A. I. Blaga “Sociology of Childhood”: Unknown Pages of the History of Sociology of Childhood. Part II

Abstract

This article is a continuation of the acquaintance with one of the pages of the scientific work of the Czech sociologist of the first half of the twentieth century Arnosht Inocens Blagi, started in the previous issue of the journal. The article is devoted to A. I. Blagi's scientific monograph "Sociology of Childhood", the first edition of which took place in 1927, and the last in 1948. In the Sociology of Childhood, A. I. Blaga lays the institutional foundations of the sociology of childhood, which will be talked about as an independent special sociological theory only in the last third of the twentieth century. The Czech scientist is ahead of the sociologists of the twentieth century in identifying the problem field and the object of research in the sociology of childhood, in identifying the "social situation" as a condition for differentiated development, education and upbringing of children, in substantiating the multifactorial theory of socialization, etc. An important contribution of A. I. A boon in the sociological approach to the consideration of childhood problems is the differentiation of social and sociological pedagogy. The scientific value of A. I. Blagi's monograph lies in the fact that it became an example of the author's appeal to a wide range of scientific works of researchers of that era, a combination of theoretical and empirical data in the sociological study of children's lives in the conditions of the development of industrialism in society. The translation of A. I. Blagi's monograph "Sociology of Childhood" includes fragments of the Introduction and subsections of the General Part. In the "Introduction" fragments of pages 7-8 are presented; in the subsection "I. Basic provisions" – fragments of pages 9-11, 16-17, 19-21, 25, 27; in subsection "II. Sociological pedagogy" – fragments of pages 27-35, 38. The translation contains A. I. Blagi's references to the sources of information used by him, the design of which also corresponds to the original. The translation and italics are made by the author of this article. The language of the original text is Czech.