p All over the world school education is attracting ever increasing attention. It is now the “done thing" to criticise school methods, and “reforming” school education has become a national hobby in many countries. Yet much of this criticism concentrates on what schools should not be, rather than putting forward concrete suggestions as to what they should become. There is much talk of the education explosion, of the need to prepare children for the world of the future, rather than that of the present, and contrasts are always being drawn between “creative” and “rote” learning. Creativity has become an almost universal cult in education circles everywhere; the most homage is paid to that ideal by those who lack a clear understanding of what creativity really involves and of the ways it can best be fostered.
p While futurologists give us confident forecasts with regard to almost all other spheres of human life, they do not hazard many quesses at what our schools will be like twenty years 6 from now. With relative certainty they predict the era of teaching machines. However schools are not factories and their success depends not on equipment or technology but on ideas.
p There is no doubt that there is no shortage of serious ideas and profound minds in this age of ours, yet what is the primary concern of parents and teachers ... and indeed not theirs alone?
p I was once invited to give a lecture at the Soviet space research centre “Star City": I knew quite well what topics I could ask my audience about, but what was far less obvious to me was what I, for my part, should recount to v them. The choice however was made for me, since the staff from the research centre asked me to talk about the work of Vasily Sukhomlinsky.
p Today as never before tremendous interest is being shown in the work and life of Sukhomlinsky. His books are not novels, stories or even manuals on child care in the family, but straightforward studies in education, yet they are published in editions running into millions and each work is always sold out within a matter of hours.
It may seem strange that Sukhomlinsky’s works are read by people who have little connection with the education world. A power engineer will take along a book of his to read while travelling; a schoolgirl of fourteen may take one to her teacher in the hope that after reading it, she will cease to treat her pupils, as her charge sees it, unfairly. In almost every 7 newspaper that carries material on children and education grateful references to Sukhomlinsky abound.
p Vasily Sukhomlinsky made a name for himself in the education world only very gradually. Once his reputation has been established though, he was at the forefront of public interest for a number of years. He was working with children for thirty-five years and publishing books and articles for twenty. His works were not only published in the USSR but have also been translated into many foreign languages. Sukhomlinsky was awarded almost all the honours that can be paid to an outstanding educationist; he was a Merited Teacher of the Soviet Union, a Hero of Socialist Labour, and a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. His school was renowned far and wide, when he died at the height of his career in September 1970, aged a mere fifty-one.
p Sukhomlinsky left behind him thirty books and some five hundred articles which do not in any way smack of startling innovation. He did not revolutionise education methods.
p Yet his fame was far more than a matter of chance. His works are popular and widely read and quoted, because he provides answers—- answers to thousands of questions which confront anyone working with children and young people. In almost any difficult situation it is possible to recall relevant recommendations made 8 by Sukhomlinsky, suggestions that are effective, simple and sensitive.
p At a time when many educationists and teachers were engaged in a search for new paths and new universal theories, dreaming of new, foolproof concepts of schooling, a modest teacher from the village of Pavlysh, that numbers a mere three thousand inhabitants and is far away from Moscow and Kiev, was moulding a school of a completely new type. The first thing that would strike the visitor about it was that it did not seem to differ in any way from ordinary schools of the traditional type ... yet on closer inspection it soon emerged that Sukhomlinsky’s traditional school is in fact far in advance of all innovatory types taken together.
p This twentieth century of ours is an age of systems analysis. It is being increasingly accepted that when we are confronted by interconnected elements, far more important than the individual elements are the connections between them.
p Indeed the crux of Sukhomlinsky’s approach is that he concentrates on the link-up between all elements of education, and their interdependence. There is nothing in school education which lie regards as possessed of either central or secondary significance. All elements in the education process are equally important to Sukhomlinsky. For the teacher a pupil should not merely be a “pupil”, but, far more important, a “person”, who needs both character moulding and instruction.
9p Similar ideas have been expounded by a variety of teachers in the past. They have also been put into practice at least with regard to children of pre-school age or in junior classes. These ideas were also voiced in respect of older children of 15-17, as a noble intention. Yet, when teachers are confronted by the teenager of today, so often noisy, impudent and critical and by no means always anxious to learn or calmly receptive to knowledge, so often noble intentions fade and teachers’ humanistic ideals pale to nothing.
p Both in theory and practice Sukhomlinsky demonstrated that a complex modern secondary education can be given to any healthy teenager, and what is more, in an ordinary school, in ordinary large classes without carefully selected teachers or pupils, and without resorting to streaming.
p Yet to Sukhomlinsky the most important thing for the teacher to remember is that school should always remain for both young children and teenagers the temple of joy of which teachers dreamt as long ago as the Renaissance. It might seem that the only way to achieve teaching success without coercion were play, yet play methods are virtually out of the question in senior classes. Sukhomlinsky demonstrated how the actual learning process could be a source of happiness not only for young children but for senior pupils as well.
p That particular goal is indeed all-important in any school of the latter twentieth century, when secondary education is gradually 10 becoming as much a mass phenomenon as was instruction in the three “R’s" in the middle of the last century.
p Some teachers succeed in making their charges happy, while others are demanding and strict in their efforts to develop their pupils and enrich them through knowledge, an achievement they find impossible without constant testing of ability, industry, and ambition.
