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 education, 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 the illness was not the same among children. 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 the levels of development at different age periods of the child. This method is of little use in studying deaf-blind people, since it does not make it possible 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 in this case was tracking the development of the same child over the course of 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 discovery of Zagorsky 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 problems raised. Thus, there is absolutely no mention 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 initial period education and training of deaf-blind children are systemic types of education. 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 subject 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 V 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 education of the deaf-blind and mute in the Zagorsk orphanage - since 1963.
However, even before the start of extensive research into 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. Third organizational task there was teacher training and development educational materials– programs and benefits to begin the process of educating deaf-blind children. For. To solve the first problem, we turned to everything regional departments Social Security of the RSFSR, to schools for the blind and to schools for the deaf with a request to inform them about 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 from mental retardation 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, a detailed profile was compiled for each student at the end of each academic quarter, and 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. To study some issues in more detail, a laboratory experiment was used. 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, we needed an excursion into the history of their education and a brief description of modern foreign experience in this area.
The originality of the practice of educating and teaching deaf-blind-mute people, in which the task of forming the human psyche is posed and solved in a specially organized pedagogical process, makes it possible to pose and discuss from a somewhat new point of view some important problems that go beyond the narrow "framework of deaf-blind-mute itself / such as the formation of the human psyche in ontogenesis, 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 proper 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. Great amount the child’s behavioral skills, his feelings, and personality traits are not at all products of special training, but arise as if by themselves in ordinary life, in everyday communication with parents, playing outside, doing things together 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 development process normal child this is impossible to do, because it is impossible to isolate a child from the diversity of the environment - such isolation would simply be 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 affecting the child, the formation of basic, especially initial, mental neoplasms in 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 to a much greater extent than usual. In case of deaf-blindness, the ability to take into account and control external influences on the child increases so much, compared to normal, 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 he will not learn to speak naturally, that is, by imitation. 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 has all his ideas about outside world forms through touch.
The second, less obvious, but most important feature of 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 a normal brain and has the potential for full 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 of specially 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 them to develop unique teaching and upbringing methods.
If, when raising an ordinary child, a pedagogical error or omission made can be corrected by life outside of school, by practice, then 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 an early age is 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).
PLAN
1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………………...3
2. Main part
Mental development of deaf-blind children
2.1. Causes of deaf-blindness………………………………………………………………..6
2.2. Types of deaf-blindness………………………………………………………………………………….7
2.3. Characteristics of mental development of deaf-blind children…………………………..9
2.3.1. Peculiarities of development of the cognitive sphere in deaf-blind children…………………9
2.3.2. Features of the activities of deaf-blind children………………………………………………………..12
2.3.3. Speech development…………………………………………………………………………………15
2.3.4. Peculiarities of the personality and emotional-volitional sphere of deaf-blind children……….16
3. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………...18
4. Bibliography……………………………………………………………...….19
1. INTRODUCTION
The modern definition of "deaf-blind" varies from country to country. The legal status of a deaf-blind person is determined by regulatory documents adopted in a particular state. Classifying a disabled child or adult as deaf-blind in the United States or Scandinavian countries guarantees him a place for free education in a special school and special social services (translation, escort, transportation, etc.). In these countries, which are at the forefront of protecting the rights of people with disabilities, the category of “deaf-blind” has long been included in the state register of people with disabilities. Deafblindness is defined there as a combination of visual and hearing impairments that creates special communication difficulties and requires special educational needs for these children.
Until now, in our country there is no official definition of deaf-blindness as a special type of disability (disability is defined only by blindness or only by deafness), therefore people with complex disabilities are not guaranteed education in the special education system and their special needs are not taken into account when organizing social services. service. The only educational institution for deaf-blind children in our country - the Children's Home for the Deaf-Blind - belongs to the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Population of the Russian Federation 1.
Deafblindness is the most studied type of complex developmental disorder. Complex disorders should be defined as the presence of two or more severe primary disorders in one child. Developmental disorders that are part of a complex defect are associated with damage to various body systems.
The study of children with a complex structure of defects is carried out by a relatively new branch of special psychology, which studies the characteristics of the mental development of a child with two or more disorders.
The subject of this area of special psychology is the study of the unique mental development of a child with complex disorders and the determination of ways of psychological and pedagogical assistance to these children and their families.
The estimated number of deaf-blind people in the world is about one million. Currently, they include all people with visual and hearing impairments.
The world history of education for the deaf-blind is over 150 years old. By the end of the second millennium, 80 countries around the world had special services and schools for the deaf-blind. The beginning of the history of educating deaf-blind children in our country dates back to 1909, when the Society for the Care of the Deaf-Blind in Russia was created and the first school for such children was opened in St. Petersburg, which existed until 1941. The scientific achievements of this school are reflected in the works of the famous Leningrad psychologist A.V. Yarmolenko. From 1923 to 1937, a school for deaf-blind children in Kharkov, organized by I.A. Sokolyansky, worked very interestingly. The most famous pupil of this school was the famous deaf-blind writer O. I. Skorokhodova. Subsequently, this experience was continued by I. A. Sokolyansky and A. I. Meshcheryakov in Moscow at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR (now the Institute of Correctional Pedagogy of the Russian Academy of Education), where since 1947 scientific research and practical work with deaf-blind children. Since 1963, the Orphanage for deaf-blind children has been successfully operating in the city of Sergiev Posad, Moscow Region, where more than 100 children are educated. Domestic experience in teaching deaf-blind people is recognized by specialists in other countries. Since 1949, there has been an international community coordinating the development of research and services for the deaf-blind in the world, formed into a public organization in 1969, in whose activities since 1962 Russian specialists have also participated 2.
