Author — S.I. Hesse. Fragment from «Fundamentals of Pedagogy»
Tolstoy, in many respects, as we have seen, coinciding with Rousseau and also denying culture, however, goes further than Rousseau and, avoiding the latter’s artificiality, in this sense gives a deeper justification for free education. If Rousseau proclaims the slogans of freedom and nature, then Tolstoy’s slogans are freedom and life. Tolstoy perfectly understands the artificial character of Rousseau’s nature. Being essentially a realist, he does not confine himself to writing a pedagogical novel, but seeks to realize his pedagogical views in life. And just as before writing his historical novels, Tolstoy thoroughly and thoroughly studies the life and customs of the era he describes from the sources, in the same way, before embarking on the implementation of his pedagogical plans, he gets acquainted in detail with the theory and practice of education as in Russia and abroad. For this purpose, he undertakes a journey through Germany, Switzerland and France in order to get acquainted on the spot with the organization of public education in countries that have gone the furthest in the field of education. As a result of this acquaintance with the best European schools, he comes to the conclusion that the educational influence of the modern school is extremely insignificant. The school is out of touch with life. This is its main drawback. Tolstoy was finally convinced of this during his trip to the south of France, where he had to examine educational institutions for the working population.
“Not a single boy in these schools could solve, that is, solve the simplest problem of addition and subtraction. At the same time, they performed operations with abstract numbers, multiplying thousands with dexterity and speed. Questions from the history of France were answered well by heart, but by breakdown I got the answer that Henry IV was killed by Julius Caesar. The same is true in geography and sacred history. It’s the same with spelling and reading.» A person who would like to get an idea of the education of the people according to their schools “would rightly think, says Tolstoy, that the French people are ignorant, gooey, hypocritical, full of prejudice and almost wild. But it is worth entering into relations, talking with one of the common people, to be convinced that, on the contrary, the French people are almost the same as they consider themselves to be: understanding, intelligent, sociable, free-thinking and really civilized. Look at a city worker in his thirties, he will already write a letter not with such mistakes as at school; sometimes he has a completely correct concept of politics, and therefore of recent history and geography … He very often draws and applies mathematical formulas to his craft. Where did he get all this? — I found this answer involuntarily in Marseilles, starting after school to wander through the streets, guingettes, cafes chantants, museums, workshops, marinas and bookshops. The same boy who told me that Henry IV had been killed by Julius Caesar knew very well the history of the Four Musketeers and Monte Cristo. In Marseille I found 28 cheap editions, from five to ten centimes, illustrated… Besides, the museum, public libraries, theatres. Cafes, two big cafes chantants… Comedy scenes are given in each of these cafes, poems are recited. Now, according to the most cursory calculation, the fifth part of the population, which learns daily by word of mouth, as the Greeks and Romans learned in their amphitheatres. Whether this education is good or bad is another matter, but here it is an unconscious education, how many times stronger than the forced one, here it is an unconscious school that undermined the forced school and made its content almost nothing. Thus, it is not thanks to the school, but in spite of the school, that the people receive their education. “Everywhere the main part of the education of the people is acquired not from school, but from life. Where life is instructive, as in London, Paris, and, in general, in large cities, the people are educated; where life is not instructive, as in the villages, the people are not educated, despite the fact that the schools are exactly the same both here and there. The direction and spirit of the education of the people is completely independent and, for the most part, is the opposite of the spirit that they want to infuse into the schools of the people. Education follows its own independent path from schools”23.
If, therefore, the school is to truly become a factor in education, it must merge with life. Not to isolate from life, but to be closely connected with life. Just as in Anna Karenina Tolstoy ridicules the whim of Vronsky and Anna, who are building a maternity hospital for village women according to the latest science and art, while the most elementary rules of hygiene are violated in the huts, Tolstoy speaks ironically about the teachers who build in in the villages there are demonstration schools with the latest pedagogical technology. Such schools lead away from the everyday life situation, they isolate from life and thereby undermine their own educational value. Meanwhile, with the money needed to maintain one such school, it would be possible to maintain a dozen ordinary schools, the situation of which would correspond to the life of a peasant boy. The school of a village boy should not be transferred to a different environment for several hours. If the school wants to be a continuation and addition to life, then it must also share the atmosphere of this life, i.e., for example, be located in a hut, and not in an unusual building, etc. Proclaiming the slogan «education is life», Tolstoy, thus, avoids the rational artificiality of Rousseau’s «nature». As always, one-sidedly and paradoxically, he raised the question of out-of-school and post-school education with extraordinary force. Whereas earlier pedagogy was predominantly concerned with a section of school education arbitrarily snatched from the line of human life, and if Rousseau showed particularly clearly that education does not begin with school, but with “birth,”24 Tolstoy supplemented this idea by destroying the second line separating education from life: education is the task of a person’s whole life, it ends only with his death. Life is education, and the theory of education is essentially the theory of life. It is well known that Tolstoy, having begun with the theory of education, ended with the theory of life, which, as it could be shown, was already completely laid down in its foundations in his pedagogical articles of the sixties.
