The Blog of Awesome Women / Olga Skorokhodova: True Visionary

Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova was a Soviet scientist, writer, teacher, and therapist. Born to poor Ukrainian peasant parents circa 1911, she was a sickly child who proved to have great strength of spirit and a powerful mind. Olga lost her sight and hearing at age five after a bout with meningitis. When her mother died in 1922, Olga was sent to a school for the blind in Odessa. Three years later, Olga arrived at the School-Clinic for Deafblind Children in Kharkiv; though at that point she was almost completely mute, under the care of Professor Ivan Sokolyansky she was able to recover the ability to speak. She began to keep self-observation notes. In 1947, she published a book titled How I Perceive the World; it drew public interest to how she was able to recover speech and won the K.D. Ushynsky literary prize. She expanded upon this original work with 1954’s How I Perceive and Represent the World and 1972’s How I Perceive, Imagine and Understand the World. Olga became a research fellow at the USSR Institute for the Handicapped for the Academy of Educational Sciences in 1948, later rising to be a senior research fellow, and worked there for the rest of her life. She authored a number of scientific works concerning the development of education and teaching of deaf/blind children.