In the past, the most well-known cause of deaf-blindness in the rare reported cases was neuroinfection in the form of meningitis. Famous in XIX V. American deaf-blind people Laura Bridgman and Ellen Keller lost their sight and hearing as a result of a similar disease at the age of about two years.
Until the middle of the 20th century. The history of education for the deaf-blind was made up of individual cases of successful education of children who lost hearing and vision in at different ages, but retaining the capabilities of intellectual and emotional development. This experience was successfully picked up by teachers in different countries of Europe and the USA. The rubella epidemic that swept across different countries of the world in 1963-1965 caused the simultaneous appearance of a significant number of children deaf-blind from birth. The education of large groups of such children required the creation of an entire network of schools, and then special services. From that time on, deaf-blindness began to be closely studied by specialists in various fields, the causes were clarified, and various measures for its prevention were proposed.
The problem of social, personal and mental development of a deaf-blind child is very acute. Visual and hearing impairments prevent a child from understanding the surrounding reality, acquiring social experience, and gaining work skills. Communication with adults and other children is important for the social and personal development of such a child. But visual and hearing impairments often do not bring children and adults together, but, on the contrary, push them away. Many parents, upon learning that their child is deaf-blind, abandon him. Consequently, the child ends up in an orphanage or boarding school, which adversely affects his development. Due to the child’s little contact with his parents, he develops underdevelopment of speech as a means of communication. He becomes withdrawn, unsure of himself, his self-esteem falls, and his emotional-volitional sphere is disrupted.
It is known that the most difficult thing is not deaf-blindness, but the attitude of a normally developing child towards a deaf-blind person. Children with developmental disabilities perceive negative attitudes towards them from their peers very painfully, especially if the loss of vision and hearing occurred at a later age.
The relevance of the mental development of these children is determined by their difficulty, due to visual and hearing impairments, interaction with the outside world, the problem of social adaptation, the development of the child as an individual, and awareness of his place in society. It is very difficult for such people to adapt to life, so society (social services, families themselves) needs to help them, educate them and create all the necessary conditions for their development. The problem of deaf-blind children is one of the leading ones in the field of psychology of persons with developmental disabilities, and its solution is of great importance.
When writing this work, we used the book by A.I. Meshcheryakov. “Deaf-blind children. Development of the psyche in the process of formation of behavior", which offers 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 Zagorsk orphanage for the deaf-blind from 1963 to 1970. The content of the book is a study of the problems of the initial mental development of a child in the process of teaching him practical behavior. 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.
In the textbooks “Special Psychology” V.I. Lubovsky and “Fundamentals of Special Psychology”, ed. L.V. Kuznetsova presents general information on the problem of deaf-blind children and their education and upbringing. Some articles were also used.
2. Mental development of deaf-blind children
2.1. Causes of deafblindness
For early diagnosis of a complex disorder, knowledge of the causes that can lead to damage to several body functions is very important. When a child has one primary developmental defect, the possibility of either hereditary or exogenous origin is considered. A complex developmental disorder may be caused by one or more causes, different or identical in origin.
Currently, more than 80 hereditary syndromes that cause deafblindness are known. These are combinations of congenital deafness and progressive atrophy of the optic nerves; hearing impairment and retinitis pigmentosa; deafness, cataracts and kidney diseases; congenital hearing loss and progressive myopia, etc. The most well-known and common cause of deaf-blindness in adolescence and adulthood is Usher syndrome. It occurs in 3-6% of people who have had impaired hearing since childhood. This syndrome is characterized by congenital hearing impairments of varying degrees and progressive retinitis pigmentosa, leading to a gradual narrowing of visual fields and blindness.
Another group of causes leading to deaf-blindness includes various intrauterine, prenatal and perinatal diseases. The most famous of these intrauterine diseases is rubella. The rubella virus penetrates from an ill mother through the placenta into the fetus and can cause multiple malformations of the child. With this disease, the greatest risk of multiple fetal damage exists in early stages pregnancy, when the development of the cardiac system, organs of vision and hearing begins. Since the early 1970s. In developed countries of the world, preventive vaccinations against rubella are carried out. In Russia, such vaccinations were not carried out until 1998.
Another known intrauterine viral disease that can lead to congenital deafblindness is cytomegalovirus infection. The causes of congenital visual and hearing impairments can be maternal illness with toxoplasmosis, syphilis, etc. Severe diabetes and a number of other somatic diseases can lead to complex visual and hearing impairments with age 3
Hereditary causes of multiple, including dual sensory, disorders include CHARGE syndrome, which is increasingly found in children with dual sensory and multiple disabilities. This name was formed from a combination of the first Latin letters of six words denoting various disorders (coloboma of the visual organs; cardiac disorders; difficulty swallowing and breathing due to narrowing of the nasal openings-choanae; stunting; underdevelopment of the genital organs; hearing impairment). Children with this syndrome are also characterized by underdevelopment of facial expressions and imbalance.
The causes of deaf-blindness can also be a variety of diseases, leading only to deafness or only to blindness and combined in one specific person. For example, the cause of congenital blindness may be genetic, and hearing loss may occur as a result of scarlet fever or as a result of meningitis; Hearing impairment that occurs for these reasons may be complicated by severe eye injury with age, etc.
Knowledge of the causes and characteristics of diseases that can lead to complex developmental disorders in a child can significantly help in diagnosing these disorders, in identifying newborn children at risk and carefully monitoring their development.
2.2. Types of deafblindness
In the early 1960s. XX century A.V. Yarmolenko analyzed all the domestic and foreign information available at that time about deaf-blind people and compiled their classification according to the state of the sensory organs, according to the ratio of the time of hearing and vision loss, according to the age of onset of disorders, and by type of education. She herself classified as true deaf-blindness only people who were deprived of hearing and vision from birth or who lost them at an early age - before mastering and consolidating verbal speech as a means of communication and thinking. She considered deaf-blind only children with minimal residual vision (with loss of it before light perception) and with severe hearing loss or deafness. She classified the rest as childhood (lost hearing and vision between the ages of 4 and 10 years), adolescent, adult or senile deaf-blindness.