Sukhomlinsky, on the other hand, succeeded in uniting these two goals, which at first glance might appear mutually exclusive.
p Why does learning come so hard to certain pupils, why from the very outset do some boys and girls start to lag behind their peers in overall development, find themselves obliged to repeat years and in the end leave school without having received a proper education? Sometimes teachers apply up-to-the-minute methods and manifest great skill as they build up brick by brick, storey by storey, and succeed in keeping the building intact during a child’s school career—-Yet when a year or two has passed the whole edifice collapses, because it never had a really firm foundation.
p Sukhomlinsky was unable to understand those inspectors who on visiting a school would always make a bee-line for the senior classes. He, like no one, knew all too well that foundations are laid at the very beginning of a school career, and indeed long before children reach school at all.
11p Throughout the Soviet Union children start school at seven and in certain republics an additional preparatory class prior to Class 1 has recently been introduced.
p This preparatory class was Sukhomlinsky’s favourite class. Sukhomlinsky as headmaster always took that class, knowing full well that it provided the foundation for the individual pupil’s education and character training. He used to refer to this preparatory class as his “School of Joy".
p Sukhomlinsky would lead his group of fifteen or sixteen six-year-olds—both girls and boys—not indoors like the other pupils, but out into the garden.
p He would announce: “Our school will be out here under the blue sky, on the green grass, under this spreading pear tree, in a vineyard or a green meadow. When you come along tomorrow come barefoot, that would be best of all at our school.”
p Speaking as if he were raising the stage curtain, Sukhomlinsky would solemnly declare: “This is where our school begins. From here we will look out at the blue sky, the garden, the village and the sun.”
p Was that really schooling? Yes, schooling, the very beginning of schooling. A teacher who greets his small charges and immediately opens an Alphabet is starting out with the second act of the play, not the first, as if he was either short of time, or the children had arrived so late as to miss the opening curtain.
p So the first act of school was not inside the 12 schoolhouse but in the lap of Nature, at the “fount of words and reason”. Sukhomlinsky’s pupils were able to drink from that fount. They used to walk anything up to three or four miles a day with their teacher; to admire the dawn and twilight together; in autumn they would study the clouds and in winter the contours of the snowdrifts; their imaginations would run wild as they listened to fairy-tales or invented their own stories; verses would come tripping off their tongues and they would start shouting for joy with their teacher, running wild among the bushes chanting the lines newly devised.... They had their own “Dream House"—a cave where they built a stove with their own hands, or again a dilapidated old hut where they would gather together when autumn rains would be streaming down outside. They would listen both to the music of Nature and to music on gramophone records, sing and draw, indeed drawing was a particularly popular pastime. Yet all this represented far more than idle diversion. Sukhomlinsky used to maintain: “Until a child has sensed the flavour of words, . . . there is no point in teaching him to read and write, and when teachers do that they are condemning their pupils to an uninspiring grind ahead.”
p The pupils from the “School of Joy" would gaze at sunlit meadows, listen to the whirring of midges, the chatter of grasshoppers . .. then they start to draw meadows and then they write the caption “Meadow” underneath their pictures. Each word and each letter are an 13 exciting discovery, for the children come face to face with them not in books, but out of doors in real woods or meadows.
p The children’s nature walks bring more and more words into their workbooks: “village”, “oak”, “willow”, “wood”, “smoke”, “ice” so that “the children learn to read and write far from any stuffy classroom, blackboard, chalks, dull drawings or letter-cut-outs".
p Is this technique an anachronism or reminiscent of Rousseau? An attempt to recreate an eighteenth-century pastoral idyll with meadows, flowers and reed-pipes (all Sukhomlinsky’s pupils used to make reed-pipes and play tunes on them)? This achievement should not give rise to any sceptical smiles: before we know where we are this eighteenth-century learning situation may come into its own as a model for the twenty-first.... Sukhomlinsky in his teaching methods penetrated that Holy of Holies of teaching, that very few teachers dare to enter, just as few surgeons venture to undertake complex operations on the heart or brain. This sphere of the child’s life, about which so much is being written, on which so much detailed research work is being carried out and where so many education experts are still groping in the dark, is that of the emotions and the subconscious. Sukhomlinsky maintained that weird and wonderful fairy-tale characters open up to a child not only beauty but living truth as well. All dry explanations of life’s truths are dead for a child if they strike no chords in his heart. Two blacksmiths live 14 on the sun according to the ancient fairy-tale and this reveals more to the small child than any account of the sun’s physical properties, although of course not one child actually believes the story of the blacksmiths.
p Emotionality for Sukhomlinsky is not a factor which supplements other fundamental “ aspects" of teaching, not one of a list of essential factors in the lesson context, but a means towards stimulating interest and the only way in which to stretch a child’s mind, to preserve the magic of childhood while teaching children.
p “Emotional awakening of the mind" is Sukhomlinsky’s method and that of his colleagues, the other teachers at the Pavlysh school. They develop their pupils’ minds by bringing out their emotional response rather than their mental faculties direct; through the emotions they develop the mind.
p It might at first seem that the path from a teacher’s knowledge to pupils’ knowledge would be a straight one. Yet in reality the shortest route proves the longest and most difficult, if the “conductor” of the emotions is not set in motion. The path that leads from the teacher’s knowledge via his emotions and then those of the pupil to the pupil’s knowledge proves far shorter....
p With reference to his pupils about to move on from the “School of Joy" into the first class, Sukhomlinsky writes that the learning process for his charges at that stage should be “no question of rote-learning, but dynamic intellectual life proceeding in a world of games, 15 fairy-tales, beauty, music, fantasy and creativity”. Sukhomlinsky’s pupils are not children with satchels on their backs that have to be stuffed with as much knowledge as possible; indeed they do not set about acquiring knowledge as such. Such abstract goals are outside the child’s horizon in Sukhomlinsky’s view. He imparts to his pupils the joy of intellectual effort and the experience that effort leads to, his pupils aspire after that joy and in doing so make good progress. Their goal is pleasure and joy and all in the school setting!
