A S MAKARENKO

PROBLEMS
O F
SOVIET
SCHOOL
EDUCATION
Anton Makarenko
A. M a k a r e n k o

PROBLEMS
OF
SOVIET SCHOOL
EDUCATION

QED
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS • MOSCOW
 Compiled by Candidates of Pedagogical Science
V. ARANSKY and A. PISKUNOV
Translated from the Russian by O. SHARTSE

A- M a i c a p e H K O
nPOBJlEM bl LUKOJlbHOrO COBETCKOrO BOCriMTAHMfl

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First printing 1965

 Contents
A. S. Makarenko-an Outstanding Soviet
E d u c a t o r ....................................... 5
LECTURE ONE. Methods of Upbringing 27
LECTURE TWO. Discipline, Regimen,
Punishment and R e w a r d ........................54
L E C T U R E T H R E E . Methods of Individ­
ual A p p r o a c h .....................................88
L E C T U R E FOUR. Work Training, Rela­
tions, Style and T o n e ..........................117
 A. S. Makarenko— an Outstanding
Soviet Educator

Every historical epoch has had its educators whose practical

activity and theoretical views exerted a strong influence on
the educational philosophy and teaching methods of the
time.
Many of the pedagogical principles maintained by Jan
Komenski and John Locke (17th century), Jean Jacques
Rousseau (18th century), Johann Pestalozzi (end 18th-begin-
ning 19th century), Johann Herbart, Friedrich Deisterweg
and K. Ushinsky (19th century), are invaluable contributions
to the treasure house of world pedagogical thought. The
views of these outstanding educators and thinkers determined
in considerable measure the development of the theory and
practice of education over the course of decades and even
centuries.
In the middle of the twentieth century the same role is
played by the pedagogical heritage of Anton Makarenko,
the Soviet practising educator, theoretician and writer.
The name of this remarkable man, who has greatly fur­
thered the development of Soviet pedagogy and practice of
communist education, is well known not only in the Soviet
Union but also far beyond its boundaries. Makarenko's
educational novels The Road to Lite and Learning to Live
are read with absorbing interest in different parts of the
world.

5
 Makarenko's Problems ot Soviet School Education, which
is a generalisation of his vast pedagogical experience and
which contains profound theoretical conclusions, has long
been the bible of Soviet teachers. It is a series of lectures
read by Makarenko for the staff of the People's Commissa­
riat of Education, R.S.F.S.R., in January 1938.
His Lectures on the Upbringing ot Children and his Book
tor Parents are the only handbooks of their kind on Soviet
home upbringing.
Makarenko's pedagogical views are based on the Marxist-
Leninist teaching on education. He practised the ideas set
forth in this teaching both at the Gorky Colony and the
Dzerzhinsky Commune.
Today, his experience is being creatively applied not only
in the U.S.S.R. but also in Poland, the German Democratic
Republic, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary,
Mongolia, and other countries. His books on education are
studied with interest by progressive teachers all over the
world.
* * *

Anton Semyonovich Makarenko was born into a working

family on March 13, 1888, in Byelopolye, Kharkov Gubernia.
His father was a painter in the railway workshops, and hard
up though he was he managed to pay for Anton's education
at the town's six-year school and after that for a year's
teachers' training course at the same school.
He began to teach school in 1905, the year of the first
Russian revolution, in Kryukovo, a suburb of Kremenchug
(Ukraine). He taught Russian and drawing. Already in the
first year of his career, this young teacher tried to establish
closer contact between school and family and to carry the
school work beyond the conventional bounds of teaching
routine.
In the turbulent revolutionary years 1905-07, Makarenko
helped the railway workers to arrange their revolutionary
meetings in the school building, took an active part in pre-

6
 paring and conducting a congress of teachers employed at
schools belonging to the railway, and read much of the
political literature published by the Bolsheviks.
In 1911, Makarenko received an appointment to the
primary school at Dolinskaya Station, about a hundred
kilometres from Krivoi Rog, in the Ukraine. Here he displayed
his gift for organisation more fully still: he introduced
various after-school activities for the pupils, took them on
trips to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sevastopol and other cities,
guided and encouraged them in their spare-time reading,
arranged shows, quizzes, and so on. His own free time, and
particularly the summer holidays, he devoted to self-improve­
ment, reading, drawing and studying music.
In the autumn of 1914, with nine years' teaching practice
behind him, Makarenko entered Poltava Pedagogical
Institute. He read widely, made a profound study of peda­
gogics, and also tried his hand at poetry and short story
writing. He graduated with honours in 1917 and went back
to Kryukovo to teach at the same school where he began
his career twelve years earlier.
After the Great October Socialist Revolution Makarenko's
rare pedagogical talent developed to the full. The Depart­
ment of Public Education put him in charge of a school with
approximately a thousand pupils. Makarenko was one of
the first to adopt the ideas of the new pedagogy, actively
joined in the campaign for reshaping the old school into the
Soviet school of the working people and applied many new
methods in practice. With a view to uniting the pupils into
a close-knit collective, he made the first attempts to organise
their work by breaking them up into teams. Makarenko also
initiated various after-school activities with great success.
Amateur theatricals was one; he put on the shows himself
and drew the teachers and parents into the work. He also
started evening classes for eliminating illiteracy among the
workers.
However, Makarenko was unable to carry on with his
versatile activities at the Kryukovo school for long. Within

7
the year, due to the developments of the Civil War, he was
compelled to move to Poltava where he was engaged from
September 1919 to June 1920 setting up a new Soviet school.
At the Third All-Russia Congress of the Komsomol, held
in Moscow in 1920, Lenin spoke on the tasks of the youth
leagues. The propositions set out by him on the unseverable
connection between Soviet education and communist con­
struction, on the need to utilise in socialist construction all
the best experience accumulated by mankind, and on the
ways and means of inculcating communist morality, were
adopted by Makarenko, his co-workers, and all Soviet teach­
ers generally as a programme of communist education in
the Soviet state.
In the autumn of 1920, the Department of Public Educa­
tion entrusted Makarenko with the organisation of a colony
near Poltava for homeless children and juvenile delinquents.
Within a few years this colony, called the Gorky Colony
from 1921, developed into a wonderful educational establish­
ment whose experience attracted the attention of teachers
and educators for many years to come.
It was here that Makarenko, in the course of his practical
activity, evolved his methods of educating new people,
citizens of a socialist society. His experience at the Gorky
Colony brought him to the firm conviction that the most
powerful educative force was socially useful productive
labour.
The productive labour of the colony inmates, limited at
that time to farming and manual training, was combined
with a balanced general development, political, physical and
aesthetic education. Labour, which was originally introduced
for a utilitarian purpose, soon became the basis of the whole
educative process and the colony's centre of activity. The
young Soviet republic, whose industry and agriculture were
in a state of disintegration and decline caused by the long
years of war and foreign intervention, was compelled to
economise on absolutely everything to speed up rehabilita­
tion. Little money could be afforded for the maintenance of

8
 the colony, and so Makarenko, as its head, had a hard time
to make ends meet.
In 1927, a commune for homeless children and adolescents
was founded on the outskirts of Kharkov in commemoration
of that great friend of children-Felix Dzerzhinsky.* Anton
Makarenko was invited to head it.
He worked there for eight years, in the course of which
the Dzerzhinsky Commune grew into a model educational
establishment with a close-knit collective formed as a result
of the practical application of his system, which he himself
modestly called ordinary Soviet education.
Here again, as in the Gorky Colony, the accent was on
productive labour which was having a most favourable in­
fluence on the one-time delinquents. At first they worked
in school workshops which, however, were run like regular
industrial enterprises according to a strictly laid down plan.
As a result of this serious approach to productive labour,
the Commune became completely self-supporting and, by
saving money, was eventually able to build two factories of
their own-one manufacturing electric drills and the other
photo cameras. Today, these cameras with the trademark
FED (Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky) are known through­
out the world.
However, it would be a gross mistake to imagine that in
organising this work Makarenko had only economical ends
in view. The ideological and theoretical basis of his system
was the Marxist teaching on the unity of physical, mental,
moral and aesthetic education, the principle of combining
school studies with productive labour in modern industry, as
the only means of rearing harmoniously developed people.
This explains why Makarenko chose for his charges such
complex types of production as the manufacture of electric
drills and photo cameras.
* As chairman of the commission for improving the life of children,
under the All-Russia Central Executive Committee, Felix Dzerzhinsky
fook vigorous measures to right the situation as regards waifs and
juvenile delinquents, and in general devoted a great deal of his time
to the welfare of children.

9
 Teaching the pupils several industrial skills to perfection
and at the same time giving them a general education was,
in fact, practising the Marxist principle of polytechnic educa­
tion. And so Makarenko had every right to say in his article
"Teachers Shrug Their Shoulders" (1932) that at the Dzer­
zhinsky Commune they did not know there was such a thing
as a chasm between physical and mental work. The pre­
paratory faculty of the Kharkov Machine-Building Institute,
opened at the Dzerzhinsky Commune in 1930, trained the
boys and girls for enrolment in higher educational establish­
ments. Besides receiving a good grounding in general subjects,
these future students also received the qualifications of highly
skilled workers.
Direct participation in the production processes, work
organisation and management of a complex modem enter­
prise, was a mighty character-building factor, cultivating in
the young people such qualities as discipline, willpower,
perseverance, a sense of collectivism and responsibility, abil­
ity to guide and obey, and also developing in them a respect­
ful regard for manual labour.
The boys and girls worked five hours a day in produc­
tion and had four hours of school. Efficient planning of the
work and the school processes left them enough time for
various other activities which furthered their physical
development and cultural education. The Commune had about
twenty permanent art and hobby circles: drama, painting,
dancing, gymnastics, literary, glider model building, and
others.
Among the different forms of non-scholastic educational
work, a place apart belongs to the arrangement of annual
trips during which the pupils gained a first-hand knowledge
of their country's geography and economy. This knowledge
enhanced their sense of patriotism and pride in their Mother­
land. They were taken to see the leading enterprises, met
the best workers and themselves took part in the work. It
goes without saying that the youngsters became the stronger
and healthier for these long summer travels.

w
 The experience of the Dzerzhinsky Commune attracted the
attention of many foreign delegations which came to the
Soviet Union in those years.
In the first five years of its existence the Commune was
visited by 127 delegations from nearly thirty countries, in­
cluding 37 delegations from Germany, 16 from France, 17
from Great Britain, 11 from South America, and 8 from the
U.S.A. All of them expressed their admiration in the visitors'
book.
This is what E. Herriot, a prominent French statesman,
wrote after visiting the Dzerzhinsky Commune at the end of
1932: "I am overwhelmed. . .. Today, I saw a veritable
miracle which I would never have believed had I not seen
it with my own eyes."
In the summer of 1935 Makarenko was appointed assistant
director of the Department of Labour Colonies of the
People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Ukrainian S.S.R.
And although officially he remained head of the Dzerzhinsky
Commune until 1937, he was no longer able to give it the
whole of his attention.
At the end of January 1937, Makarenko moved to Moscow
where he settled permanently and devoted himself entirely
to writing.
His first big literary work was a collection of sketches
entitled 1930 Marches On (1932) in which he described the
Commune. Encouraged and helped by Maxim Gorky, he
published his famous The Road to Lite (1933-35), which
immediately placed him among the best writers of the day.
This book, written in the form of a novel, brilliantly general­
ises the enormous educational work carried out at the Gorky
Colony in those years.
In 1937 Makarenko published his Book for Parents. One
may judge of its popularity from the fact that it has stood
ten editions and to this day is widely read both in the Soviet
Union and abroad.
Makarenko wrote a great number of articles on problems
of education, book reviews, screenplays and stories.

it
 His last big work was the novel Learning to Live (1938)
describing the Dzerzhinsky Commune. It was closely linked
with his first book The Road to Lite, for the nucleus of the
Commune was the group of former Gorky Colony pupils
who came over with Makarenko.
He combined his literary work with numerous personal
appearances before teachers and parents, with talks on prob­
lems of communist education, on his own experience, and
on Soviet pedagogy generally.
But his fruitful and extremely diversified activity in
Moscow came to an end too soon. Makarenko died on April
1, 1939, before he could complete the work he dreamed of
publishing all his life-his scientifically substantiated
"Methods of Communist Education".

* * *

Makarenko applied his theory of communist education in

practice. In his system the experience of building up the
Soviet school is generalised, and provision is made for
prospects of its further development in the period of com­
munist construction in the U.S.S.R.
The distinctive feature of his system is the active and
purposeful process of education, embracing all aspects of
the children's and adolescents' life and activity, and not
stopping at schoolwork alone.
As Makarenko quite rightly asserts, pedagogy should
have at its command all the various means of exerting a
positive influence on the pupils, strong enough to overcome
any harmful influence they might come up against. In other
words, education should not be restricted to the class-room,
it should influence the pupil's entire life, governing his
behaviour both in a family environment and in the company
of friends.
Makarenko s theoretical premises, just as the whole of
his practical work, are permeated with the spirit of socialist
humanism, a profound faith in man, and a love of children
12
 and youth. The basic principle of his profoundly humane
pedagogy has always been the observance of this rule: place
the most exacting demands on a person and treat him with
the utmost respect.
Guided by this principle, Makarenko attained unparal­
leled results in his work with juvenile delinquents, strays
and children whose education had been neglected. He even
insisted that difficult children as such did not exist.
In setting out his educational aims he proceeded from the
Marxist-Leninist teaching on communist education which
provides for the all-round development of personality. "I
take the aim of education to mean the programme of a human
personality, the programme of a human character, and into
the concept 'character I put all that a personality holds/'
said Makarenko.
Enlarging on this general formula, he wrote: "We want to
bring up a cultured Soviet workingman. It follows therefore
that we must give him an education, if possible a secondary
school education, we must teach him a trade, we must dis­
cipline him and make him a politically developed and loyal
member of the working class, the Komsomol and the Bol­
shevik Party. He must learn how to obey a comrade and
how to give orders to a comrade. He must know how to be
chivalrous, harsh, kind or ruthless, depending on circum­
stances. He must be an active organiser. He must have staying
power, self-control and an ability to influence others. If he
is punished by the collective he must defer to the collective,
respect its decision and take his punishment. He must be
cheerful, bright, smart in appearance, able to fight and to
build, capable of living and loving life, and he must be
happy. And that is the sort of person he must be not just
in the future but right now, every day of his life."
Makarenko stressed the importance of cultivating such
qualities as staunchness, purposefulness, ability to quickly
size up a situation, efficiency and honesty. In particular he
pointed out the necessity of cultivating patience and an ability
to surmount difficulties over an extensive period. "You may

13
£orm any number of correct ideas about what has to be done,
but if you do not instil in the child the habit of surmounting
difficulties over an extensive period, you will have taught
him nothing/' he wrote.
In his pedagogical system Makarenko ascribed the greatest
importance to productive labour, to the collective, and to
personality. Correctly understanding Soviet education to
mean collectivist education, he maintained that the way to
organise it was to set up strong, influential collectives. The
school was such a collective-a community of pupils and
teachers headed and directed by the headmaster.
Makarenko disapproved of pedagogical methods which
reduced education to the direct influence of the teacher on
the pupil. Yet in his constant concern for the shaping, strength­
ening and steady development of the collective, he never
lost sight of the child as a separate entity and always stressed
the importance of educating the individual.
He worked out a new and original method of individual
education, based on a fundamentally new approach to the
relationship between the individual and the collective. Ana­
lysing his experience at the Gorky Colony and the Dzer­
zhinsky Commune, Makarenko arrived at the conclusion that
the connection between the collective and the individual
should be not a direct link but contact maintained through the
so-called primary collective, specially formed for educational
purposes (detachment, team, class). This teaching on the
primary collective is a big step forward in the development
of pedagogy. A teacher may find its correct application a
powerful ally.
What is a primary collective? According to Makarenko's
definition it is a collective of people constantly associating
with each other and united in business, friendship, communal
interests and ideology.
In his experience the primary collective-in this case a
detachment-played a part of enormous importance in
influencing the individual. At the Gorky Colony and the
zeizhinsky Commune it was the primary collective with

14
 which the bodies of self-government (such as the genera]
meeting, the council of commanders and the Komsomol
organisation) had dealings with mainly. It was the primary
collective on which specific demands were made and which
was held responsible for every one of its members.
The primary collective was very exacting towards any one
of its members violating the norms of behaviour in any way.
This collective influence produced a strong pedagogical effect.
And it was this principle of "parallel action" on which
Makarenko based his educational work.
Another point of importance stressed by him was that the
primary collective should not be allowed to shut itself in
within the circle of its own narrow interests. The danger of
such an isolation is not excluded. Boys and girls working
on the same team, going to the same form, or attending the
same hobby circle obviously have their own particular
interests which are liable to differ from those of the other
primary collectives. Obsession with these private interests
may cause the disintegration of the school collective, the
loss of the common aim, and the ebbing of the general
enthusiasm, i
Ascribing great importance to the primary collective,
Makarenko pointed out that a true collectivist can only be
reared in a big collective that is closely linked with other
big collectives. Real Soviet education can only be achieved
when the entire collective of children, adolescents and teen­
agers regards itself as part of Soviet society.
This premise, put forward by Makarenko, is the axiom
of the Soviet system of education. Every teacher, every
educator is guided by it in his practical activity.
Makarenko, dwelling on the question of how a children's
collective should be formed, pointed out that observance of
the "law of a collective's movement" is one of the basic
principles to be applied in order to organise a collective
correctly and spur it to activity. A collective must always
have an aim set before it, the attainment of which requires
an effort. Involving all the pupils in a system of increasingly

15
complicated aims, attained through organised collective
effort is an essential condition for the development of a
collective, for uniting it and making of it an educational
factor.
Proceeding from the Marxist concept of "collective",
Makarenko taught his pupils to co-ordinate their private
interests and aspirations with the interests and aims of the
collective.
From his point of view there can be no antagonism
between them in conditions of Soviet society: private aims
must stem from common aims. He always said that if the
private aims of a children's collective are not determined
by common aims, that particular collective is organised
wrongly and the education effected in it cannot be called
"really Soviet education".
Makarenko devoted a great deal of attention to such
questions as the style and tone of a children's collective.
Style and tone are the outward forms in which the collec­
tive's activity is manifested and in which the observance of
the norms of communist morality on the part of the majority
of its members is reflected.
Style is the manifestation of a pupil's real and serious
responsibility for any job entrusted to him and for his ability
to control himself, to uphold his self-respect and preserve
it whatever the circumstances.
The style of a Soviet children's collective, Makarenko used
to say, should be characterised by a prevailing atmosphere
of good cheer, smartness and a readiness for action at a
moment's notice. Figuratively, Makarenko called the aggre­
gate of all these characteristics "life in a major key", a state
he regarded as a sign of the collective's calm confidence in
its future.
While advocating the encouragement of this mood, Maka­
renko demanded at the same time that the children should
be taught to decelerate, to use self-control, and learn not to
violate the norms of cultured behaviour or break the estab­
lished rules. He strongly disapproved of unbalanced behaviour.

16
holding that children should be taught to control their
movements and their speech.
Among the educational means facilitating the upbuilding
of a collective, he attributed a role of major importance to
the emotional in the activity of children, and particularly
to play. "In a children's collective there definitely must be
play," he used to say. "A children's collective that does not
play will never be a real children's collective. It helps to put
the collective in a cheerful, vigorous mood, and makes the
children ever ready to take up some useful activity, to do
something interesting and intelligent."
As a means of cementing the collective, traditions came
first with Makarenko. He maintained that true Soviet educa­
tion could not be effected unless there was a close-knit
collective pursuing the same goals, a collective that has stood
the test of time, and has built up certain praiseworthy tradi­
tions. He considered the cultivation and maintenance of
good school traditions a task of supreme educational
importance.
He looked upon a pupil's ability to take and give orders
to a comrade, as the case may be, a valuable trait in a col­
lective-educated person. In this connection, his experience as
an innovator appears extremely valuable to us: both at the
Gorky Colony and the Dzerzhinsky Commune he succeeded
in creating a complex system of relations based on mutual
subordination and. mutual dependence, which served to rear
strong-minded, disciplined people, who could both give and
take orders.
Talking about the methods of building up relations of
complex interdependence and the elaboration of these methods,
we must mention Makarenko's big contribution to the theory
and practice of children's self-government. In the first years
after the establishment of Soviet power, when the old school
was being broken up and the new school created, the ques
tion of the pupils' self-government was often tackled wrongly
by placing school organisations in contraposition to the teach­
ing staff. Makarenko's experience helped educators to arrive

2-163 17
at the correct solution. He showed both in his theoretical and
practical work that one of the main functions of the staff,
headed by the school principal, is to organise the children's
collective and its self-government, which is one of the more
effective means of training active and articulate members of
a society. Self-government helps pupils to cultivate habits
of organisation, to display willpower, consciousness and
discipline in a collective. The prerequisites for this are a
sense of independence and a clarity of purpose, supported
by the teaching staff and the school's Komsomol and Young
Pioneers organisations.
In order to organise educational work correctly there has
to be a close-knit collective of teachers. Makarenko stressed
again and again that success in shaping a children's collective,
and more especially in rearing its individual members, can
be achieved only if the educators act not singly but as a
body, a strong collective united by commonness of views and
convictions, where one helps the other.
If we take upbringing in a collective to be the main distin­
guishing feature of Makarenko's educational system, then
the next in importance is his education-through-work prin­
ciple. Only through joint, socially useful productive labour
can the education of real Soviet citizens be achieved. Through
nothing else but joint effort, work in a collective, mutual
assistance and interdependence in work, can the right sort
of relations be formed between people, a kinship with and
an affectionate friendship for every working man and woman
can be engendered, and a feeling of indignation and con­
demnation can be instilled against anybody who shirks work
and lives at the expense of others. Work trains a youngster
for productive endeavour and cultivates in him a correct
attitude to other people. In work a person gains confidence
in his own abilities, and from work he receives great satisfac­
tion and joy.
Its social significance apart, work plays a role of enormous
importance in a child's personal life, being the principal form
ot individual expression.

18
 Work, as a means of all-round development for a person
of communist society, must be creative and productive,
it should be organised at enterprises with a high technical
efficiency and it must be combined with school education.
This is what Lenin said about it: "An ideal future society cannot
be conceived without the combination of education with the
productive labour of the younger generation: neither training
and education without productive labour, nor productive
labour without parallel training and education could be
raised to the degree required by the present level of techno­
logy and the state of scientific knowledge."
Work in modern industry was Makarenko's principle
vehicle of education and also the pivot around which the
entire life of his pupils revolved. At the Dzerzhinsky Com­
mune work was organised in such a way that it engendered
in the boys and girls an awareness of its social purpose, an
awareness that their endeavour was part of the Soviet people's
common endeavour, an awareness that their efforts helped
to build up their country's economic strength and contributed
to the creation of the material and technical basis of
socialism.
Analysing the experience of the Gorky Colony and the
Dzerzhinsky Commune, Makarenko pointed out that, as a
means of education, labour should always be viewed in
conjunction with the other means of that educational system,
since "labour that does not go hand in hand with political
and social education remains a neutral process of no educa­
tional value".
Makarenko held the "principle of perspectives" to be one
of the main principles of Soviet education. Guided by it, he
first elaborated and then with great skill and effect applied
his system of perspectives in practice. He defined the essence
of this system in the following words: "Man must have some­
thing joyful ahead of him to live for. The true stimulus in
human life is the morrow's joy---To educate a man is to
furnish him with a perspective leading to the morrow's joy."
2* 19
In pedagogical technique this is one of the most important
objectives to be worked for. A collective of children must
be furnished with new aims to strive for all the time, the
achievement of which, while requiring a certain effort, will
bring them joy.
The supreme aim of his system of perspectives was to instil
collective and not merely personal ambitions in the children.
They had to be made to feel with all their being the forward
movement of their Motherland, her toil and her successes,
and then they would see their own life as a component of the
life of the whole society, and would struggle for a happier
lot for everybody. In this way, collective perspectives would
also become the personal perspectives of every single
pupil.
Giving assignments to the pupils was something Maka­
renko set great store by, qualifying it as an exercise for the
mind and the kind of activity that furthers the all-round
development of an individual's gifts within the framework
of a collective. These assignments should be feasible tasks,
and the individual entrusted with them by the collective
should be accountable to the collective who would also
appraise his work.
In Makarenko's view, individual approach was an integral
part of collective education. He stressed time and again that
every individual in a collective had to be worked on with
tact and subtlety to encourage the full unfolding of all his
endowments and abilities. "Only the creation of a method—
a general, single method which would at the same time give
every person a chance to develop his individual traits and
preserve his individuality-would be an organisational task
worthy of our epoch and our revolution," Makarenko said.
Every child presents a complex world of feelings and emo­
tions. And the lofty mission of the educator is to gain access
to this world, direct its development wisely, and make it the
richer for great ideals.
Makarenko s experience gives us a wonderful example of
ow to build up the character of children and teenagers.

20
 shape their world outlook, and instil in them the finest moral
qualities. From the one-time strays and juvenile delinquents
he had in his charge, he reared some 3,000 new people, new
in the full sense of the word-honest, devoted Soviet patriots
with a high sense of their socialist duty, people with a will
and initiative, well disciplined and industrious.
He ranked such questions as discipline, regimen, reward
and punishment with the more important problems of school
upbringing, to be regarded as components of the entire
system of education.
First of all it should be said that Makarenko gave a new
definition to the concept of discipline from the standpoint of
a Soviet educationist. Whereas traditional bourgeois pedagogy
regards discipline as merely a means of inculcating humility
and obedience, he regarded it as a result of education.
"Discipline is the product of the aggregate of educational
influences, which comprises the school education process, the
political education process, the process of character building,
of encountering and settling clashes and conflicts within the
collective, of forming friendships and establishing relations
of mutual trust-in short, everything that an educative pro­
cess can cover, including physical education, physical develop­
ment, and so on."
Soviet discipline in Makarenko's understanding is the
discipline of overcoming obstacles, the discipline of struggle
and advance, the discipline of striving for something, fighting
for something. "Our discipline," he said, "is a blend of a
full awareness of duty and a perfectly clear understanding,
shared by everyone, of how to act, while preserving a clear-
cut, precise outward form which brooks no argument, dis­
agreement, objection, procrastination or talk."
While asserting that discipline is built up through the
skilful organisation of a collective, he pointed out the need
to explain the rules and ethical norms of Soviet behaviour
to the pupils in a convincing and understandable way
in order to be able to demand their obseryair^Fofcihese

ws
rules. Y
/ <
21
 He considered a teachers ability to make demands on his
pupils an important requirement of pedagogical skill. In
making his demands, the teacher should be justly strict and
uncompromising. To achieve the desired educational impact
he should state his demands in a firm, businesslike tone,
impressing the pupils with his strong will, culture and per­
sonality.
The forms may differ. A milder form can be applied in
cases where peculiarities of character, lack of restraint and
ignorance of ethical norms are present, because here it is
fairly reasonable to expect the influence of experience to have
a positive effect and good habits to be gradually acquired.
But in cases where the individual deliberately opposes the
collective, defying its requirements and its power, the teacher
must make determined demands, following them through to
the end until that individual recognises that he must obey
the collective.
Reward and punishment played a notable part among the
great variety of means applied by Makarenko in his educa­
tional work. He maintained that only in conditions of trust
and confidence in the individual's good qualities could such
means as reward and punishment produce the desired educa­
tional effect. Both should be well considered and used spar­
ingly. In every single case their significance should be made
clear to the collective as a whole and to every one of its
members.
In his opinion, regimen is the code of everyday life, a
means of establishing order and of setting the rhythm for
the collective's activity. Accumulating sound disciplinary
experience and establishing the general pattern of behaviour
are the principal aims to be served. To obtain the best
educational effect, regimen must be expedient, based on the
experience of the entire collective, precise and compulsory
for all its members.
Makarenko pointed out repeatedly that a fixed, unvarying
pattern is inadmissible in educational work. He qualified
pe agogy as the most dialectical, mobile, complex and many-

22
 sided of sciences. Educational means must be suited to
circumstances, for the same means may prove good in one
case and bad in another. In educational work no means can
be put down as either good or bad if considered apart from
other means, from the entire system, from the aggregate of
educative influences.
The work of an educator is both difficult and delicate,
since it is not just children collectively that he has to deal
with, but a number of different individuals each with his
own inclinations, level of development, abilities and personal­
ity. Therefore, every lesson, every encounter with a pupil,
every conversation alone with a pupil, are small etudes in
an educator's creative work. Everything is taken into account
here-the purpose of the conversation, the circumstances under
which it takes place, the level of the collective's intel­
lectual development, and the individual peculiarities of the
pupil.
Makarenko's thoughts on the craftsmanship of teachers
are of interest and value. He said that pedagogical skill was
by no means a natural gift, a person is not born with it,
he attains it through study, training, experience and constant
self-improvement. In his opinion, the traits essential to
excellence are: a faculty for quick orientation, self-control,
calm confidence, and an ability to influence effectively not
just the collective as a whole but every one of its members
taken separately. Makarenko said that teachers should, while
still at college, get their voices trained-the voice being the
main instrument in teaching work-and perfect such tech­
niques as control of facial expression, gesture and pose
when facing a class-room of children, manner of address in
different situations, etc.
When delivering his lectures and talks to teachers, Maka­
renko always spoke with great warmth and tact of the
teacher's toil and his difficult and honourable role of embark­
ing the young generation on the road to life. His manner of
addressing the teachers was very simple, he never put
himself above them or claimed the right to preach to them.