I.A. Sokolyansky classified as true deaf-blindness only children with congenital or acquired complete or partial dysfunction of the peripheral part of the visual and auditory analyzers, without gross disorders of the central parts of the brain. He classified mentally retarded children with severe visual and hearing impairments as “cerebrally insufficient.” 4
The first classification of deaf-blind people was made in the 1940s. A.V. Yarmolenko based on an analysis of 220 life stories of deaf-blind children, both in our country and abroad. The classification was based on the time of onset of the defect and the presence of a combination of sensory impairments and intellectual ones:
Deaf-blind from birth or who lost sight and hearing in early childhood, before mastering and consolidating verbal speech (congenital deaf-blindness);
Deafblind people whose vision and hearing loss occurred in preschool age and later, when the child had already formed speech (acquired deafblindness);
Deaf-blind mentally retarded children: all previous variants complicated by mental retardation.
Currently, it is customary in the world to distinguish the following groups of deaf-blind people.
1. Congenital and early deafblindness resulting from congenital rubella or other intrauterine infections, extreme prematurity or birth trauma, genetic disorders. The severity of visual and hearing impairment largely depends on the quality of timely medical care these kids. Many have visual impairments for which early surgical and therapeutic treatment is indicated (congenital cataracts, glaucoma, strabismus, etc.). Early and high-quality eye surgery can significantly improve residual vision, and ongoing treatment can maintain its condition for a long time. However, there are observational data showing a large number of complications after removal of congenital cataracts in children with congenital rubella and a poor prognosis for the development of residual vision in these children. According to foreign data, up to 25% of children who had rubella in utero and were operated on for bilateral cataracts lose their vision after 18 years of age as a result of complete bilateral retinal detachment.
Based on the severity of sensory impairments, children with congenital visual and hearing impairments are usually divided into totally deaf-blind, practically deaf-blind, visually impaired deaf, blind hearing-impaired and visually impaired hearing-impaired children. Such children need special educational conditions. These can be special schools for the deaf-blind and special classes in schools for the blind or for the deaf, as well as individual education in special schools of various types.
The first means of communication for these children may be household objects or natural gestures depicting actions with these objects. In the future, they can learn to communicate using dactylology, oral and written speech (writing in large “sighted” letters or Braille). There are individual cases of teaching children with congenital deaf-blindness by a purely oral method - they could speak orally and read the oral speech of others by vibration, with their hand from the throat of the speaker.
2. Congenital hearing impairment and blindness acquired with age. These people make up up to 50% of adults who are deafblind. The causes of the disorders are Usher syndrome and other hereditary syndromes, trauma, etc. As a rule, these people attend educational institutions for people with impaired hearing; their vision deteriorates significantly in high school or later. Special attention demanded by deaf children who lose their sight in adolescence. Spicy, state of shock and the psychoses that occur in some cases in such adolescents and their parents can be largely prevented if these children are identified in time and provided with timely psychotherapeutic and psychological-pedagogical assistance. The leading means of communication for deaf-blind people in this category are most often sign language and dactylology, which in cases of a sharp decline in vision can be helped by touch: they can perceive the sign language of the interlocutor if they touch his hands or perceive dactyl speech “in the hand.”
3. Congenital blindness and acquired deafness. These are people who have profound visual impairments and study in schools for the blind. As a result various reasons As they age, they lose some or all of their hearing. As a rule, these are children, adolescents or adults who use predominantly oral speech in communication, sometimes not intelligibly enough. Many of them need speech therapy and audiological help. Most people are recommended to wear hearing aids and individual lessons on the development of residual hearing and pronunciation correction. Observations show that in a number of cases these people mature age may lose their hearing completely, and then they switch to communicating only with the help of touch (writing on the palm, fingerprinting “in hand” or Lorm - a special alphabet for the deaf-blind, invented by the Czech deaf-blind G. Lorm and quite popular in Germany, the Czech Republic and some other countries).
4. Deaf-blindness acquired with age. These are people who were born with normal hearing and vision, and who lost their hearing and vision as a result of illness or injury in adolescence or adulthood. In this case the most a big problem- cope with the stress of loss of vision and hearing and try to rebuild the already established and automated orientation in space to the use of other types of sensory. A special task is to make available other means of communication (perception of oral speech with the hand, writing on the palm, dactylology and writing in Braille).
5. Senile deaf-blindness. It is known that some people after 65 years of age and many over 85 have sharp deterioration in hearing and vision. Some of them become deaf-blind in old age. In developed countries of the world, these people are provided with special support aimed at establishing relationships in their families, organizing special conditions of assistance in institutions for the elderly, and helping with communication and orientation. 5
2.3. Characteristics of mental development of deaf-blind children
2.3.1. Features of cognitive development in 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 6 .
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 visual and hearing impairments in children make it possible to provide psychological assistance to the family at the right time, to begin raising the child in a timely manner and to significantly improve the prospects for his development.
The famous French deaf-blind-mute 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 dumb, and from a school for the blind, as an “idiot”, and placed in solitary confinement in a 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 like a 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 mentally, forgot how to walk, and fell into a stupor that lasted until the beginning of his education - until the age of ten 7.
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 8.
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.
Similar to this boy were the children who came to us from children's invalid homes. 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 is replaced by stereotypical motor activity, which allows them to expend 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. In these cases, the development of the human psyche 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. 9 "
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 10.