p More often than not children lose some of the magic of childhood after they start school. In the charge of Sukhomlinsky however they only become children in the true sense of the word at school. School, far from cutting childhood short, prolongs it. More than that it restores the joys of childhood to those children who for various reasons were deprived of them at home.
p For whole months on end children in the first three classes of his school play at Robinson Crusoe, invent tales of their own, build the island of Lilliput from reeds and ply-wood, plant out rose bushes in their “Arbour of Beauty”, fashion an “underground emerald kingdom" from pieces of coloured glass ( inspired by Ivan Bazhov’s tales of the Malachite Casket) and read aloud stories of Tsar Saltan, Robinson Crusoe, Baron Munchhausen, Gulliver in the specially set out, “Fairy-Tale Room" where the visitor is confronted by Solovei Razboinik, Ilya Muromets, Red Riding Hood and 16 other fairy-tale characters, a room where tales by Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Lev Tolstoy, Konstantin Ushinsky, Kornei Chukovsky and Samuil Marshak ring out time and time again .... It is here also that the boys and girls play toys and dolls. Each one has his special favourite among them. The children at Sukhomlinsky’s school play toys up to the age of ten, yet this in no way prevents them learning right from Class 1 how to grow corn on the school plot, to work with their hands, to take care of trees, birds, fish, to build models of wind-driven electric stations and a score of other no less intricate models, to play chess (“chess is essential for the development of a child’s mental powers and faculty of retention") or prevents mathematics tournaments being held as early as Class 3, and frequent use being made of such words as “ phenomenon", “cause”, “result”, “event”, “ conditioning", “distinction”, “similarity”___
p To say that toys prevent Sukhomlinsky’s pupils from engaging in all these other activities is an understatement. It is precisely fairytales and children’s creativity in play, lessons in resourcefulness drawn from the folklore, which serve to pinpoint the shortest route to all that is truly up-to-date in science, to abstract concepts, for they arouse, develop and enrich children’s thought processes.
p On all sides there are demands being made for “more effective teaching”, although in practice “effectiveness” is usually misconstrued as “intensivity”.
17p Sukhomlinsky’s pupils were not hurrying anywhere. Their teacher went out of his way to preserve their mental and emotional equilibrium, their sense of life’s fulness, their clarity of thought and their confidence in their own strength. It is often a good three or four months before they became accustomed to the school routine, and not the first day as many good teachers would proudly claim elsewhere. Initially some of the pupils were allowed to leave the classroom when they wish to do so, for the teachers are educating the children and not breaking their habits. Almost half of Sukhomlinsky’s lessons were conducted out of doors, in a summer house or out in the fields, because he believed that eighty-five per cent of children, who make poor progress, fall behind because of various often undiagnosed ailments and he took meticulous care of the children’s health. All the children in Sukhomlinsky’s charge had a proper breakfast at home before starting lessons, they slept out of doors at midday and did their homework in special summer houses built by older pupils. Sukhomlinsky’s pupils never had pasty cheeks, circles under their eyes; they are all rosy-cheeked and tanned, their complexions real “strawberries and cream”. Sukhomlinsky does not only regale his pupils with fairy-tales in order to promote their intellectual development, but also in the interests of their health, since he established a definite connection between joy and health, and between boredom and sickness. Sukhomlinsky was proud of the successes reaped 18 by his pupils; perhaps his greatest triumph was that from the third class onwards none of his pupils has ever come down with a cold!
p Sukhomlinsky did not give his young pupils bad marks. His pupils go up into Class 5 without ever having had a bad mark or seeing one for that matter. Indeed Sukhomlinsky could not imagine how anyone could give a small child a bad mark. To use the words of the eminent Polish educationist Janusz Korczak that he “respects children’s lack of knowledge" and he was patient: for a year, or even perhaps two or three a child will perhaps “fail to catch on, but the time will come when he shall master the problem”. If some venture ended in failure Sukhomlinsky avoided marks altogether. This meant that a child was neither disgraced or punished but later on would strive to prove worthy of a mark.
p Marks as administered by Sukhomlinsky were always optimistic; they are rewards for diligence, not punishment for laziness. Only six times did Sukhomlinsky fail to enter marks at the end of a school quarter, yet nevertheless half of the pupils completed the fourth class with certificates of commendation, and almost all the rest managed to finish with good marks. Sukhomlinsky managed to persuade his pupils’ parents not to demand inordinately high marks from his pupils. His school was not one which chased after “distinctions”: “star pupils did not feel themselves a world apart, while those who only just made the grade were not oppressed by any feeling of inferiority.”
19p The parents connected with Sukhomlinsky’s school were a breed apart as well: for twelve years they used to come to the school twice a month for a special course in psychology and education techniques, which made a total of 350 hours exceeding in length any course of study at a university or college.
p The teachers at this school also lead very different lives from most of their colleagues. Sukhomlinsky holds that a teacher’s free time is the root which feeds the branches of his creativity. He does not demand any written reports, or any fixed duty rota. He encourages the teachers to check a representative cross section of the children’s exercise books rather than spend hours poring over them, and whenever there is an opera or concert of classical music to be seen on television then all meetings and seminars are cancelled.
p Sukhomlinsky left behind him a detailed theory on the subject of training teachers within the school situation. Many people thought he had specially selected the best teachers from the whole area. That was not the case: instead he had taught them himself and in his turn learnt from them. All the discoveries made at the Pavlysh school were the fruit of joint effort on the part of the school’s finest teachers and many of Sukhomlinsky’s books were devoted almost entirely to recording their experience. He only started to write of himself as a teacher or educator and of his own personal experience after he had been teaching for close on thirty years.