23
Rather the contrary, he was anxious to learn from his col­
leagues because he was certain their experience contained
much that was interesting and enlightening.
* * *

A. S. Makarenko's lectures included in the book under

the general title "Problems of Soviet School Education" give
the views of this innovator in pedagogy on questions that
agitate pedagogical circles today. Some of these views remain
as topical today, although they were voiced almost thirty
years ago.
Candidates oi Pedagogical Science
V. ARANSKY and A. PISKUNOV
 PROBLEMS
OF
SOVIET SCHOOL
EDUCATION
 L E C T U R E ONE

Methods of Upbringing

The subject of our talk today is upbringing. Only remem­

ber, comrades, that I am a practising educator and so there
will inevitably be a somewhat practical bias in my words.
But in this present epoch, practical workers are introducing
some wonderful amendments into the premises of the dif­
ferent sciences. With us in the Soviet Union such workers
are called Stakhanovites. We know how many amendments
the Stakhanovites, the practical workers, have introduced
into many of the premises of sciences which are more precise
than our science, and how many records they have set in
labour productivity, in labour efficiency generally and in
their own special field particularly. It is not simply by increas­
ing the expenditure of labour energy that productivity is
rising, but by practising a new approach to work, by applying
a new logic and by distributing the elements of labour in a
new way. It follows, therefore, that labour productivity is
growing with the help of inventions, discoveries and finds.
Our field of production-the field of education-can by no
means be excluded from this general Soviet movement. And
in our field as well-it is my profound and lifelong convic­
tion-inventions are as necessary, even inventions of details,
even of trifles, and the more so of groups of details in the
system and in parts of the system. These inventions, of course,
are welcome not just from the theorists but also from

27
ordinary rank-and-file workers like myself. That is why I
permit myself to tell you, without feeling too shy about it, of
my experience and of the conclusions I have drawn from this
experience, believing as I do that in significance they should
be placed on a level with similar amendments contributed
by practical workers to certain achievements of theory.
What store of knowledge have I that I make bold to
address you?
Many believe that I am an expert in dealing with juvenile
delinquents and homeless children. That is not true. Out
of my thirty-two years of work I spent sixteen teaching school
and sixteen educating homeless children and adolescents.
True, there were some special circumstances in my teaching
career-the school I taught was maintained by a factory and
was under the constant influence of a workers' community,
a community of Bolsheviks.
Nor was my work with the homeless by any manner of
means special work with homeless waifs. In the first place,
from the very outset, I made it my working hypothesis that
no special methods were to be applied in their case; in the
second, I succeeded in a very short space of time to bring
the homeless waifs up to standard, and thereafter I was able
to work with them as with normal children.
In the last period of my work at the Dzerzhinsky Commune
near Kharkov, I already had a normal collective, attending
ten-year school, and striving for the usual goals our conven­
tional schools strive for. The members of this collective, the
one-time waifs, did not really differ in any respect from
normal children. If they did, it was for the better, I think,
since life in this working collective provided more educational
stimuli than even a family environment could give a child.
Therefore, my practical conclusions may be applied not to
the homeless, difficult children alone, but to any children's
collective, and consequently to anyone working in the field
of education.
So much for my introductory observations, which I would
ask you to make note of.

28
 And now, a few words about the very character of my
practical, pedagogical logic. I came to certain conclusions,
arriving there neither painlessly nor quickly, but on the
contrary after going through several stages of rather torment­
ing doubts and errors. These conclusions may sound strange
to some of you, but I have ample supporting evidence to
tell you about them without any undue modesty. Some of
these conclusions have a theoretical character. I shall
enumerate them briefly before going on to describe my own
experience.
The very character of the science of upbringing is an
interesting question in itself. A conviction exists among the
pedagogical thinkers of our time and also among those who
organise our pedagogical work that no special methods of
upbringing are needed at all; that teaching methods, the
methods of teaching a school subject, should include educa­
tional thought in its entirety as well. I do not agree with this.
I maintain that the science of upbringing, I mean pure
upbringing, is a separate field, quite distinct from teaching
methods.
The following makes me firmly convinced that this is so.
In the Soviet Union, not just the tiny tots and schoolchildren
but all adult citizens are subjected to educative influences
at every step. They are subjected to them either in specially
organised forms, or in the form of a broad public stimulant.
With us, in our country, our every undertaking, every cam­
paign, every process, apart from pursuing special aims, is
invariably accompanied by educational aims as well. It is
sufficient to recall our recent Supreme Soviet elections*: this
was educational work at its greatest, involving tens of mil­
lions of people, even those who would seem to have nothing
to do with educational work, even the most passive were
brought to the fore and drawn into active work. I want to
emphasise the successes scored by the Red Army in its

* Reference is made to the 1937 elections to the Supreme Soviet,

the highest organ of state power in the Soviet Union.

29
educational work: you know very well that every person
who has served in the Red Army comes home a new man,
not simply equipped with new military and political knowl­
edge, but a man with a new character, new ways, and a new
type of behaviour, which is achieved through the enormous
efforts of Soviet socialist education, a single whole in tone,
style and content, furnished, of course, with a definite educa­
tional method. We can already make a summing up of this
method which has been practised for twenty years under
the Soviet government. And if we add to it the educational
achievements of our schools, our institutes, and our organisa­
tions of another type-kindergartens and children's homes,
we shall see that we have accumulated a vast store of experi­
ence in educational work.
As a matter of fact, if we took the tried and tested,
established and precisely formulated list of educational
means, plus the assertions and propositions of our Party and
the Komsomol, and the views expressed by Comrade Lenin,
we would already now be fully able to compile a workable,
comprehensive code of all the theorems and axioms of the
educational set-up in the U.S.S.R.
In my experience I was obliged to make upbringing my
main goal. Since I was entrusted with the reformation of the
so-called juvenile delinquents, my primary task was to give
them a moral education. No one even thought of setting
before me the task of educating them in the sense of book­
learning. I was given boys and girls-juvenile delinquents or
strays-with much too unconventional and dangerous traits
of character, and what I was expected to do above all else
was to remould that character.
At first it seemed that I would have to concentrate on their
moral education as a separate sort of subject, and in par­
ticular on their work education. I myself did not hold this
extreme view too long, but my colleagues at the Dzerzhinsky
Commune supported it for quite a long time. In some com­
munes, even at the NKVD (under the old administration) this
remained the prevailing policy.

30
 The pursuit of this policy was helped along by a seemingly
admissible assertion that attending school should be a matter
of choice: those who wished could come and study, those
who didn't need not. What it actually ended in was that no
one took school seriously. A bad mark or some other
unpleasantness in class left the pupil free to immediately
claim his right to give up school.
It did not take me long to become convinced that in the
system of labour colonies school is a powerful vehicle of
moral education. In the last years of my work I was per­
secuted by certain Labour Colony Department workers for
upholding this principle. I made the ten-year school my basis,
and I am firmly convinced that real reformation, complete
reformation that is proof against any relapses, can only be
achieved with the help of a full ten-year school, but still,
even now, I remain of the opinion that methods of upbring­
ing have a logic of their own, relatively independent from
the logic of teaching methods. In my view, the one and the
other-education and teaching methods-are two more or less
independent branches of pedagogy. Needless to say, these
two branches have to be linked organically. And, needless to
say, all work done in class is, in effect, educational work.
But reducing education to book-learning is something I
consider out of the question. Further on I shall dwell on this
point in more detail.
And now a few words on what can be taken as a basis of
educational methods.
To begin with, I am convinced that educational methods
cannot be evolved from what is suggested by adjacent
sciences, no matter how far developed such sciences as
psychology and biology, the latter especially after Pavlov s*

* Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936)-the outstanding Russian

physiologist. Academician and Nobel Prize winner, who founded the
teaching on the higher nervous activity. His major works are: Twenty
Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity (Behaviour)
of Animals (1922), Lectures on the Work of the Cerebral Hemispheres
(1927).

31
achievements, may be. I am convinced that deriving an
educational means directly from these sciences' findings is
something we have not the right to do. These sciences should
play a vastly important part in educational work as control
propositions for verifying our practical achievements, but
by no means as prerequisites for a conclusion.
Moreover, I consider that an educational means can only
be evolved from experience, and then verified and approved
by such sciences as psychology and biology.
This assertion of mine is based on the following: pedagogy,
and in particular the theory of education, is above all else
a science of practical expediency. We cannot educate a person
unless we have a clear-cut political aim in view. If we don't,
we have not the right to take up educational work at all.
Educational work that does not pursue a clear, far-reaching
and minutely studied aim, is education without a political
purpose, and we find evidence proving this at every step in
our Soviet public life. The Red Army is making a great, an
enormous success of its educational work, quite outstanding,
really, in world history. This success is so great, so enormous,
because the Red Army's methods are always expedient, and
the Red Army educators always know what sort of people
they want to bring up and what goal they want to attain. Now
the best example of inexpedient pedagogical theory is the
lately deceased pedology.* In this sense pedology may be
regarded as the exact opposite of Soviet education. It was a
system not furnished with an aim.
Wherefrom can the aims of education arise? From our
social needs, of course, from the aspirations of the Soviet
people, from the aims and tasks of our revolution, from the
aims and problems of our struggle. And so, obviously, a
formula of aims cannot be derived from either biology or

* In the late 1920s and middle 1930s, pedological ideas became

rather popular with a part of the Soviet pedagogues and psychologists.
,* «. •^.a^ f ren^° was sharply opposed to pedology, maintaining
t at it hindered the development of the Marxist teaching on educa-

32
 psychology, but only from our social history, from our social
environment.
And I think that we should not make such claims on
biology and psychology and seek in them a confirmation
of our teaching methods. They are developing, and before
the next ten years are out both psychology and biology will
probably set out precise propositions on human behaviour,
and then we shall be able to base our work on these sciences.
The attitude of our social needs and the social aims of
socialist education to the aims and findings of the theory of
psychology and biology must always go on changing, and
maybe the change will even involve the constant participa­
tion of psychology and biology in our educational work. But
what I am convinced in firmly is that a pedagogical means
cannot be derived from either psychology or biology simply
by deductive logic. I have already said that pedagogical
means must be originally derived from our social and polit­
ical aims.
It is my belief that it was in the matter of setting an aim,
in the matter of expediency, that pedagogical theory was
mostly at fault. All the mistakes, all the deviations in our
pedagogical work always occurred where the logic of
expediency was concerned. Let us call them mistakes for
reference.
I see three types of such mistakes in pedagogical theory:
deductive statements, ethical fetishism and isolated means.
In my practical activity I suffered greatly from trying to
overcome these mistakes. Someone would pick on a method
and assert that it would have such and such an effect. For
example, take the story of the complex method,* which is
well known to all of you. Someone would recommend a
method—in this case the complex method of teaching, and

* A system widely practised in Soviet schools in the 1920s, whereby

the study material on various subjects was united to make single themes.
Experience showed that a teaching method such as this gave the
pupils no chance to acquire systematic knowledge on the basic sciences
and prevented them from cultivating essential learning habits.

3-163 33
deduct speculatively, by means of logic, that this method
must bring about good results.
And so the effect-the good results of the complex method-
became established before experience had proved it so. But
established it nevertheless was that the result would defini­
tively be good; that the desired effect would be hiding in
some secret places of the psyche.
When we, the modest practical educators, asked to be
shown this good result, we were told: "How can we show
you what's inside a human soul, it's there that the good result
must be, it's complex harmony, the connection of parts. The
connection between the separate parts of a lesson must
surely leave a positive impression on a person's mentality."
In other words, even logic precluded this method from
being put to the test. And a vicious circle was formed: the
method was good, therefore the result must be good, and
since the result was good, the method must be good.
Mistakes such as this, resulting from the prevalence of
deductive logic and not experimental logic, were many.
There were also many mistakes of the so-called ethical
fetishism type. For example, take labour education.
I, too, was one of those who made that mistake. The very
word "labour" sounds so pleasant, it holds so much that to
us is sacred and justified, that the concept "labour education"
appeared to us absolutely precise, definite and correct. And
then we discovered that the word "labour" as such does not
contain anything like the only correct, finished logic. At first,
work was regarded as ordinary work, what may be termed
as self-service, and then as an aimless labour process, as
unproductive labour-an exercise in the waste of muscle
power. The word "labour" so illumined the logic that it
appeared infallible, although it was revealed at every step
that there was no genuine infallibility. But belief in the
ethical power of the term itself was so strong that the logic,
too, seemed sacred. And yet my own experience and the
experience of my teacher friends has shown that no educative
means can be evolved from the ethical colouring of a term.

34
that labour as applicable to education can be organised in
different ways and that it can bring about a different result
in every separate case. At any rate, labour that does not go
alongside of school education, that does not go alongside of
social and political education, remains a neutral process of
no educational value. You can make a person work as much
as you want, but unless he receives a political and moral
education at the same time, unless he takes part in public
and political life, this work will be no more than a neutral
process that yields no positive results.
Work can be a means of education only if it is part of a
general system.
And, last but not least, the mistake of the "isolated means"
type. Very often people say that such and such a means
unfailingly brings about such and such a result. One partic­
ular means. Let us take an assertion which at first glance
seems to be the most indisputable one and which is often
voiced in pedagogical writings-the question of punishment.
Punishment educates a slave-this is a precise axiom which
has never been subjected to doubt. This assertion, of course,
contains all the three mistakes. There is the mistake of the
deductive prediction type, and the ethical fetishism type.
In punishment, the logic stems from the very colouring
of that word. And, last but not least, there is the mistake
of the "isolated means" type. And yet I am convinced that no
means can be considered in isolation from a system. No
means whatever can be pronounced good or bad if it is
considered apart from other means, from a whole complex
of influences. Punishment may educate a slave, but sometimes
it may also educate a very good person, a very free and proud
person. In my own experience, you will be surprised to hear,
punishment was also among the means I resorted to when
I was confronted with the task of inculcating dignity and
self-respect in my charges.
I will tell you afterwards in what cases punishment results
in the cultivation of human dignity. Obviously, this effect
can be achieved only in a definite environment of other means
3* 35
and at a definite stage of development. No pedagogical means,
not even a universally accepted means-which is what we
usually call persuasion, explanation, talk, and public influ­
ence-can be termed a perfect and invariably useful means.
The best of means is sure to be the worst of means sometimes.
Take a means like collective influence, that is the influence
of the collective on the individual. Sometimes it will be good
and sometimes bad. Take individual approach, the heart-to-
heart talk of teacher with pupil. Sometimes it will be beneficial
and sometimes harmful. No means can be regarded from the
point of view of its usefulness or harmfulness if it is con­
sidered apart from the entire system of means. And finally,
no system of means can be recommended as a standing
system.
I recall the history of the Dzerzhinsky Commune. This
Commune, set up in 1928, grew up as a collective of boys
and girls not older than eighth-form pupils (that is, 15 or 16).
It was a healthy, jolly collective, but it was a far cry from
the collective of 1935 with its big Komsomol organisation
and its veteran communards, some as old as twenty years of
age. Obviously, a collective such as the latter called for an
entirely different system of education.
Personally I am convinced of the following: if we took
an ordinary Soviet school and placed it in the hands of good
teachers, organisers and educators for twenty years, it would
travel such a long and wonderful way in that time-provided
it was retained in good pedagogical hands-that at the end
of this road the system of education would differ greatly from
what it had been at the start.
By and large, pedagogy is the most dialectical, mobile,
complex and diversified of sciences. This assertion makes the
credo of my pedagogical faith. I am not trying to say that
I have verified everything there is to verify in practice, far
from it, because I am still not clear on very many points,
but I do advance it as a working hypothesis which at any
rate deserves to be put to the test. I personally have the
proof of my experience, but of course it needs putting to the

36
 test in extensive Soviet social practice. By the way, I am
convinced that the logic of what I have said is not incom­
patible with the experience of our best Soviet schools nor
that of very many of our best childrens and adult collectives.
So much for my general preliminary observations on which
I wished to dwell.
Let us now pass to the most important question, that of
setting up educational goals. By whom, when and how can
educational goals be set, and what exactly are educational
goals?
I take the concept "educational goal" to mean the pro­
gramme of a personality, the programme of a character, and
what is more I put into the concept "character" all that a
personality holds, that is, the nature of his outward mani­
festations, his inner convictions, his political education and
his knowledge-the picture of a human personality in its
entirety. I maintain that we, pedagogues, should have such
a programme of human personality towards which we must
strive.
I could not do without a programme like that in my
practical work. There's no teacher like experience. In that
same Dzerzhinsky Commune I was given a few hundred
people, and in every one of those people I saw deep-rooted
and dangerous urges, deep-rooted habits, and I had to stop
and think: what should their character be like, what must
I strive for in order to mould these boys and girls into worthy
citizens? And when I began to ponder over it I discovered
that this question could not be answered in a brief two words.
The notion-to mould a good Soviet citizen-did not yet show
me the way. I had to work out a more comprehensive pro­
gramme of human personality. And, as I began to tackle it,
I came up against the following question: this programme
now, must it be the same for everybody? Why, am I supposed
to wedge every personality into a single programme, trim
them to a pattern and strive for this pattern? If so, I must
sacrifice the individual charm, the originality and the peculiar
beauty of personality, because if I don't what sort of a

37
pattern will I get? I could not simply go and answer this
question as an abstract problem, but then it was solved for
me in practice in the course of ten years.
I discovered that indeed there must be a general pro­
gramme, a pattern, and also an individual amendment to it.
The question did not arise for me: should my pupil grow
up a courageous man or should I bring up a coward? A
pattern was in order here*, every one of my pupils had to
grow up a brave, staunch, honest and industrious patriot. But
what line to take when you have to deal with such delicate
aspects of a personality as talent? And sometimes when it
comes to talent, when you are confronted by it, you do have
to suffer some tormenting doubts. I had a case like that. The
boy, Terentyuk his name was, finished ten-year school. He
was an excellent pupil, all his marks were fives (we had a
best of five system), and upon graduation he announced that
he wished to enrol at a technological institute. I had earlier
discovered in him a great gift for acting, and it was the gift
of a singularly powerful comedian, extremely subtle, sharp-
witted, skilled by nature in mimicry and endowed with
splendid vocal chords-an intelligent sort of comedian, I
mean. I saw that an actors career was where he would attain
the best results, and that he'd be no more than an average
student at a technological institute. But all my boys wanted
to become engineers, it was the craze of the time. They'd
laugh in your face if you so much as intimated that they might
become, say, teachers*. "How do you mean? Become a teacher
purposely?" I said to Terentyuk: "Go on the stage." And
he: "Oh no, is that work, being an actor?" And so he went
and enrolled at a technological institute, leaving me pro­
foundly convinced that we were losing a fine actor. I gave
in, for after all I had no right to make a wrench like that in
a person's life___
But still I couldn't help interfering. He had been studying
at the institute for six months then, and in his spare time
had been attending our amateur theatricals circle. I thought
and thought about it, and then I made up my mind: I sum-

35
 moned Terentyuk to a general meeting, and announced that
I was putting in a complaint against him for disobedience.
Our boys and girls said to him: "Aren't you ashamed of
yourself, why don't you do what you're told?" And they
passed a resolution that he should leave the technological
institute and join the school of theatrical art instead. He went
about looking very sad for a while, but he could not go
against the collective, for it was the collective that paid him
a monthly maintenance grant and gave him a place to live.
He has become a splendid actor, he is already playing in one
of the best theatres in the Far East, having in two years
traversed the road others only traverse in ten. And he is very
grateful to me now.
Still, if I were confronted with a similar problem now,
I should be afraid to solve it-how can I know if I have the
right to commit this violence? The question of whether a
person has the right to tamper with a pupil's chosen career
remains unsolved for me. But I am profoundly convinced that
every teacher will be confronted by this question-has he
the right to interfere in the development of a character and
guide it in the correct direction, or must he passively look
on? To my mind, the question should be answered in the
affirmative-yes, he has that right. But how to go about it?
In every separate case the question has to be approached
individually, because it's one tiling to have the right, and
another to exercise it properly. They are two different prob­
lems. And it's very possible that a time will* come when
teaching people how to perform this operation will play a
part of paramount importance in the training of our educa­
tors. After all, a surgeon is taught how to trepan the skull.
And with us, a teacher will perhaps be taught how to perform
this "trepanation"-more tactfully, more successfully, than I
had done, perhaps, and they'll be taught how to guide a
person in the best direction by making the most of his
inherent qualities, leanings and abilities.
I shall now set out those practical forms which in my
experience and the experience of my colleagues were applied

39
with the greatest success in our educational work. I regard
the collective as the supremely important form of educational
work. Pedagogical literature would seem to contain a great
deal about the collective, but somehow the writings carry
little conviction.
What is a collective and how far can we interfere with it?
I am making observations of very many schools both here
in Moscow and in Kiev where I often go now and have often
gone in the past, and I do not always see a real collective
of pupils. Occasionally I do see a class-room collective, but I
have hardly ever seen a school collective.
I shall now tell you in a few simple words about my col­
lective, reared by my friends and myself. You must remem­
ber, though, that the conditions I worked under were unlike
those of an ordinary school, because in my case the pupils
worked in our own factory, they lived in, and in the over­
whelming majority had no parents, in other words they had
no other collective. And so naturally I had more means of
collective education available to me than a school teacher has.
But I am not inclined to put it down to conditions alone. At
one time I was headmaster of an ordinary school where the
pupils were children of railway workers, or rather workers
of a factory where railway coaches were built, and there,
too, I had them knitted into a school collective.
There are some very strange things happening in school
practice, which in its time was directed by the old leadership
of the People's Commissariat of Education, things that are
quite incomprehensible to my pedagogical soul. To clarify.
I was in one of the recreation parks yesterday, a park with
its own Palace of Young Pioneers. In the same district there
is a Pavlik Morozov House,* it's a separate building. And
in that same district there are thirteen schools. Yesterday I

* Pavlik Morozov, fourteen-year-old Young Pioneer, son of a poor

peasant, fought heroically against the kulaks in his home village during
the period of collectivisation. The kulaks murdered him in 1932. A
large number of Young Pioneer squads and palaces bear Pavlik
Morozov's name.

40
 saw how those three institutions-the school, the Palace of
Young Pioneers and the Pavlik Morozov House-pull the
children about from one collective to another. The children
have no collective. During school hours they belong to one
collective, at home to another one, at the Palace of Young
Pioneers to a third one, and at the Pavlik Morozov House
to a fourth. They drift from one collective to another, choosing
one in the morning, a different one at lunchtime, and
still a different one at night. I witnessed the following scene
yesterday: the Palace of Young Pioneers has a dance circle,
it's called the rhythmics circle in a somewhat old-fashioned
way, actually, it's just dancing. The Komsomol organiser of
one of the schools declared: "We shan't allow our girls to
attend that circle." The headmaster of the school was indig­
nant: "Can you imagine it? The Komsomol organiser has
declared that he won't let the girls attend!" The headmaster
dragged the Komsomol organiser to a public hearing. "Look
what he's doing!" And the Komsomol organiser stuck to
his guns: "I said I wouldn't and I won't." A conflict. And I
remembered a conflict of a similar type we had at our
Commune. We ran a great variety of hobby circles, very
serious study circles too, we had real gliders, and a cavalry
section.... Well, one boy, a very good boy, a Young Pioneer,
joined the Kharkov Palace of Young Pioneers through his
Pioneer organisation and there took part in Arctic studies,
doing so well that the Palace awarded him a prize-a trip
to Murmansk with a group of other boys. This boy, Misha
Peker his name was, came back to the Commune and told
everyone that he was going to Murmansk.
"Where's this you're going?" one of the older boys asked.
"Murmansk."
"Who'll let you?"
"I'm being sent by the Palace."
At a general meeting the older members of the Commune
demanded an explanation from Misha-who was sending him
and where.

