THE CONTRIBUTION OF UKRAINIAN PSYCHOLOGISTS TO THE FIELD OF INDIVIDUALIZATION OF EDUCATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOL (THE SECOND HALF OF THE XX-TH CENTURY)

Abstract

In the context of highlighting the introduction of individualization in the educational process of the Ukrainian secondary school, a little explored aspect is revealed - a contribution to the development of this process, carried out by Ukrainian psychologists in the second half of the 20th century. The leading directions, methods and results of their research in the field of pedagogical psychology, psychology of the individual, social psychology, concerning the individualization of teaching (studying memory, individual differences in mental activity, the creative potential of students, their abilities, taking into account the motives of learning activity, identifying and developing giftedness and creative thinking, conducting vocational guidance, introducing differentiation in education in primary school, the organization of psychological service in secondary comprehensive school). The analysis of the psychological and pedagogical heritage of Ukrainian scientists showed the expansion during the period under study of the range of their studies aimed at ensuring the implementation of individual educational needs and interests of schoolchildren. The gradual formation, especially in the 1980s, of the foundations for the establishment in the 1990s of the paradigm of personalized education as one of the key directions of educational policy in the independent Ukraine was proved. Ukrainian scholars contributed to the direction of schoolchildren’s education along the path of its gradual individualization and differentiation, which contributed to the development of ideas about the humanization of education and prepared a theoretically and experimentally grounded basis for the transition of education in Ukraine from the paradigm of the “school of learning” to the personality-oriented paradigm of school education. In the first decade of the country’s independence, the most significant vector of the school’s humanization, the individualization of teaching, was the multidimensional psychologization of education. The real embodiment of psychologization was the creation of a psychological service in school, increased attention to the practical psychological and pedagogical education (training) of future teachers and the retraining of practicing teachers. It is proved that at the beginning of the XXI century there was a significant increase in attention from the state to the issues of psychologization of the educational process both in school and in training of psycho-pedagogical personnel. At the same time, such an increase in the concern for psychological and pedagogical support for the development of an individual is explained by the high degree of activity of the scientific and educational communities and their influence on the adoption by the authorities of fundamentally important decisions in the educational sphere.