Freedom is not in «nature», but in «life». This is what distinguishes Tolstoy’s free education from Rousseau’s ideal of free education. How does Tolstoy justify this idea? Tolstoy distinguishes between two concepts — education and upbringing. “Education is a forced, violent influence of one person on another with the aim of educating such a person who seems good to us; and education is the free relation of men, which has as its foundation the need of one to acquire information, and of the other to communicate what he has already acquired. Teaching, Unterricht, is a means of both education and upbringing. The difference between upbringing and education is only in violence, the right to which education recognizes. Education is education by force. Education is free. «Education is the desire of one person to make another the same as himself.» This is «raising to the principle of striving for moral despotism.» But do we have the right to make other people our own likenesses? Are we better than children, happier than them? Can we honestly say that our life is good, and that we can force others to be like us, to have the same tastes, moral concepts, to do the same things? No, Tolstoy answers, «education» as the deliberate formation of people according to known patterns is not fruitful, illegal and impossible. . There is no education right. I do not recognize him, do not recognize him, did not recognize him, will not recognize him, all the young generation being educated, always and everywhere revolting against the violence of education. When the church prescribes a certain education, it believes that it has absolute truth, the mystery of salvation. Whoever is not brought up in a certain way will not be saved, and therefore, from her point of view, she has the right to educate, i.e. e. forcibly lead people to salvation. In the same way, the state in its own way has the right to compulsorily educate people. It means its own existence, its self-preservation. It needs officials, judges, soldiers, and it forcibly molds people according to its goals and needs. Finally, parents, “whatever they may be, want to make their children the same as themselves, or at least such as they would like to be themselves … Parents, more than anyone else, will depend on what their son will become : so that their desire to educate him in their own way can be called, if not fair, then natural. But you, liberal educators, asks Tolstoy, you who, in your own words, do not possess absolute truth and claim that you are raising children not for the sake of extraneous goals of the state, the well-being of parents, etc. etc., but for their own good, how will you prove this right of education? “I don’t know and don’t believe anything, but you recognize and believe a new, for us, non-existent right of one person to make other people what he wants.” Let the children themselves know what is good for them. They know it as well as you. Let them, therefore, educate themselves and follow the path that they choose for themselves. Unlike family, church, state education, public education has neither good nor bad justification. “Public education has no basis other than the pride of the human mind and therefore brings the most harmful fruits.” If the educated person himself is the goal of education, then education is meaningless.
Education is illegal. Only education is permissible as a free relationship of equal persons, that is, precisely the education that life itself gives. And therefore, the school, if it wants to become a positive factor in the development of man, and not an obstacle to him, must renounce all coercion: from an educational institution, it must become a purely educational institution. The teacher should not have any power over the students, the relationship between them should be one of equality. The school should only provide students with the opportunity to gain knowledge, students should have the right to choose what they need, what is of interest to them according to their own concepts. Such a school will immediately be both free and vital.
The Yasnaya Polyana school was an attempt to put into practice the idea of such a free education, flowing from life and serving life. It was a wonderful school. One cannot read without emotion the chronicle of the Yasnaya Polyana School, in which Tolstoy describes its labors and days. Each teacher should, in our opinion, read these pages, outstanding in their artistic beauty, in the original. Here, therefore, we confine ourselves to a brief description of the Yasnaya Polyana school. This school did not have everything that is covered by the word «school discipline»: a certain schedule of lessons, the need to come at a certain hour, calls, punishments, and any penalties for being late for lessons or leaving the lesson. “No one carries books or notebooks with them. Homework is not assigned. Not only do they carry nothing in their hands, they have nothing to carry in their heads. No lesson of anything done yesterday, he is not obliged to remember today. He is not tormented by the thought of the upcoming lesson. He carries only himself, his receptive nature and the confidence that school will be as fun today as it was yesterday.” This freedom of the students was sometimes accompanied by phenomena that puzzled the teachers.