41
 'Tm going to Murmansk to explore the Arctic, and I'm
being sent by the Palace of Young Pioneers/' Misha told
them.
There was a general outcry.
' How dare the Palace send you anywhere! And supposing
we want you to go on an assignment to Africa or something
tomorrow? W ere planning a trip down the Volga and you're
our clarinetist, but even if you couldn't play the clarinet
what s the big idea playing both sides? Serving two masters,
that s what you re doing. No, you're not going anywhere.
You ought to have asked the general meeting's permission to
accept all those prizes and things."
Misha obeyed the general meeting. But the Young Pioneer
and Komsomol organisations, and also the Palace of Young
Pioneers found out, and there was talk: "Wbat's going on at
the Dzerzhinsky Commune? We're sending a person to the
Arctic, and here they tell him: no, you're not going, you've
got to stay and play the clarinet because we're planning
a trip down the Volga." The matter was taken all the way
to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Komsomol Organ­
isation. But it was settled without any trouble. Members of
the Commune's Komsomol organisation said: "If Misha must
go, we won't hold him by main force, of course, we'll give
him his monthly grant and everything, and if he wishes he
may join the Palace and stay there. ... And if need be, we
ourselves will send anyone we want to the Arctic to make
the necessary investigations and we'll do our share to help
in the exploration of the North Pole. At the present time our
plans do not include it, that's all." And to Misha: "So what
if Schmidt* does this and Schmidt does that! Everybody in
the Soviet Union can't go to the North Pole, and so it's no
use arguing^that it's everybody's business to go exploring the
orth Pole! Evidently Misha meant to argue, but they told

astroimmnr (*8.91'1956)-prominent Soviet mathematician,

1Qo o h*hl*A 2 9e°Physicist' Hero of the Soviet Union. From 1929 to
of the U S S R more ^ an one expedition to explore the Arctic regions

42
him: "All right now, you've done enough talking." And then
he said: "I don't want to go myself now."
And here's another question. I've been to several summer
camps near Moscow. They're good camps, it's a pleasure
to stay at one and, of course, they're wonderful health-build­
ing establishments. But what surprised me was that children
from different schools come there, and that's something I
can't understand. I believe that in a way it upsets the
harmony of education. A boy belongs to one school collective,
but his summer holidays he spends in a mixed collective. It
means that his school collective plays no part in organising
his summer holidays. And there you are: one senses a friction
in the Palaces of Young Pioneers and elsewhere, and I know
what causes this friction.
Correct Soviet education must be organised by forming
united, strong and influential collectives. The school must
be a single collective where all the educative processes are
properly organised. Every separate member of the collective
should feel his dependence on the collective, he should be
devoted to the interests of the collective, he should uphold
these interests and value them above all else. But a situation
in which every separate member of a collective is free to
find associates for himself after his own taste, without using
his collective's help and means to do so, I consider not right.
The Young Pioneer Palaces in all our towns are doing excel­
lent work, and those in Moscow especially. We may applaud
the efforts of very many of the workers and the methods
of work they practise. But while they are doing such an
excellent job and our society helps them in this, it gives
some of our schools a chance to dodge any extra work. Many
of the schools do not trouble to start hobby circles because
pupils can attend them at the Palaces of Pioneers. And,
certainly, excuses can always be found: either they have no
suitable premises or no funds, or again no instructors to run
these circles, and so on and so forth. I am all for a collective
where the entire educative process is properly organised.
Personally, I see it as a system of strong, powerful, well-

45
equipped and fully armed collectives. But these are only the
external requirements of a well-organised collective....
The same Palace of Young Pioneers, or in other words the
childrens club, can work alongside the school, but the work
should anyway be organised by the school. The school should
be answerable for this work, and it has got to be a joint
effort. The Komsomol organiser who was against the girls
attending the rhythmics circle was right. If he is responsible
for the upbringing of the children in his collective, he must
take an interest in and be answerable for what his charges
do in the Palace of Young Pioneers. This breaking up of the
educative process among different institutions and persons,
bound by no mutual responsibility or authority, can serve no
useful purpose.
I do realise that a single children's collective, excellently
equipped and armed, would naturally cost more money to
maintain, but it is very possible that in the long run it would
prove to be the more economical, if efficiently organised.
All this concerns the pattern of collectives as such. In
short, I am inclined to insist that the role of a single collec­
tive, guiding children in their education, must belong to the
school. And all the other institutions must be subordinated
to the school.
I am convinced that if a collective has no set goal, it is
hopeless to try and organise it. Every collective must have a
common collective goal, set not before the separate forms,
but before the whole school, which is .absolutely essential.
My collective numbered five hundred people. Their ages
ranged from eight to eighteen, in other words, it included
pupils from the first to the tenth forms. They obviously dif­
fered from one another in a great many things. The older
ones were better educated, more skilled in industrial work,
and more cultured. The youngest were, of course, illiterate
and closer to the definition "strays". In the final count, they
were simply children. Nevertheless, in the last years of my
work all the five hundred made up a genuinely single-minded
collective. I never permitted myself to deny any one of my

44
 charges his rights as a member of the collective or his vote,
irrespective of his age or development. The general meeting
of the Commune members was indeed a real governing body.
It was this idea of the general meeting functioning as the
governing body that aroused the protests and doubts of my
critics and chiefs. They said: You can't allow such a large
general meeting to make decisions, you can't trust the
management of a collective to a crowd of youngsters. They
were right, of course. But then my whole point was to get
those children to be not just a crowd, but a general meeting
of members of a collective.
There are countless ways and means of changing a "crowd"
into a general meeting. It can't be done by any artificial
means, nor can it be achieved in one month. This is one of
those cases when a striving for quick results invariably ends
in failure. Take a school where there is no sort of collective,
no co-ordination, where at best a form lives a life apart and
comes together with the other forms the way we come
together with the passers-by in the street. To shape a col­
lective out of this amorphous collection of children would,
naturally, be a long and difficult job (taking more than just
a year or two). But then if a collective has once been shaped,
if it is kept whole, well looked after and has its development
closely watched, it can live for ages. And especially in
school, where a child spends eight or ten years, such a col­
lective must be treasured as the most powerful instrument of
education.
A children's collective is a mighty force; in power it is
practically unsurpassed, yet it can easily be broken up, of
course. A sequence of errors, a series of changes in the
guidance may reduce it to a "crowd." But the longer a col­
lective lives, the stronger it grows, the keener it becomes to
go on living.
And now we come to one very important condition, which
I should like to stress particularly. Tradition. Nothing
cements a collective so strongly as tradition. Cultivating tradi­
tions and instilling respect for them is an extremely important

45
part of educational work. A school that lacks traditions
cannot be a good school, and the best schools I have seen,
in Moscow too, are those that have built some up. What
is a tradition? I have met with opposition in the matter of
traditions as well. Our old educationists used to say: "Every
law, every rule should be sensible and logically clear. And
you are bringing in tradition, the sense and logic of which
have long disappeared." Quite right, I did bring in tradition.
Here's an example. When I was younger and had less work
to do, I used to get up at 6 in the morning every day and
make a roll-call: that is, I went to the dormitory together
with the detachment commander on duty, and my coming
was saluted with the order "Attention!" I took the roll-call
of the commune members and made my morning check-up.
I was the commune's Commanding Officer to them then, and
as such I could examine any disputes that needed settling and
mete out punishments. No one in the Commune except me
had the right to impose punishment, that is barring the
general meeting, of course. When I was no longer able to
take the roll-call personally every day I told my charges
that thereafter the commander on duty would do it in my
place.
Gradually this became a routine procedure. And so a
tradition was established: when taking the roll-call the
commander on duty had the authority of a commanding
officer, and his word was law. With time, the original reason
was forgotten. Newcomers to the Commune knew that the
duty officer was empowered to impose punishment but they
did not know why. The old ones remembered of course. The
duty officer would tell them: "Two fatigues for you." And
they'd answer: "Yes, sir." But if the same duty officer had
tried to exercise this right at any other time of the day, they
would have said to him: "And who're you to give us orders?"
It became a fixed tradition, and it did much to cement the
collective.
We had very many of these traditions in my collective,
virtually hundreds of them. I didn't know them all, but the

46
 boys and girls did. They knew them even if they weren't
recorded, they used their feelers or something to detect them.
"Is this correct behaviour?" They would ask themselves.
"Why? Because our elders behave this way." Copying the
experience of their elders, respecting the elders' logic,
respecting their endeavour to build up the Commune, and,
most important, respecting the rights of the collective and its
representatives-these are vastly important attitudes and they
are, of course, upheld by tradition. The life of the children
is made the more beautiful for these traditions. Living as
they do within this pattern of traditions, they take a personal
pride in these special laws peculiar to their own collective
and try to perfect them.
To my mind, correct Soviet education cannot do without
traditions. Nor can it be achieved unless a strong self-
respecting collective of pupils has been built up with a
dignity of its own.
I could name very many interesting traditions, but I will
only mention a few as instances. Here's one, it's a tradition
too, and a funny one at that. A member of the sanitary
commission is on duty every day, he or she wears an armband
with a red cross on it, and has far-reaching rights, the rights
of a dictator, actually. He or she can ask any member of the
collective, any Komsomol member, to leave the table and go
and wash his hands, and there is no choice but to obey. He
or she has the right to drop in at the flat of any member of
the staff, be he an engineer or a teacher, and then report to
the general meeting that there's dirt in so and so's flat. It
was made a rule that no details were to be mentioned, they
simply said: dirt. It was quite enough to start a drive for
cleanliness. It became a tradition, I can't remember how it
started to elect this "dictator" from among the girls, but it
had to be a girl, someone from the lower forms, and she had
to be a fiend for neatness. Say, they'd propose someone, but
the rest would object: "It won't work, she's already 17."
What was wrong with that? "The other day she went on duty
with a hole in her stocking, so she's no good for the job."

47
Why does it have to be a girl and not a boy? A boy, they
said, couldn't always be trusted to tidy up after himself, and
then girls are meaner by nature. If a girl finds fault she won't
care if the misdoer is her friend or enemy, she'll hang on
regardless. I didn't think it fair to the boys and the older
girls. They all agreed with me, but just the same when the
elections came round and you proposed a girl of Komsomol
age, they'd all vote against her, and call for one of Young
Pioneer age. And the one they'd elect would be a mere child,
you wouldn't dream of entrusting the job to her. "No," they'd
say. "She's the right kind."
Those sanitary commission girls were real fiends, they
were a proper menace, one of those twelve-year-olds would
be after you all day-at dinner, at work, in the dormitory,
everywhere. The rest would grumble: "What a life! When
they can't find a speck of dust in the dormitory they'll turn
a chair upside down and make a fuss if there's a bit of fluff
or a single hair."
And she would put in her report that she found dirt in
dormitory 15. And there was no arguing against it because
it was true. This Nina, a mere child, would say: "You were
combing your hair and dropping it all over the floor, so what
am I expected to do-cover you up?" Grownup fellows would
listen to this child accounting to them for her work, enumer­
ating the rooms she had visited and making her comments
on them, and they'd ask themselves: "Has she done well?"
"Very well." Next time they'd elect her again, quite forgetting
that they themselves had thought her a nuisance.
The collective felt that it was precisely to this sort of girls
that the work should be entrusted-little girls, the most
pedantic, the neatest and the most honest, girls too young
to fall in love or get carried away with anything else. This
tradition struck such deep roots, that even at Komsomol
bureau meetings they'd say: "No, this girl won't do, let's
get someone younger like Klava, she'll work hard."
Children are awfully good at creating such traditions.

48
 Admittedly, when creating traditions a certain instinctive
conservatism must be used, laudable conservatism I mean:
respecting what has been done, respecting the values created
by our comrades and refusing to let them be shattered by
somebody's whim. (Mine, in this case.)
Among other traditions, I value one in particular and this
is the tradition of militarisation-as a game. ... This must
not be a repetition of an army unit's rules. By no manner
of means must it be a copying and imitating of something.
I am against perpetual marching, which certain young
educators practise to excess. Their pupils are always march­
ing, whether they're on their way to the dining-room, to
work or anywhere else. It looks bad and is quite unnecessary.
But in army life, especially in the life of the Red Army, there
is much that is beautiful and thrilling, and in my work I
became more and more convinced in the usefulness of this
beauty. Children have the knack of further beautifying this
"militarisation", making it more childlike and pleasant. My
collective was militarised to a certain degree. To begin with,
the terminology we used was somewhat military, for instance,
"detachment commander". Terminology is important. I don't
agree, for instance, that it's all right to call a school an
incomplete secondary school.* I would give this matter
thought. How does it sound: I go to an incomplete secondary
school? A truncated title, surely. The name itself should be
attractive to the pupil. I gave thought to the question of
terminology. When I suggested calling our seniors team
leaders, the youngsters said it was not the thing. A team
leader is the leader of a team of workers in industry, and
in our detachment we had to have a commander. But, after
all, he'd be doing the same thing. That's as may be, the
youngsters argued, but a commander can give orders whereas
* Incomplete secondary school (seven-year school)-the first seven
forms of a complete or ten-year secondary school. They were also
run as independent schools. Graduates could go on to the 8th form
of a ten-year school without taking entrance exams, or enrol' in special
secondary schools (technical, medical, teachers' colleges, etc.) after
passing exams.

4-163 49
if a team leader tries to do it he'll be told to mind his own
business. In a children's collective they have a very nice
and simple way of settling the problem of one-man manage­
ment.
Take the term "report". Naturally, the boys could simply
give me their account of the day, but I find that a certain
formality appeals to them enormously. To make his report
the commander must come dressed in his uniform and not
in his overalls or the clothes he runs about in all day. He
must hold his hand raised in salute while reporting, and I
am not allowed to take it sitting down. All those present
must also stand and salute. They are saluting the work of
the detachment, of the whole collective.
Then, there's a great deal that can be borrowed from
army life and introduced into the routine and movement of
the collective. For example, the Commune had a splendid tra­
dition for opening general meetings. The privilege belonged
to the commander on duty exclusively. The amazing thing
was that the tradition had gained so great a significance that
even when big people arrived at the Commune, even if it was
the People's Commissar himself, no one was allowed to
open the meeting but the commander on duty. Bugles were
played to call everyone to the meeting. After that, the
orchestra seated on the balcony played three marches. People
could sit and talk, come and go. When they were coming
to the end of the third march I knew I had to be in the hall,
I felt it was my duty*, if I didn't come I would be accused
of violating discipline. After the music had died away I had
to give the order: "Attention! The flag!" I could not see the
flag, but I was sure it was near and once the order was given
it would be brought in. When the flag was borne into the
room everyone stood up and the orchestra played a special
flag salute. The meeting was considered open as soon as the
flag-bearers had taken up their positions on the stage,
whereupon the officer of the day would come in and say:
e meeting is open. And for ten years no meeting was
opened in any other way.

50
 This tradition adorns the collective, it creates the frame-
work within which life can be made beautiful, and that being
so it captivates the imagination. The red flag makes a
splendid content for this tradition.
According to the same tradition, the flag-bearers and their
attendants were elected by the general meeting from among
the best and worthiest communards, "to the end of their
days" they called it, meaning their days in the commune.
The flag-bearers could not be punished, they had a room
to themselves, an extra best suit, and they could not be
addressed familiarly when they were guarding the
flag.
Esteem for the flag is a tremendous educational means.
At the Dzerzhinsky Commune it was displayed in the fol­
lowing manner: if the room where the flag was kept needed
repainting and the flag had to be moved elsewhere, the only
way to do it was to line up all the pupils, call in the brass
band and solemnly carry the flag to the other room.
We travelled through almost the whole of the Ukraine,
the Volga country, the Caucasus and the Crimea, and our
red flag was never left unguarded for a minute. When my
teacher friends heard about it, they said: "What are you
doing? The boys have to sleep at night. You're making these
trips for their health, and yet you have them standing guard
all night long!"
We were speaking different tongues. I just could not see
how a flag could be left unguarded on the march.
A sentry with a good rifle always stood at the entrance
to the Commune. I am even afraid to mention it. He had
no cartridges, of course, but he was vested with great power.
Often the sentry was a boy of thirteen or fourteen. They
took turns. They had to check the identity of any stranger
coming in, find out his business, ask him whom he wanted
to see, and they also had the right to bar his way with the
rifle. The door was not locked at night, and the sentry had
to stand guard. Sometimes he felt frightened, but anyway
stand his two hours he did. Once a woman pedologist from
4* 51
the Ukrainian People's Commissariat of Education came to
the Commune with a Cheka man. A curious conversation
took place between them: "D'you mean he just stands there?"
she asked. "Yes, he does." "He must be bored. You ought
to let him read a book." He said: "How can a sentry read
a book?" "But surely good use must be made of the time!
A person must broaden his knowledge." Two different people:
she was surprised that the sentry was not doing anything,
and he was surprised by the very suggestion that a sentry
should read while on duty. They were surprised by different
things.
There was another rule, a tradition rather. Holding on
to the banisters when coming down the stairs was not
allowed. I know how it started. It was a fine staircase in a
fine building and the steps began to get worn out where
people coming up and down clutched the banisters, and so
the youngsters passed this rule in order to preserve the
staircase. But later they forgot the reason. New pupils would
ask: "Why mustn't we hold on to the banisters?" The answer
was: "Because you've got to rely on your own spinal column
and not the banisters." Originally, strengthening the spine
had nothing to do with it: the idea was to preserve the stair­
case.
There has to be military smartness and trimness, but under
no circumstances ordinary barracks-ground drilling. Shooting
and riding are taught, and also military science. And that
means efficiency and aesthetic education, which is absolutely
essential in a collective of youngsters. This sort of training
is especially valuable because it preserves the collective's
strength, I mean it teaches the boys not to make vague,
awkward gestures, slack and aimless movements. The matter
of uniform is extremely important here. You know it better
than I do, and on this score the People's Commissariat of
Education and the Party have a definite point of view, so I
shall not dwell on it. But a uniform is only good if it is
handsome and comfortable. I had to go through a lot of
different kinds of trouble and suffer plenty of setbacks before

52
I was finally able to introduce a more or less comfortable
and handsome uniform.
But as far as uniforms go, I am prepared to carry the
matter on further. In my opinion, the clothes of children
should be so beautiful and so colourful that they would
evoke amazement. In past ages the troops were dressed
beautifully. It was the splendour of the privileged classes.
With us it is the children who should be such a privileged
class of society entitled to beautiful clothes. I would not
stop at anything, I would give every school a very hand­
some uniform. It serves as a very good glue to stick a col­
lective together. I was more or less headed in that direction,
but I had my wings clipped. I had gold and silver mono­
grams, embroidered skull caps, starched white pique collars,
and so on. A collective which you dress well is 50 per cent
easier to manage.
 L E C T U R E T WO

Discipline, Regimen,
Punishment and Reward

Today I will propose the theme of discipline, regimen,

punishment and reward. Once again I want to remind you
that my propositions are based entirely on my personal
experience which I gained under rather extraordinary condi­
tions, mostly in colonies and communes for juvenile delin­
quents. But I am convinced that the general system of my
finds, and not just separate conclusions, can be applied to a
normal children's collective. The logic here is this.
Out of my sixteen years of work as head of an institu­
tion for juvenile delinquents, the last ten, or perhaps even
twelve, I look upon as normal work. It is my profound
conviction that boys and girls become delinquents or "not
normal" because they are treated as delinquents or "not
normal" children. Normal education, active and purposeful,
very quickly shapes them into a perfectly normal collective.
There is no such thing as born criminals or inherently dif­
ficult children; personally, through experience, I have become
a hundred per cent sure that it is so.
In my last years of work at the Dzerzhinsky Commune
I emphatically objected to the very thought that mine was
a collective of not normal children, of juvenile delinquents,
and so the conclusions and methods which I intend to propose
to you today are, in my personal opinion, applicable to
normal children.

54
 What is discipline? In our practice, some of the teachers
and pedagogical thinkers are apt to regard discipline as a
means of education. I hold that discipline is not a means of
education but a result of education, and as a means of educa­
tion it must differ from regimen. Regimen is a definite
system of means and methods facilitating education. And the
result of this education is discipline.
In making this assertion I suggest that discipline should
be given a broader meaning than the conventionally accepted
one in days before the Revolution-in pre-revolutionary
schools and pre-revolutionary society. Then it was a form
of domination, a form of suppression of personality, indi­
vidual will and individual aspirations, and even, to a certain
extent, a method of domination, a method of bringing the
individual into submission with respect to the elements of
power. And that is how discipline was regarded by all of
us who lived and went to school under the old regime, and
everyone knows that we, as well as the teachers, looked upon
discipline in the same way: discipline was a code of certain
compulsory regulations which were essential for convenience,
order, and a well-being of sorts, a purely outward well-being,
a sort of bond rather than a moral state.
In our society, discipline is both a moral and a political
requirement. And yet I observe certain teachers who even
now cannot renounce the old view on discipline. In the old
society an undisciplined person was not regarded as an
immoral person, as a person who was transgressing the
social moral code. You will remember that in the old school
both we and our comrades looked upon this defiance of
discipline as something akin to heroism, a daring feat, or
at any rate a sort of witty, amusing spectacle. All mischief­
making was sure to be regarded not just by the pupils but
even by the teachers themselves as an expression of liveli­
ness or quick-wittedness, or perhaps as a manifestation of
a revolutionary spirit.
In our society defiance of discipline means that the person
is acting against society, and we must judge his behaviour-
55
from the political and moral points of view. That is how
every pedagogue should look upon discipline, provided, of
course, that discipline is taken to mean a result of educa­
tion.
First of all, as we already know, our discipline must
always be a conscious discipline. It was precisely in the 1920s,
when the theory of free education, or rather the tendency
towards free education, was enjoying such wide popularity,
that this formula on conscious discipline was being enlarged
in the belief that discipline must stem from consciousness.
Already in my early practice I saw that this formula could
lead only to catastrophe. Persuading a person that he must
obey and hoping that he will be persuaded into becoming
disciplined means putting 50 or 60 per cent of success to
the risk.
Discipline cannot be based on consciousness alone, since
it is a result of the entire educational process and not of any
special measures. It is a mistake to think that discipline can
be instilled by means of some special methods aimed at
creating it. Discipline is a product of the sum total of the
educative efforts, including the teaching process, the process
of political education, the process of character shaping, the
process of collision-of facing and settling conflicts in the
collective, the process of friendship and trust, and the whole
educational process in its entirety, counting also such
processes as physical education, physical development, and
so on.
Expecting discipline to be built up by preachings alone
means counting on extremely small returns.
It was when it came to preachings that the staunchest
opposition was raised to discipline (by some of the pupils,
I mean). And any attempt to convince them verbally of the
need of discipline was liable to evoke as rousing a protest.
And so, trying to instil discipline by this means may only
lead to endless argument. Nevertheless I emphatically insist
that, as differing from pre-revolutionary discipline, ours—
being a moral and political requirement-should be a conscious

56
 striving, that is, it should be accompanied by a full awareness
of what discipline is and what it is needed for.
How can this conscious sort of discipline be achieved?
In our school there is no theory of morals, there is no such
subject, and there is no one appointed to teach this theory
or obliged to communicate it to the children according to a
given programme.
In the old school there was scripture. It was a subject
refuted not by the pupils alone but very often by the priests
themselves, who treated it as something deserving of little
respect, but at the same time it did raise many moral
problems which were touched upon during lessons in one
way or another. Whether this theory yielded good results
or not is another question, but in certain measure the problem
of morals was set before the pupils in its theoretical render­
ing, i.e., they were told: do not steal, do not kill, do not
insult, obey your elders, honour your parents, and so on.
These moral concepts, the concepts of Christian morals
which were meant to instil faith and religion, were revealed
in their theoretical rendering, and moral laws-if only in their
old-fashioned religious form-were expounded to the pupils.
My practice has brought me to the conclusion that we
too must render the theory of morals. No such subject is
taught in our modern schools. We have a collective of edu­
cators, we have Komsomol organisers and Young Pioneer
leaders who, if they wished it, could very well present to
the pupils a proper theory of morals and the theory of
behaviour.
I am sure that we shall inevitably arrive at this form in
the future development of our school. I was forced to present
the theory of morals to my pupils in a straightforward
manner, as a programme subject. I had not the right to
introduce such a subject as morals myself, but I had before
me a programme I had drawn up for my own personal
guidance, which I set out before my pupils at the general
meetings under various pretexts.

57
 In the course of my experience I worked out a programme
drafting these talks of the moral theory type. I had time
and opportunity to perfect my efforts in this direction some­
what, and I saw the results-they were very good and far-
reaching, incomparably better, of course, than anything that
could have been achieved in the old school with the subject
handled by some priest, even if an enlightened one.
Let us take the question of stealing. We have the means
to develop the theory of honesty-the theory of relation to
one's own things, the things of others and things belonging
to the state-with infinite conviction, very strict logic and
great persuasiveness. In impact and force the old preachings
about the evil of stealing stand no comparison to this concrete
theory of behaviour towards property, the theory of prohib­
iting stealing, because the old logic that a person must not
steal or God will punish him hardly convinced anyone and
could not act as a brake on stealing.
Self-control, respect for women, children and old men,
respect for oneself, and the whole theory of actions in rela­
tion to the society as a whole or to the collective could be
presented to our pupils in a most convincing and compelling
form.
This theory of behaviour, Soviet behaviour I mean, is sup­
ported by so many facts in the life of our society, in our
social practice, in the history of our civil war, in the history
of our Soviet struggle and especially in the history of the
Communist Party, that it would take little effort to present
the subject beautifully and convincingly.
I have reason to assert that a collective, before whom
this theory of morals has been set out, will undoubtedly
take it all in, and every one of the pupils will find for him­
self in every separate instance some compulsory moral forms
and formulas.
I recall how quickly and gladly my collective took on new
life after a single talk on this moral theme. And a series,
or rather a cycle of such talks had a truly salubrious effect
on the collective's philosophy of morals.

58
 What general principles can serve as a basis here?
I have arrived at the following list of general moral
principles. First of all, discipline as a form of our political
and moral well-being must be exacted from the collective.
It is no use counting on discipline to appear of its own
accord as a result of external measures, methods or talks
given every now and again. Discipline, with a clearly defined
purpose, has to be imposed on the collective in the form of
a clear-cut, definite task.
These arguments, the need to exact discipline, are prompted
by the following considerations. Firstly, every pupil should
be convinced in his mind that discipline is a form enabling
the whole collective to best attain its aim. The logic, provided
it is presented clearly and fervently (I am against cool
discourses on discipline), which asserts that without discipline
a collective will not be able to attain its aim, will be the first
brick laid in the foundation of a definite theory of action,
that is, the theory of morals.
Secondly, the logic of our discipline asserts that discipline
places each separate individual in a more secure and free
position. This paradoxical assertion that discipline is freedom
is very easily accepted by youngsters. The truth of it is
confirmed for them at every step, and in their active
campaigning for discipline they themselves say that it is
freedom.
Discipline in a collective means perfect security for every
individual, complete confidence in his right, his abilities and
his future.
A great many facts in .support of this principle can, of
course, be found in the life of our society, in our Soviet
history. Our revolution, our very society are a confirmation
of this law.
Here is the second type of general moral requirements
which should be set before a childrens collective and which
eventually will help the educator to settle any conflicts that
may arise. In every separate case it is not only I but the

59
whole collective who accuses the offender of going against
the interests of the other members and depriving them of
their rightful freedom.
As a matter of fact, this co-operation on the part of the
pupils can perhaps be put down to the fact that a good half
of the waifs and juvenile delinquents I had then had already
spent some time in one of those children's collectives where
discipline is lacking, and had suffered all the terrible hard­
ships of an undisciplined life. This involved gangster law,
with ringleaders from among the older and tougher boys
lording it over the weaker and younger, exploiting them and
forcing them to steal and commit acts of hooliganism. These
once victimised children looked upon discipline as a real
godsend, recognising it to be an essential condition for the
full development of their personality.
If I had the time I would tell you about some very striking
instances of boys being reborn almost instantaneously upon
finding themselves in a disciplined environment. I shall only
tell you about one such case.
One night in 1932, on orders from the NKVD I collected
fifty homeless waifs off the express trains which made a
stop at Kharkov. The urchins were in a very bad state. The
first thing that struck me was that they all knew one another,
although I took them off different trains, coming from the
Caucasus and the Crimea in the main, but know each other
they did. This was a "seaside resort gang" which travelled
back and forth, met, crossed each other's paths and had some
sort of relations among themselves.
When I brought them in, I had them washed, their hair
shaved off, and so on. And the very next day they had a
fight. It turned out that they had a great number of scores
to settle. Someone had stolen something from someone else,
someone had insulted someone, someone had broken his
word, and it became clear to me at once that this group of
fifty had its own ringleaders, its exploiters, its rulers and
its exploited and oppressed. It was not only I who saw it
but also my communards, and we realised that it was 'a mis-

60
 take to keep those fifty together in the hopes of shaping
them into a separate small collective.
The very next evening we broke up the group, taking care
to put the tougher boys in the strongest detachments.
For a week we watched them trying to settle their old
scores whenever they met. Under pressure of the collective
an end was put to it, but several boys ran away from the
Commune because they were unable to reconcile themselves
to the fact that they had been forced to yield to an enemy
stronger than themselves.
We gave this question a good airing at the Komsomol
meeting, and brought to light many circumstances of that
undisciplined life in which the individual suffered from a
lack of discipline, and then, availing ourselves of the
opportunity, we launched a campaign to elucidate this moral
principle, to make it clear to the boys that discipline means
freedom to the individual, and the ones to speak most pas­
sionately, convincingly and emotionally in support of this
principle were the new boys, the street arabs I had picked
up at the Kharkov Railway Station. They told the meeting
how hard life was when there was no discipline, and how
in that fortnight of living a new way of life they had come
to understand from their own experience what discipline
was.
Understanding came to them because we had launched
the campaign and invited the discussion. If we had not
talked to them about it they might have felt that life with­
out discipline was hard, but they would not have appre­
hended it.
It was from children such as these, who had suffered from
the anarchy reigning in a society of waifs and strays, that
I reared the staunchest champions of discipline, its most
ardent defenders and most dedicated preachers. And if I
were to recall all the boys who were my right hand in the
teachers' collective, you would see that they were the very
people who, as children, had suffered most from the anarchy
of an undisciplined society.
67
 The third point of my moral theory, which should be set
before the collective, which should always be remembered
by the collective and should always guide it in its fight for
discipline, is this: the interests of the collective are superior
to the interests of the individual. This, it would seem, is a
perfectly understandable theorem to us, Soviet citizens. And
yet, in practice it is far from understandable to very many
intelligent, educated, cultured and even socially cultured
people.
We assert that the interests of the collective come before
the interests of the individual in cases where he is opposed
to the collective.
But when it comes to a case in hand, matters are often
decided the other way about.
In the course of my life I once came up against a com­
plicated case like that. In the last years at the Dzerzhinsky
Commune there were no educators, all we had were school
teachers, but no special tutors, and so the work was done
by our senior pupils, Komsomol members in the main. The
pattern on which our collective was built made this possible.
The pupils were divided into detachments each of which had
its own commander. A commander was answerable for
everything the collective did in the course of the day: clean­
ing the premises, tidying their things, serving and eating
meals, receiving visitors, attending school and working at
the factory. He was called the officer of the day, wore
an armband, and was vested with great authority which he
had to have in order to direct the day's activities all by him­
self. His orders had to be obeyed without question, and it
was only at the end of the day, his duty done, that he had
to give an account of all the orders he had issued. No one
had the right to talk to him sitting down, you had to stand
before him, and no one had the right to argue with him in
any way. As a rule the commander on duty was a merited,
respected comrade, and no one ever defied him.
One day, the commander on duty was a boy whom we
shall call Ivanov for reference. He was a member of the