It is clear that such a person 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 in this way he will create an unlimited 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 education and training, are completely devoid of any features of the human psyche - they only have the possibility of its formation and development (to the highest level), but at the initial stages of this process they have no need for knowledge peace, 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, napkin 11.
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” 12.
Sensation and perception in deaf-blind children has a number of features.
Since deaf-blind children cannot navigate in space using vision and hearing, then “ Skin sensitivity and motor memory become a special way for deaf-blind children to understand the world around them” 13. 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 14.
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 unfamiliar person at a distance, recognize the weather outside by smells from an open window, determine the features of rooms and find 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 a room, listen to the sounds of music with their hands, determine with their feet the direction of 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” 15.
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. Classes on the development of 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.
2.3.2. Features of the activities of deaf-blind children
Proper upbringing of a young child with profound visual and hearing impairments in the family is possible only with the sensitivity of adults to the most inconspicuous manifestations of his activity, with the ability to support this activity in every possible way and develop it in order to stimulate any contacts with adults and with objects in the surrounding world. The constancy of the location of the objects surrounding the child and adherence to the temporary daily routine contribute to his correct orientation in time and space. Independent movement around the house and mastering actions with objects create the prerequisites for successful cognitive and speech development. Even the most limited sensory sphere of a deaf-blind child creates conditions for his mental development. With intact cognitive abilities and the correct attitude of parents towards a deaf-blind child, he is capable of a certain spontaneous development. An indicator of such successful development is the emergence of communication between the child and his loved ones using natural gestures. However, mastering verbal speech is possible only with special training.
In the development of a deaf-blind child of preschool age, the formation of the first means of communication - gestures - plays a leading role. Thanks to an adult, the child gradually learns the order of everyday everyday situations (morning toilet, breakfast, games, lunch, nap, afternoon snack, walk, dinner, evening dress and getting ready for bed, etc.). An object or a gesture depicting an action with an object can become a signal for every everyday situation that is significant for a child. A deaf-blind child’s independent mastery of first individual actions, and then a whole cycle of actions within each everyday or play situation, makes it possible to make a natural gesture a sign of a certain individual object and action with it. All this prepares for the replacement of a natural gesture with a conventional sign, making it possible to subsequently replace the gesture with a dactylic word, and then with a written phrase (written in capital letters or in embossed dotted Braille) 16 .
Modeling, modeling, drawing and playing are of great importance for the formation of correct ideas about the environment for a deaf-blind child. It is these types of activities that make it possible to control the adequacy of a child’s ideas about the environment; with their help, the meaning of children’s first words is generalized, when one name can denote a real object and its image, a real object and an object that replaces it in the game.
However, a deaf-blind child with additional impairments is often limited or even deprived of the ability to independently observe and imitate the actions of an adult. His learning occurs through the organization of joint actions with an adult (the adult acts with the child’s hands or the child’s hands “follow” the adult’s actions), which gradually turn first into separate actions with the adult (the adult begins the action, and the child finishes it) and, finally, completely independent actions. But, having taught the child to act independently, it is necessary to try to organize his independent observations of the activities of the people around him. For this purpose, a deaf-blind child is taught to calmly observe with his hands how his loved ones eat, drink, dress, etc. Thanks to these observations, the child receives his first ideas about the actions of other people, conditions for imitation are formed, which is very important for the full social development of a person. The meaning of gestures and words is expanded and generalized, denoting not only a specific cup for drinking by the child himself, but also other cups from which mom and dad, guests, etc. drink. By organizing the child's observation of the daily activities of others, we expand his own experience and ideas about the activities of other people. For example, before starting to teach a deaf-blind child to read and write, he needs to develop a “reading mindset” - he is taught, without interfering with the actions of other people, to observe them; Before teaching a child how to act with story toys - dolls, you need to teach him to “see” the real actions of other people.
Observations of the development of play in children with complex sensory impairments show that story toys first act as real objects for them. A deaf-blind or blind child tries to lie down in a doll's crib or drink from a small cup after the actions with these toys have been demonstrated to adults with the help of a doll. Real role-playing game develops in such children much later, at school age.
Any child cannot develop as an individual without mastering the objective world, without learning to independently navigate in time and in the surrounding space, without mastering self-service skills. In the education of children with complex disabilities, this period can take both preschool and school age child.
Of great importance for the development of the psyche of the deaf-blind-mute is socially significant work, aimed not only at the self-care of the pupil himself, but also necessary for his comrades. In this work, the first understanding of the community of labor in a divided operation is developed: I serve not only myself, but also others, and others serve me. This work is often carried out collectively, and it develops the ability to combine one’s activities with a common task. And individual work is assessed from the point of view of its significance for general labor. Here the beginnings of self-awareness as a member of some kind of collective already arise. Deaf-blind pupils are also invited to participate in various types of collective work. They clean the yard, clear the snow in winter, chip away the ice on the property, dig a vegetable garden in the spring, water the beds, and care for the animals that are kept in a special house in the yard. The types of work that students do are different: some are easy, others are more difficult. Pupils do some work willingly, others less willingly, and they do not enjoy doing some things at all.
Upon reaching the age of sixteen, deaf-blind pupils, subject to their physical and mental readiness, begin to learn professional work. In an orphanage, professional labor, just like the types of labor that precede it (self-service, group self-service, manual labor, educational work in workshops), serves educational tasks. Usually, when analyzing work in a special school, they note its importance for improving speech, developing movements, perception, memory, imagination, and thinking. All this is correct, but not enough. One might even say that such a characterization of the meaning of labor misses its main function in student development. Labor training and practical participation in labor are the only correct way to form a full-fledged personality. It is in work that an awareness of one’s position in the system of interhuman relations is formed; through work one acquires an assessment of oneself through the attitude of others. The formation of the most important essential human traits occurs in work. If in the historical aspect, a person, creating forms of labor, created himself, made himself a man, then in a certain sense we can say that in the process of ontogenetic development, mastering the forms of labor activity, a person each time, as it were, creates himself anew. It is also important that through work, through personal participation in it, a correct reflection of social relations is formed and through the prism of these relations the world of things humanized by labor is more deeply and adequately cognized 17 .
