

p Meshcheryakov wrote more than eighty scientific papers and one monograph, Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Children, 1974 (also available in an English edition put out by Progress Publishers in 1980, further cited as Awakening to Life).

p There was a good reason why Lev Vygotsky devoted so much attention to the psychology of the handicapped, wrote so many papers about it, and even founded a special Institute for the Study of the Handicapped. The study of the damaged human brain can be a short-cut to the secrets of the normal, undamaged brain—provided, of course, that one moves in the right direction and proceeds from valid theories.

p Work on the training and education of deaf, dumb, and blind children probably offers the soundest proof of the correctness of historical-genetic psychology. The spectacularly successful method of "divided operational action”, developed by Meshcheryakov, is as follows: at the first stage, the teacher carries out all the actions himself, holding the deaf, dumb, and blind child’s hands in his own and directing them, and at the final stage it is enough to give a signal—a special kind of touch with the hand—for the child to perform all the learned operations itself. The principle is, in effect, a realisation of Vygotsky’s idea that the psyche is formed under the influence of society through tools, speech, and rules of behaviour.

p Meshcheryakov’s friend and constant assistant in the matter of training deaf, dumb, and blind children, Doctor of Philosophy Dyenkov, wrote in his booklet Learn to Think from Youth:

p “When Meshcheryakov’s four pupils kept a packed audience of hundreds of students and teachers enthralled for three hours, one of the many notes from the audience read, ’Doesn’t your experiment refute the old truth of materialism whereby there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the sensations? They don’t see or hear anything, but they understand everything better than we do.’

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p “I conveyed that question, letter by letter, through the finger (dactile) alphabet to Sasha Suvorov. I was sure he could answer it better than me. And indeed, Sasha replied promptly and clearly, speaking into the microphone:

p “ ‘Who told you that we don’t see or hear anything? We see and hear with the eyes and ears of all our friends, all people, the whole human race.’

p “It was an intelligent and pointed answer by a Marxist psychologist, and it was not lost on the audience, which broke into stormy applause. Sasha had a moral and scientific justification for replying thus to the question: succinctly, accurately and convincingly, with complete grasp of the matter.”

p And this from Meshcheryakov, writing in the concluding part of his book Awakening to Life:

p “When a child is brought into this world, it finds itself in a humanised environment. The space around it is filled with man-made objects: the house in which it was born and lives, the bed in which at first it spends most of the time, its clothes and all the numerous objects of attending to the baby, the household utensils and work tools to which humans have attached functions and modes of action—all that, in Marx’s expression, represents objectivised human capacities. And they create the human space around the child. Over the course. of history human capacities, have objectivised themselves not only in material objects but also in the development of codes of behaviour and the ordering of life. Thus, apart from the humanised environment, there is equally objective, humanised time, which exists independently of the child—the regime in the broad sense of the word, the order of life telling the child what it should do and when. Humanised space and humanised time—the whole humanised environment—are initially realised for the child in certain actions of other people catering to its needs... Even such an organic need as the need to breathe is objectivised in actions as, for example, in airing the room, i.e, in specific human behaviour.”

p During the many years of our acquaintance, I never asked Alexander Meshcheryakov whether he considered himself a follower of Vygotsky. There was no need to do that, for his work provided an eloquent answer to the question.

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p Even so, I would like to cite an article by Evald Ilyenkov which shows that the Sokolyansky-Meshcheryakov school is directly descended from the Vygotsky school, including its attitude toward a broad interpretation of the concept of “reflex”:

p “The initial condition is what has been given by nature, by biology. It is infinitesimal, including only the simplest organic needs for food, water and a limited range of physiological factors. But no more. There exist no mythical reflexes such as ’goal orientation’, ’freedom’, ’ collecting’ or the ’search and orientation reflex’ which many physiologists still regard as ’unconditioned’, i.e., hereditary. Even the need for a certain amount of movement is lacking. Even if there is an instinct that makes the infant crawl, it quickly disappears, when it is discouraged by negative sensations.

p “As a result, a person does not even possess the lowest level of the psyche which is the subject of zoology. The nucleus of that psychology is the activity of search and orientation. Any animal looks for—and finds—its way to food and water by actively relating its own trajectory with the shapes and position of external bodies, with the ’geometry’ of the environment. A person born deaf, dumb, and blind cannot even do that. He has to be taught to do it (which is true, however, of the normal people as well, only in the latter case, we do it unwittingly and later come to think that this search and orientation capacity has appeared ’by itself...

p “The underlying educational strategy and tactics of Sokolyansky and Meshcheryakov were as follows. The animal adapts actively to the natural environment, getting its bearings in the process of satisfying its innate biological needs. Its psychic activity appears and develops as a function of this mode of life activity. And that is its limit. With man, everything is turned upside down. He begins actively to adapt nature to himself and his needs and requirements. At first the needs that impel him to work are not much different from the needs of his closest animal ancestors. But in time, these needs become increasingly differentiated and specifically human. And this is due to labour, which transforms not only the external nature but also the organic nature of man himself.

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p “These new needs, unknown to the animal, become more complex and diverse from century to century. They become historically developing needs. And they arise not within the organism of the individual but in the organism of the ’human race’, i.e., in the organism of social production of specifically human life, amidst ’the totality of social relations’ arising between people in the process of production, in the process of joint and specified activity of individuals creating the material body of human culture.”

It is amazing how complete the continuity of scientific thought can be...