62
 Komsomol, one of our promising cultural workers, a member
of the dramatic club, a good industrial worker. He enjoyed
everyone's respect, mine as well. I had personally picked
him up in Simferopol-the boy was one of the "old" strays,
with a big record of lawbreaking and vagrancy behind him.
When making his report to me in the evening, he said
that someone had stolen Mezyak's radio which that boy had
just bought. It was the first radio in the Commune. Mezyak
had paid seventy rubles for it. It had taken him six months
to save up for it out of his pay. The radio always stood
beside his bed, and was there no more. The dormitory was
always open, since locks were not allowed in the Commune,
but going into the room during the day was forbidden, and
anyway none of the communards could have gone in because
they were away at work.
I suggested calling a general meeting at which the floor
was given to Ivanov. He spoke with great tact, suggested that
someone might have gone into the room to get their tools,
and so on; he told the meeting what he suspected, proposed
electing a commission, and urged the general meeting to
investigate the case thoroughly and find the culprit, because
he was sorry for Mezyak and also worried by the act itself
-the theft of something for which a person had been saving
money from his pay for six months.
But nothing was found out that evening; the boys went
to bed none the wiser. Mezyak, by the way, was about
twelve.
Early next morning a group of lower-form pupils. Young
Pioneers all of them, came to me and told me that they had
searched the place, having got up at five o'clock, and had
found the radio in the theatre under the stage. They asked
me to let them have the day off to watch.
They stayed there the whole day, and then they came
and told me that it was Ivanov himself who had stolen the
radio: they saw him come close to the prompt-box several
times and stand there for a few minutes, listening. They
had no other proof. The only evidence against him was that

63
he had come in, when not on duty, stood by the prompt-box
and listened.
I decided to take the bull by the horns: I called in Ivanov
and told him :"It was you who stole the radio/7
He turned pale, sat down, and said: /7Yes/7
This case became the object of discussion at our general
meeting. The Komsomol organisation expelled Ivanov and
placed the matter in the hands of the communards. A boy
nicknamed Robespierre was in the chair. He always proposed
one thing-expulsion. This time, too, the meeting moved to
expel Ivanov, to literally kick him out-to open the front
door and throw him down the stairs.
I objected to this measure, recalling other cases when this
one and that one of those present had almost been expelled,
but I didn't get anywhere.
Then I rang up the NKVD and told them that the general
meeting had adopted a decision to expel a boy, to kick him
out in such and such a way. The NKVD replied that they
would not endorse this decision and that it was up to me to
get the meeting to repeal it.
I carried great authority with the communards and could
get them to do anything I wanted, very difficult things some­
times. But here I was helpless-they refused to give me the
floor for the first time in the Commune's existence.
And that was that. Still, I told them that they had no
right to expel Ivanov before they received the NKVD's
approval. They agreed that I was right, and postponed the
matter till the next day's meeting when in the presence of
the NKVD representatives they would reiterate their deci­
sion.
There was trouble for me, I was rebuked for failing to
get the sentence repealed. The next day, several prominent
Cheka men arrived at the Commune.
What are you here for? To defend Ivanov?" the boys
demanded.
"No, to see justice done."
And then a debate on discipline ensued between the Cheka

64
 men and the communards, a debate which even now can
serve me as a framework for the elaboration of this vitally
important problem.
This was what the Cheka men said at the general meeting:
"What are you trying to prove by your decision? Ivanov
is your fronbranker, an active member of your collective,
you showed confidence in him, you entrusted the Commune
to him, and obeyed his orders without question. And now,
because he stole once, you are kicking him out. Where i>s
he supposed to go? It's the streets for him, and that means
-delinquency! Surely you are not so weak that you can't
make a man of Ivanov?"
Ivanov himself, it must be said, was in a fit of hysterics
all that day, he quite went to pieces.
"See the state he's in/' the Cheka men said, indicating
Ivanov. "Yours is such a strong collective, you have remould­
ed so many characters, surely you are (not afraid that he'll
be a bad influence! After all, there are 456 of you. And only
one of him."
It was a killing argument, killing logic.
And this was what the communards replied, Robespierre
and others, people with much less experience than the Cheka
men, but people who felt responsible for their collective.
"If Ivanov goes wrong it's fair enough. Let him. It would
have been one thing if he'd simply gone and pinched some­
thing. But he was the commander on duty, we trusted the
Commune to him, he presided at the general meeting and
begged us to tell all we knew. It's not mere stealing. He
went against all of us, brazenly and cynically, falling for
the seventy-ruble prize; he went against us and against
Mezyak who had been saving up for months, putting ten
rubles aside out of his monthly pay. And so if Ivanov goes
wrong we shan't waste pity on him.
"Sure we can manage him. We're not afraid. We're simply
not interested. We'd manage him because we know we can
kick him out. But if we keep him and don't kick out the
next one like him either, our collective will lose its power
5 -1 G3 65
and then we won't be able to manage anyone any more. We
have seventy others like Ivanov, and kicking him out will
help us to manage them."
The Cheka men argued that losing a member would put
a stigma on the collective, that Ivanov would go wrong. The
communards came back: look at such and such a colony,
there's no discipline there and see how many members they
lose a year. Fifty per cent of the boys run away every year.
And so if we enforce discipline so strictly we stand to lose
less, we're willing to lose Ivanov, but then we'll be able
to reform the others.
The debate went on all evening. The communards stopped
objecting at long last and even applauded the good speeches
of the Cheka men. But when it came to voting and the chair­
man said: "Who's for Ivanov's expulsion?"-all hands went
up at once. Once again the Cheka men took the floor, once
again they tried persuasion, but I could see from their faces
that they knew Ivanov's fate was decided whatever they
said. By midnight the resolution was adopted: to expel
Ivanov and do it the way the communards wanted to do it
the day before: open the front door and throw him down the
steps. We were able to prevent the use of violence, however,
and got Ivanov sent under escort to Kharkov.
And so they did give him the rogue's march. Afterwards,
of course, we saw to it that Ivanov was sent to another
colony, taking care to keep it a secret from our communards.
They found out about it a year later, though, and asked me
how I could have gone against the decision of the general
meeting: they had expelled him and yet I went and intervened
in his behalf.
This case started me thinking: how far above the interests
of the individual should the interests of the collective be
placed? And now I'm inclined to think that the interests of
the collective should prevail to the very end, even if it is
relentless—and then and only then will education really
serve both the collective and the individual.
I have more to say on this subject. All I will say at this

66
 point, however, is that it need not be physically relentless,
that is, the technique of relentlessness has to be organised
in such a way that while the collective's interests should
triumph over the individual's, the individual in question
should not be placed in a grave, desperate position.
And last but not least, here is the fourth theorem which
should be taught to the children as pure theory: discipline
is an adornment for the collective. This aspect of discipline
-its beauty and dignity-is most important. From what I
know, very little is done about it in our children's collectives.
Our discipline is sometimes "a bore"-to use my strays' pet
expression, it's dull, and actually boils down to nagging,
pushing about, and exasperating twaddle. The question of
making discipline pleasant, exciting and evocative is simply
a question of pedagogical technique.
In my own experience I did not arrive at the final form
of a beautiful discipline too soon. The danger to be avoided
here, of course, is letting discipline become a mere outward
adornment. The beauty must spring from its essence.
For my own part, at any rate, I had finally drawn up for
myself a rather involved scheme to cultivate the aesthetic
side of discipline. To give you an example I'll tell you about
some of my methods which I used not so much to enforce
discipline as to test and maintain its attractiveness.
For instance, breakfast was late. The signal for breakfast
was given ten minutes late. I do not know who was to blame:
the kitchen staff, the commander on duty, or one of the
pupils who had overslept. The question was what to do next:
put off the signal for work for ten minutes, start work later,
or forego breakfast. In practice this can be a very difficult
question to decide.
I had a big hired staff of engineers, foremen and
instructors, about two hundred people in all, and time was
precious to them too. They came to work at eight o'clock,
and the factory whistle had to go at eight sharp. And there
was breakfast ten minutes late, the communards were not
ready to start for work, and it meant that I would have to
5* 67
keep the workers and engineers after hours. Many of them
lived out of town, they had a train to catch, and so forth.
And anyway the rules of punctuality were involved.
In my last years at the Commune I never doubted once
what I had to do; nor did the pupils. Breakfast was late.
I would give the order for the whistle to go at eight sharp.
Some of the boys would come running out, others would
only be sitting down to breakfast. I would go into the dining­
room and announce that breakfast was finished. I realised
perfectly well that I was making them go hungry, I knew
perfectly well that it was bad for them physically, and so
on. But nevertheless I never doubted my action once. If I
had done this to a collective that had no feeling of the beauty
of discipline, someone would have surely said: "Are we
expected to go hungry, or what?"
But no one ever said such things to me. Everyone under­
stood perfectly that this was what I had to do, and the fact
that I was able to walk into the dining-room and give the
order showed that I had confidence in the collective, demand­
ing of them that they should go without breakfast.
At one time the officers of the day began to complain to
me about boys wasting time in the dormitory, in no hurry to
come down to the dining-room, and as a result being late
for breakfast. I never started any theoretical discussions on
this subject, and never said anything to anyone. I simply
went and stood outside the dining-room door in the morning
and got into conversation with someone there about other
things. And, do you know, the late-oomers, a hundred or a
hundred-and-fifty of them, mostly seniors, instead of going
in to breakfast would dash past me and go straight to the
factory. "Good-morning, Anton Semyonovich," they would
say. None of them complained about missing breakfast, and
only occasionally one of them would say to me in the
evening: "You certainly starved us today."
On this basis I was able to try different exercises. Say,
everyone would be waiting for the film Battleship Potyomkin
to begin. Everyone would be seated in the hall, and the film

68
 would be on. During the third part I would say: "The fourth,
second and third detachments, come outside."
"What's happened?"
"I've been told that some suspicious-looking characters are
prowling outside. Go and make sure."
"Yes, sir."
They could not be sure that any suspicious-looking char­
acters were really prowling outside, they might even suspect
it was simply a test, hut if anyone had put it into so many
words he would have landed in trouble with the others. They
would go outside, make sure there was no one there, and
come back. They would miss part of their favourite film,
yet no one would say a word of complaint, they would sit
down quietly and watch the rest of it.
It was a kind of exercise. There were many different kinds.
For instance, we had a tradition to give the best detachment
the hardest and most unpleasant tasks when dividing up the
house-cleaning work. And I have to tell you that cleaning
was quite a strenuous job, because we had several delega­
tions coming to the Commune a day, and we had to keep the
place spick and span, in perfect shining order.
"Which is the best detachment?"
"The sixth."
And so the sixth detachment, being the best, was given
the most unpleasant work to do. It had to do the nastiest
job for being the best. We found the logic quite natural. It
was the best detachment and as such it was entrusted with
the hardest job.
Or very often, when we were on one of our trips we
would find ourselves in difficulties, surmounting which called
for no little physical effort, speed and energy. Which detach­
ment should we send? The best one, and this best detach­
ment was proud to do it. I can hardly imagine myself having
any qualms about giving it an extra job, or an assignment
over and above its ordinary duties. I would give it the extra
job without a moment's hesitation, precisely because it was
the best and because my confidence in it would be
69
appreciated. The peculiar beauty of this would not be lost on
the boys.
This sensitivity to beauty will be the last finishing touch
to discipline, making it a thing of really fine workmanship.
Not every collective will attain it, but if a collective does
attain it and follows the logic that the higher you stand the
more is demanded of you, if it adopts this logic as genuine,
living logic, it will mean that in discipline and education the
collective has reached a certain satisfactory level.
And now for the last theoretical general premise, which
I thought necessary to set before my pupils as often as
possible in a very simple form, easy for them to grasp: if
a person has to do something he finds pleasure in doing, he
will always do it, discipline or no discipline; discipline comes
in when he does something he finds unpleasant to do with
equal pleasure. This is a very important disciplinary thesis.
It must also be made note of and stressed as often as pos­
sible at every opportunity.
Well, such is briefly the general theory of behaviour, the
theory of morals, which should be set out before the children
as a definite sum of knowledge, stress on which must always
be laid in talks and the children's understanding of which
must always be striven for. Only in this manner, by forming a
general theory of it, will discipline become a conscious thing.
In all these theorems and axioms, emphasis must always
be made on the main and most important thing-the political
significance of discipline. In this respect our Soviet reality
provides plenty of brilliant examples. The greatest achieve­
ments and the most glorious chapters of our history are as­
sociated with a splendid display of discipline. Remember
our Arctic explorations, Papanin's group,* all the feats of the
Heroes of the Soviet Union,** take the history of collectivisa-
* I* D. Papanin, a well-known Polar explorer, headed a four-man
Soviet Arctic expedition, which on May 21, 1937, was landed on ice
in the region of the North Pole, and drifting for nine months studied
the natural conditions of the central part of the Arctic Ocean.
** The title was introduced in 1934 in connection with the rescue
of a group of shipwrecked Arctic explorers by Soviet pilots.

70
 tion, take the history of our industrialisation-and in our
literature as well you will find magnificent examples which
you can present to your pupils as models of Soviet discipline,
based on these very principles of discipline.
Still, as I have said already, this consciousness, this theory
of behaviour should be an accompaniment to discipline, it
should run parallel to discipline, and not be the basis of
discipline.
What then is the basis of discipline?
To put it in plain words, without delving into the depths
of psychological research, the basis of discipline is exacting­
ness without theory. If anyone were to ask me to define the
essence of my pedagogical experience in the briefest of
formulas, I would say: place the utmost demands upon a
person and treat him with the utmost respect. I am convinced
that this is the formula of Soviet discipline, the formula of
our society generally. Our society differs from bourgeois
society in that we place much higher demands upon a person
than does bourgeois society, and our demands are more far-
reaching besides. In bourgeois society a person may open
a shop, he may exploit others, he may go in for specula­
tion, or be a rentier. There, much fewer demands are placed
upon a person than in our society.
But, on the other hand, we treat him with incomparably
greater and basically different respect. This combination
of the most exacting demands with the utmost respect for
a person are part and parcel of the same thing-they are
not two different things. By placing demands upon a person
we show our respect for his strength and abilities, and by
showing respect for him we make demands on him at the
same time. It is not a respect for something extraneous,
something outside society, a pleasant and beautiful some­
thing. It is the respect due to a comrade who is taking part
in our common endeavour, who is doing our common job
with us, it is respect due to a worker.
No collective and no discipline can be formed, of course,
unless demands are placed upon the individual. I am all for

71
demands-consistent, extreme, clear-cut, without amend-
ments or concessions.
Those of you who have read my book The Road to Lite
will know that I began with such demands and will also
know the story of my beating up Zadorov. It proved -above
all else my lack of training as an educator, my poor know­
ledge of pedagogical techniques, the poor state of my nerves,
and my despair. But it was not punishment. That, too, was
a demand.
In the first years of my work I carried my demands to
the limit, to violence, but I never punished my pupils for
their misdeeds, I never punished them so cruelly -and with
such extreme measures. That crime of mine, which I have
described, was not a punishment, it was a demand.
I would not recommend you to repeat my experience
because this is 1938 and not 1920, and also because I hardly
think any of you or the comrades you teach will ever find
yourselves in a situation as difficult, lonely and involved
as mine had been. But I insist that there can be no upbring­
ing if no demands are made. A demand cannot be a half­
way thing. It must be utmost in the Bolshevik way, as high
as it can possibly be.
This matter of issuing demands is a very difficult thing,
naturally, but it does not call for a strong will at all, as
many believe. Personally, I am not a strong-willed man, and
I never possessed the qualities of a strong personality. Far
from it. I am an ordinary intellectual, an ordinary teacher.
I was simply convinced that I had no right to play about
with or flaunt my intellectuality, and I knew that educators
often did just that simply because they did not know what
line to take. I am convinced that the correct line is to place
demands upon the pupils.
Needless to say this line must be developed further. But
I firmly believe that the ways of development are always
the same. If you are going to take on a collective of undis­
ciplined or only outwardly disciplined children, you will
 have to begin by placing your own individual demands
upon them.
Very often, in the majority of cases actually, it is sufficient
to state a resolute demand that will not break or bend, to
get the children to give in to you and do what you want
them to do. Both suggestion and knowledge that you are
right play a certain part in this. Thereafter, everything will
depend on your intellect. Rude, illogical and ridiculous
demands which are not linked with the demands of the
collective must never be made.
I'm afraid I won't be logical now. Here is the theorem
I devised for myself personally: whenever I was not sure
what I could demand, whether it would be right or wrong,
I pretended not to see anything. I bided my time until it
became clear to me-and to anyone else with any common
sense-that I was right. And then I stated my dictatorial
demands fully, and since they sounded better because I was
so obviously right, I acted with greater boldness, and the
pupils, knowing that I was right, gave in to me easily.
To my mind, this logic in the early stages should be made
law. An educator who gives free rein to his sense of power
and turns into a petty tyrant in the eyes of his pupils,
demanding things they cannot understand, will never win a
victory over them.
I did not demand from my first lot of strays that they
should not steal. I realised that I could not hope to reform
them right away. But I did demand of them that they should
get up at a given hour and perform the jobs they had to
perform. They went on stealing, however, and for the time
being I closed my eyes to it.
At any rate, one cannot begin to educate a collective
without being sincere, frank, convinced, passionate and
determined in the demands one makes. And anyone who
intends to begin with vacillating, favour-currying, and plead­
ing is making a very grave mistake.
The theory of morals should develop alongside the develop­
ment of demands, but under no circumstances must the

73
first be substituted for the second. When occasion allows you
to theorise and explain to the youngsters what they must
do, do so by all means. But when the occasion calls for
firmness you must not indulge in any theorising, you must
simply state your demands and insist on their fulfilment.
I have been to many schools, Kiev schools mostly. What
really amazed me about those children was their awful
shouting, the fidgeting, their lack of seriousness, their hyster­
ical excitement, their running up and down the stairs, break­
ing windows, smashing noses, bruising faces, and so on.
I can't stand shouting. My nerves must have been strong
enough if I was able to write my Road to Life while living
among a crowd of youngsters. Their talking did not bother
me. But shouting, screaming and dashing about are, to my
mind, something children can do very well without.
And yet I have heard some pedagogues contend that a
child must run about, a child must shout, it's supposed to
be natural.
I object to this theory. A child needs none of it. It was
everybody shouting in school that, more than anything else,
frayed everyone's nerves all the time, and did nothing but
harm. On the contrary, my experience has convinced me
that a children's collective can easily be trained to behave
in an orderly manner, to decelerate, to show consideration
for others and respect property, doors, windows, and so
forth. You would never hear this sort of racket going on at
the Commune. I finally got the pupils to behave in a perfectly
orderly manner when out in the street, on the school
grounds and indoors. I demanded perfect orderliness in
movement.
If I were put in charge of a school now I would begin
by calling everyone together and telling them that I never
wanted to see such behaviour again. No arguments, no
theories. Later I would present them with a theory, but not
at the very start. I would make a determined start: never
let me see that again! I never want to see a yelling pupil in
school again.

74
 This emphatic demand, spoken in a tone that will brook
no argument, must be made as soon as a collective is taken
on. I cannot imagine how discipline could be instilled in a
disorderly high-strung and uncontrolled collective unless the
organiser stated his demands in this cold tone. After that,
he would find things much easier.
The second stage comes when first one, then two, then
three and then four pupils begin to side with you, forming
a group that consciously wants to maintain discipline.
I hurried matters up. It did not worry me that my boys
and girls had quite a lot of faults, I wanted to assemble a
group as soon as I could so they would support my demands
by making their own, voicing them at general meetings, and
stating their views to the other pupils. It was imperative
at the second stage of development to have a nucleus like
that formed around me.
And now for the third stage when the collective begins to
make the demands. It is the result and also our compensation
for the nervous strain of the first stage. When the collective
begins to make the demands, when stability comes to the tone
and style of its activities, the educator s work becomes a
thing of mathematical precision and efficiency.
I never demanded anything any more during my last five
years at the Dzerzhinsky Commune. On the contrary, I acted
as a sort of brake on the collective's demands, because a
collective is apt to take too big a start and demand too much
from an individual.
Once this stage has been reached you will be able to
introduce the theory of morals on a broad scale. It will now
be understandable to all that the moral and political require­
ments are the basic ones, and as a result each pupil will
adopt an exacting attitude towards himself, taking the
strongest view of his own behaviour.
I regard this line of development-from the dictatorial
exactingness of the organiser to a free-will exactingness of
every individual towards himself against the background of
the collective's demands-the basic line in the development

75
of a Soviet children's collective. I think there can be no
fixed forms. One collective may be going through the first
stage of development, and that being so it will need to have
a dictator-like educator to guide it, but it must go on to the
next istage-to the form of free collective demand-as soon as
possible, and then on to demands made upon himself by the
free individual.
Demand is not all there is, of course. It is an essential
clement of discipline, but not the sole one. True, in essence
all the other elements also belong to the category of demands,
but they are stated in a le9s resolute form. Attraction and
compulsion are, as it were, a weaker form of demand. And
last but not least comes threat-a stronger form than ordinary
demand.
I maintain that all these forms must be applied in our
practice.
What is attraction? It is a form subject to development
as well. It is one thing if the attraction is 'a gift, a reward,
a bonus or some other benefit to be enjoyed by individuals
singly, and quite another if it is an aesthetic attraction, if
the appeal lies in the inner beauty of an action.
It is the same with compulsion. At the early stage it may
be expressed in a more elementary form, in the form of
argument or persuasion. At a higher stage compulsion is
expressed by hint, smile or joke. It is something the children
value and appreciate.
Whereas at the early stages of a collective's development
you may threaten the children with punishment and other
trouble, later on it will no longer be necessary. In a devel­
oped collective threats -are inadmissible, and at the Dzer­
zhinsky Commune I never permitted myself to threaten any­
one, saying I'll do this and that to you! It would have been
a mistake on my part. What I did threaten my charges with
was putting the matter before the general meeting, and there
was nothing they feared more.
In the development of a collective, compulsion, attraction
and threat may be greatly varied in form. At the Dzerzhinsky

76
 Commune in later years rewards for good work or behaviour,
granted to pupils singly, were ranged in this ascending
manner: gift, bonus, and gratitude endorsed by order and
read out before the ranks. This last, highest (award, which
was not accompanied by any gifts or material pleasures, was
fought for by the best detachments. What was it they fought
for? For the honour. All the pupils were ordered to put on
their best clothes and assemble on the parade ground. Next
the brass band marched in, and then all the teachers,
engineers and instructors, forming a separate line. The order
was given: "Attention!" The flag was borne in, the band
played a flourish, and then the boy who was to be rewarded
and I came out. The order: "By decision lof the general meet­
ing, gratitude is expressed to so and so", was then read
out.
The gratitude was entered into the detachment's and the
Commune's journals, and a notice was posted on the honours
board-that so and so, or detachment number so and so, had
been thanked before the ranks on such and such a date.
M'aking this the highest award is only feasible in a col­
lective which has noble sentiments, high moral qualities and
self-respect. It is something to be 'striven for, but not begun
with. One should begin with attraction of a more primitive
kind, with material and other pleasures suited for each
separate case, for instance, like going to the theatre to see
a play. A good educator will, of course, find a great many
nuances for the application of the different forms-attraction,
compulsion, threat and demand-in each single case.
The question is-demand what? The formula I would
suggest here should, rather than develop, always remain the
same. First of all, the only thing that must be demanded is
submission to the collective. It is the communards who
taught me that. In developing their collective they arrived
at a very interesting form.
In later years we did not punish pupils for stealing. It
came as something of a surprise for me that the communards
had evolved their own method of dealing with petty thieves.

77
 One of the communards, a boy of sixteen, stole five rubles
from his friend's locker. He was called to the general meet­
ing, and told to stand in the centre of the room which was
like this one only bigger, and had an endless sofa running
along the wall. Everyone sat on this sofa, there was no table
or anything in the middle, and whoever was called upon to
give account to the general meeting had to come out and
stand in the very centre, right under the chandelier. The
communards had certain set rules. For instance, if a boy was
called as a witness, he didn't have to come out. Nor did a
commander if he was accounting for his detachment; but if
it was for himself personally he did have to. I do not
remember any cases dealt with in any other way. Refusal to
come out into the middle of the room was regarded as
refusal to obey the collective. A boy might commit a small
crime and get away with a small punishment, but if he
refused to come out into the middle he was tried for the
supreme offence of going against the collective.
Well, the boy came out.
"Was it you who -stole the money?" he was asked.
"Yes, it was."
"Who wants to take the floor?"
The boy had to stand at attention.
The first person to take the floor was Robespierre, the
one who always demanded expulsion.
"What are we to do with him?" he said. "He's a savage.
He can't help stealing. Listen you, you'll steal two more
times."
Everyone liked this speech.
"Quite right, he'll steal two more times. Let him leave the
middle of the room," everyone said.
What d'you mean I'll steal two more times?" the culprit
said, hurt. "On my word of honour, I won't!"
We know best," said Robespierre. "You'll steal two more
times."
The culprit walked out. That evening he came to my
room.