When teaching a deaf-blind person more and more “adult” types of work, a contradiction appears and grows between the nature of the activity and its relationship to needs. If at first the work activity available to the child during the period of formation of his self-service skills is directly and directly related to the satisfaction of his simplest needs, then already during the transition to collective self-service this connection is not so obvious. And as you master the forms of divided labor, the direct connection between specific activities and the needs of the body is lost. This connection becomes more and more mediated and, in the end, is carried out through such a measure of labor as money. Understanding money as a measure of labor and awareness of the connection of one’s labor with the ability to satisfy one’s needs using money is a necessary condition for practical knowledge of existing social relations.
2.3.3. Speech development
It is extremely important in teaching a deaf-blind child to master the means of communication. The first special means of communication for him are gestures. The child uses gestures to designate objects, their functions, actions, and elements of behavior. Mastering gestures is a necessary stage speech development child.
The next stage of mastering means of communication after gestures is the formation of verbal speech in the child. Verbal speech in dactylic form is a superstructure over sign speech, arises within it as its variant, and subsequently develops into an independent and dominant form of speech.
It happens this way. Gestures denoting well-known and frequently encountered objects are replaced by finger words. For a child, these designations are also gestures, but only gestures of a different configuration. The gesture shows him that this object can be designated differently. Subsequently, he designates the object shown to him with a gesture that is new to him, without even suspecting that he already knows a word made up of letters, just as a sighted-hearing child who has learned to speak in the second year of life does not know that he is speaking in letter-by-letter words.
Teaching verbal language begins not with letters, but with words, and not just words, but with words in a system of coherent semantic text. The semantic context of the first words is gestures. The first dactylic words are included in the story, carried out by means of facial expressions. Here words act as gestures. Only after mastering several dozen words denoting specific objects is the child given the dactyl alphabet, which he already practically masters. After the dactyl alphabet, the child can be given any word, correlating it with the corresponding gesture and object. Memorizing the letters of the dactylic alphabet is also of great importance because in the process of memorizing the child learns to perceive dactylic letters from the teacher’s hand.
After the fingerprint alphabet has been firmly memorized, the child is given a dotted designation of letters. The child’s finger articulation and dotted representation of letters must be impeccable and perfect. To improve this, a special dictionary of two to three dozen words is selected that denote objects well known to the child. The same dictionary is used in the future to master the grammatical structure.
Teaching verbal speech to deaf-blind people is possible through mastering writing and reading 18 . Mastering writing and reading often takes the entire school period of such a child’s development. When a child masters regular writing in large letters or raised dotted writing in blind font, he is taught to consistently describe his own actions. From such descriptions, consisting of simple, uncommon sentences, the first texts for reading by a deaf-blind child are composed. As the child’s vocabulary is enriched, the grammatical structure of the first texts also becomes more complex. These texts, which describe the child’s own experience and the actions of people he knows, are compiled with the help of the teacher and are called educational. In addition, texts reflecting the child’s personal experience are compiled by the child himself (spontaneous texts). The constant interpenetration of these two types of texts, which I.A. Sokolyansky called parallel, creates conditions for the full acquisition of verbal speech by a deaf-blind child. The child’s desire to talk about important and bright events of his own life is, as it were, built into the already existing grammatical forms of telling about similar events.
Along with the assimilation of elements of narrative speech, work is being carried out on the development of colloquial speech (in dactylic form), first in the form of simple incentive sentences, and later more complex ones.
A low level of initial proficiency in verbal speech should not artificially limit a child’s communication, as this will inevitably lead to a delay in his overall development. It is necessary, especially in the first period of training, to use a gestural form of communication.
Oral speech for the deaf-blind is not a means of education; it is one of the subjects of study. Speaking classes are conducted in the form of individual lessons.
2.3.4. Features of the personality and emotional-volitional sphere of deaf-blind children.
In the early stages of development of a deaf-blind child, personal development is fused with all other lines of development. A deaf-blind child cannot develop as a person without mastering the objective world, without learning to independently navigate in time and in the surrounding space, without mastering self-service skills. Equally important is mastering writing and reading. Cognitive development at this stage it seems to be the main thing, largely determining the development of the individual. But concern for the child’s development should not be directed only to solving cognitive problems.
Until recently, in the education of deaf-blind children, the main and often the only task was considered to be their speech and intellectual development. This was justified during the period of formation of the very tradition of teaching deaf-blind people in Russia. In the early 1980s. The content and methods of primary education for deaf-blind students were basically determined, and the tasks of personal development of deaf-blind students came to the fore. By this time, it was possible to assess the low possibilities of independent life for adult deaf-blind school graduates, to see their extreme personal immaturity and unpreparedness to understand the rights and responsibilities of an adult member of society 19 .
In cases of complex sensory impairment, the likelihood of defective, dependent, egoistic development of the child’s personality is especially high. Observations show that many deaf-blind young people exhibit primitive moral assessments and criteria, insufficient self-awareness, lack of self-identification as a family member, as a representative of a certain age group, as a member of a certain community of disabled people, as a resident a certain area, as a citizen, etc. One can also talk about the poverty of deaf-blind people’s ideas about their past and future, about the biography of their loved ones, about a person’s life path in general.
The possibility of such personality development is explained by a number of reasons (Sokolyansky I.A., Basilova T.A., Blagosklonova N.K.). The first is the reasons due to the complex disorder itself, which leads to varying degrees of isolation of the child from the outside world. Such isolation inevitably leads to secondary developmental disorders - weakness and distortion of emotional and social connections with the wider world of people, to egocentrism.
