On M.N. Skatkin's work «Science and the school subject». A view 81 years later

Abstract

This paper examines, from the standpoint of the present day, the range of questions concerning the relationship between science and the school subject that were raised eighty-one years ago by M.N. Skatkin. It is shown that the problem identified by M.N. Skatkin had both its prehistory in Russian and foreign pedagogy and its further development. The paper considers the aspects of the problem singled out by M.N. Skatkin: the correlation between the content of science and the content of the school subject, the logic of science and the logic of the subject, the depth at which questions of science are presented in a school course, the scientific and the pedagogical presentation of science, and the development of scientific concepts in the course of learning. The development of scientific concepts is related to the stages of the cognitive development of learners. Particular attention is paid, using physics as an example, to the difficulties of incorporating into the context of modern education the questions of twentieth-century science and the digital measuring instruments of the twenty-first century; the content of the former and the design of the latter are characterised by a considerably greater non-visualisability in comparison with classical physics. In methodology, the search proceeds, in particular, towards creating analogies and certain models for explaining the questions of modern science. In this respect, in the twenty-first century the work of M.N. Skatkin has not lost its relevance, and it is proposed to regard it as a necessary introduction to the discussion of this problem both from the standpoint of didactics and from the standpoint of subject-specific methodologies.