78
 "It's a hell of a business !#/ he said. "They didn't even
punish me. They're ragging me, saying I'll steal two more
times.'7
"Well, prove to them that they were wrong to rag.''
Can you imagine, a week passed and he stole a cutter
from his neighbour's locker. And there he stood in the middle
of the room again, and when the chairman asked him: "Did
you steal that cutter?" everyone laughed.
Robespierre took the floor.
"I told you you'd steal two more times, and you did steal,"
he said. "So what was the sense of telling people we'd
wronged you? And you will steal one more time."
The boy left. He stayed good for a month, and then he
went into the kitchen and stole a pie.
When he stood in the middle of the room again, everyone
looked at him with sympathy. And Robespierre asked him:
"Well, is it the last time?"
"I know now it's the -last time."
They let him go, and he never stole again. They proved
right.
Everyone liked it so much that it became a custom to
say; "You'll steal two more times" whenever we had a case
of theft. The sentence became symbolic.
"What's the big idea?" I asked the boys. "Telling people
they'll steal two more times! There are 450 of you here, and
if every one of you steals three times what will happen to
the Commune?"
"Don't worry," they said to me.
And, indeed, I needn't have worried, because it had such
a killing effect, this force of the collective's conviction, that
all stealing stopped, and when one boy did steal something
he begged on his bended knees not to be placed in the
middle of the room because, if he was, that symbolic sentence
which he used to say to others would be said to him, and
he solemnly promised never to steal again.
We did not punish for such crimes as petty thieving. It

79
was considered a disease, the force of old habit which the
culprit hadn't got over yet.
Nor did we punish newcomers for rudeness or a certain
leaning towards hooliganism. What we did punish them for
was something else.
Take a case like this, for instance. Shura, one of the best
girls we had, a veteran communard, commander of a detach­
ment, member of the Komsomol, a pretty, lively girl, whom
everyone treated with respect, went off on leave one day
and did not come back that night. A girl friend of hers
telephoned through to us to <say that Shura had fallen ill
and was staying the night at her place.
The commander on duty, who answered the telephone,
came and reported it to me.
The news alarmed me. I told Vershnev, the (Commune's
physician and our former pupil, to go there and see what
was wrong with her. He went, but found no one in-neither
Shura nor her hostess. The next day, Shura was ordered to
stand in the middle of the room.
There was girlish embarrassment in her manner and
something else too.
"I wanted to go to the theatre, but I was afraid I wouldn't
be allowed," she said.
Saying this she smiled in such a shy, sweet way.
Yet it was anything but a smiling matter. I knew it, and
all the communards knew it. Robespierre, as usual, proposed
to expel her, because if every detachment commander took
it into his head to go to town and "fall ill" there, making
us send doctors out, and so on and so forth.
I looked at them, wondering....
"Let's vote on this," the chairman said.
"You've gone mad!" I told them. "She's been here for
so many years, and you'd go and expel her!"
"I suppose we are going too far," Robespierre said. "But
anyway she's got to be put under arrest for ten hours."
That was the verdict-ten hours' arrest, and after that the
Komsomol took over. They made it "pretty hot" for her at

80
 the Komsomol meeting that evening. The Party organisation
had to intervene so Shura would not be expelled from the
Komsomol. What the members said to her was this: it's
worse than stealing. You, a member of the Komsomol, a
detachment commander, rang up to say you were ill, but you
weren't ill, you simply wanted to go somewhere, and so you
lied, and that is a crime.
This logic does not come at once, it comes gradually and
gains ground as the collective develops.
One has to be most exacting towards a person who goes
against the collective more or less intentionally. One may
be less strict when the offense can be blamed on the
offenders nature, his character, his lack of self-control, or his
political and moral ignorance. In such a case one may count
on good influence and the gradual accumulation of good
habits to have the desired effect. But in cases where a person
consciously goes against the collective, refusing to recognise
its power and flouting its demands, one has to be firm to
the end, until this person has acknowledged the fact that
the collective must be obeyed.
And now a few words about punishment. Things are not
too well with us in this respect. On the one hand we have
already admitted that punishment can be both necessary and
useful. But on the other, although punishment is permissible,
there is a line, born of our peculiar squeamishness and fol­
lowed mainly by us teachers, of course, which implies that
punishment is permissible but best avoided. You are free
to punish, but if you do punish, you're a poor pedagogue.
A pedagogue is considered good if he does not punish.
I am sure that this logic must confuse the pedagogue.
And so it has to be established once and for all just what
is punishment. Personally I am convinced that punishment
is not so very beneficial. But I also maintain that where
punishment has to be meted out the teacher has no right
to suspend it. To punish is more than a right, it is a duty
in cases where it is imperative to punish. In other words, I
assert that a teacher may either punish or not punish, but
G-163 81
i£ his conscience and his convictions dictate that he must
punish, he has nO right to refuse to do it. Punishment should
be proclaimed an educational measure as natural, straight­
forward and logically acceptable as any other.
The Christian attitude towards punishment as a necessary
evil must be resolutely rejected. To my mind, the notion
that punishment is an evil which for some reason is necessary
does not quite agree with either logical or theoretical views.
There can be jio talk about evil in cases where punishment
will do good, where no other measures can be adopted, and
the teacher feels that it is his duty to punish. This belief
that punishment is a necessary evil turns the teacher into
a practising hypocrite. There must be no hypocrisy. No
teacher must flirt with the notion that he is a saint since he
gets along without resorting to punishment.
What is a person who knows that he ought to punish sup­
posed to do? He broods and worries: so and so manages
without punishing, and what will people say about me? They'll
say I'm a second-rate pedagogue.
This sort of hypocrisy has to be done away with, I say.
A teacher must apply punishment where it ought to be
applied and where it can do good.
This does not at all -mean, however, that we -are asserting
the advisability of punishment in all and every case.
What is punishment? I believe that it is in the sphere of
punishment particularly that Soviet pedagogy has the
opportunity of discovering much that is new. In our society
we have so much respect for man, so much humaneness, that
we should be able to arrive at the happiest possible norm in
the matter of punishment. This is what this happy norm
should be: a punishment must settle -and eliminate a conflict
and not create new conflicts.
The evil of the old-world punishment lay in the fact that
: S m€ lr nfatin,9 ,°ne C°nflict k created mother one, the
settlement of which was necessarily more involved still.
*“,What d? e s cSoviet Punishment differ from other
punishments? In the first place, its aim must never be the

82
 infliction of suffering. According to usual logic: I shall
punish you, you will suffer, and others watching you suffer
will say to themselves: we can see you suffering, and we
must take care not to do the same.
There must be no physical or moral suffering. What then
is the meaning of punishment? Knowing that the collective
condemns your action. The culprit must not feel crushed by
the punishment, but it will make him think over his mistake,
and ponder on his estrangement, however slight, from the
collective.
And that is why punishment should be resorted to only
when logic demands it and only when public opinion is for
it. Punishing is wrong if the collective is not on your side,
if you have not succeeded in winning it over to your side.
If your decision is opposed by everyone, your punishment
will do more harm than good. You are free to punish only
if you feel that you have the backing of the collective.
So much /for the meaning of punishment.
And now, for the form.
I am against any sort of established forms. Punishment
must be entirely individual, best suited to the person in
question, but nevertheless there can be certain laws and
forms restricting the right to punish.
In my practical work I upheld the view that the right to
punish belonged to either the whole collective, that is the
general meeting, or to one person, authorised by the col­
lective. I cannot imagine how >a collective could be healthy
if ten different people had the right to punish.
At the Dzerzhinsky Commune, where I had charge of the
pupils in their factory work, school and everyday life, the
right belonged to me alone. It is an essential requirement.
It is also essential to have a single logic of punishment and
not to punish often.
Secondly, punishment must have its traditions and its rules
for those who mete it out.
At the Dzerzhinsky Commune we had a rule. Every new­
comer was called a pupil. After a time, when his "belonging"
6* 83
to the collective became obvious to all he was given the title
of com m unard and a badge with the letters FED (Felix
Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky) on it. This badge confirmed his
status of a communard.
I could punish a pupil by giving him a fatigue. This was
work for half an hour in the kitchen or the hothouse but
not at the factory. Or I could deprive him of leave on a
Sunday, or suspend his pocket money: the money earned by
the .pupils was credited to their personal savings account, and
without my endorsement they could not draw any for
pocket money. The most terrible punishment I could use was
dismissing the culprit from the factory and putting him on
house jobs.
Those were the punishments I was able to apply and had
the right to apply to pupils.
I had no right to apply them to the communards. The only
punishment we had then was arrest. A pupil, on the other
hand, could not be put under guard.
This system had an enormous significance. Every pupil
tried to be promoted to communard as quickly as possible
to be able to enjoy this privilege. I had no inhibitions about
putting them under arrest. They would get an hour for the
smallest offence, for trifles, even for having a button undone.
When giving this order I had no right to remain sitting.
I had to stand up and say: "So and so, I give you an
hour's arrest." And he would say: "Yes, sir, an hour's
arrest."
I could give them up to ten hours if I liked.
On Sunday the iboy would hand his belt in to the com­
mander on duty, and coming into my office say*. "I have
come to take my punishment."
And since he was there I could not let him go, because
in 1933 the general meeting had deprived me of the right
to forgive. Quite right too, because there'd hardly be any
older if I punished someone one minute 'and forgave him the
next day. So I could not forgive him, and he stayed in my
office doing something. I alone had the right to talk to him.

84
 no one else had, and talking about his offence was also out.
It was considered poor taste, it would have been tactless of
me to broach the subject. He was under arrest, he was taking
it like a man, and rubbing it in would have been frankly
indecent.
As a rule we talked about the Commune's affairs, factory
matters, and so on. I had not the right to remind him that
he was under arrest or look at my watch to see how long
he had been there, because he himself was supposed to
organise his arrest. It suited me very well that the matter
was entrusted to him.
You cannot know what this arrest was like. They had to
spend the whole of their day off sitting in my office, talking
to me.
The girls were strangely (horrified at the very thought of
arrest-it meant being disgraced before the whole Commune.
And so the girl-communards, who had the FED badge, took
care .never to get arrested.
One day I put a smart, pretty girl, a detachment command­
er, under arrest for two hours, and all that time she sat
weeping in my office: how was she to face the ^general meet­
ing now? Incidentally, she is a tragic actress at the Kharkov
theatre at present. Arrest means the application of the
theorem I have mentioned earlier: the utmost demands
combined with the utmost respect for a person, and with us
arrest was a sacred thing.
When I was urgently called to Kiev by telegram and had
to leave the Commune within the hour, I had no more than
thirty minutes in which to say good-bye to the collective
with which I had spent eight years. I could not say anything,
of course, it was as difficult for me to speak as it was for
them. The girls cried, everyone was in a state of nervous
shock, but still a reflex was occasioned just the same. I
interrupted my farewell speech, noticing dust on the piano
top, and said: "Who's on theatre duty today?
"The first detachment."
85
 "Five hours' arrest for the commander."
He was my old friend. We had spent all those eight years
together. But why the dust? He had overlooked it, and so
he got five hours' arrest.
I left, and when I returned two months later for inspec­
tion, the boy came to my office and s>aid:
"I've come to take my punishment."
"What for?"
"For the dust on the piano."
"But why didn't you do your punishment before
now?"
"I wanted to do it with you here."
And so I was obliged to sit there with him for five
hours!
So much for the form.
If a collective is united in its general tone and there is
trust, punishment can be a very original and interesting thing,
that is, if it is the general meeting which imposes it.
Once at a general meeting a senior Komsomol member
cursed the instructor. The boy wais right, but the language
he used was foul. And so the general meeting decided:
"To have Young Pioneer Kirenko (the youngest boy of
all) explain to Komsomol member so and so the rules of
behaviour."
They meant it. After the meeting, the commander on duty
called in Kirenko and the senior boy and said: "Sit down
and listen."
Kirenko tackled the task earnestly, and the senior boy
listened as earnestly.
At the next meeting, Kirenko reported:
Young Pioneer Kirenko reports fulfilment of the general
meeting's assignment."
"Did you understand what Kirenko told you?"
"I did."
"Go then."
It all ended there.

86
 One other case: a communard who was out taking a walk
with a girl-communard saw some people fighting. Tempted,
he joined in. The whole thing ended in plenty of trouble for
him. The general meeting's resolution said: "So and so must
think over his action for five minutes at 3 p.m. aiext day off,
and report to the commander."
He had to think his action over, whether he liked it or not.
It gave him enough food for a week's thought. And he did
draw the right conclusions, reporting them as ordered.
This sort of punishment, in imposing which the collective
effortlessly demonstrates its power, is really more of a
stimulus than anything else. In my practice, however, the
main thing was not punishment, of course, but talks of an
individual nature.
 LECTURE THREE

Methods of Individual Approach

Today I meant to discuss with you the question of indi­

vidual influence, the pedagogy of individual approach. The
transition from collective influence, from the organisation of
the collective to the organisation of the individual was some­
thing I took an erroneous view of in my first years of work.
I believed that influencing the collective as a body came
first, and influencing individuals as a corrective to the
development of that body came second.
As I gained in experience I became profoundly convinced,
and this conviction was later confirmed in practice, that
there is no such thing as >a direct transition from a collective
to an individual. The transition takes place through a primary
collective specially organised for an educational purpose.
I think that in future pedagogics will pay special attention
to the theory of the primary collective. How is one to under­
stand the term-primary collective?
The term can apply to a collective the members of which
are in constant business, friendly and ideological association.
It is what at one time our pedagogical theory proposed
calling the "contact”collective.
In our schools we do have these, of course. They are the
grade or the form, and perhaps their only shortcoming is
that they do not play the role of a primary collective, that
is, a link between the individual and the school collective.

88
 and very often they are the final collective. I saw this in
some schools, but I did not always see a school collective
as such.
The conditions I had were more favourable, since my com­
munards lived in and worked there, and thus had many
logical and practical reasons for taking an interest in the
affairs of the whole collective and live by its interests. But
then I did not have a natural primary collective, which a
school form is. I was obliged to create it. Later, we had a
full ten-year school and I could have based my work on a
primary collective of the school-form type. But I did not take
this course. A form unites children in their everyday work
and this leads to their isolating themselves from the rest of
the school. The reasons for them to shut themselves in in
their form interests are too many and too sound. And so in
later years I gave up the idea of building up a primary
collective according to a school-form pattern or even a work-
team pattern. My attempts to organise a commune made up
of primary collectives, united by such strong links as school
form and production work, yielded isad results. This type
of primary collective always tends to withdraw from the
interests of the collective generally and become isolated. If
this happens, it loses its value as a primary collective, it
consumes the interests of the school collective and makes
transition to the higher stage rather difficult.
I came to this conclusion through my mistakes-mistakes
which affected my educational work. I have the right to
speak about it because I see the same thing happening in
many schools where the interests of the primary collective
prevail.
Collective education cannot be achieved through primary
(contact) collectives only, because the unity of such a col­
lective, where the children see each other all day long and
live in friendly co-operation, engenders nepotism and leads
to a type of education that cannot be called quite Soviet
education. Only through a large collective, whose interests
come not from simple association but from a more profound

89
social synthesis, can the transition be made to a broad polit­
ical education where the word "collective" means the whole
Soviet society.
The danger of letting youngsters form a small closed col­
lective is that theirs will be a group and not a broad political
education.
I finally organised things in such a way that the primary
collective was a cell which received its school and work
interests from other groups. That is why, towards the end
I decided on breaking up the pupils into detachments com­
prised of boys and girls belonging to different forms and
different work teams.
I realise perfectly that the logic of this pattern will not
seem convincing enough to you. I do not have the time to go
into detailed explanations, and so I will briefly set out some
of the circumstances. For instance, there was the question
of age grouping. I wondered how it worked, so I studied it
in statistics, in action, in behaviour. At first, I too was all
for building up the primary collectives from children of the
same age. Partly because of their school interests.
This would seem to place the youngsters, isolated from
seniors, in a more natural and correct environment. At that
age (11 or 12) they ought to belong to one collective, with
their own interests and organisations, and this I believed was
the soundest pedagogical point of view. I was also influenced
by pedagogical literature which maintained that age-grouping
was one of the most important things in education.
But then I saw that youngsters, isolated from other age
groups, were in actual fact placed in an artificial environ­
ment. They were deprived of the constant influence of older
boys and girls, there was no handing down of experience,
they received no moral or aesthetic incentive from their older
brothers, from people who were more experienced and effi­
cient, and who, in a certain sense, were a model for the
youngsters to copy.
When I tried, by way of an experiment, to unite different
age groups, I found I was doing much better. And that was

90
 the form I decided on. In the last seven or eight years my
detachments always included some of the oldest, most
experienced, well read and politically developed Komsomol
members, and some of the youngest children. A collective
such as this, made up of different age groups, gave a much
better educational effect, and what is more it was manoeu­
vrable and smart, easy for me to manage.
A collective made up of youngsters of an age always tends
to shut itself up in its own shell of interests peculiar to that
given age, to withdraw from me, their guide, and from the
rest of the collective. Say, all of them are keen on skating;
this keenness naturally shuts them in into a precinct entirely
their own. But if my collective is made up of different age
groups, the life it lives and the hobbies it pursues follow a
more intricate pattern, requiring greater effort from both
its older and younger members, making higher demands upon
them, and, consequently, producing a more desirable educa­
tional effect.
In later years I practised the principle "who wants to be
with whom" when forming collectives of different age groups.
The boldness of this venture frightened me at first, but
then I saw that it was the most natural and wholesome set-up,
provided that this natural primary collective included
youngsters from different school forms and work teams.
Thus I reached the irrevocable decision that this was the
best way.
A detachment was a voluntary union of ten or twelve
people. The union was formed gradually, of course. In the
Commune there were always boys with whom no one wanted
to join up of their own free will. A circumstance which helped
me to identify the difficult cases. There were about fifteen
to twenty such boys in our collective of five hundred who
would not be taken on voluntarily by any of the detachments.
There were fewer difficult girls, no more than three or four
out of the total 150, although girls are usually less friendly
than boys. The reason for this discrepancy was that the boys
were rather more principled than the girls and also given

91
to exaggeration, refusing to take on this or that person,
because he'd ruin their skates or bully the younger kids or
something. The girls took a more optimistic view, they were
quicker to agree to admit a doubtful character to their midst,
hoping they'd be able to reform him.
What did I do in such cases? I brought the unwanted boys
to -the general meeting and said:
"Here are the fifteen people no detachment wants to take
on. Zemlyanoi here wanted to join the first detachment but
was Tefused. He tried the second, but was rejected again.
He approached the fifteenth detachment, and the same thing
happened. What are we to do?"
A debate ensued. A detachment commander would stand
up and say*.
"What's the big idea refusing to take him on? Why did the
first, second and fifteenth detachments reject him? We want
an explanation from them."
The explanation would be brief.
"Take him into your fourteenth detachment, if that's the
way you feel about it. Make him your responsibility and
you're welcome to the bother."
"We had nothing to do with him," an -answer would come
back. "He went to you. He's so-and-so's buddy. You bragged
you'd make something of him."
It turned out that no detachment would take him on.
I had to "earn my bread" then. It was obviously both
unpleasant and difficult for the detachment which refused
to take the boy, especially since no one made any definite
charge against him and simply said: let some other detach­
ment take him on. And there stood the boy, rejected by the
collective.
He would then try to persuade them, swearing he'd be
good and promising to do wonderful things in the future.
Well, the matter had to be settled one way or another. And
then the leaders-members of the Komsomol bureau and
detachment commanders—would have their say, suggesting
where to put the boy. As a rule all this talk led nowhere.

92
 They would drop Zemlyanoi and start discussing Ivanov,
Romanehenko, Petrenko 'and the rest of the fifteen, trying
to squeeze one boy into each of the fifteen detachments.
A new process began. Every detachment would try to get
the most passable of the fifteen boys. A break was made
after which one of the commanders would say: 'Til take so
and so/'
The most passable boy was now a prize competed for by
all the other detachments, and the very same Zemlyanoi,
whom nobody wanted at first, was now craved by all,
because Petrenko, Shapovalov and the rest were even
worse.
Say the first detachment got him.
"You are responsible for him," we told them. "You wanted
him, and so you'll answer for him."
We would go on to the next candidate. He was the best
of the remaining fourteen, and again the detachments fought
for possession of him. And so it went on, until there were
only Voskoboinikov and Shapovalov left. And here again
the remaining two detachments tried to grab the lesser of the
two evils.
In the process of distribution I was able to study all the
unwanted boys well. They formed a community apart as
far as I was concerned. I kept them in mind all the time, and
I knew that those fifteen boys were my most dangerous group.
They had no crimes on their record, but still it was very
important for me to know that the collective had not wanted
to take them into its midst.
The boys and girls sensed what Petrenko was at bottom,
and their not wanting to admit him to their detachment
meant that he warranted my particular attention. The fact
that the detachment which took him eventually made itself
responsible for him was a great help to me.
That is how our primary collectives were formed. Some
very intricate instrumentation had to be done, of course,
to get the best use out of the collective. The tone and style
of the detachment's work needed the most attuning.

93
 What is a primary collective, a detachment? In our practical
work at the Gorky Colony and the Dzerzhinsky Commune
we arrived at the following rule: we, that is myself as head
of the Commune, the bodies of self-government, the Kom­
somol bureau, the council of commanders, and the general
meeting, tried to have no dealings with separate individuals.
That is, officially. I find it very difficult to prove this logic
to you. I have called it the logic of parallel educational
influence. It is so difficult for me to explain because I have
never written anything about it and never sought or found
any formulas.
What is parallel educational influence?
We dealt only with the detachment. We had no dealings
with the individual. Such was the official formula. In actual
fact we dealt with the individual, but we asserted that we
were not concerned with the individual.
To explain. We did not want every separate individual to
feel that he was an object of education. The way I saw it was
that here's a twelve or fifteen-year old living and enjoying
life, getting some joy out of it and accumulating experience
and impressions. As far as we are concerned he is an object
of education, but as far as he is concerned he is a living
person, and it will not serve me well to try and convince
him that he is not a person, only a person in the making,
that he is not a living thing but an object pedagogically
speaking.
I tried to convince him that I was more a teacher who was
teaching him to read and write than an educator; that I was
helping him to learn a trade, that I appreciated his contri­
bution to the production process, that I realised he was a
citizen, and that I was an older comrade guiding his life
with his help and his participation. I took care not to make
him feel that he was no more than a pupil, no more than an
object of education, of mo social or personal worth. But
actually to me he was just that.
It was the same with a detachment. We insisted that a
detachment was a small Soviet cell faced with big social

94
 tasks. It was up to the detachment to try and elevate the
Commune to the highest possible state. It had to help the
ex-communards, help the one-time strays who came to the
Commune and needed assistance.
The detachment had to be public-spirited and act as the
primary cell in social work and life.
Together with my teaching staff we came to the conclusion
that an individual needed very careful adjusting to his
environment to make him feel himself a citizen, a person,
above all else. In our subsequent work this became a tradi­
tion.
Petrenko oame late to work. The matter was reported to
me that same evening. I called in the commander of his
detachment and said:
"One of you was late to work."
"Yes. It was Petrenko."
"See it doesn't happen again.''
"It won't happen again."
But then Petrenko was late again. I summoned the detach­
ment.
"It's the second time your Petrenko came late to work."
I ticked off the whole detachment. They promised it would
not happen again. I said: "You may go."
I watched to see what would happen. I knew they would
take Petrenko to task, and make enormous demands upon
him as a member of their detachment, as a member of the
whole collective.
The meetings of the council of commanders were attended
by commanders elected by the general meeting. But it made
no difference who came-the commander himself or some
member of his detachment. Such was our rule. We made
sure that all the detachments were represented. First detach­
ment, present? Present, but so and so is representing the
commander who is busy. This person had the right to attend
and speak for his detachment and its commander.
Another example: Volkov stole something. He was dealt
with personally, but it was the detachment and not Volkov

95
that was given a bad mark. The detachment was entirely
responsible for the fact that one of its members had com­
mitted a theft.
To go on. Supposing ten out of the twelve members of a
detachment had excellent -showings. The detachment would
move up to first place. It received certain privileges, a bonus
or, perhaps, was given tickets for several shows at the opera
theatre. We had some tickets every day. Well, the whole
detachment would go: the ones with good showings and the
few whose marks were quite bad. They benefited by what
the detachment had earned.
It would seem unfair, but actually it worked very well,
because it made the pupil with the bad marks feel awkward
going to the theatre with the excellent ten or eleven. He had
not earned it, he was benefiting by what the others had
earned, and it placed him under -an unspoken moral obliga­
tion. The next month he would strive for excellent showings
himself.
Sometimes a boy like that would come to me and say:
"Transfer me to another detachment. All of our chaps
have excellent showings except me. They're all going to the
theatre and they say they'll take me along rather than throw
the ticket away, and I don't want to go."
This advancement of the individual against the background
of the detachment helped us a great deal.
If out of the twelve, five were good or up to standard and
seven were such a drag on the detachment that they pulled it
down to the bottom of the ladder, the whole detachment
was answerable for it.
We had from 35 to 45 detachments all in all. Every month
their indices were added up and the detachments placed.
There was a special diagram showing this. On the 2nd of
every month there was a meeting at which the previous
month s winners ceremoniously handed the banner over to
the detachment which had -taken their place. It was a gor­
geous, splendid banner made specially for the purpose and
kept in the dormitory of the best detachment.

96
 The detachments also competed in orderliness, discipline,
and so on. Results were announced every six days. The seven
best detachments were given theatre tickets. We had 31
tickets every day. The way we distributed them was this:
the best detachment got 7 tickets, the next one 6, the third 5,
and so on down the grade. In other words, the best detach­
ment got seven tickets every day for six days, the next one 6,
and so on. We did not care who got the tickets, whether it
was the ones who pulled the detachment up or those who
dragged it down. It was the business of the detachment and
none of ours. Everyone went. A bus came for them every
evening, and those who had tickets got in. The commander
on duty made sure they all had tickets, were dressed prop­
erly and had a ruble on them to buy some refreshment.
Those going to the theatre had to answer the three require­
ments: ticket, appearance and ruble, and no one asked them
if they ranked first or last in their detachment
Such was the significance of the detachment in all other
matters as well. Take the distribution of the cleaning jobs.
We had no cleaners, but the premises had to be kept spick
and span in view of the fact that the Commune, being so
conveniently situated, was always receiving our own and
foreign delegations. In 1935, for instance, we had our two-
hundredth Intourist delegation. It was a spur to us, of course,
to keep the place in perfect order, but cleaning, polishing
floors, brass door handles and mirrors, always having fresh
flowers, and all the rest of it was a huge job, and since we
had no specially employed people to cope with it, the com­
munards themselves had to do all the work. All the five
hundred of them did cleaning from a quarter past six till
a quarter to seven every morning.
It took a lot of organising to get this work to run smoothly,
A certain amount of experience was needed. Efficiency was
attained by dividing the work up among the detachments
six months ahead. There can be no shifting about. One detach­
ment got a pail, a mop, and a floor brush, another one got
everything necessary for polishing floors, a third for cleaning
7-163 97
toilets, a fourth for polishing and dusting the assembly hall
etc. The standing of a detachment was taken into considera­
tion when dividing the work. The best one, for instance, got
the toilet to clean, which took twelve minutes, and the lowest
ranking detachment got the assembly hall which took a very
long time to do properly, all the members working in the
sweat of their brow, so to speak. As a rule the lowest ranking
detachment was given the cleanest but the most labour­
consuming job, and, mind you, if it was not done properly
the commander alone would be punished. He was put under
arrest as punishment for the inefficiency of his detachment,
and we did not bother to ask exactly who forgot to dust the
radiator.
In all matters, the detachment was the body which I, as
head of the Commune, came into closest contact with. But
it was a very difficult business for me to make a careful
study of the detachment's psyche. It is here that the personal­
ity of the tutor attached to the detachment comes to the fore.
But of this later.
I could go on speaking about the significance of the pri­
mary collective, but I have not the time. There is one more
thing I want to say. In school we have less opportunity of
advancing the primary collective. Some other method is
indicated. But nevertheless I maintain that a primary col-
lective must not push the school collective into the back­
ground or substitute for it, and my second thesis is that
contact with the individual must be made chiefly through the
primary collective. Such is my theorem in general terms, and
when it comes to details a commune must approach it in one
way and a school in quite another.
Officially we came in touch with the individual only
through the primary collective. Such was the idea. But
actually the individual pupil came first with us.
How did my colleagues and I organise work with the
pupils, with the different personalities?
To work with a pupil one has to know him well and
cultivate him. If in my imagination I had seen those per-