The second group of reasons is related to the attitude of the people around him. As a rule, close people surrounding a deaf-blind child, having realized it severe violations, may show excessive anxiety and pity. The requirements for the child may sharply decrease, and the assessment of the success of his actions may become excessively high or even inadequate. A situation of overprotection may arise when the child becomes the center of the family’s existence and the interests of all other members are relegated to the background and are considered insignificant.
The third group of reasons includes problems associated with the practice of teaching and upbringing, in which the child himself remains its object throughout preschool and school education. He is taught and educated, and not he himself learns and is educated. In the special conditions of a special preschool and school institution, where the child is constantly among children like himself, he does not have the need to realize his impairments and the possibility of compensating for it, to think about the impact of visual and hearing impairments on his future independent life among people who see and hear differently. On the one hand, the help of people directly surrounding the child opens up opportunities for personal development, on the other hand, it limits and even distorts this development.
Thus, taking into account the causes of complex disorders and the types of upbringing of deaf-blind children, it is necessary to highlight such personality characteristics and the emotional-volitional sphere as weakness of social connections, egocentrism, lack of independence, low self-esteem, poor development of self-education, unawareness of one’s impairment 20 .
“The experience of teaching deaf-blind children and children with multiple disabilities convinces us that there are no unteachable children, but there are children with different learning abilities. Even a small advance in development helps to gain greater independence and, therefore, self-confidence. A child’s success is largely due to the courage of his loved ones, their optimism and self-confidence 21.”
3. CONCLUSION
Such deviations as visual and hearing impairment significantly complicate the mental development of children; they face numerous difficulties in their social rehabilitation. The causes of deafblindness vary: from congenital to acquired.
A child born deaf-blind is a special child. These features are the result of certain factors that make deafblindness a specific type of disability. Since vision and hearing are the most important means of development, as well as the most important channels for communication, a deaf-blind child has enormous problems in understanding the world, in relation to both himself and other people.
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. Therefore, a deaf-blind child needs special psychological and pedagogical support. On the other hand, parents of a deaf-blind child also need consultations with a psychologist.
A deaf-blind child is deprived of the most important means of contact with the environment - vision and hearing and, most importantly, is deprived of verbal speech. A child with such a disorder finds himself “cut off” from the whole world; deaf-blindness isolates the child from society, complicating his physical, mental and social-personal development. The circle of people communicating with him is very narrow, while nearby there is a big world, unfamiliar and inaccessible to knowledge. Independently, only through his own efforts, a child cannot come into contact with the social environment around him and cannot acquire specific ideas about it.
The mental development of deaf-blind children is based on preserved intellectual and sensory capabilities and their improvement. Proper education of a young child with deep violations vision and hearing impairment in the family is possible only with a sensitive attitude of adults to the most inconspicuous manifestations of the child’s activity, the ability to support this activity in every possible way and develop it. The constant arrangement of objects surrounding the child and adherence to a temporary daily routine contribute to his orientation in time and space. Independent movement around the house and mastering actions with objects creates the prerequisites for successful cognitive and speech development. In the development of a deaf-blind child of preschool age, the leading place is taken by the formation of the first means of communication - gestures. Thanks to an adult, the child gradually learns the order of everyday everyday situations. An object or gesture can become a signal for every everyday situation that is significant for a child.
A deaf-blind child’s independent mastery of first individual actions, and then a whole cycle of actions within each everyday or play situation, makes it possible to make a natural gesture a sign of a certain individual object and action with it. All this prepares for the replacement of a natural gesture with a word. Great value Modeling, modeling, drawing and play are used to form correct ideas about the environment. Learning verbal speech is possible through mastering writing and reading. Having mastered regular writing in capital letters or raised dotted blind font (L. Braille), the child is taught to consistently describe his own actions.
“A child with complex sensory impairments has all the necessary self-care and household skills to feel independent in everyday life. He can master specific everyday skills and certain labor skills to work in specialized enterprises for people with disabilities or at home. Under certain circumstances ( constant assistance and attention from family, teachers, support organization) a deaf-blind person can continue his education after finishing school at a college or university and find his place in life among professionally well-prepared people” 22.
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18 Special psychology: Textbook. aid for students higher ped. textbook institutions, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - P. 401.
19 Special psychology: Textbook. aid for students higher ped. textbook institutions, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing center "Academy", 2005. - P. 402.
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The estimated number of deaf-blind people in the world is about one million. Currently, these include all people with visual and hearing impairments: these are children with congenital or early acquired deaf-blindness; children with congenital visual impairments who lose their hearing with age; people who are deaf or hard of hearing from birth and whose visual impairment appears with age; people who have lost hearing and vision in adulthood or old age.
The first classification of deaf-blind people was made in the 1940s by A.V. Yarmolenko based on an analysis of 220 life stories of deaf-blind children, both in our country and abroad. The classification was based on the time of onset of the defect and the presence of a combination of sensory impairments and intellectual ones:
- * deaf-blind and mute from birth or who lost sight and hearing in early childhood, before mastering and consolidating verbal speech (congenital deaf-blindness);
- * deaf-blind people whose vision and hearing loss occurred in preschool age and later, when the child had already formed speech (acquired deaf-blindness);
- * deafblind mentally retarded children: all previous options, complicated mental retardation.
IN last years a number of experts note an increase in the number of children with congenital visual and hearing impairments, born very prematurely and saved thanks to advances modern medicine. Approximately 11% of premature babies have abnormalities in the development of the eyes, leading to profound visual impairment and even blindness (congenital glaucoma, congenital cataracts, atrophy optic nerve, retinopathy or retrolental fibroplasia, etc.). As a consequence of extreme prematurity, such children may also experience hearing impairment. In some cases, cerebral palsy and other disorders are added to the bisensory defect. In many ways, the causes of deep prematurity remain unknown.