20p Sukhomlinsky exhorted his fellow teachers to remember that they were not a deux with their pupils but that “a third person is also present as well—your conscience, your teacher’s conscience”. He always went out of his way to bring other teachers round to sharing his ideas and felt that the hardest task of all was to mould a teacher’s convictions with regard to his work, to instill faith in children into them.
p Faith in children, in their strength, in their ability and their urge to “turn out well" was the main feature of all Sukhomlinsky’s work. He worked with young teachers for many years, trying to demonstrate to them how they should go about their work and patiently explaining his views. Yet if even after several years’ practice in teaching it turned out that a teacher had still not learnt to have faith in children, that their inexperience and weaknesses irritated him, then Sukhomlinsky would discharge such a teacher. To teach without faith in children was in his view impossible. A lack of faith meant a lack of love.
When asked what the most important thing in his life was Sukhomlinsky would always reply without a moment’s hesitation, “My love for children".
p Sukhomlinsky’s education theory was centred on the child and his needs. Attempts to evolve such theories had been made before. All 21 the finest of the world’s educationists have aspired to that goal and more often than not became guilty of that fatal excess known in the education field as “pedocentrism”: the theorist ceases to lead the child but follows in his footsteps, without fostering any new serious interest in the child, he takes as his guide the child’s passing interests.
p Not only did Sukhomlinsky elaborate a reasonable middle path in this respect and avoid excesses, but he also lit upon a fundamentally new solution to the problem. He leads the child to knowledge, teaches him seriously and thoroughly, starting out not from any chance interests of the children in his charge but from the demands inherent in the common state curriculum for all schools of the Soviet Union: his main concern was to foster in the child the desire to learn.
p According to Sukhomlinsky education is an impossible goal, if the pupil feels no inclination for self-education. To mould a child’s character is impossible if the child experiences no urge to shape and direct his character.
p It may seem superfluous to draw attention to the importance of self-education in the present period?.... However what represents no more than a secondary concern for others is fundamental to Sukhomlinsky’s way of thinking. What others regard as desirable he sees as essential. What others would classify as result, he sees as cause.
p All the recommendations Sukhomlinsky makes and all his articles, books and ideas are 22 centred round one and the same idea, the need to foster interest in learning, to teach children to derive joy through diligence, and to impart to them the desire to become worthwhile people. A child should not be allowed to feel that he is inferior to others, incapable or backward, his sense of dignity must not be slighted. All children, even the most backward, must be trained for the role of worthwhile people, “for there is no other way”, according to Sukhomlinsky.
p Sukhomlinsky rejects outright the possibility of resigned acceptance of a child’s intellectual weakness and his corruptibility. He believes only in an optimistic outcome of the struggle for the child and it is to be hoped in an ordinary run-of-the-mill class. In the Soviet Union it is well known that children are not put through tests: teachers and pupils are unaware of the very word IQ. Sukhomlinsky is uncompromising as ever in the following reference to backward children: “Such children should be taught in ordinary schools; it would be quite out of the question to set up for them any special educational establishments, that would be contrary to elementary humanity. These children are not ugly, merely the frailest and most delicate of all the flowers in mankind’s infinitely various garden. It is not their fault that they came into our schools thin, weak and defenceless. The guilt can be laid at the doors of Nature, the whole human race, the age-old social injustice which has been annihilated but its fruits are still there to last for years. . ,.”
23p Sukhomlinsky’s love for children is a love which is essentially active. It is possible to love a child to distraction, yet if a child is not getting on well at school love shown him by an adult is not going to make him happy. Love involves bestowing happiness and what happiness can be compared with self-confidence, with joy derived from success in studies?
p In passing it is worth noting that no teacher before Sukhomlinsky had made such a powerful appeal to love children and understand them. To love children in general is no easy task and one which is not within everyone’s grasp. It is a task that confronts those entrusted with the care of children with particular difficulties, for they may find themselves up against children with a wide range of different characters, sometimes of the most unattractive variety. Hardest of all is the task of loving and understanding all children for those teachers working with children whose thought patterns are as yet undeveloped or slow or who quite simply have no ability to learn. Teaching able pupils is an easy and pleasant task, indeed a delight. Alas, every class contains only a handful of outstanding pupils. Sukhomlinsky comes to the rescue of the slower pupils, those whom Nature herself seems to have condemned to failure, humiliation and despair. Indeed it is perhaps the epitome of humanism to “ overcome that which appeared to be laid down by Nature herself".
p Sukhomlinsky had not yet reached the age of thirty when he found himself confronted for 24 the first time with the most insuperable of all a teacher’s problems. Each day he would go the rounds of the classes conducted by his colleagues and listen to the answers proffered by the pupils. He finally came to ask himself: “Why do these answers often contain nothing of the child’s own real live thoughts? We are not teaching the children to think for themselves!”
p The skill of the teacher consists in his ability to teach children to think! Later Sukhomlinsky was to note in his writings: “This realisation inspired me, it gave me the extraordinary happiness of creative inspiration.”
p He listened to the answers given by two small girls. The answers were perfectly adequate, yet coming forward with them obviously brought the girls no pleasure. Why was that? Was it that they were not interested in the material? Lesson material cannot however all be interesting.