98
 sonalities scattered like so many peas outside the bounds
of the collective, if I had approached them without this col­
lective yardstick, I would never have managed them.
I had five hundred different personalities. An important
circumstance. The first year, I made the usual beginners
mistake. I turned my attention to personalities which were
misfits in the collective. Mistakenly I directed my attention
to the most dangerous characters and occupied myself with
them. Naturally, it was the thieves, the hooligans, the col­
lective's antagonists and those who wanted to run away-
in other words those whom the collective would any­
way cast off and drop-who engaged my attention. Naturally,
I watched them particularly. I did it in the firm belief that I
was a pedagogue and that I knew how to handle different
personalities. I called everyone in in turn, talked, persuaded,
and so on.
I changed the tone of my work in later years. I realised
that the most dangerous characters were not those who made
themselves conspicuous, but those who hid from me.
What made me think so? By that time I had already
graduated fifteen groups, and following their careers closely
I saw that many of those whom I had thought dangerous and
bad were doing well, meeting life on the right terms as Soviet
people should, and though they did make mistakes some­
times, as a product of education I found them quite satis­
factory. Some of the boys who used to hide from me, making
themselves unnoticeable in the collective, were taking a
philistine attitude to life: they married too early, built -a
'pretty nest", squeezed themselves into soft jobs by various
means, resigned from the Komsomol, severed all ties with
society, and turned into small nondescript creatures, with
no telling "what they are" or "how they smell". In some
cases I even noticed signs of a slow but deep-seated decay.
Those whose ambitions stopped at building a home and
feeding up pigs, those who stopped attending meetings and
reading the newspapers, were quite likely to get involved in
shady deals one fine day.
7*
99
 I came to the profound conviction that it was the ones who
hid from me and kept out of my way, who made the most
dangerous characters requiring my particular attention.
Incidentally, it was the communards themselves who
started me thinking about it. In -some cases they were quite
outspoken in assuring me that the ones who kept to them­
selves, cramming all day (they'd probably go on cramming
or fixing their radios even if a fire broke out), never
speaking at meetings, never voicing an opinion, were the
worst of the lot, the most dangerous, because they were
clever and shrewd enough to keep out of the way, pursue
their own quiet course, and go out into life intact and
unconvinced.
When I had made some headway, when I had got over the
shock of faheft and hooliganism, I realised that the aim of
my educational work was not putting two or three hooligans
and thieves straight, but rearing a definite type of citizen,
moulding a militant, active, efficient character, and that this
positive aim could only be achieved if I trained the whole
collective and not merely put straight the odd individual
who needed straightening.
Some teachers make the same mistake in school, too. There
are teaahers who think it their duty to concentrate on difficult
or backward pupils, leaving the so-called "normal" ones to
carry on by themselves. But the question is: what are they
carrying on and where will it carry them?
The communards helped me even in their terminology.
It was the council of commanders and not I who made a
regular analysis of the collective, posting it up for all the
Commune to know. To myself I divided the communards
into two groups: 1) the doing activists, and 2) the reserve.
The doing activists are the ones who lead the Commune,
that s obvious to all. They respond to every question with
feeling, passion, conviction and demands. They lead the
Commune in the ordinary sense of the word. But in case of
emergency, danger, or the launching of a major campaign
they always have their reserve to fall back on, not really

WO
 called the active yet, not commanders, but quick to render
assistance. This is the reserve which eventually takes over
from the doing activists.
Then, there were boys and girls whom I noted down as
the healthily passive group. They wanted time to grow up,
but in the meantime they attended hobby circles, went in for
sports, contributed to the wall newspaper, and obediently
followed the seniors.
I had a few people whom I called the rotting activists.
They were our detachment commanders, members of com­
missions and the Komsomol bureau, but it was obvious to
me and the rest simply from the expression of their eyes and
their gait-we needed no facts-that they were playing a subtle
and clever game. Doing something underhand here, slander­
ing someone there, dodging work, getting a small boy to
wipe their machine tools for them, and so it went on; decay
set in when they started abusing their privileged standing,
shirking work and using a lordly tone. Sometimes this decay
assumes quite ominous proportions. You could smell alcohol
on their breath, and we were merciless where drinking was
concerned. The law at the Commune was: first time drunk,
out you go!
I would ask the boy for an explanation.
"I had a glass of beer in town," he would say.
"Drinking a glass of beer is no crime, but I suspect it
wasn't beer."
So much for the rotting activists. We did not formally list
people in that category, but the Komsomol secretary and two
or three other Komsomol members knew that some sort of
decay had set in.
And finally there was a group which some communards
called "the rabble". You had to keep a sharp eye on them
and see they didn't pick your pocket. They might do anything:
break open and rob a safe, or get into the factory and steal
spare parts. Usually they were newcomers belonging to the
senior age group. We had fifteen or twenty of them at a time.
Even if they didn't do anything wrong, everyone knew that

101
they were "the rabble" and if they weren't watched they
would be sure to do something bad.
And now for the term "bog" which we took from the
French Revolution. This applied to a group of fifty or so
who stumbled along somehow, fulfilled their norms half­
heartedly, and there was no knowing what they lived by,
what their hearts and their minds were on.
Watching this group making progress was the most pleas­
ant and gladdening thing. Say, Petrov or someone was in
the "bog": we'd tell him that he was, that he wasn't doing
anything, not interested in anything, that he was dull, inef­
ficient and indifferent to everything. And then the detach­
ment would try to wake him up. Before long you'd see him
displaying initiative, taking an interest in something, dis­
playing initiative again, and there he would be promoted to
the reserve or the healthy passive.
Our whole task was to root out the "bog" and "rabble"
categories.
We launched a direct attack on the "rabble". There were
no subtleties here. It was a frontal attack. The "rabble" was
given a talking to for every trifling offence, and brought
before the general meeting. To cope with this job we had
to be determined and exacting.
The more difficult categories, i.e., the "bog" and the rotting
activists, called for an individual approach and a variety
of methods.
We shall now deal with individual approach. The collective
of tutors and teachers plays the most important role here.
It is very difficult to define their task in accurate enough
terms. This, perhaps, is the greatest problem in our pedagogy.
In our pedagogical literature the word "tutor" appears in
the singular in more cases than not: "the tutor must be
this and that", "the tutor must do this and that", or "the
tutor must speak in such and such a manner".
I cannot imagine how pedagogy could count on the lone
tutor. Naturally we'd find things difficult without this gifted
tutor, capable of managing the pupils, and possessing a keen

102
 eye, perseverance, intelligence, experience-a good tutor, in
other words. But when we have thirty-five million children
and teenagers to educate, can we stake everything on the
chance that such tutors will be available?
Leaving this to chance means accepting that a good tutor
will provide good education and a poor tutor will provide
poor education. Has anyone tried to count the number of
gifted and giftless tutors? And then, of course, -a tutor has
to be well educated himself. What sort of upbringing must
he have, what sort of person must he be, what should his
aims and interests be? No one has ever counted the tutors
who fail to meet these requirements....
And yet we are staking everything on the tutors alone.
Since in the course of my life I have been obliged to deal
mainly with the aims and problems of upbringing, I know
what it means to be landed with poorly brought up tutors
and how the work suffers from it. It was a waste of years
and effort for me, because it is exceedingly foolish to expect
such a person to do any useful upbringing for us. Later, I
came to the conclusion that it is better to have no tutor at
all than one who has had a poor upbringing himself. I thought
it was better to have four gifted tutors than forty giftless
and ill-educated ones. I have seen how they work with my
own eyes. What results could their work be expected to yield?
Nothing but the disintegration of the collective. There could
be no other results.
It follows that the choice of tutor is a matter of primary
importance. How make that choice? For some reason little
attention is paid to this matter. It is the prevalent opinion
with us that any person, anyone at all, can be a tutor if he
is appointed to the job and paid a tutor's salary. And yet
it is a most difficult job, perhaps the most responsible job
in the long run, demanding of a person not merely maximum
effort, but also strength of character and uncommon
ability.
No one did so much harm to my work, no one knocked
out of true the structure it had taken me years to build as

103
badly as a poor tutor. And so in later years I adopted a firm
line to work without them or to use only those that were
really capable. Naturally, it made extra work for me.
Then I gave up the idea of tutors altogether. I usually
sought the help of school teachers, but I had to train them
first. I am convinced that teaching a person to bring up
youngsters is as easy as teaching him arithmetic, say, or
reading, or operating a lathe, and so teach them I did.
How did I go about it? First of all a tutor s character,
behaviour, special knowledge and his training have to be
organised. Otherwise he will not make a good tutor and
do useful work. He must know how to use his voice, how
to speak to youngsters, and what and when to say to them.
This training is essential. A tutor who cannot control
his facial expression or his moods is no good. He must
know how to walk, joke, appear gay or angry, and he must
be able to handle the pupils. He must behave in such a
way that his every movement would be educative, and
he must always know exactly what he wants or does not
want. If he does not know this, how can he educate
others?
I am convinced that in future our teachers' colleges will
introduce such compulsory subjects as voice training, posture,
control of one's movements and facial expression, otherwise
I cannot imagine a tutor coping with his task. Tutors need
to have their voices trained not merely to sing beautifully
or speak, but to express their thoughts and feelings with the
utmost precision, authority and imperiousness. All these are
matters of educational technique.
For instance, you must know in what tone of voice to give
a scolding, how far your anger or indignation may be shown,
what right you have to show it at all, and if you do—in what
way. All this is, in fact, education. A pupil apprehends your
feelings and your thoughts not because he knows what is
going on in your heart, but because he is watching you and
listening to you. Watching a play we admire the actors on

104
 the stage, and their beautiful acting gives us aesthetic
pleasure. Well, here the pupil is watching too, but the actors
he is watching are tutors, and the impact has to be educative.
I cannot dwell longer on this matter. The important thing
is for a tutor to tackle his job consciously and actively.
Secondly, no tutor has the right to play a lone hand, to
act at his own risk and on his own responsibility. There has
to be a collective of educators, they have to be united, working
according to a single plan, adopting the same tone and the
same approach to pupils. Otherwise there can be no educa­
tional process to speak of. Therefore, it is better to have
five weak tutors, united and inspired by the same thoughts,
principles and style of work, than ten good educators with
all of them working on their own in any way they see fit.
There can be many different distortions here. I suppose
you know what a favourite teacher is. Now, I'm a school
teacher, and supposing I begin to imagine that I'm everyone's
favourite. Without myself noticing it I begin to pursue a
certain policy. I am liked, and so I want to keep the pupils'
affection, I try to be well loved by them. There I am, the
favourite teacher, and all the rest are no one's favourites.
What kind of educational process is this? The teacher
has already divorced himself from the collective. He fancies
himself 50 well liked that he can afford to work any way it
pleases him.
I respected my helpers-some of them were absolutely
brilliant in their work-but I tried to convince them that
becoming the favourite teacher should be the least of their
ambitions. Personally, I never tried to win the children's
affection, and in my opinion this affection, encouraged by
the teacher for his own pleasure, is a crime. Maybe some of
the communards are attached to me, but since my main task
was to make citizens and real people out of the five hundred
boys and girls in my charge, I did not see why I should
make it more complicated by fostering in them a hysterical
sort of love for my own self.

105
 This coquetry, this chasing after popularity, this boasting
of their belovedness does a lot of harm to teachers and pupils
both. I have persuaded myself and my comrades that there
is no room for this sort of thing in our life.
Let them grow attached to you little by little, without any
effort on your part. But if a teacher sees this affection as
an end in itself, it can do only harm. If he does not seek
this affection, he can be exacting and fair to his pupils and
to himself.
Correct upbringing can be achieved only by a collective
of educators united in their common views and convictions,
mutually helpful, and free from jealousy, free from a craving
to endear themselves personally to the pupils. That is why
I warmly welcome the news, which our newspapers have
published, that the People's Commissariat of Public Educa­
tion is giving serious consideration to the problem of enhanc­
ing the authority and power of headmasters and directors
of studies who would co-ordinate the work of the teaching
staff.
A short while ago the Sovietsky Pisatel Publishers sent
me a manuscript to read. The author is a Moscow teacher.
The book is written in the first person, it tells about a
schoolmistress, the staff, the pupils, and covers the period of
a school year.
At the publishing house opinion on this book differed
sharply. Some dismissed it as cheap and shoddy, while others
proclaimed it wonderful: I was called in as an arbiter.
If I were to recommend the publication of this story, it
would only be for a definite purpose. The schoolmistress
portrayed in it is such a disgusting person that, actually, it
would do people a world of good to read it and see what a
schoolmistress should not be like. But the author is full of
admiration for her.
This pedagogical fake's only care is to win the pupils*
love . All the parents are awful people, she has nothing
but contempt for them, she calls all parents and families
dull, drab things", while she herself is a pedagogue with

106
 capital P, if you please. All her fellow teachers are rotters
o a man.* one can t see clearly for vanity, another takes no
m erest in anything, a third is a schemer, and a fourth is
just lazy; the headmaster is sluggish and stupid. She alone
is perfect.
TVi^kat S r?ore/ ^ is stuff is written in the nastiest tone,
e book is full of tender sighing, a pining for love a la
ci itskaya, a chasing after affection, and the pupils are
escribed in a most unpleasant manner. And another thing:
c peculiar unwholesome attention to matters of sex.
he plot, I suppose, boils down to this: a boy looked at
<*girl in a special way, the girl wrote him a note, and she,
f Pedagogue, brilliantly smashed these attempts at
a love, and earned everyone's gratitude.
er tyPe pedagogical fakes who flirt with themselves
even when alone, who flirt with their pupils and society,
cannot educate anyone. The only way to make responsible,
serious educators of the school teachers is to unite them
juto a collective, rally them round the central figure-the
eadmaster. This is also a very serious problem which our
Pedagogues should pay more attention to.
, ™ Suck £Jreat demands are to be made on the educator,
en even greater demands must be made on the person who
tlnl tes educators into a collective.
. Tlle length of time a collective of teachers works together
a most important condition, and I think our pedagogues
not take this matter seriously enough. If, on the average,
years is what a communard stays with us, then a tutor
s ould also do five years' service at the Commune at the
^erY least. It should be made a rule, because in a really close­
s t collective, whose life is settled and runs a proper course.
a newcomer is always a newcomer, whether he is a pupil or
f fntor. And it is a mistake to imagine that a tutor who has
joined the staff will be able to give the pupils anything,
he success of a tutor depends on how long he has been
°n the staff, how much energy and effort he has put into the
shaping of the collective; if -the collective of teachers is

107
younger than that of the pupils it will be rather feeble. This
does not mean at all that only old men should be taken on
the staff. It is up to our pedagogues to study the peculiarities
of impact made by old teachers and beginners, and strike
a balance. Assembling a staff of teachers cannot be a chance
or accidental thing, it has to be done intelligently. There
must be a certain number of old, experienced teachers, and
it is absolutely essential to include a young girl who has
just graduated from college and has never yet taken an
independent step. It is one of the mysteries of pedagogy:
when a young girl fresh from college comes into an old
collective of teachers and an old collective of pupils, an
elusively subtle process, which makes education a success,
is sure to begin. The girl will be learning from the old
teachers and this will give them a sense of responsibility for
her work.
The question of how many men and how many women
should be on the staff needs serious thought. The prevalence
of men creates an undesirable tone. And having too many
women also results in a sort of one-sided development.
I should say that the looks of the teacher are also very
important. It would be best, of course, if all teachers were
handsome, but at any rate there simply must be one good-
looking young man and one beautiful young woman on the
staff.
This is the way I did it. Let us suppose I had twenty-two
teachers and one vacancy. If all the twenty-two were plain
like me. I'd choose a good-looking person to fill the vacancy.
The pupils should admire the staff aesthetically also. Let
them be a little infatuated. This will be the best sort of
infatuation, not sexual but aesthetic, pleasantly visual.
The question of how many teachers should be gay and
how many glum also needs deciding. I cannot picture a
collective composed of gloomy people exclusively. There
must be at least one cheery person, at least one wit. Regula­
tions governing staff composition ought to fill a volume in
the pedagogics of the future.

108
 I had a teacher, Tersky* by name. It frightened me to
think that someone might lure him away from me. He was
an amazingly jovial person. He infected all of us-the pupils
and myself-with his bubbling good humour. He lacked
organisation, but I succeeded in making a real, splendid
tutor of him. He did awful things sometimes. Once, when
we were off to see an opera, I was surprised to see him
carrying his year-old baby in his arms. "What are you bring­
ing the baby for?" I asked him. "He's a year old, he's got
to get used to good music!" And I said: "Take him when
you're not with the communards."
He developed into a wonderful tutor. He was jolly every
minute of the day, whatever he was doing, and he proved
to be a wizard for devising games, quizzes, rebuses, and other
things. Take the rebus-the picture puzzle covered half the
wall. The genius of the man quite astonished me: how could
anyone make up so many puzzles? There were all kinds of
questions, short ones and long ones, funny and tricky ones,
with pictures and diagrams. He did not devise them all
himself, he had a hundred-and-fifty people or so working
on the rebus, a proper editorial board, who hunted through
the magazines, or made up the jokes themselves. There was
method in the rebus. For instance, there would be a puzzle
which, if solved correctly, would give the winner a thousand
points. If one person solved it, he would get the thousand
points, and the author of the puzzle would get the same. If
a hundred people solved it, they got ten points each, the
puzzle being obviously an easy one.
Tersky managed to draw all the communards into these
games, firing the enterprise with his enthusiasm.
For instance, there was this puzzle once: "On Sunday find
me at a spot 4 km away from the Commune in the north-

* Viktor Tersky-Merited Teacher of the R.S.F.S.R., who had worked

with A. S. Makarenko at both the Gorky Colony and the Dzerzhinsky
Commune. He is the author of Hobbies and Games in A. S. Makarenko's
Practice and A School Game to Match Wits, which are popular with
Soviet teachers. In his novels Makarenko calls him Persky.

109
easterly direction. I'll have a curious object in my right
pocket The finder will get a thousand points."
And so on Sunday the communards started out in a body
to look for Tersky, taking their compasses and their lunch
with them. I had to put dinner back, because they were still
looking for him somewhere to the north-east of the Com­
mune.
It is quite impossible to enumerate all the interesting things
he did! Another time, he challenged them: "On such and
such a date at such and such an hour you must untie the
shoe-laces of Solomon Borisovich Kogan, our production
manager. The person who succeeds in doing it will get so
many points."
Solomon Borisovich was a man of substance, a dignified
person, running to fat. He had already read the notice and
was indignant. At 3 p.m. the communards surrounded him.
"What, are you going to assault me? No, that's not the way,"
he said to them.
He was right, it was not the way. Cunning had to be used.
And one of the boys did manage to untie his shoe-laces.
Tersky was bubbling over with energy, and he had a way
of keeping the youngsters busy all the time.
One day he suddenly announced to the Commune at
large:
"As a matter of fact, perpetual motion is possible to
achieve. We could make a device, I believe, which would
remain in motion for ever."
He sounded so confident and played his part so well that
before you knew it, even the engineers and instructors,
carried away by his idea, all got down to work on the device.
What's the big idea?" I asked Tersky. "Everyone knows
that no such device can be made."
"Never mind, let them try," he answered. "Maybe one of
them will make it."
And I found myself almost believing that perpetual motion
could be achieved.
On the other hand, the staff must have someone who never

no
 smiles, who is very stern, a person who never forgives a
fault and who cannot be disobeyed.
I enjoyed myself tremendously sometimes. A young
teacher, a girl fresh from college, would be on duty. The
entire collective of pupils would be on the alert because
there were always boys who'd try to make a fool of her,
and she might need help.
"I was late to work because I have no shoes to wear,"
one of them would say.
She'd be flustered, not knowing what to do. And immedi­
ately the others would be on to him: "You be careful, we
know you're lying."
A thing like this rallied the whole collective.
The next day, the stern educator would be on duty. He
made his appearance at 6 a.m. sharp, he never let anyone
oversleep, he merely had to open the door and twitch a
moustache for everyone to know that there was no getting
round him.
In my practical work I stuck to the principle that no
pedagogue, tutor or teacher should have the right to punish,
and I never gave anyone this right, even the right to scold.
In the first place it is a very difficult thing to do. In the
second, my considered opinion was that one person alone
should have the right to punish, so there would be no con­
fusion and no getting in each other s way. I admit that it
made the work of -the pedagogues more difficult still since
they were obliged to rely solely on their authority over the
pupils.
Talking about authority, many pedagogues are convinced
that it is either a gift from God-a person is born with author­
ity, everyone looks at him and knows he has it-or it is
something that has to be artificially built up. That is why
people so often say: "You shouldn't have ticked off -the
teacher in front of the pupils. You are undermining his
authority."
Authority, I think, results from responsibility. If a person
has a responsibility to bear and he bears it with honour.

///
he gains authority. It is according to this pattern that he
must build up his authority, behaving accordingly.
The pedagogue must strive to establish the closest contact
with the primary collective, to make the best friends with
it and guide it as an older comrade. Pedagogical instrumenta­
tion is altogether an intricate and lengthy procedure. For
instance, if a pupil violated discipline, displaying the bad
in him, I insisted that the pedagogue should first of all get
the detachment to investigate. It is part of the educator s
work to stimulate the detachment's activity, to encourage the
collective to be more exacting towards the individual.
I cannot dwell longer on the methods of the educators'
work, it would take up too much time, so I will merely
tell you how I myself, working as an educator, approached
different personalities.
In dealing with an individual I preferred the frontal
attack, and recommended it to others. To illustrate: if a boy
did something bad, despicable, I told him so: "Your action
was despicable."
That famous pedagogical tact, of which so much is being
written, should really mean the sincerity of your opinion:
I will not permit myself to hide anything, to sugar the pill/
I say what I really think. It is the most sincere, simple, easy
and effective way, but it so happens that it is not always
right to speak.
I think talk helps least of all. If I saw that my talking
did no good, I said no more.
Say, a boy insulted a girl. I found out about it. Should
I talk to him? The important thing for me was to have him
understand without my talking to him. And so I wrote him
a note and sent it to him in a sealed envelope.
I ve got to tell you about those "liaison officers" of mine.
They were boys of ten or so, sharp-eyed and smart. They
always knew where anyone was to be found. These liaison
officers had an important part to play. I would hand one of
them the envelope which contained my note: "Com. Yevstig­
neyev, please come to my office at 11 p.m. tonight."

112
 The boy knew perfectly well what was in the note, he
knew what was wrong and why I was calling in Yevstig­
neyev, in short, he knew all the inside story but did not let
on to me that he did. “ Take the note to Yevstigneyev," I
said to him. And not another word.
I knew what would happen. He would come into the
dining-room and say: "A note for you."
“What's that?"
“Anton Semyonovich wants you."
“What for?"
“I'll tell you. Remember insulting that girl yesterday?"
And the liaison officer would come for him at 10.30 p.m.
"You ready?"
"I'm ready."
"It's time you went."
Sometimes the boy, let's call him Yevstigneyev, was
unable to stand it until 11 p.m. and came to my office at
3 in the afternoon.
"Did you call me, Anton Semyonovich?"
"Not now, at 11 p.m."
He would go back to his detachment, and everyone would
ply him with questions: "What's up? Getting hell?" "Yeah."
"What for?"
And until 11 p.m. they'd give him hell in the detachment.
He'd come to my office at the appointed hour looking pale
and unnerved by what he had gone through that day.
"Have you understood everything?" I'd ask him.
"I have."
"Go then."
There was no need to say more.
In other cases I acted differently. I'd tell the messenger:
"Tell him to come at once."
And when he came I'd tell him all I thought of him. But
I would not bother to talk to him at all if he was a difficult
character who did not trust me, was antagonistic to me and
treated me with some suspicion. Instead I would call the
seniors together, summon the boy and address him in the
8-1 63
113
most formal, agreeable of tones. What mattered to me was
not what I said but how the others looked at him. He faced
me squarely enough, but he was afraid to meet the eyes of
his comrades.
"Your comrades will now explain things to you," I'd
say.
They would proceed to tell him what I had taught them,
and he would imagine that it was all their own idea.
A special method had to be used sometimes. There were
cases when I had to call in the whole detachment, but in
order not to make it too obvious that I was summoning the
whole detachment to put one single person straight, I invited
them to come and have tea with me. I offered them tea,
cakes and lemonade. As a rule I had one detachment to tea
every week. And as a rule no one knew what it was all about
and was frightfully intrigued. As they drank tea, joked and
chatted, they wondered which of them was the culprit.
Sometimes I would not even give them a hint. And if in the
course of conversation the culprit gave himself away they'd
pounce on him right there and then. After tea they would
go back to their dormitory in a good mood and disposed to
do good.
"Everything was fine, and there you went and let us
down!" they would say.
A week later I would invite the same detachment to tea
again. They understood that it was a test, that I wanted to
see what had been done. And they would tell me themselves
how they had talked to the offender, making him promise
to behave himself, and how they had appointed someone to
look after him.
"Don't worry! Everything will be all right."
Sometimes it was a school form I invited to my tea
parties.
Since no one knew when the next tea party would be and
who would be invited, all the pupils made ready for it,
keeping their clothes neat, just in case. (They used lotion
for the occasion, too.) It worried them that they might

114
 suddenly get an invitation to tea when things were not quite
right in their detachment.
I remember one case: the tea party had just begun when
suddenly an offence so gross came to light that the com­
mander on duty suggested that they all stop eating and
drinking. The punishment was well deserved. It was mortify­
ing for the whole detachment with everyone teasing next
day: "Enjoyed the tea party?"
All these are forms of individual treatment. These forms
are especially important if the initiative belongs to the pupils
themselves. Usually the boy or girl would come to me and
say: "Tve got to speak to you in private, it's a secret/'
This is the friendliest and best of forms.
In some cases, however, I permitted myself to forego the
frontal attack and try flanking instead. That was when the
whole collective was set against one person. A frontal attack
is not fair then, because the person has no protection on
any side. With the collective set against him, and with me
against him too, it may break him.
We had a girl called Lena, a sweet, good girl, but she
had already been a streetwalker. We had a lot of trouble
with her at first, but after a year with us she began to
improve. And then one day her best friend discovered that
someone had stolen fifty rubles from her locker. Everyone
■said that it was Lena's doing. I gave them permission to
search her things. They did. The search yielded nothing. I
su9gested that the case be considered closed.
A few days later, however, the money was discovered in
the reading-room 'stuck into the special gadget we had for
bolting windows and hidden from view by the draperies.
Some youngsters remembered seeing Lena wandering about
from one window to the other and even holding something
in her hand.
The council of commanders summoned her.
'You stole the money!"
I could see that they sincerely believed it. They demanded
her expulsion for stealing. I also could see that there was
8*
115
not a single person there who felt like sticking up for her,
not even the girls who usually defended their sisters. Even
they insisted on her being expelled, and I realised that she
was indeed the thief. There was no doubt about it.
It was one of those cases when a flanking move had to be
resorted to.
"No, you've no proof that it was Lena who stole the
money," I told them. "I cannot allow her to be expelled."
They stared at me, surprised and indignant. And then I
said:
"I am convinced that it was not Lena."
And while they all tried to prove to me that the thief
was Lena, I tried as hard to prove to them that it was not.
"What makes you so sure?" they asked me.
"I know from her eyes."
I often did guess things from people's eyes, and they
knew it.
Lena oame to me the next day.
"Thank you for defending me, it was mean of them to go
for me like that."
"How can you say this? You did steal the money, you
know."
My move was so unexpected that her resistance broke.
She burst out crying and admitted everything. But it was a
secret only we two knew that I had lied at the general
meeting to protect her, knowing full well that she was the
thief. This secret delivered her into my hands completely
and made her perfectly educable.
I lied. But I saw how relentless the collective was. They
might have kicked her out, and to avert it I had to play
this trick. I am against such flanking moves. It's a dangerous
thing to do, but in the present case the girl appreciated the
fact that I had deceived the general meeting to save her,
she understood that we now shared a secret, and it made
her completely malleable as an object of education. Such
flanking moves are very difficult and hazardous. And one
should only risk making them in extreme cases.
 L E C T U R E FOUR

Work Training, Relations,

Style and Tone

I want to dwell for a little on the question of work train­

ing before I go on to the concluding chapter on style and
tone.
As you will remember, in the first years after the Revolu­
tion our school had been called the labour school, and all
of us teachers had then been impressed not so much by the
method as by the word "labour" itself and the labour prin­
ciple which held a special fascination for us. The colony,
of course, offered greater opportunities for introducing
industrial training than the conventional school did, but in
my sixteen years of work with the Gorky Colony and the
Dzerzhinsky Commune I had to go through a difficult course
of development in my attitude to the educative role of labour
and the organisation of the labour processes, and even in
my understanding of the labour process itself.
In 1920 I could never have pictured the 1935-36 set-up
which obtained at the Dzerzhinsky Commune with its accent
°n labour.
I cannot confidently say that the course of labour organ­
isation and its development which I followed was the right
course, since I was unable to act independently in this field
and had to comply with the many opinions and points of
view of people who came in temporary contact with my
work, introducing their own viewpoints, changes and forms.

