Rehabilitate Defectology! Teaching Foundation Reading as Compensation

Early years education begins with the rejection of the notion that children are deficient adults. But it has culminated in a deep and abiding concern for learning difficulties, particularly in the field of reading. The purpose of this paper is to reconcile the seeming contradiction between the former view, which appears to eschew the concept of deficits, and the latter, which appears to depend upon it. To do this, we re-examine the work of L.S. Vygotsky, whose career – conversely – began in the study of learning difficulties known as ‘defectology’ and culminated in a ‘pedology’, a systematic critique of the notion that early years are simply defective school children. Vygotsky took ‘defect’ as a general – in fact, universal – deficiencyin- itself, which then provokes different forms of social compensation’, or deficiency-for-others. Negative compensations lead to what Adler called an inferiority complex – a ‘deficiency-for-myself’; positive ones, however, lead to the next zone of child development. By reconceptualizing Foundation Reading as different forms of compensation, we may learn much from this lost science. We may even be able to compensate for its defects.