“Sometimes, says Tolstoy, when classes are interesting and there were a lot of them (sometimes up to seven big hours a day), and the guys are tired, or before a holiday, when the stoves at home are ready to take a steam bath, suddenly, without saying a word, on the second or third In the afternoon class, two or three boys run into the room and hurry through the folders. «What do you?» — «Home». — “What about learning? After all, singing! “And the guys are talking home,” he replies, slipping away with his hat. «Who’s talking?» — Guys let’s go! “How, how? asks the puzzled teacher, who has prepared his lesson. “Stay!” But another boy runs into the room with a hot, preoccupied face. “What are you standing? he angrily attacked the detainee, who hesitantly stuffs cereal into his hat: “The guys are already in there, probably at the forge already.” — Went? — «Went». And both run out, shouting from behind the door: “Goodbye, Ivan Ivanovich!” And who are these guys who decided to go home, as they decided. “God knows them. Who exactly decided, you can not find. They did not consult, did not make a conspiracy, and so the guys decided to go home. «Guys are coming!» — and the little legs clattered on the steps, who grinned like a cat from the steps, and jumping and flopping in the snow, running around each other along the narrow path, the guys ran home screaming. Such cases are repeated once or twice a week. It is insulting and unpleasant for the teacher — who will not agree with this, but who will not also agree that as a result of one such case, how much more important are those five, six, and sometimes seven lessons a day for each class, which are freely and willingly observed every day. students»26.
The school undoubtedly gave beneficial results: in terms of teaching, its students learned to read and write, for example, “In three or four weeks, while in neighboring schools several months were spent on this. With regard to the behavior of students, there were no special incidents in the sense of violations of the order, so frequent in schools where order is forcibly forced, also did not take place. And yet, is it possible to say that Tolstoy’s children were free, that the Yasnaya Polyana school, kept alive by Tolstoy’s enthusiasm, would have continued to exist in its former form even after Tolstoy, disillusioned with his pedagogical activity, left it, which is inevitable in life the mechanism of habit and custom would not have led to the establishment in it, perhaps, of unwritten, but from that no less obligatory order? The following case from the life of the Yasnaya Polyana school, described by Tolstoy in his chronicle, will help us to answer this question.
“In the summer, during the restructuring of the house, a Leyden jar disappeared from the physical cabinet, pencils disappeared several times and books disappeared already at a time when neither carpenters nor painters worked in the house. We asked the boys, the best pupils, the first schoolchildren in time, our old friends blushed and became so timid that anyone, therefore, would think that this confusion was a sure proof of their guilt. But I knew them and could vouch for them as for myself. I realized that one thought of suspicion deeply and painfully offended them: the boy whom I will call Fyodor, a gifted and gentle nature, was all pale, trembled and cried. They promised to tell if they found out, but they refused to look. A few days later, a thief was discovered — a yard boy from a distant village. He took with him a peasant boy who had come with him from the same village, and together they hid the stolen things in a chest. This discovery produced a strange feeling in the comrades: as if relief, even joy, and at the same time contempt and pity for the thief. We suggested that they impose the punishment themselves: some demanded that the thief be whipped, but without fail by themselves; others said: sew a label with the inscription thief. This punishment, to our shame, was used by us before, and it was the same boy who a year ago himself wore a label with the inscription liar, now most urgently demanded a label for a thief. We agreed to the label, and when the girl was sewing the label, all the students looked with evil joy and made fun of the punished. They demanded even more severe punishment: «take them through the village, leave them with labels until the holiday,» they said. The punished were crying. The peasant boy, captivated by his comrades, a gifted storyteller and joker, a plump little white peanut, was simply crying loosely, with all his childish might; the other, the main criminal, hook-nosed, with dry features of an intelligent face, was pale, his teeth were trembling, his eyes looked wildly and angrily at his rejoicing comrades, and occasionally his face twisted unnaturally into tears. A cap with a torn visor was worn to the very back of the head, her hair was disheveled, her dress was stained with chalk. All this struck me and everyone now as if we had seen it for the first time. The malevolent attention of all was focused on him. And he felt it hurt. When, without looking back, with his head down, he went home with some special criminal gait, as it seemed to me, and the guys, running after him in a crowd, teased him somehow unnaturally and strangely cruelly, as if against their will an evil spirit led them , something told me that this is not good. But the matter remained as it was, and the thief walked with the label for a whole day. From that time on, it seemed to me, he began to study worse, and he was no longer visible in games and conversations with comrades outside the class …
Once I came to class, all the schoolchildren announced to me with some horror that this boy had stolen again. He stole 20 kopecks from the teacher’s room. copper money, and he was caught hiding it under the stairs. We labeled him again — the same ugly scene began again. I began to exhort him, as all educators exhort; At the same time, the talker, a grown-up boy, began to exhort him too, repeating words that he had probably heard from the janitor’s father. “Once he stole, another time he stole,” he said smoothly and sedately, he will take the habit, he will not bring it to good. I was beginning to feel vexed, I felt almost angry at the thief. I looked into the face of the punished man, even more pale, suffering and cruel, for some reason I remembered the convicts, and I suddenly felt so ashamed and disgusted that I pulled off the stupid label from him, ordered him to go where he wanted, and suddenly became convinced that with my mind, but with my whole being, I was convinced that I had no right to torment this unfortunate child, and that I could not make of him what I and the janitor’s son would like to make of him.