The causes of deafblindness can also be the most various diseases, leading only to deafness or only to blindness and combined in one specific person. For example, the cause of congenital blindness may be genetic, and hearing loss may occur as a result of scarlet fever or as a result of meningitis; Hearing impairment that occurs for these reasons may be complicated by severe eye injury with age, etc.
Currently, it is customary in the world to distinguish the following groups of deaf-blind people.
- 1. Congenital and early deafblindness resulting from congenital rubella or other intrauterine infections, extreme prematurity or birth trauma, genetic disorders. The severity of visual and hearing impairment largely depends on the quality of timely medical care for these children.
- 2. Congenital hearing impairment and blindness acquired with age. These people make up up to 50% of adults who are deaf-blind. The causes of the disorders are Usher syndrome and other hereditary syndromes, trauma, etc.
- 3. Congenital blindness and acquired deafness. These are people who have profound visual impairments and study in schools for the blind. As a result of various reasons, they lose their hearing partially or completely with age. Many of them require speech therapy and audiological assistance. Most people are advised to wear hearing aids and individual lessons to develop residual hearing and correct pronunciation.
- 4. Deaf-blindness acquired with age. These are people who were born with normal hearing and vision and who lost their hearing and vision as a result of disease or injury during adolescence or adulthood. In this case, the biggest problem is to cope with the stress of loss of vision and hearing and try to rebuild the already established and automated orientation in space to use other types of sensory input.
- 5. Senile deaf-blindness. It is known that some people after 65 years of age and many over 85 have sharp deterioration in hearing and vision. Some of them become deaf-blind in old age.
In the development of a deafblind child preschool age The leading place is taken by the formation of the first means of communication - gestures. Thanks to an adult, the child gradually learns the order of everyday everyday situations (morning toilet, breakfast, games, lunch, nap, afternoon snack, walk, dinner, evening toilet and getting ready for bed, etc.). An object or a gesture depicting an action with an object can become a signal for every everyday situation that is significant for a child. A deaf-blind child’s independent mastery of first individual actions, and then a whole cycle of actions within each everyday or play situation, makes it possible to make a natural gesture a sign of a certain individual object and action with it. All this prepares for the replacement of a natural gesture with a conventional sign (a deaf language gesture, a dactyl or spoken word), and makes it possible to subsequently replace the gesture with a dactyl word, and then with a written phrase (written in capital letters or in raised dotted Braille).
Modeling, modeling, drawing and playing are of great importance for the formation of correct ideas about the environment for a deaf-blind child. It is these types of activities that make it possible to control the adequacy of the child’s ideas about the environment; with their help, the first concepts are generalized, when one name can denote a real object and its image, a real object and an object that replaces it in the game.
Teaching verbal speech to deaf-blind people is possible through mastering writing and reading. When a child masters regular writing in capital letters or raised dotted writing in blind font, he is taught to consistently describe his own actions. From such descriptions, consisting of simple, uncommon sentences, the first texts for reading by a deaf-blind child are composed. As the child's vocabulary is enriched, the grammatical structure of the first texts also becomes more complex. These texts, which describe the child’s own experience and the actions of people he knows, are compiled with the help of the teacher and are called educational. In addition, texts reflecting the child’s personal experience are composed by the child himself (spontaneous texts).
In the early stages of development of a deaf-blind child, personal development is fused with all other lines of development. A deaf-blind child cannot develop as a person without mastering the objective world, without learning to navigate independently in time and in the surrounding space, and without mastering self-service skills. Equally important is mastering writing and reading. Cognitive development at this stage seems to be the main one, largely determining the development of personality.
That is why, until recently, in the education of deaf-blind children, the main and often the only task was considered to be their speech and intellectual development. This was justified during the formation of the very tradition of teaching deaf-blind people in Russia. In the early 1980s. The content and methods of primary education for deaf-blind students were largely determined, and the tasks of personal development of deaf-blind students came to the fore. By this time, it was possible to assess the low opportunities for independent living of adult deafblind graduates.
All of the above applies primarily to cases of congenital or early-onset deafblindness, namely they are indicated in the anamnesis of most pupils special school for such children. However, among them there are children with multiple disabilities. Children who become deaf-blind as a result of intrauterine infection, extreme prematurity, or other causes may have severe brain damage that results in motor impairment or severe mental impairment. The experience of teaching and raising children with multiple disabilities in schools for the deaf-blind has shown that in all cases it was possible to achieve some progress in their development. But the learning of most children with severe mental retardation progressed very slowly, the developing skills were characterized by extreme inertia and the difficulty of transferring them to new conditions, the children were passive and lack of initiative in communication.
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 a high intellectual level in their development are widely known - these are, 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. At the Scientific Research Institute of Defectology of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, a long-term pedagogical experiment on teaching deaf-blind children was continued.
The proposed work is the first attempt at a systematic presentation of a pedagogical experiment conducted in an 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 experimentally prove 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 the problems of mental development of a 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 the Zagoroka orphanage for the deaf-blind, as well as 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.
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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 education, 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 the illness was not the same among children. 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 speed and in general character 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 shortcomings of the average statistical research method when studying 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 make it possible 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 over a 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 were studied only from the day of the opening of Zagorsky 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 problems raised. So, there is absolutely no talk here about the problem of assimilation school subjects, despite the fact that a group of older students, having received secondary education, are currently successfully studying at 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-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 education of the deaf-blind and mute in the Zagorsk orphanage - since 1963.