117
Throughout the sixteen years I was obliged to go along with
them and adapt myself to the circumstances in which I
found myself. At the Gorky Colony I had to adapt myself
to poverty more than anything else, and to introduce work
for reasons of necessity, in conditions of need. At the
Dzerzhinsky Commune I had to adapt myself to and even
fight against tendencies started by my superiors.
There were periods in the history of my collective which
I believe I have a certain right to call quite ideal. At the
Dzerzhinsky Commune this was in 1930 or 1931.
Why do I call that period ideal? By then all my commu­
nards were already working at a real factory, that is to say,
it was an enterprise with its own industrial and financial
plan and its efficient organisation with all the forms of a real
factory: a production planning department, a rate-setting
office, an efficient interdependence between all the jobs, and
a strictly kept record of manufactured parts showing quan­
tity, rates of output and standards of quality.
At that time our factory was already a paying concern,
covering its own expenses and those involved in the main­
tenance of the communards, and it was building up assets.
It was a regular factory, I mean. The communards, however,
received no wages. This, of course, is a debatable question,
and it remains debatable to this day. I know of no other
institution where such an experiment has ever been carried
out.
I was against wages at that time. I believed in raising the
productivity of labour by the simple means of convincing
everyone that it was in the interests of the collective to do
so, I believed in a steady labour enthusiasm, not the enthu­
siasm of an assault, not the enthusiasm for attaining the
immediate goal of that week or that month, but a calm,
steady enthusiasm for the collective's far perspectives which
would spur the pupils on to the performance of enormous
tasks, demanding of the pedagogue the full mobilisation of
his mental, physical and ideological strength. ... I considered
an enthusiasm such as this of the greatest educational value.

118
 and I had a profound conviction that wages would inevitably
mar and break up to a certain extent this picture of moral
well-being.
I would not say that the introduction of wages brought
about any sort of additional achievements, .and so I continued
to defend my point of view. I pointed out that when the
communards worked without pay they did everything they
were expected to do, overfulfilling the plan and doing more
than their day's norm, and that they had no quarrel with
the material side of their life.
But I was surrounded by such strong opponents who
couldn't have been less interested in my pedagogical ambi­
tions but who were certain that wages would raise efficiency
and give the pupils an incentive, and whose point of view
was so actively supported by my superiors that I had neither
the chance nor the strength to fight this tendency, and as a
result my last years of work were spent in conditions of wages.
Therefore I can now discard that which I may perhaps
call the negative conditions of a work education. I mean the
absence of production, the absence of collective work, with
nothing but isolated attempts in their place, that is, a labour
process which is supposed to provide a work education.
Just now I cannot visualise the work education of com­
munards without their being employed in industry. It is
possible, I suppose, to educate people through work the
character of which is not productive. I had a taste of it for
a relatively short period at the Gorky Colony in the first
years of its existence, when in view of the absence of an
industrial arena and industrial equipment I had no choice
but to content myself with industrial self-service, so .to ^peak,
and with a production process of sorts.... In any case I am
Quite sure that labour which does not aim to produce values
is not a positive element of education, and therefore even
that labour which is called industrial training should be
based in the concept of values which can be created through
toil.

119
 At the Gorky Colony it was sheer need that compelled me
to go over to production in a hurry. It was agricultural
production. In conditions of children's communes farming is
almost invariably a losing proposition. Within two years
I succeeded, and then only thanks to the remarkable abilities
and knowledge of the agronomist N. E. Ferre, in making our
farm-a stock-raising and not a grain-growing farm, mind
you-a paying concern. I went in for pig raising mainly.
Eventually we had as many as two hundred sows and boars
and several hundred young. This farm had the most up-to-
date equipment. The specially built premises were kept as
clean as the dormitories, sluiced regularly-there was running
water, drains, sewers, taps and what not-and aired. There
wasn't even .any smell there, and the pig-tenders had the
appearance of dandies. Now that we had this farm, equipped
with all the latest devices and well provided with feed
resources, we received a sizeable income from it and lived
a more or less prosperous life. Besides good food and
clothes we could now afford to buy everything we needed
for the school, enlarge our library, build an excellent stage
and fit it up. With the pig-raising money we bought instru­
ments for our brass band and a film camera-things which
in the 1920s we could never have bought out of our budget.
Besides, we helped our ex-pupils whose numbers were
growing, our graduates who were studying in higher schools
and happened to be hard up, and also those who got married
and were starting a home of their own. Going on trips and
receiving guests are also very expensive things. We went
to the theatre very often, and generally we enjoyed all
the good things of life which a working Soviet citizen is
entitled to.
All those good things of life, which I have enumerated,
made such a convincing stimulus for raising the productivity
of labour that no one even thought about wages at the time.
True, I did recognise the need for the pupils to have
pocket money, by and large I am a great believer in pocket
money.... When a person enters the world he must have

120
 some experience of living within a private budget, he must
know how best to spend his money. He cannot go out into
the world as a sheltered young miss straight from boarding
school who has not an inkling of what money is. But at that
time the Ukrainian People's Commissariat of Public Educa­
tion took a determined stand against giving the inmates of
the colony any pocket money, believing that in this manner
I would teach them to be mercenary. And so the only way
I could give a pupil any pocket money was by making a
pact with him beforehand that he would not tell anyone
about it. ...
This pocket money, however, was handed out to pupils
depending not on their production work but on their services
in general to the collective.
I found myself in the same situation when I came to the
Dzerzhinsky Commune, only here it was handicrafts and
not farming. Here the communards depended on what they
could produce even more. The Gorky Colony received state
allocations against the estimates submitted, but the Dzer­
zhinsky Commune did not get a kopek, and I don t think
it took anything from the state in all its existence. And
so even keeping ourselves in food, enough not to feel
hungry, even that depended entirely on what the collective
was able to produce, to say nothing of buying any extra
luxuries.
The conditions under which I had to begin were very,
very difficult, much more so than 'at the Gorky Colony which
did get a subsidy, after all. The Dzerzhinsky Commune was
built on a grand scale. In the beginning it was run on
somewhat philanthropic lines. The house was built as a
monument to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. It was a very
beautiful building, one of the more splendid creations of
the Soviet Union's best known architect, where even now no
flaw can be found in the planning, the design of the facade,
the ornaments, the shape of the windows, or anywhere else.
The bedrooms were splendid, there was a magnificent hall,
baths, showers, and spacious, beautiful school-rooms. The

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communards were decked out m costly wool suits, and a
sufficiency of clothing was provided for future wear. But
not a single decent machine tool was installed. We had no
kitchen garden, not a plot of land, and no state subsidy.
It was hoped that everything would somehow take care of
itself.
In the first years the Commune lived on what the Ukrainian
Cheka men contributed from their salaries. They donated
0.5 per cent of their monthly pay, which added up to roughly
2,000 rubles. And I needed 4,000 or 5,000 rubles a month
just to meet our current expenses, counting the school.
There was nowhere I could get the two or three thousand
of which I was short, since there was no place for us to
work. We did have, by misadventure, three workshops-
shoemaker's, joiners, and a sewing shop-in which the
People's Commissariat of Public Education had been reposing
its hopes from the beginning of time. These three workshops,
as you know, were considered the beginning and end of the
educational labour process. Work at the joiner's shop was
to be done by hand; the shoemaker's shop contained a few
pairs of lasts, several stools, some awls and hammers, but
not a single machine tool and not a scrap of leather. The
idea was that we would rear shoemakers who would manu­
facture hand-made shoes, in other words a type of artisan for
whom we have absolutely no use just now.
The joiner's shop was equipped with several planes, that's
all the tools there were, and we were expected to graduate
good joiners who did everything by hand.
The sewing shop also answered pre-revolutionary standards,
the idea being that we would produce capable housewives
who, in a pinch, could hem a diaper, sew on a patch, or
make a simple blouse.
Earlier, at the Gorky Colony, I had already been sickened
by those workshops, and here even more so. I simply could
not understand what they were there for. And so my council
of commanders and I closed them down within the week,
keeping some of the tools for our own needs.

\22
 During the first three years the Dzerzhinsky Commune
suffered dire need. There were times when we had nothing
to eat all day-just bread. You can judge how dire our
poverty was from the fact that I received no salary the first
eight months I worked there, and like the rest of the com­
mune had to live on bread alone.... There were moments
when we had not a kopek of cash among the lot of us, and
then we had to go out and "cadge". And can you imagine,
this need, in spite of the fact that we took it very hard and
felt bitter about it, was a wonderful stimulus for the develop­
ment of labour. The Cheka men-and I am very grateful to
them for it—never agreed to put us on an allowance basis
nor to ask the People's Commissariat to give us money for
the maintenance of our pupils. It would really have been a
shame for them to ask: they had built the commune but they
could not afford to feed the communards. And so we bent
all our efforts to make some money ourselves-we were
moved by a frank desire to make money.
That first year we worked very hard, in our joiner's shop,
making chairs, lockers, and whatever else was needed for
everyday use. We also had clients. Our workmanship was
very poor, the clients were dissatisfied, and as a rule we
lost money on it. The prices we charged barely covered the
cost of materials, electricity, nails and glue, and we our­
selves worked for free.
Help came to us through one happy circumstance. We
invited Solomon Borisovich Kogan to be our production
manager. He was a most unprincipled person as far as
pedagogy was concerned, but he was extremely energetic.
I am very grateful to this comrade, and feel that some day
I should offer him my special thanks for those entirely new
pedagogical principles which he introduced into my work
for all his unprincipled attitude to pedagogy.
The very first words he said to me struck me as
amazing. He was a fat person, with a paunch, short of
breath, and very pushing.
123
 "What? A hundred and fifty communards, three hundred
hands cant earn the price of a bowl of soup? How can that
be? They've got to know how to earn a living, it can't be
otherwise."
This was a principle the soundness of which I used to
doubt. Within a month Kogan proved to me that he was
right. True, I had to give in to him on many of my peda­
gogical points of view.
He began with a rather bold venture. He went to the
management of the Building Institute and said he would
take an order for furniture.
He had no grounds at all for making this offer. We did
not know how to make furniture, we had no equipment, no
tools and no material. All we had was Solomon Borisovich
Kogan and 150 communards.
Luckily the Institute people were credulous and naive,
and they accepted the offer.
"Make your order then," Kogan said.
The order was made-so many thousands of different
articles for the lecture halls, so many tables, so many
chairs, so many book cases, and so on. When I saw the
200,000 ruble order, my first reaction was to ring up the
doctor or at least take Kogan's temperature.
"How could you take it on?" I asked him.
"We'll manage," he said.
"But still, how do we begin? We'll need money, you
know, and we haven't any."
"It's always like that," he said. "The first thing a person
always says is—'but there's no money!' And then he gets it
from somewhere, and we'll get some too."
"But where? Who'll give it to us?"
Aren t there enough fools in this world who will?”
And can you imagine, he did get the money. In that very
same Institute he found a fool, excuse me the rudeness,
who accepted Kogan's proposal.
"Where shall we store the furniture we make?" Kogan
had asked him. You're only digging the foundation

m
 trenches for your building. The furniture will be ready
soon, the question is where to store it?"
"There really seems no place to store it," the man had
said.
"All right, we'll store it at our place."
"You've got room for it?"
"No, but we can build a storehouse. We'll need 50,000
rubles for it."
"All right, here's the fifty thousand," the man had said.
Well, we got fifty thousand rubles, and with the money
we bought tools and material. Kogan took some more
money from the Institute as down payment, and proceeded
to make chairs which were not intended for our clients at
all but for a quick sale at the market. They were ordinary
chairs, the first lot was clumsy and no use at all, but Kogan
said that the communards would learn and in the meantime
they could make the rungs. And he introduced division of
labour. I was very doubtful about it.
He divided labour this way: one boy planed the wood,
the second sawed it, the third trimmed it, the fourth
Polished it, the fifth checked it, and so on. This, however,
was not teaching them a trade, and they began to say that
they were not learning anything. At the general meeting
the consensus of opinion was that the job they were doing
was useful, they had to work for the good of the Commune,
but a.t the same time they ought to derive a benefit for
themselves from it and learn a skill, whereas making those
rungs was not teaching them anything.
Solomon Borisovich proved that he really knew his job.
He broke the work on a chair into ten operations, and each
°f the communards had one specific operation to perform.
As a result we began to put out chairs in countless numbers.
Before long our yard was cluttered with chairs, which
it must be said were of a very poor quality. At first Kogan
relied mostly on the finishing touches he made afterwards:
be invented a special putty, made from glue and sawdust,
and with it filled all the small cracks, then he polished the

125
wood, and so on. Anyhow he put this initial capital of
50,000 rubles to good use, and in six months' time we had
200,000. Then he bought more tools and material and
began to turn out theatre-house furniture.
Later, Solomon Borisovich became less of a figure with
us, having been appointed supplies manager-a job where
he could put his knowledge and his talent to the best use.
A new engineer came to take his place, but still I remained
convinced that Kogan's division of labour was a useful
thing. It is a depressing sight at first glance, but when you
have watched it for some time you realise that there is
nothing terrible about it. Each of the boys and girls per­
forms one operation for some time-which is hardly learn­
ing a skill, you'd think-but after a few years when the
pupil has become practised in many different operations
and has reached the stage when he is trusted with the final
and most difficult ones, such as assembly, he really becomes
a highly skilled joiner, a worker needed in large social
production and not simply in cottage industry.
Of course, if I had stopped at woodworking my com­
munards would have been good only for employment at
woodworking factories, and factories, mind you, where the
work was broken up into many operations. But such was
the success of our business, the success of our labour pro­
ductivity, I mean, that after we'd had Kogan a year with
us we were able to thank the Cheka men and ask them to
make no more contributions to the Commune out of their
pay. At the end of the second year we already had 600,000
rubles in the bank.
That s how much we got from our furniture-making. And
now with 600,000 rubles in the bank our standing was no
longer that of a charity institution but of a serious enter­
prise which could be trusted.
The bank gave us loans for building. In 1931, we built
our first factory. It was a regular factory of the metal­
working industry producing precision drills, which until
then we had imported from abroad. Each drill had a motor

126
 of its own, 150 parts, numerous gear-wheels requiring both
milling and gear-cutting machines, very complicated as­
sembling and casting, but all this notwithstanding our com­
munards, with their division of labour experience to fall
back on, were able to master the metalworking processes
in a very short time. The psychology of a person working
on one and the same part and striving for perfection in
this process also came in useful here. It took them no more
than six weeks to learn how to operate those highly com­
plicated machine tools, and the operators were boys and
girls of thirteen or fourteen.
The enterprise was such a great success that we started
building another one, a factory producing photo cameras.
This very complex factory had commune-made equipment.
As it stands today, it is the Commune's own. Not all fac­
tories have the machine tools you can see there. The pro­
duction process is very complicated, demanding precision
to within a micron, that is to say it calls for a complete set
of special tools and a highly efficient technique of verifica­
tion.
I am sure we would never have mastered it if we had
not begun with chairs and division of labour. I realised
that it did not matter what you began with, the important
thing was the logic of the given production, based on the
latest data which are: division of labour and plan.
A person who has nothing to do with industry will find
it hard to understand what a production plan is. It does
not simply stipulate that so many tables and chairs must be
made. It is a fine lacework of norms and relations. It is a
lacework involving different parts, different units, the
Movement from one machine tool to the other. The plan
has to make provision for the equipment, the quality of the
material, its delivery, the issue of tools, the sharpening of
cutters and the refilling of stocks, and last but not least-
technical control, which at a good factory also means an
assortment of devices, norms and conditions. The produc­
tion plan is the most complex "machine" regulating human
activity. And it is in the intricacies of this machine that our
citizens should be trained since they are employed not in
cottage industry but in large-scale state production, organ­
ised on the highest level of technical efficiency.
Needless to say, now that we had those two regular
factories, the sewing and joiners shops, and even the fur­
niture-making shop where the tool was turned, by hand,
became unimaginable things....
Gradually, our manual training grew into industrial
training, and it surpassed my expectations. And yet, in my
last years at the Commune it no longer surprised me to see
a boy of thirteen or fourteen operating a group of milling
machines which called for a knowledge of mathematics and
a very quick mind, to say nothing of an expert knowledge
of the quality of both the material and the cutter, an ability
to read drawings, and so forth.
Beside the boy of fourteen or fifteen who, being an
excellent milling-machine operator, had charge of a group,
you would see a shop manager of sixteen or seventeen. True,
it would be one of the simpler shops, but at nineteen he
would certainly be put in charge of a more complex one. Such
was the career of Volodya Kozyr, my one-time 'liaison of­
ficer", whose job had been to run and find someone for me.
This road which would take an adult as much as ten
years to cross, takes a boy or a girl no more than one or
two. The road I chose for them was far from easy, and at
first it seemed incredible that they should be making such
enormous strides. As far as the girls go I've got to say
this: they reach a Stakhanovite's rates of output as quickly
as the boys, only not in metalworking but in assembly,
fitting, and other light physical work, especially in the
production of lenses where the accent is on precision and
neatness. They were better in this than our boys. The boys'
strong point was their gift for designing, and the girls'-
their efficiency in the intricate processes which called for
precision. The production of lenses was their province, since

128
 the boys were unable to cope with it. To say nothing of
output the girls also left the boys far behind in the organ­
isation of production when it came to a process like assem­
bly of the finest parts which demanded a great precision of
movement keen eyesight and meticulous observance of the
order in which the pieces were laid out on the table.
By and large our boys were dedicated metalworkers. Not
so the girls-metal evoked no emotions in them. The sight
and touch of iron, brass and nickel always make a boy's
heart miss a beat. The girls, on the other hand, tried to keep
away from milling machines and especially such machine
tools where they were liable to get spattered with oil and
dirt.
Our girls never even tried working in the foundry.
Well, those are the kinds of jobs my collective began to
do in its last year.
If you look upon this work from the angle of the con­
ventional understanding of a pedagogical process, that is,
here's the pupil and there's his teacher, then it will perhaps
appear incorrectly set up, but if you look at it from the
point of view of the collective and observe it for a time,
you will find it very attractive.
Any factory with a complex production process provides
vast opportunities for the satisfaction of all tastes and
inclinations, and that in itself is a wonderful thing.
At a factory like FED we had a large design room, where
dozens of draughtsmen were busy working, a planning
department, a control department, a large instrument-
making shop, and a commercial department, and so every
pupil was able to find an outlet for his ambitions. The
design office employed communards exclusively (designers
and draughtsmen). Naturally, only those who were inter­
ested in the work and had a talent for it went there.
The highest qualification was to be obtained at the instru­
ment-making shop. This was the crowning point in a boy s
industrial training after he had worked in all the other
shops and departments.
9-163 129
 I see how useful this process of production is, in its every
separate point, for moulding a person's character. My
graduate communards, who are either studying at various
institutes or have already completed their higher education,
often come from town to see me. Among them there are
historians, geologists, physicians, engineers, designers, and
so on. But there is one feature peculiar to all of them-a
broadness and versatility of views, habits, etc.
A short while ago one of them, a surgeon, came to see
me. I remember he used to work as a grinder operating a
huge grinding machine on which a part had to be brought
to the extreme of precision, to within a hundredth of a
millimetre. The foreman would say to him: "Here, remove
a hundred, will you."
The boy would make the part secure in the chuck, and
without verifying anything or using any measuring instru­
ments, take off the "hundred".
His eyes, hands and machine tool worked in such prac­
tised harmony that his work needed no checking. His sense
of the machine tool was perfect. That excellent grinder is
now a surgeon, and in his philosophy I can even now sense
his tremendous respect for accuracy. Watching the other
former communards, I can see reflected in them the attitudes
and habits acquired in our various organisational and
industrial jobs.
A collective which owns a factory and is answerable for
it acquires habits of organisation, which are needed most
of all, perhaps, to a citizen of the Soviet Union. This ability
to organise is exercised at every general meeting, at every
commanders' production conference, in group and shop
meetings, or simply during everyday conversation, and the
collective inevitably becomes accustomed to demanding a
responsible attitude from every worker and from every
communard. If you must picture all the complexities of
production, you must also picture all the complexities of a
person s attitude to production. At a general meeting,
attended by pupils from the mechanical shop, the optical

130
 shop, this assembly shop and that assembly shop, and the
instrument-making shop, someone would raise the ques­
tion about, say, the short supply of some parts. Boys from
the assembly shop would take the floor, inviting others who
have nothing to do with the matter to say what they thought.
They would get up and make suggestions, I mean they under­
stand what those short-supplied parts were and they spoke
as organisers.
They exercised their organisers' abilities even more in the
workshops during work. Even to take charge of a group
of milling machines a person has to be a good organiser
and manager.
I realise that organising such production is anything but
easy, but, after all, we can't talk of easy things only. In
my own case, the organisation of this production cost me
sixteen years of toil, sixteen years of need and struggle. Oh
well, I am sure that any children's collective, if it has a
mind to go into serious production work, will spend no less
than ten years either, and the first generations, of course,
who will struggle to build it up will graduate without tast­
ing all the fruit of their labours. The next generations will,
though.
You must not think that the first generations will mind.
After all, striving towards a goal set years away is of great
value in itself, both as far as character-building and work
experience are concerned. Perhaps the main thing in all this
process is the collective striving, this forward-looking
attitude, this advance towards a definite goal.
I am happy in the thought that my collective always had
clearly set aims to strive for, that it did not simply move
forward in space but surmounted difficulties on the way,
even poverty and friction within the collective. And if a
collective is really marching towards a definite goal, if
these very words are used consciously, then the question
of wages becomes a matter of less basic importance. In a
working collective where labour achievements are obvious,
where well-being is self-evident, where every ruble of profit
9 *
131
promises something for the morrow, people do not need the
incentive of their personal earnings.
Wages were introduced later on, but still I managed to
preserve the collective spirit and to alleviate the harm
wages might have done to the youngsters. Wages in the
case of a grown man who has a family and a responsibility
towards it is one thing. When it comes to a collective of
youngsters. Til move heaven and earth to keep them in
clothes. I am answerable for them, for their clothing, food,
housing and schooling. That being so, wages come as a sort
of extra satisfaction anyway, and in a good collective they
can receive these satisfactions without wages. I succeeded
in getting them to hand their wages to me to be used with
my permission. It was a resolution adopted by the general
meeting. And the communards were keener on depositing
money in their savings account for their future life than
getting it in cash to spend.
Towards the end we made it a rule for every communard
to contribute ten per cent of his pay to the council of com­
manders' fund. It was no trifling matter*, ten per cent out
of everyone's monthly pay was a lot of money.
And in this manner we built up the fund very quickly.
The right to dispose of it belonged to the council of com­
manders, it was not the personal property of anyone. The
money was mainly intended for cultural needs and for ren­
dering assistance to former communards.
You cannot imagine what it's like to hear the council of
commanders announce their decision: "Ivan Volchenko is
very gifted musically, he must be sent to the conservatory
and we shall give him 100 rubles a month extra until he
graduates."
At the Dzerzhinsky Commune dozens of these scholar­
ships were granted. The year I left as many as a hundred
boys and girls were getting those monthly extras. The
maintenance grant paid to students by the state is enough
if one has a father and mother, or relatives. It isn't if a
person is all on his own. It was a good, humane deed on

132
 the part of the communards to give the students a monthly
allowance of 50-100 rubles depending on how well they
were acquitting themselves and what year they were in.
Money out of this fund was also sent to ex-communards
who happened to be in need, provided there was a plausible
reason for it and not just laziness. A fund like that allows
the Commune to control the destinies of all the graduates
until the time they are quite ready to go out into the world
on their own.
The money was earned by the communards. Never once
in all the years I was with them did I hear a single one of
the communards begrudge the ten per cent of his pay either
openly or by implication. I must also tell you that every
communard was bought a "trousseau" out of this fund­
bedding, a blanket, an overcoat, six shirts and a suit, in
short, what every mother gives her son when he leaves the
nest.
A fund like this, by means of which the life of the com­
munards can be guided, is worth thousands of our peda­
gogical premises that have yet to be tested in practice.
The remaining ninety per cent of their wages were
usually deposited in the savings bank, and each communard
was expected to have a thousand rubles saved up by gradua­
tion time. They could not get their money in cash at the
Commune, and none could be drawn without my endorse­
ment. There were communards who got as much as 2,000-
2,500 rubles on graduation, having saved the money in the
five or six years they lived with us. A small part of their
wages was handed out to them as pocket money. We went
°n travels every year. I attributed great significance to
these excursions which were not ordinary trips but very
big undertakings. The Dzerzhinsky Commune made six such
trips. We planned them like this: first we went by train,
then we walked a distance of at least 80-100 km, pitched
camp and stayed there for some time, then we walked back
the same distance again, and came the rest of the way
home by train. We mapped out the route in the autumn. It
10-1G3
133
was very important to have a prospect like that for next
summer, exactly the same sort of pleasant prospect you
have before you when you plan your summer holiday, dream
about it and make preparations for it. The collective made
ready for it in the same way. When our factories closed
down for the summer we knew exactly how and where we
would spend our holidays.
I found those travels enormously helpful. In the course
of the school year I used the coming trip as something
round which I could rally the different pupils and the col­
lective, I got them to save up for it and make various
preparations which included cultural work, etc. For instance,
we spent one whole winter planning our Caucasus-Vladi-
kavkaz-Tbilisi-Batumi trip. We even sent out a scout to
investigate, so we would know beforehand where we were
to sleep and eat. The scout was one of the communards. In
latter years we planned our trips in such minute detail that
we knew, for instance, when the five hundred of us marched
out of Kharkov, at which mile post exactly communard
Ivanov would hand the bass to communard Petrov to carry.
Ivanov could not carry it all the 400 km of the Military
Georgian Road, he played it when he had to, but the others
carried it for him, ten kilometres each. Every one of them
knew at which mile post exactly he would be handed the
bass and who would be the next one to carry it.
Trifles such as these had to be planned beforehand so the
march would not be a strain. And as for the more serious
things—where to board the train, where to spend the night
so there would be a roof over our heads, water to be had
nearby, and people with whom we could talk and arrange
a meeting-someone had to go out and do some scouting
every time.
Our longest itinerary was Kharkov-Nizhni-Novgorod-
Stalingrad-Sochi-Odessa-Kharkov. The trip lasted six weeks
and required a lot of planning. We sailed down the Volga
for fifteen days, and every day the captain asked the com­
munards :

134
 "Do we go on or stop?"
"Full speed ahead to the Kama and then back to the
Oka."
He even drank vodka with our permission only. He was
a terrible drunkard, and we had him up before our general
meeting after he had run aground near Samara. It was all
great fun, of course, but anyway we begged him not to drink
any more until the end of the voyage.
Every communard saved up for the trip, putting a bit
aside from his pocket money to buy all those treasures
which supposedly we would come across on our voyage. As
a rule there were no special treasures to be had, and the
boys and girls bought wallets, handbags, drank lemonade
and ate sweets-all of which was available in Kharkov. But
the sweets in Ulyanovsk taste sweeter than the same kind
in Kharkov.
They put the money in my cash box to save for them.
And I always took a suitcase full of money along on our
travels, fifty or sixty thousand rubles.
So you see all these devices helped to lessen the greed
for money, for wages, which in a collective provided with
everything might have made a very difficult and unpleasant
thing burdening the educative process.
I forgot to tell you that on the question of school and
work relations I have always been against any sort of link,
and for that I was persecuted in no mild manner. I am
against it to this day, and my profound conviction is that
if we have a ten-year school in the district or at a colony
which answers all the requirements of the People's Com­
missariat of Public Education-and these requirements are
growing from day to day—it needs no link with production,
it is even useful to have no such link.
I am profoundly convinced that the sermons we hear
about forming a link are survivals of a belief in the system
of complexes, which I always detested because it is my
considered opinion that a certain role must be preserved
for the free formation of associations, and that only this
10*
135
free formation can give a personality breadth and unique­
ness, whereas we can create only a dull, uninteresting per­
sonality wherever we try to stir it to greater activity through
associatve relations.
Therefore in my practical work the one and only devia­
tion from my convictions which I permitted myself was
adding two hours of draughting a week for each form. For
the rest, our school was governed by the teachers' council
as any other school, and had no connection with production
whatsoever. We have our own laws, requirements and aims
in every field of knowledge, learning and teaching, and these
requirements have to be satisfied equally in all cases.
As a result the healthiest and most natural of links was
formed. The graduate had a sound knowledge of produc­
tion, the organisation and the processes of production, and
he was, besides, an educated person, with a secondary-
school education.
And when the representatives of theoretical thought took
exception to this, I told them that a secondary school educa­
tion and the highest qualification of a milling-machine
operator made a wonderful combination and did not need
to have anything added to it. After all, it's no cause for
complaint that a person knows how to operate a machine
tool.
By and large I believe that only in conditions of a full
secondary school education can a character be remoulded
and a juvenile delinquent reformed. As I have said, an
incomplete secondary school education does not give one
the same confidence as a full ten-year school.
And now for the concluding part of my report about the
basic type and character of the individuals that ought to
be shaped in our educational collective. In my opinion, we
pedagogues have more thinking to do on this point. I am
profoundly convinced that the traits of our Soviet personal­
ity differ fundamentally from the traits of personality in
bourgeois society, and therefore our upbringing should also
be fundamentally different.