p As soon as we come round to the viewpoint that children should only be offered material that interests them, a school immediately loses the opportunity of providing children with firmly based systematic knowledge, a school curriculum then becomes hopelessly out of touch with modern life.
p Sukhomlinsky then established that it is not lesson material as such which brings the pupils joy. Rather it is the work the pupil carries out, his mastering of difficulties, his small victories over his own shortcomings. That is the source of interest which can be something constant, 25 at both boring and inspiring lessons. Success! First hurdles won! A child’s first victory— these are the keys to a teacher’s victory over Nature, over a child’s “natural” abilities or lack of them.
p Pupils grow accustomed early to the idea that in any class there are leaders and those who lag behind: the weaker pupils accept with resignation that geometry problems will be beyond them and that they are bound to make mistakes in their compositions.
p Sukhomlinsky pondered and deliberated all these questions slowly and carefully. For years, even decades he would turn over each of his ideas in his mind before finding correct solutions.
p However whatever problem he turned to, he would embark upon it with faith in his ultimate victory. The other teachers at his school came to believe in his victories as well and—what is most important—the children as well. A child must believe in himself, believe that diligent work will enable him to come to grips with his weaknesses, and that good school progress is within everyone’s reach. When Sukhomlinsky began his teaching career, his first concern was his pupil’s literacy. Many children used to have to repeat years because of their weak written work and it seemed that there was no power on earth capable of doing away with their poor literacy. Two years’ intensive work enabled Sukhomlinsky to cut down the numbers with a low literacy rating by half. That was the first major achievement in the school’s 26 history—the first battle and the first victory.
p Then Sukhomlinsky took on a different problem: how to impart to the children a strong desire to learn, to fill the children with a thirst for knowledge. If children are not eager to learn, all efforts on the teacher’s part are in vain. Sukhomlinsky never tired of repeating that “without curiosity there can be no school. All our schemes, quests and projects are worth nothing if children feel no desire to learn”. Later he expressed the paradoxical idea that was subsequently to become as well-known as celebrated paradoxes in mathematics which lent impetus to the whole of scientific progress.
p The desire to learn, as pointed out above, comes only in the wake of success in study. This desire stems not from the children’s interest but from their ability to learn.
p It would thus follow that in order for a child to make good progress at school ... he must make good progress at school!
Sukhomlinsky pinpointed this paradox and went on to resolve it. The solution proved quite “simple”: children should not only be taught but also taught how to learn and achieve success. If a child is taught and given the chance to experience the inspiration that can be gleaned from schoolwork, the joy it can bring, then interest in his schoolwork will appear and he will go on to conquer new ground. The paradox pinpointed by Sukhomlinsky charts out the most fruitful strategy the teacher can follow.
27p Success and the joy of inspiration—these constitute the “teaching machine" of the twentieth century, the momentum of learning, the force which explodes the pupil’s indifference to school and compels him to study.
p However not all children can achieve success in grammar, physics or chemistry. It is vital to have patience and pick out some sphere of activity for each child, where he can come into his own and achieve not just success, but “ significant success”. Each child should outstrip his fellows at least in something and feel himself strong and intelligent!
p To this end it is not a spirit of sportsmanlike competitiveness which is required as some educationists would have us believe, for in trials of speed, agility and accuracy the outsiders are bound to figure among the “champions”. Sukhomlinsky eradicated with methodical consistency all the hundred and one things which can humiliate even a single child, or rob him of his self-confidence. Gymnastics, the quest for beauty and harmony of movement is ideally suitable for schoolchildren, whereas sports competitions aimed at singling out champions are out of place in schools. Sukhomlinsky ascribed far more importance to physical labour, which involves a considerable element of mental effort. This is a sphere where every child should be able to achieve significant success and such success may well have a beneficial effect on his class work.
28p Sukhomlinsky then proceeds to elaborate a well-defined theory for fostering diligence. To him it is not important that children should work out in the fields or in workshops. He is not after any kind of labour; he is for labour that bears fruit, in the context of education and fosters a love of work, both physical and mental. “Labour as such has no interest for children,” writes Sukhomlinsky. Where there is no interest there can be no love of work. Only labour which involves thought, creative thought, aspiration to success and real interest is important to the teacher. To take a simple example: if a teacher wants children to work out in the fields, or tend flower-beds, then a good piece of land must be selected for the purpose. That will be advantageous from the agricultural point of view but, as Sukhomlinsky points out, not for the teacher! On a fertile plot his pupils will be able to bring in a good harvest. However it is not the size of the harvest that counts, but the number of difficulties that have been overcome, it is in terms of the latter that success and joy should be assessed. Children should be led forward to confront what is difficult, almost impossible, and then be helped to conquer the impossible. From childhood a person should be given to feel that he can do everything, that he is the very same hero he had come to admire in his story-books. Then incidentally he will start to grow more aware of those heroes and be more eager to imitate them. It is impossible to unearth the strong, brave and heroic side to every child’s 29 nature and show him what he is capable of with mere words, it must be done through the conquest of real difficulties.