However, even before the start of extensive research into 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 social security RSFSR, to schools for the blind and to schools for the deaf with a request to inform them about 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 from varying degrees of mental retardation.
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 the presenters gave lectures at these courses research fellows Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR.
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, a detailed profile was compiled for each student at the end of each academic quarter, and 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. To study some issues in more detail, a laboratory experiment was used. 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, we needed an excursion into the history of their education and a brief description of modern foreign experience in this area.
The originality of the practice of educating and teaching deaf-blind-mute people, in which the task of forming the human psyche is posed and solved in a specially organized pedagogical process, makes it possible to pose and discuss from a somewhat new point of view some important problems that go beyond the narrow "framework of deaf-blind-mute itself / such as the formation of the human psyche in ontogenesis, 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 proper organization their training and education, but it is also a unique method of 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. He, for example, is not specially taught oral speech, thinking, representation, perception, but 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 ordinary 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 simply be technically impossible and completely unacceptable pedagogically. That's why it's difficult normal development the child’s psyche to reveal the true meaning 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 to a much greater extent than usual. In case of deaf-blindness, the ability to take into account and control external influences on the child increases so much, compared to normal, 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 he will not learn to speak naturally, that is, by imitation. 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 a normal brain and has the potential for full 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 of specially 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 them to develop unique teaching and upbringing methods.
If, when raising an ordinary child, a pedagogical error or omission made can be corrected by life outside of school, by practice, then 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 Around me” (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, are capable of much learn and find your 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, Alexey Maksimovich Gorky wrote to Skorokhodova that the study of man cannot be achieved by experiments on dogs, rabbits, and 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).
The problems of deaf-blindness attract the close attention of scientists of various specialties: psychologists, philosophers, physiologists, public figures and others. The mental and physical development of a deaf-blind child, separated from the great world of nature and society by a wall of eternal silence and eternal darkness, is deeply unique. Here it is possible to strictly take into account all the influences and information communicated to a deaf-blind person, which makes it possible to approach the solution of the question of the driving factors and mechanisms of the formation of the human psyche and consciousness. Many foreign scientists believe that the development of deaf-blind people to the level normal person either impossible, or is a spontaneous, immanent self-development of the child’s super-genius inclinations. External influences are considered only as an impetus for spontaneous development.
Outstanding Russian teacher I.A. Sokolyansky contrasted these views with a system of teaching deaf-blind children, based on a materialistic idea of the essence of man, his consciousness and the psyche as a whole. The path of humanization goes from building real human relationships to reality and the emergence of communication on this basis, to mastering human language, to human consciousness. A deaf-blind-mute child has only the potential for the development of the psyche and consciousness, but through his own efforts he will immanently never achieve even minor mental development. Without special pedagogical intervention, such a child will remain disabled for life. Before learning, a deaf-blind-mute child cannot stand or sit like a human being and does not have a human posture. The formation of the psyche and consciousness of such a child is carried out at a number of stages of education, successively interconnected.
The first learning task, which is associated with the initial development of the psyche of a deaf-blind child, is the formation of a system of self-service skills, the formation of skills in human everyday behavior. This human behavior has been developed by the entire society; it is, in principle, associated with the use of tools and objects of labor invented by mankind, and also presupposes the mastery of the methods of action assigned to these tools. At the same time, the child masters a socially developed norm of activity, which becomes an act of his individual behavior. This is only possible when this behavior satisfies individual needs of the child. Forming self-service skills is an extremely labor-intensive process.
The first acquaintance with the objects of the surrounding world occurs in the process of activity to satisfy one’s needs, the simplest natural needs. Deaf-blind children have no need for orientation activities. Elements of such activity arise within the activity of satisfying simplest natural needs. As a result of this still elementary cognitive activity, images of objects involved in satisfying needs are formed. Elementary cognitive activity, as well as its results - images of objects, at the first stage of child development arise as necessary condition successful “business activity” of the body. Gradually, the circle of images of objects associated with the satisfaction of needs expands and moves further and further away from serving the simplest natural needs. The structure of orientation-research activity gradually becomes more and more complex and moves away from directly serving the simplest needs, gaining independence to some extent, generating the need for knowledge of the objects of the surrounding world and search interest. At this stage, not only images of directly “needed” objects are formed, but also new connections that ensure the creation of new images. Thus, during the initial education of a deaf-blind child, he develops images of the everyday objects around him and the skills to properly handle them. During this period, the foundations of the human psyche, the foundations of human consciousness are laid.
The figurative and effective thinking of a deaf-blind child arises in the process of live communication between the child and adults. The development of this communication gradually takes on the character of a child’s thinking. To develop one’s own need for communication, a certain separation of communication activities from the activities of serving the child is necessary; it is necessary to form his self-service activity. This creates the conditions for the formation of means of communication. Only in this way does communication develop into independent activity. Gesture is the first visual and at first the only one understandable to a deaf-blind child designation, on the basis of which the next stage of conceptual designation can be formed - word, i.e. formation verbal speech. Verbal speech is formed in dactyl(verbal) form. It arises within gestural communication as a variant of gestural speech and only later develops into an independent dominant form of speech, displacing gestures. Gestures denoting well-known and frequently encountered objects in everyday life are replaced by dactyl words. Then the child is given individual letters, and in the process of mastering the dactyl alphabet, he learns both to reproduce each finger configuration and to freely “read” it from the teacher’s hand. Teaching grammar begins with composing a text and compiling a system of texts. Children are then taught written language in Braille form, which allows you to record a thought, return to it and correct it. In written speech, thoughts are not only recorded, but also formed. A deaf-blind child trained using this method gains access to all spheres of human cognition and morality. This is confirmed by the fate of Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova, a candidate of pedagogical sciences, author of three books and many poems. There are other examples of high intellectual development of deaf-blind people from childhood.
