Modern pedagogy has gone through several stages in its formation as a science. One of them is pedagogical anthropology - a teaching that has been repeatedly persecuted for ideological reasons in the USSR. The main reason for this “thorny path” was that it was supposed to consider the educational process not only as an act of the systematic impact on a person of the official institutions of the state and society, but also of non-institutional factors of nature, heredity, and social environment. In this sense, pedagogical anthropology is a comprehensive teaching, which is closely interconnected with such scientific disciplines as psychology, sociology, psychiatry, history, genetics, etc.
In relation to the problems of school education, this meant that the educational role of the school should not be regarded as dominant in relation to other factors, or even the only one (there were such hypotheses). According to representatives of this scientific field, objective environments such as society, family, people's mentality, traditions and beliefs, and even natural and climatic conditions play an equally important role in education.
Based on this thesis, psychological and pedagogical anthropology claims that in order to successfully achieve the goals of upbringing, it is necessary to take into account the achievements of various sciences, where, according to Ushinsky, "the bodily and mental essence of the individual is" studied. In the 1920s and 1930s, an entire scientific school of anthropologists was formed in the Soviet Union, which emphasized the need for an integrated approach to the consideration of the determining factors of education.
Among the most prominent representatives of this school are Ushinsky, Sevostyanov, Uznadze. The most widespread among the scientific and pedagogical community was the pedagogical anthropology of Ushinsky. That is why Ushinsky, participating in the formation of the system of Soviet pedagogical education, even proposed creating not just pedagogical educational institutions and faculties, but anthropological ones. In his deep conviction, such an approach could provide an extension of the limits of the human worldview and world outlook and, as a result, contribute to the formation of a man of the Soviet future.
Ushinsky and his pedagogical anthropology affirmed the principles of the comprehensive development of personality, for which it’s not enough to simply teach a person how to write, read and count. Such one-sided training, according to anthropological educators, can lead to the fact that a person will grow up completely unsuitable for the conditions of dynamically changing social reality, and therefore will become a “ballast” in the construction of a new society, which was understood as communist. In practice, this meant that every teacher and educator should be prepared in such a way as to be able to use any facts of the surrounding reality for education. Only in this case can a comprehensive impact on the character, feelings and qualities of the young generation be ensured.
At the same time, Soviet pedagogical anthropology pointed out that the best pedagogical experience of Western Europe and other countries should be carefully studied, but they should not be blindly copied, since this in itself contradicts the main idea of pedagogical anthropology.
Rational anthropologism in pedagogy involves taking into account all the sociocultural, mental, historical and political circumstances of personality formation, which determine its development on the basis of the psychophysiological properties of individuals. Answering the question about the combination of sociocultural and psychophysical components in education, pedagogical anthropologism proposes to use the principle of nature conformity as a criterion , which consists in harmoniously combining the achievements of both the natural sciences and the humanities in the educational process.