136
 In bourgeois society upbringing is limited to the individ­
ual, adapting him to the struggle for existence. And quite
naturally the traits of character needed for this struggle
have to be cultivated in the individual: cunning, diplomacy,
fighting one's own personal battles, fighting for oneself.
And it is quite natural that in our old school, as in any
bourgeois school, this complex of dependencies, essential
in a bourgeois society, was cultivated. In that society the
chain of dependencies is entirely different from what it is
in ours.
You will remember our schooldays. No one actually told
us in so many words that we would be dependent on the
wealthy class and the officialdom, but the very essence of
our upbringing was permeated with the thought. And even
when we were told that the rich ought to help the poor,
even that beautifully sounding, really splendid idea con­
tained a certain indication of that dependence which exists
between the rich and the poor. The idea that a rich man
would help me, a poor boy, implied that he had riches, it
was within his power to help me, while all I. could look
forward to were his help, his handouts, the help of a rich
man. And I, a poor boy, was an object of his charity. In
this way the system of dependencies which we would be
confronted with in life was deeply impressed upon us. A
dependency on position, on wealth, on charity and cruelty
—such was the chain of dependencies for which a person
was trained.
We also prepare our pupils for a definite chain of de­
pendencies. It is a terrible delusion to suppose that a pupil,
once having freed himself from the system of dependencies
of a bourgeois society, i.e., from exploitation and an
inequitable distribution of material benefits, is free altogether
from any chain of dependencies at all. In Soviet society
there is a different chain of dependencies, the dependency
of members not simply thrown together but living an
organised life and striving for a definite goal. And in this
organisation of ours there are processes and phenomena

137
which determine the morals of a Soviet person and his
behaviour.
All of us living in Soviet society develop and mature as
members of a collective, that is as people within a definite
system of dependencies. I do not know if I have probed
this matter to the end in my work, but this aspect of educa­
tion always interested me most of all. I have already spoken
a little about it when I mentioned discipline.
To see this problem more clearly, let us look at a collec­
tive in action, I mean a collective and not a crowd, that is
to say a collective which has definite common aims. The
dependencies in this collective are very involved, for each
separate individual has to co-ordinate his personal desires
with the desires of others: first, with the collective as a
whole and, second, with the primary collective of its im­
mediate group, co-ordinating them in such a way that his
personal aims would not be antagonistic to the common
aims. Consequently, it is the common aims which should
determine one's private aims. This harmony of common and
private aims shows the character of Soviet society. For me,
common aims are not simply the main and the dominating
aims, they are actually linked with my personal aims. I
suppose it is the only way in which to build up a children's
collective. If a different pattern is followed, I assert that
it will not be Soviet education.
In the practice of a collective, the contraposition of
private and collective aims and the need to harmonise them
are problems which arise at every step. If one senses a
contradiction, it means that it is not a Soviet collective, it
means that it is organised incorrectly. And only where the
common and the personal aims coincide and there is no
disharmony whatever, only that collective can be called a
Soviet collective.
But this problem cannot be solved without contact with
the routine trifling happenings of everyday life. It can be
solved only in the practice of each individual communard
and each separate collective. Practice is what I call the

J3S
 style of work. I think the question of style in educational
work should be regarded as worthy of special monographs
being devoted to it, that's how important I think it is.
Let us take a detail like the relations of the communards
with one another, the attitude of one boy to another. The
question is not new, it would seem, and yet only a feeble
answer is given to it in our pedagogical theory. The problem
could hardly exist in pre-revolutionary pedagogy. There,
just as in pre-revolutionary society, the relations of people
were treated as relations of one individual with another
individual, that is to say, as relations between two free and
independent worlds, and one could speak about bringing
up a good person, a kind person, or this and that person.
In our pedagogy we can speak of bringing up a comrade,
of the attitude of a member of one collective to a member
of another collective, of members who do not revolve freely
in empty space but are bound by their obligations to or their
relations with the collective, by their duty to the collective,
their honour as members of the collective, and their actions
in regard to the collective. This organised attitude of the
members of om? collective to the members of another col­
lective must play a decisive role in our educational set-up.
What is a collective? It is not simply a gathering, or a
group of interacting individuals, as the pedologists used
to teach. It is an organised community of personalities
pursuing a clear purpose and governed by its collective
bodies. If a community is properly organised, it will have
its collective bodies and an organisation of the collective s
representatives empowered by it, and the question of a
person's attitude to his comrade is not a question of friend­
ship, affection or good neighbourliness, but a question of
responsible dependence. Even if the comrades are in the
same position, march shoulder to shoulder and perform
Practically the same functions, they are linked not simply
by friendship but by their common responsibility foi^ the
J°b and by their joint participation in the collective s
Work.

139
 Of particular interest are the relations of comrades who
do not march in the same line but march in different lines,
and of even greater interest are the relations of comrades
who are not equally dependent on one another, with one
being subordinate to the other. That's the most tricky thing
in a children s collective, it is the hardest thing to create
relations of subordination and not equality. It's the thing our
teachers fear most of all. A pupil must be able to obey his
comrade, not simply obey but know how to obey him.
And in his turn he must know how to order his comrade,
that is, to entrust certain functions to him and demand their
execution.
This ability to obey a comrade-submitting not to force,
wealth or charity, but to each other as equal members of a
collective-is an extremely difficult thing to inculcate not only
in a children s community but even in a society of adults. If
there are any surviving vestiges of the old philosophy, it is
precisely here that they cling most tenaciously. A person
finds it hard to give an order to his equal just because he
has been told to do so by the collective. The complex of
dependencies here is extremely involved. IHt he will know
how to give an order to a comrade, entrust him with some­
thing, rouse him to action and be answerable for him, if he
feels responsible for it to the collective and knows that, by
giving the order, he is carrying out the will of the collective.
If he does not feel any of this, he will have scope for nothing
better than the exercise of his personal vanity, his love of
domination and power, and all the other inclinations alien
to us.
I paid particular attention to this side of the matter. And
that s why I was prepared to adopt a very intricate pattern
of dependencies and subordinations within the collective.
Take the commander on duty*, today he controls the collec­
tive, and tomorrow he has to take orders from the boy or
girl he will hand over his duties to. This is an excellent
example to illustrate the system of education I am speaking
about.

140
 I went even further in this respect, I tried to intertwine
the dependencies of the different representatives as much
as possible in order that submissions and orders might cross
with the utmost frequency.
That was why I started the system of primary collectives
on principles of one-man management, the right to exercise
which I gave my commanders. I tried to break up the
collective into detachments of ten people to have as many
commanders as possible, I also tried to set up as many
different commissions as I could, and later I arrived at
another form-that of giving assignments to individuals.
I never missed a chance to use this form. I'll give you
the first example I can think of. Supposing the pupils have
to be moved from one dormitory to another, the arrival of
new boys and girls necessitating this regrouping. The new­
comers, it must be said, were always distributed among the
old detachments. The council of commanders decides that
moving is to begin at such and such an hour. Only bedding
may be taken along; the beds, tables, portraits and lockers
are to remain where they are. A boy, let's call him Kozyr,
is made responsible for the moving. At first he finds it
anything but easy. The boys refuse to obey him, they dismiss
his orders with a wave of the hand, and he does not know
how to manage the four hundred of them.
In later years I got things running so smoothly that not
just Kozyr but the others too knew what they had to do.
Kozyr was stationed in the corridor, directing the show with
a movement of his finger, a stare, or a raised eyebrow, and
everyone realised that Kozyr was answerable for success,
that Kozyr would be held responsible if someone took the
best portrait to his new dormitory, he'd be called to account
for neglecting his duties.
Supposing I had to take twenty waifs off an evening train.
The council of commanders always selected a special team
of five or six people for the purpose. Zemlyansky, say, would
be appointed commander. And he understood perfectly that
he was the commander, and the team of five or six carri

11— 163 141

out all his orders immediately, without question. They took
a certain pleasure in it, they liked the idea of having a
central figure to guide them and take the responsibility for
them.
And this Zemlyansky understood that the whole operation
was entrusted to him, and the team understood it too. At the
railway station, they knew where the waifs had to be taken
off the roofs of coaches and elsewhere, how to pick out the
better lads who could be relied upon, and not the snivelling
weaklings. And they did pick out the best of the lot. Zem­
lyansky was in charge. I could not interfere. He had an
assignment to carry out and he had to account for his actions.
I could not really spare the time, but no matter how late the
hour or how hard pressed I was, I nevertheless made it a
point to hear his report and assess his work as satisfactory,
good or unsatisfactory.
Not a day passed without there being an opportunity to
give one of the communards some assignment as an exercise
in responsibility. As a rule he would be given several assist­
ants from different detachments. Supposing some boys had
a fight and refused to make up the quarrel, ii comrade would
be appointed at once to find out what had caused the
quarrel, get the boys to make it up, and then account for
his own actions in the matter.
Serious responsibility was a means of solving many pro­
blems. It goes without saying that all these were extra duties
over and above the general work of the detachment. A
detachment was really answerable for its actions.
I observed how in some children's homes care was taken
to organise the work in this manner, but no one took the
trouble to demand efficiency or strict responsibility. Yet
without responsibility there can be no real work. It is as
important to demand a responsible attitude to work in
industry, to school studies, and to one's duties as a member of
a joint team. Take a small matter like going to the bathhouse:
even there someone must be put in charge. This personal
responsibility must be blended with the responsibility of the

142
 whole collective. If this blend is not achieved, if the persons
responsible are not in complete harmony with each other,
the whole thing may become a game and nothing more.
The style of work, the style of the collective is built
up from all these techniques, all these assignments. As I
have already said, monographs ought to be written on this
subject.
The style of work in a Soviet children's collective must,
I think, have the following distinctive features.
First of all, high spirits. I make this quality the corner­
stone. Constant good cheer, no gloomy faces, no sulky
expressions, a constant readiness for action, and a good mood,
I mean a happy, buoyant mood and not a hysterical gaiety.
Readiness for useful action, interesting, sensible action with
a purpose, and never just gadding about, screaming, shriek­
ing and generally behaving like the inmates of a zoo.
I emphatically object to such animal behaviour as shriek­
ing, squealing and dashing about. At the Dzerzhinsky Com­
mune where we had five hundred boys and girls you'd never
hear any shrieking or shouting. And yet you'd always see
them in a happ^ cheerful mood, secure and confident.
This cheerfulness cannot, of course, be created by any
special methods: it comes as a result of the collective's work,
of all that I have spoken of earlier.
The second feature is a sense of dignity. Naturally, it
cannot be cultivated overnight. This confidence in one s own
person stems from appreciation of the collective's value, from
pride in one's own collective.
If you come to the Commune you'll be met very politely,
very amicably. It's unheard of that a boy would walk past
and fail to greet you. The first person you meet will be sure
to say:
"How d'you do. Whom would you like to see, please?"
And everyone would be on the alert.
"What is your name, and what is your business?"
No one will ever complain about the Commune to you.
I have observed some amazing things in this respect. Take a

143
communard who has just been hauled over the coals for
something, and he is still in the extreme of distress. And
suddenly he encounters a stranger, a visitor. An immediate
change will come over him, hell look happy and cheerful,
and hell offer to take you wherever you want to go. If a
permit to enter is needed, hell say: "Come with me to get
a permit."
He is preoccupied with his personal troubles, his mistake,
but hell thrust everything into the background and never
let you see that he was distressed a minute ago. If you ask
him: "How's life?" hell answer: "Fine."
H ell do it not because he wants to please, but because
he feels responsible for the collective, and even though
punished he takes pride in his collective.
Or again supposing a boy has just been punished for
something, and suddenly an excursion arrives.
"What a nice boy!" theyll say. "Is he doing well?"
No one will ever mention it by so much as a word that
he has been punished. It would be considered poor taste,
it's our own affair, and we'd never betray him to strangers.
This dignified tone is very difficult to cultivate, it takes
years. Politeness to every visitor, to every comrade, must
be perfect, of course. But this politeness must always be
accompanied by a readiness to resist the attempts of stran­
gers, idly curious characters, and the more so of enemies,
to get in, to steal into the collective. And so, although the
communards will greet you very politely and take you wher­
ever you want to go, they'll first ask: "Who are you? What
is your business?"
And if they see that you have no real business to be there,
they'll tell you just as politely: "Sorry, I can't let you in.
But if you come on business next time you'll be very wel­
come."
There was never a lack of loafers who wanted to get in
from idle curiosity.
This type of politeness stems from a most essential ability
which we ought to develop in every one of our citizens. It

144
 is the ability to size up a situation. You have probably
noticed the lack of it in a collective of children or a crowd.
A person sees only that which is before his eyes/ and docs
not notice what is behind him.
The ability to feel what is going on around you, what
surrounds you, what is going on in the other rooms which
you can't see, to feel the tone of life, of that particular day,
is very difficult to cultivate and requires great effort and
constant thought. The screaming and shouting which we so
often hear in a children's collective shows, above all else,
a complete lack of orientation, an awareness of one's own
self and one's own movement alone. There's no awareness
of environment. But a real Soviet citizen must feel what
is going on about him with his every nerve. It's one thing
when you are among old friends. You are then free to behave
in a certain manner. But it's another thing when you are
among new pupils, some of whom were only brought in
the day before. If a communard knows it, he won't say
anything the newcomer should not hear. Or again, supposing
a woman or a^young girl is walking past. She is nothing
to him, but he must adjust his behaviour accordingly.
If I am anywhere near, the communard must know
and feel that I, the head of the collective, am near. He must
also adjust himself to the situation if it is someone else, a
teacher, an instructor, an engineer, or an official.
This does not mean that he has to adapt himself to or
ingratiate himself with anyone. It means that hi had to feel
what his behaviour ought to be in different situations
involving different members of the collective.
I noticed that most of the boys and girls living in children's
homes and colonies adopt a most unbecoming tone when
talking to visitors. Never having seen the person before, they
begin to tell him their grievances, complaining against the
teachers, the superintendent, and each other. I set out to
put an end to this carrying of tales to strangers. Self-criticism
was all very well, but telling sob stories, grumbling and

145
"squealing", as the communards called it, in the presence
of any strangers was not to be tolerated.
The communards were very often displeased with some­
thing or other. They voiced their complaints at the council
of commanders' meetings, but they never permitted them­
selves to "squeal" to strangers, to whom the collective had
to appear a single whole. An urge to complain is not the
same as criticising. It is the condition of someone who feels
unhappy in the collective, it shows that the collective itself
and some of its members are given to snivelling. The idea
of security has to be prominent in a collective, adorning its
whole style. It has to be developed through pride in the
collective, by making demands upon every single individual,
giving the individual a sense of security from bullying, hazing
and petty tyranny.
This sense of security comes with experience. I succeeded
in making it so that even the youngest, the most vulnerable
of the boys and girls of ten or twelve did not feel inferior
to the older members of the collective. In work-yes, when
something wanted doing-yes, but not as persons. They had
self-confidence because they felt perfectly protected, they
felt that no one could do them an injury, because if any
harm was threatening he would be protected from it by his
detachment, his work team, myself, and, what is more im­
portant still, by the first comrade who came his way.
This idea of security can't appear spontaneously, it would
seem, it also has to be created and worked on. While
encouraging high spirits, energy, action and movement, one
should at the same time teach the pupils to decelerate when
necessary. It is this that an average tutor achieves rather
rarely. Putting on the brakes on oneself is a very difficult
thing to do, in childhood especially, and since it will not
come from simple biology it has to be taught. And it's up
to the tutor to teach it, for a child will never develop the
ability of his own accord. A person has to pull himself up ut
every step, it must become a habit manifesting itself in every

146
 physical and mental movement, and particularly so in argu­
ments and quarrels. How often we see children quarrelling
simply because they lack this ability. And our communards
realised perfectly that a person without brakes was as bad
as a broken-down engine.
To train a child to give in to his comrade is another dif­
ficult job. Considerations of the collective's good helped me
to achieve this. Before the children got carried away, I'd
put on the brakes-stop-and the quarrel did not materialise.
I succeeded in averting quarrels, and even more so fights,
scandal-mongering and tale-bearing for months in a row.
And my success was due solely to the fact that they knew
how to decelerate. I did not "go at them", saying you're right
and you're wrong.
Every one of you understands perfectly what cases I am
referring to and what it can lead to. This style, of course,
with all its peculiar features must be ingrained in every
aspect of the collective's life without exception, including
the rules and standards of formal behaviour-that which
many ridiculed when analysing my work, refusing to
acknowledge tkem as formal standards of behaviour.
I still consider it an extremely important rule that a
communard should not hold on to the banisters, that he
should not lounge against the wall, or talk to me or anyone
else in that attitude; also, that his response to my every order,
which I give him as his commander, should be "Yes, sir",
•and that until he has made the response his understanding of
the order is not be accepted. ^
All this is very important. We made it a rule. Supposing
Zemlyansky was put in charge of homework. He would tell
another boy.- "Nikolai, go and fetch me a pencil and a piece
of paper." If Nikolai simply dashed off, Zemlyansky would
say to him: "Where's your response?" "Yes, sir."
This outward smartness, this feeling of form, determines
the inner content of behaviour as well. Those two, Zemlyan­
sky and Nikolai, would perhaps play rounders or football
together the rest of the day, but right then they were a

147
commander and his subordinate. And their relations had to
take a definite outward form.
If I gave someone a punishment, I did not consider it
accepted until the boy said: "Yes, sir."
This established form of politeness in business relations
is an extremely useful thing, for it mobilises the will, gives
one a feeling of efficiency and smartness, lays stress on the
type of business relations involved and teaches one to draw
a distinction between friendship, good-neighbourly relations,,
affection, chumminess and business.
I suppose one could manage without this, but it is the
most economical form of business training, an outward form
of business relations. And an outward form very often deter­
mines the content itself.
Eventually it became such an ordinary, natural matter
of routine as if it could not have been otherwise. The salute
reflex became so strong in the smallest chaps that no one
would have called it a game or a joke, and as soon as they
entered the sphere of business relations their business attitude
reflex worked as naturally and quickly.
A boy would be playing some very exciting game out o f
doors. Running past the commander on duty he would hear
him giving some minor order to someone. The boy would
draw up to attention immediately.
All these standards of formal behaviour are senseless if
there is no all-embracing style. This outward form, of course,
cannot be introduced, or rather it will be an empty form if
at the same dime the pupils are not taught orientation,,
deceleration, responsibility, efficiency, self-reliance, or given
a sense of security. This formal politeness, which may perhaps
have a certain resemblance to militarisation but which, in
fact, does not go farther than the principles of the Young’
Pioneer movement, is essential, useful and an adornment for
the collective only provided this collective has a definite
style and tone of work.
I cannot imagine how a child could want to live in &
collective that is outwardly unattractive. Attractiveness is

148
 an aspect of life which cannot be ignored. And yet we,
teachers, very often take a somewhat nihilistic attitude to
aesthetic education.
The pleasing appearance of a person, a room, a staircase,
a machine tool is as important as beautiful behaviour. What
behaviour is aesthetically pleasing? Behaviour which
has been given form, for form itself is a sign of higher
culture.
And so we come to another worry: taking aesthetics as
the result of style, as an index, we begin to regard it as a
factor of education in its own right.
I cannot give you a list of requirements for a beautiful
life, but life must be beautiful without fail. They are two
entirely different things-a child's beautiful life and an adult's.
Children have their own kind of emotionality, their own
measure of expressing their feelings. And the beauty of a
children's collective cannot quite repeat that of an adult
one.
For instance, play. There must always be play in a chil­
dren's collective. If there is no play it is not a real children's
collective. Ands^y play I do not only mean that a boy plays
football or some other game, I mean that he plays a little
every minute of his life, he soars a bit in his imagination,,
makes tiny flights of fancy, he acts a little, and in play feels
rather bigger than he is. Children can develop their imagina­
tion only if they are in a collective, and a playing collective
at that. And I, being their teacher, have to play along with
them a little. If I do nothing but teach, demand and insist,
I will be an alien force, a necessary one maybe, but a strange
one to them. It is imperative that I should play a little, and
I demanded the same from all my colleagues.
I am quite a different person, of course, when I'm speak­
ing with you, but when I am with children I have to put on
a bit more cheer, use more humour and smile more, not
ingratiatingly or anything like that, but just smile a pleasant
and sufficiently imaginative smile. I must not simply prevail
over the collective, I must be a member of it with pleasure

149
to give. I must impress them aesthetically, and so I never
once appeared before my pupils in an unbelted blouse or
boots that needed a shine. I, too, had to shine, to the best of
my ability, of course. I, too, must be as cheerful as the
collective. I never permitted myself to wear a melancholy
expression. I had trained myself never to let the children
see that I was worried by something or was unwell.
On the other hand, I had to be capable of storming, of
reading the riot act. I saw an article in your pedagogical
magazine last year about the tone in which one should talk
to pupils. It said there: a teacher must speak to the pupil in
a level tone. Why should he? Why in a level tone? I'm sure
he'd be such a bore that the pupils would soon grow to hate
him. No, I say that a teacher has to be gay, wide-awake, and
really angry when something goes wrong, speaking quite
sharply to make the pupils feel that he really is angry and
not simply indulging in some pedagogical moralising.
This is a demand I made on all my staff. I dismissed
excellent tutors without compunction, although their only
fault was that they made things so dull and sad all the time.
A grownup person working in a collective oi children must
know how to control his feelings and keep his troubles to
himself.
A collective also needs outward adornment. For this
reason, even when ours was very poor, I built a hothouse
right away, and not just an apology for one but a big hot­
house with an estimated hectare of flowers, and I did not
mind the expense. And I insisted on planting roses and
chrysanthemums, and never any wretched little blooms. The
children and I loved fussing over the flowers. And we really
did grow a hectare of flowers, real first-rate flowers. We
had bowls of them standing in the bedrooms, the dining-
room, class-rooms, studies, and even on the stairs. We made
baskets out of tin and placed them all down the steps. It was
an excellent idea. A detachment needed no written permis­
sion to get more flowers: when they wilted, someone would
go to the hothouse and take a couple of pots.

150
 All those flowers, clean rooms, clothes and boots are
essential in a children's collective. Boots have to shine, what
sort of upbringing is it otherwise? Children must clean their
teeth regularly, and their shoes too. There must be not a
speck of dust on their clothes. A neat head of hair is
essential. The boys were free to dress their hair any way
they liked so long as it was neat. To enforce this rule, a
member of the Sanitary Commission made the rounds of the
dormitories once a month with his clippers at the ready.
If someone's hair was untidy, he'd run over it with the
clippers: the victim was obliged to go to the barber's then
to get the job finished. It helped, and all the boys took good
care of their hair.
All these rules of cleanliness have to be enforced very
strictly. Six months after leaving the Dzerzhinsky Commune
I came back on inspection from Kiev. Everybody came run­
ning out, they shook my hand and gave me a very nice
welcome generally. I went to look at the dormitories. Some­
thing was not quite right: there was dust in the room, a
soiled handkerchief was lying on the bedside table of Yanov-
sky, my best commander, and when I opened his locker I
found a whole pile of dirty things. I did not use a level voice
then, I spoke in my real voice: "Ten hours under arrest, I'm
not inspecting any more dormitories. I'll be here to check
tomorrow morning." They sent a car for me to Kharkov
early next morning, and when I inspected the room for
dust I could not find a mote. "How did you manage so
quickly?" I asked them. "We didn't go to bed."^
I do realise, you know, that I demand what I think
necessary, and others demand other things. Were I less exact­
ing, the tone and the style would be gone. Everything has
to be borne in mind. For instance, when lessons begin the
member of the Sanitary Commission on duty asks the teacher:
'Are you pleased with our form?" The teacher is in a tight
spot: if he says he is, the Sanitary Commission will discover
thousands of faults: dust in that corner, hands with black
under the nails, fresh knife cuts on someone's desk.

151
And so whether he wants to or not a teacher has to be
exacting.
If a teacher was dressed untidily I did not let him start
lessons. And so we got used to wearing our best clothes to
school. I, too, wore the best suit I had. We all looked dan­
dified.
A very important point, that. Take the dinner table. An
oilcloth is good and hygienic, you can put anything on it,
wash it, and it will be nice and clean again. But only a white
tablecloth can teach youngsters to be tidy eaters, whereas
an oilcloth spoils them. At first the tablecloth will always be
filthy and spotty, but in six months' time it will be as clean
before dinner as after. You can't teach children table man­
ners unless you give them a white tablecloth.
Every trifle has to be treated seriously, neatness has to
be exacted at every step. Why chew pencils? A pencil must
always be kept sharpened to a point. Why the rusty pen-nib,
what's that fly doing in your ink-well? Add these trifles in
their millions to the pedagogical demands which you already
have in mind. It is too much for one person to cope with,
but it can easily be done if the whole collective helps and
knows the value of these trifles.
We had a boy with a rifle standing at the front door. He
woie his best suit. He had to see that everyone wiped his
eet on the door mat. Rain or shine, nobody was allowed
to enter the building without wiping his feet first. The com­
munard on g%ard understood perfectly well why he had to
enforce the rule: he had to dust the rooms himself every
day, and if all those who came in wiped their feet properly
t ere would be less dust. The communards needed no remind-
ing. lsitors sometimes asked: "But why must I wipe my
teet, i came along a clean asphalt path." And the boy would
have to explain to him: "Yes, but still you brought in two
grams of dust.
Another trifling matter-the handkerchief. A clean hand-
arc le must be issued to everyone every day, it's obvious.

152
 I should think. And yet I've seen children's homes where
they change the handkerchiefs once a month, in other words
they purposely teach children to wipe their noses with a
filthy rag. But it's such a small expense, surely.
The cuspidor. A triumph of hygiene-a cuspidor in every
corner! But why should anyone spit? That's what the boys
said too: "Want to spit? Go to the hospital then, you're sick,
you've got the camel sickness, healthy people don't spit all
the time."
"But I smoke."
"If that's the kind of smoker you are, give it up quick,
real smokers don't spit."
If a boy did not give up the habit of spitting, he'd be taken
to the doctor by force. The doctor usually helped, persuading
the boy that it was no more than a reflex.
A cuspidor in a corner usually marks the spot where
spitting is allowed. And usually the wall behind it is
filthy.
In the life of a collective these trifles are very many, and
it is from them that the aesthetics of behaviour is built up.
A boy who doJy not spit and blows his nose into a hand­
kerchief, is already a well-behaved boy. These small basic
requirements must be answered to the full, and moreover
they must be thoroughly considered and brought in harmony
with some general principles. There are many such trifles
which can't be enumerated but which can be performed in
a pleasing, healthy manner and linked to tJ^e collective's
advance generally.
I shall end here. I am sure that what my colleagues and
I did was done by many people in the Soviet Union.
I only differ in that I have an urge to demand the same from
everyone, I feel an urge to preach these ordinary rules, not
my personal ones, but rules which a great many teachers in
the Soviet Union have drawn up for themselves.
I also feel an urge to systematise them. I have myself
observed very beautiful work being done in many of our
schools, we have excellent collectives, splendidly organised.

153
with their own centre, their style and their beauty. This
experience wants systematising, I think. It will be a pity
if this large Soviet educational experience of a good twenty
years gets lost. That's why I feel in duty bound to put down
as much as I can in writing. Much of it is confused, perhaps,
and there are many mistakes. But popularising Soviet
pedagogical experience is a cause that must be carried on.
I think that it is your particular duty, I mean people
working in Public Education, to get this experience summed
up and to popularise the methods of the best Soviet educa­
tional establishments.
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