p For centuries educational theorists have given thought to ways of alleviating their pupils’ labours. Sukhomlinsky on the other hand created conflict situations, as it were, between dreams and possibilities, plans and their implementation. For five hundred children he laid on facilities for pursuing eighty different hobbies and, what is more, facilities that were created by the work of the children’s own hands. The hobbies ranged from poker-work to radio-electronics. Legend has it that towards the end of his life Sukhomlinsky dreamt of a home-made school helicopter. There is no doubt that given time, they would have built it—-
p Sukhomlinsky encouraged adolescents to prove themselves, show what they were capable of and assert themselves. Given that it comes naturally to teenagers to seek to prove themselves, Sukhomlinsky encouraged them to do so in workshops and hobby groups side by side with their peers, to show what they can. The young people at school in Pavlysh made light of their “growing pains" in comparison with their peers elsewhere, for the disciplinary impact of intelligent, happy work in a collective knows no bounds.
p Enthusiasm for work is catching. Children cannot be taught to enjoy work, but they can be infected with that enjoyment. Sukhomlinsky insisted that pupils should find themselves in 30 an atmosphere of all-pervasive work. All his pupils were busy, all were working towards some sort of goal, both the senior boys and girls and the teachers. In that kind of atmosphere, work comes to be respected by the children as a moral virtue.
p In order to ensure fruitful study it is important that a class should have the appropriate “intellectual context" and that the general attitude to learning should be a positive one. Important in this context are meaty conversations between pupils, and a variety of intellectual interests.
p A “work context" is also essential to foster positive attitudes to work. This “context” created by the collective fosters the energies of every individual pupil. It may be that this “work context" (intellectual, moral, aesthetic and that connected with manual work) provides that very mechanism through which the collective brings influence to bear on the individual and the individual on the collective. The actions of the individual child are guided not by commands, demands, coercion, incentives or punishments but through the overall atmosphere of the collective which is one of moral uprightness, diligence and intellectual effort.
p A few years ago a book was brought out in the United States entitled Two Worlds of Childhood: US and USSR. Its author, the wellknown psychologist and sociologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, had made a painstaking comparative study of children in the two countries 31 using the latest sociological techniques: he pointed out that teenagers in the Soviet Union manifest higher moral qualities than their peers in the United States. In an effort to probe the secrets of Russian education Urie Bronfenbrenner elaborated a theory of imitation and modelling: he ascertains that the children he was studying found themselves face to face with models of approved behaviour and copy them. However it would seem that the term “ modelling”, despite its up-to-date ring, was not an accurate way to describe the mechanism of education and character-moulding under discussion. It is not the isolated model, nor pupils’ comparison of themselves with “models”, but precisely collective impulses in an overall creative atmosphere which influence the child, absorb him and steer his behaviour into a pedagogically expedient channel.
p If a teacher has an opportunity to influence a child, to guide him, this does not mean that the education received will necessarily be of a positive, fruitful variety. Sukhomlinsky seeks to place the child in a position where he cannot fail to find enjoyment in work, to aspire to success, and to love learning for its own sake! In this way Sukhomlinsky can be seen as the continuator of the principles of his great predecessor, the outstanding Soviet educationist, Anton Makarenko. There was a time when attempts were made to contrast the work of Sukhomlinsky and Makarenko, and indeed they still occur today. It has been maintained that Makarenko put forward the theory of 32 education through the collective, and Sukhomlinsky opted for education of the individual. However this contrasting of the two theories betrayed a highly superficial understanding of both Makarenko’s and Sukhomlinsky’s work.
p History itself it seems is set on demonstrating to us the actual relationship between the two outstanding Soviet educationists. Sukhomlinsky graduated from the same institute of education as Makarenko in Poltava in the Ukraine (albeit after an interval of twenty years) and he started his teaching career the year that Makarenko died. They worked in settlements for railway workers at two adjoining stations, Kryukovo and Pavlysh, where commemorative museums have since been opened.
p Sukhomlinsky wrote in his day: “There is no other teacher whose work I have admired and respected as much as Makarenko’s. It was in his works that I sought true wisdom of which I was so desperately in need. All my modest experimentation in teaching has been the result of that search.” Indeed not only was his experimentation the result of the search inspired by Makarenko’s writings, but it also represented the elaboration and continuation of the truths he found in his predecessor’s work.
p The theory of education through the collective which is usually associated with the name of Makarenko and his book The Road to Life is the only educational theory of this century which has stood the test of time. It was 33 subjected to severe criticism, and many people claimed that education within the collective led to a levelling out of individuality. Yet as the years go by more and more people in many countries come to realise that at the present time no other type of education can be effective; Makarenko’s works are continually being reprinted (recently a one-volume selection of his writings came out in the United States). Today it is impossible to educate young people outside the collective, and collective education does not in any way undermine individuality: on the contrary, precisely this type of education allows a child to develop all his abilities.
This was demonstrated conclusively by Sukhomlinsky, leaving no room for any doubt on the subject. This serves to explain why Sukhomlinsky’s paradox can only be resolved within the children’s collective. If a teacher is alone with the child he has no opportunity to truly absorb his interest and awaken new energies in him that will be adequate for new successes in learning to be scored and bring joy.
p If we were to spend a day in school picked at random anywhere in the world, there is no doubt that at some time during that day we should hear an angry teacher upbraiding one of her charges with the words: “How many times do I have to tell you?" or “D’you ever listen to what I say?”