Doesn’t this incident in Tolstoy’s description show that the children of the Yasnaya Polyana school were not free? It was left to them, in their own way, to relate to the discovered fact, but they reacted to it in a different way, remembering the attitude of the teachers and the father-janitor towards him and imitating what they saw, as a result of which the court, nevertheless furnished with some guarantees teachers degenerated into a disorderly court of the mob. It may be objected that the remaining habits of the old school with its punishments, from which the teachers could not immediately free themselves, and the habits of the family, which set a bad example for the children, were to blame for this. But the whole question lies precisely in this: can children be free from the influence of their elders, whether in school or in the family anyway? Aren’t the influence of teachers, the influence of the father who works as a janitor, the influence of the older children surrounding them, all these kinds of coercion, sometimes much stronger than the coercion of school discipline? The mistake of Tolstoy, as well as of any anarchism in general, is in a too narrow understanding of coercion: coercion is much broader than it seems at first glance. That organized coercion, which is known under the name of «discipline» and which Tolstoy thought to abolish, is part of coercion in general, manifesting itself in a thousand influences and impressions that surround the child, from which no one but himself has the power to free him. The abolition of organized coercion only intensifies and makes more explicit the unorganized coercion, which, by enveloping the child with much greater perseverance, is even more capable of depriving him of his own will than the obvious coercion of «discipline», which is recognized in its external imposition. Tolstoy himself could not fail to notice this. “Despite the frequent repetitions to the guys,” he admits, “that they can leave whenever they want, the influence of the teacher is so strong that I was afraid lately that the discipline of classes, schedules and grades, imperceptibly for them, would not constrain their freedom. so that they do not at all submit to the cunning of our spread network of order, so that they do not lose the possibility of choice and protest. And that is why it was Tolstoy who rejoiced in his soul at those unforeseen departures from the lessons that we spoke about above. Wouldn’t it be necessary to adjust such departures over time (following Rousseau) so that the children feel free and free? Isn’t freedom here replaced by the awareness of one’s own freedom? Isn’t the abolition of school coercion reduced to the replacement of one coercion by another, even stronger one, if by freedom we understand the originality of a person, and not the arbitrariness of action? It is clear that the concept of education developed by Tolstoy turned out to be inapplicable to his children. And how could it be otherwise? After all, it is a free relationship of equal people. Isn’t the child’s unstable, vacillating, responsive to any influence temperament ready to blindly submit to the established character of the teacher and the prevailing mores of the environment? It is possible to abolish coercion over a child not by simply abolishing it, always by necessity private, but by educating in the child the inner strength of personality and freedom, which could resist any coercion, no matter where it comes from. Thus, in Tolstoy, we see, a wonderful plan led to the opposite result: freedom turned into arbitrariness, into imitation of elders, into the power of unorganized coercion.
Tolstoy himself later felt this mistake of his. “In the higher spheres of literary activity,” he writes in Confession, “I realized that it is impossible to teach without knowing what to teach, because I saw that everyone teaches differently and only hides their ignorance from themselves by disputes among themselves; here, with peasant children, I thought that this difficulty could be circumvented by leaving the children to learn what they wanted. Now it’s funny for me to remember how I hung around in order to fulfill my lust — to teach, although I knew very well in the depths of my soul that I couldn’t teach anything that was needed, because I myself didn’t know who was needed … I was so exhausted from that especially that I got confused … my activity in schools was so vaguely manifested, my wagging in the magazine became so disgusting, which consisted all in the same thing — in the desire to teach everyone and hide what I don’t know what to teach — that I fell ill more spiritually than physically, he left everything and went to the steppe to the Bashkirs — to breathe the air, drink koumiss and live an animal life.