STEFAN BALEY’S PERSONALITY AND SCHOLARLY ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE FIELD OF CHILD AND CHILDHOOD RESEARCH

Abstract

Ukrainian science has followed a long and difficult path in the process of its development. A great number of Ukrainian scientists have moved abroad due to political, social, ideological, and economical factors. The same happened to Stefan Baley (1885–1952), the Ukrainian and Polish scholar, psychologist, philosopher, and pedagogue who had to emigrate to Poland. He was one of the founders of pedagogical psychology in Eastern and Central Europe and the author of a great number of works. He lived through the First World War, the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917, and the Second World War. The first half of his life he lived in Lviv and Galicia and the other part he lived in Warsaw. He had contacts with scholars in many countries, including Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Austria, USA, France and Switzerland. Forced to move to Poland due to political and social factors, he became one of the prominent scholars and personalities in Polish scholarship, but remained in close contact with scholars in Ukraine. The central object of the research of the scholar was child and childhood. He used his knowledge in psychology, philosophy, sociology, pedagogy and medicine to study the development and education of a child. He is well known for creation of the table of child’s psyche development according to the age of a child. In addition he regarded child not only from psychological point of view, but also from physiological. Therefore, he is considered to be pedologist; owing to this, he was forbidden in the Soviet Union. In order to understand better his pedological ideas, we tried to analyse them and compare with the same ideas of famous Urainian pedologists

Keywords

• stefan baley
• scholarship
• scholarly achievements
• pedagogical psychology
• childhood
• child education
• child-centered approach.