34p Children never respond to angry words, whatever they might imply. Such words fail to penetrate their armour of emotional impassivity or “thick skin”, to use Sukhomlinsky’s phrase. A teacher’s words in such a situation prove ineffective, they become nothing but a tedious exhortation.
p Sukhomlinsky pointed to the only way out of such a situation. Before a child can be educated he has to be rendered educable. Before the teacher addresses himself directly to a child, it is essential that the child should be in a state in which he is capable of taking in the teacher’s words. If a child is far from able, then his abilities must be fostered: indeed there is no other way. The same applies when it comes to moral guidance: harsh methods such as punishment or complaints to parents should be avoided, and instead energies should be concentrated on developing the pupil’s capacity for listening to his teachers. A teacher who appreciates this will be more patient in relation to his pupils. Just as he should refrain from shouting at weak pupils and give them additional help instead, so he should stop himself shouting at pupils who do not pay attention, who are incapable of listening. There is no point in reproaching a child with a lack of sensitivity or scruples: instead patient work is required to foster his emotional responses and moral scruples, that very same emotional sensitivity which alone makes it possible for the teacher to make any headway with character training.
35p Now we come to one of the most important of Sukhomlinsky’s principles: education through our sense of the beautiful. Our sense of the beautiful in Nature, in books and in people ennobles our minds: it helps a child to become sensitive to what is being said to him and to moral influences.
p The practical bias in education, essential for the needs of the modern child, must be complemented by “impractical arts" otherwise that education will become too dry. The more businesslike and practical children are in their studies and at work, the more essential it is to educate them in understanding and appreciation of the beautiful. Otherwise businesslike application can easily degenerate into calculating greed, etc... .
p Nowhere is patience so important for the teacher as in his work to foster pupils’ sense of the beautiful. It is a simple undertaking to lead children out into a meadow and comment to them: “Look how beautiful it is here!" The children may nod in agreement but this in no way implies that they have really been struck by the beauty of the spring meadow. Sukhomlinsky recounted how it sometimes takes years before all of a sudden the all-important day and minute are at hand when, as a result of some coincidence or mood, a child’s heart is suddenly aroused and filled with happiness when confronted with the beautiful. The teacher has to muster up vast reserves of patience and faith as he waits for that moment, believing that it will come and leading up to it.
36p It was pointed out earlier that Sukhomlinsky starts his teaching not in the classroom but outside in meadows or woodland. First he encourages his young charges to admire Nature and then works of art and finally their fellow-men and the latter’s deeds. If a child fails to appreciate that people too are beautiful, how can he, in his turn, aspire to lead a beautiful life? Then again if a child lacks inspiration to strive after a beautiful life, how can he be educated in moral standards and academic subjects?
p Sukhomlinsky maintained that a child can only be taught to love beauty through action and deeds. He must be taught not only to admire Nature but also to preserve its beauty; not only to admire beautiful deeds, but to emulate them. He wrote: “School is only worthy of that name, if the main subject taught in it is the Science of Man, when knowledge of the world starts out from knowledge of man’s soul. ...”
p If a child performed a kind action, if he helped someone, or went without some kind of treat for the sake of a friend whose mother was ill, thousands of teachers would commend the deed. However for Sukhomlinsky the actual deed on its own was only half the story. For him just as important was the emotional response of the child at the time. Was he happy in doing good? Did he glean joy from doing good or did he only experience that, after his good deed had been singled out and commended.
37p Education of emotions can only be discussed in terms of emotions. Important results for the teacher are not deeds themselves but the excitement and emotional experience bound up with them.
p Some teachers’ attitude to the children in their care can be summed up in the primitive formula “let them lie low”. If a pupil “lies low”, does not call attention to himself through misdeeds, then the teacher is satisfied. It is difficult to appreciate who is steering the education process, who triggers off the educative influence. More often than not it is the “rule-breaker”, for those who do not “break rules”, simply go unnoticed by the teacher.
p Sukhomlinsky and his colleagues were constantly aware of the children they were working with. Sukhomlinsky did not wait for misdemeanours but educated his charges by a completely different method, not with reference to violations of norms for moral behaviour, but by upholding those norms. He educated through reference not to misdeeds, but to deeds that were good and beautiful.
p How did Sukhomlinsky lead a child into a world of goodness? As mentioned at the outset of this article, by way of the fairy-tale. He asked of the mothers who brought their children to his school that they should tell their children fairy-tales. He himself was constantly telling them and then started to listen to them with the children. When they reached the age of twelve or thirteen, when all children elsewhere were turning their backs on fairy-tales 38 for once and for all, Sukhomlinsky’s pupils were still inventing them. At the Pavlysh school the children’s fairy-tales were carefully collected and bound together in thick folders. The Kiev television studios have already transmitted a series of programmes entitled Pavlysh Tales consisting of these stories.
p Who epitomises kindness in the eyes of small children? The figure of the old story-teller of course. When the children of Pavlysh first came to school it was just such a Story-teller who welcomed them. School soon became a magical and alluring place, welcoming and bewitching just like a magic fairy-tale.
p After the fairy-tales came books. Sukhomlinsky observed long ago that children lose their bearings in an ordinary library and select the first thing they come across, making random choices. Guiding children’s reading habits is an extremely difficult task. So often children automatically reject a book picked out for them by an adult. Sukhomlinsky made his pupils a library of a very different kind which he called the “Thinking Room".
p It only contains three hundred books—three hundred of the finest works of world literature, to be read and reread! Sukhomlinsky made a point of persuading his pupils to reread their favourite books several times over. The authors represented range from Homer to Hemingway, and the children had at hand classics of oriental as well as Russian and Soviet literature. The atmosphere is one of reverent respect for these pearls of literature which inspires all 39 who enter with the hope that they will one day have read them all. Here again atmosphere and mood are all important, a distinctive “literary context" is provided, permeated with love for the written word. Rare is the child who does not succumb to it and start reading.
p Lack of space prevents me from describing the musical activities at the school in Pavlysh and the lessons in art appreciation all of which occupy an important place in the school curriculum.
