Intellectual Abilities of Russian Peasants of the Pre-industrial Era

Abstract

The overwhelming majority of Russian peasants in late imperial Russia did not undergo systematic schooling. For this reason, they have not yet fully mastered the cognitive abilities of the educated person and possessed a specific, so-called sympathetic thinking. It is a practical analysis and synthesis, a generalization without detaching from the concrete and within the information directly accessible to it. Abstract thinking is poorly developed, an individual can operate with information derived almost exclusively from his life experience and within the framework of this experience. However, indifference to formal operations and to logical abstract reasoning is not an inability to think: the same peasants to whom abstract thought was given with difficulty, in those cases when an object represented to them a vital interest, showed themselves to be judicious, skillful, and refined. Cognitive abilities correspond to the metacognitive skills of a person — the current self-control and self-control, the ability to reflect on the thinking processes of one’s own and other people, to engage in self-analysis and self-criticism, to analyze their actions in the past, to connect them with the reality of the present and mentally transfer to their own future, to reason at a high moral level. In view of this, the self-concept of peasants and educated people differed significantly. In their majority, farmers were collectivists in essence, tried to refrain from going against the group interests, to set personal goals and desires above the public, to show independence and independence in their actions and actions and to build their behavior based on their own convictions.