The re-education of a child is the destruction of what has already been brought up, and the construction of a new one on the ruins of the old.
This is the hardest thing to do. The sad fate of those who have not learned to control the child and did not take care of his upbringing in advance.
Makarenko about re-education
When I began and continued this work, I believed that I was faced with a miniature task: to somehow straighten the brains, straighten the souls of these same offenders, make them fit in life, that is, heal, patch up the characters, nothing more, only what is necessary for a person to be able to somehow lead a working life, somehow — I do not pretend to greater achievements. /But as I worked, as my team grew and grew rich, as it became a Komsomol team, and not a delinquent one, I gradually increased the requirements for my business, for myself, and the case increased the demands on me and on my team, and I had already ceased to be interested in the issue of correction, I was no longer interested in the so-called offenders, because I saw that there were no offenders, there were people who were in a difficult situation, and I understood very clearly that if I were in such a position, I would also steal, hooligan, rowdy, buzz, that is, I would be like them .. / .. I came to the conclusion that there are no offenders, but there are people who are no less rich than I, who have the right to a happy life, are no less than me, talented, able to live, work, able to be happy and capable of being creators. / And then, of course, it is quite clear — no specific pedagogical tasks could no longer stand before me. / Before me was an ordinary task — to educate a person so that he was a real Soviet person, so that he could be a model of behavior. / In recent years, therefore, I have not corrected anyone, I just did ordinary Soviet work, brought up ordinary good Soviet people — (PUBLIC LECTURE IN THE LECTURE ROOM OF THE MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY ON THE TOPIC «ABOUT COMMUNIST EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR» (March 1, 1939) ).