The Practice of Social Education of Children with Developmental Disabilities in the Yenisei River Area in Siberia During the 1920s

Abstract

The authors reviewed documents and materials on the organization of social education of children with developmental disabilities in the Yenisei River area in Siberia during the 1920s. At that time, Russian science had no clear defnition of children with developmental disabilities as a special category, the most commonly used term being defective children. Social education of these children was formed under complex cultural and historical conditions, i.e. the building of a new polity based on the principles of state social care and socialist humanism. The idealistic idea that “defective” children could be corrected by the new methods of education laid the foundation for the practice of social education in social welfare institutions for the “physically disabled and mentally retarded”. Since the early 1920s, this practice had been spreading across the country, including the Yenisei River area in Siberia. We found that, in this region at the given period, the social education institutions for this category of children included a boarding school for deaf and dumb children and a school for physically defective children. In general, social education in institutions for “defective” children in the Yenisei River area in Siberia developed by improving their methods of teaching communication as well as general working skills and basic professional skills to children, which shows the state’s optimistic view on the inclusion of every child in
social life through education and labour. In addition, the paper argues that the historical experience of special school development is directly related to the ideas of inclusion and can thus enrich the modern understanding of social and learning support for this category of children.