p To summarise: all these means for enriching the children’s lives—study, work, books, music, painting, wise advice from the teachers, the opinions and verdicts of the collective, parental influence channelled by the teacher—constitute a diversified arsenal which is exploited to the full. Whoever comes to this school, however lacking in talent he or she might be, there is never any doubt that a pupil will give up, or fail to find enjoyment in his lessons: by the time they reach the last, tenth class Sukhomlinsky’s pupils answered the teacher just as eagerly as Class 1 pupils are wont to do.
p Children who grew up in that school cannot fail to aspire after knowledge, creative work, goodness and beauty; they were bound to leave its doors as fine and interesting young people.
p The question is often asked as to what the results of such education are and what distinguishes Sukhomlisky’s pupils from other schoolchildren. This is a very difficult question, for as yet no scales have been devised for measuring human virtues. All that can be said 40 on the subject perhaps is that many boys and girls from that village school succeed in entering universities in various parts of the country, that those who stay behind in their local village are prized as good workers, and that every ex-pupil from Sukhomlinsky’s school has a library of his own at home. Finally, it is well known that no law-breakers have gone forth from that school.
p Everyone who has ever worked with children knows that from time to time it starts to look as if everything he is doing is of no use to anyone, neither himself nor the children, that those who came to school intelligent remained intelligent and those who arrived stupid left it just as stupid. Teachers in this mood come to feel themselves overwhelmed by the impression that they are unable to come to terms with either the child’s innate ability or the environment in which the child finds himself.
Sukhomlinsky succeeds in conveying faith in the potential of education to such doubting teachers. This is why his works are so eagerly read both by those who have ceased to believe in the role of the school, and by those who still believe in it. The former are anxious to restore their faith and the others to consolidate the faith they have not yet lost.
p By way of conclusion a few details concerning the modest and difficult life of this remarkable Soviet teacher would not be out of place.
p Vasily Sukhomlinsky was born in September 41 1918 not far from Pavlysh, in the district where he spent the whole of his life. His father was a peasant carpenter and apart from Vasily there were two other boys and a girl in the family. All four of them were to become teachers.
p His childhood was a difficult one and food was often scarce in the home; when at the age of 15 Vasily set off to Kremenchug to embark on his studies his mother had nothing to give him for the journey other than a few potato scones and two glasses of fried soya beans.
p Initially Sukhomlinsky started to train as a medical orderly but after his first visit to the morgue he ran out and resolved to take up teaching instead. He wrote verse at this period and not long ago the staff working for the children’s journal Pioneer (published in Moscow) unearthed verses signed Vasya Sukhomlinsky in an old issue of the journal, which means he must have started having his work published at a very early age.
p At the age of 17 Sukhomlinsky returned to his home and began to work as a primary teacher. While engaged in this work he completed a degree course as an external student of the Poltava Institute of Education. When the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) started, Sukhomlinsky enlisted at the first opportunity. His native village and the surrounding area were occupied by the fascist invaders. His eighteenyear-old wife Vera Povsha helped the partisans in the occupied area. She was captured by the Gestapo and while in a Nazi prison Vera 42 gave birth to a son. A Nazi officer brought the baby to Vera, when he was no more than a few days old and said that if she did not name the leader of the local partisan organisation they would kill her son. This was what happened and Vera Povsha after long days of torture was finally hanged—-This tragedy was a source of deep distress to Sukhomlinsky for the rest of his life. Shortly before his death he wrote in. an account of her death: “I am filled with two emotions—love and hate. Love for children and hatred for fascism. My heart will always throb with anger, while at the same time I always feel the urge to hug all the children of our country, anxious that none of them should ever know grief or suffering.. .. Each day and each hour I go out of my way to foster humanity in children, that subtle ability to sense the complex pulsations of another’s heart, another’s soul.”
p At the time when that tragedy was being enacted in occupied Pavlysh, Sukhomlinsky himself was seriously wounded at the front near Moscow. In fact shell splinters in his chest were to be with him for the rest of his life. He was treated deep in the rear of the country in Udmurtia, and when he came out of hospital it turned out that he was no longer fit for active service after his wounds, while at the same time his home was still occupied by the Nazis.. .. Sukhomlinsky found a posting on the spot and started work as the director of a school in the very town where he had been undergoing treatment, namely Ufa. As soon 43 as the Ukraine was liberated he returned home and was put in charge of the district education department. Those were very difficult years that followed, for many schools had been destroyed during the war and not only were teachers in short supply but there were no textbooks or exercise books to be had either. At the same time the children had been robbed of their childhood by war, had not seen or known their fathers; they had run wild and grown bitter after all the horrors of occupation they had been through. It was during those years that Sukhomlinsky’s theory of education took shape, a theory based on defence and protection of children. It was not the first situation of its kind in the history of education. Pestalozzi appeared on the scene in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, Makarenko right after the Civil War in Russia and now Sukhomlinsky after the Great Patriotic War. No one suffers more horribly in war than children and the need for teachers is great in times after war.
p This was what led Sukhomlinsky, right from the start of his work to his last day, to write so much about children’s grief and suffering and appeal to teachers to look long and searchingly in the eye of their pupils. He found children’s grief something quite intolerable.
p One day he was approached by a small girl in tears: her father had just left his family and some of the unkind children at the school were teasing her, saying that she now had no 44 father. Sukhomlinsky said to her: “I shall be your father. You can tell that to everyone: I am your father.”
p At that time he already had a family of his own, a wife, son and daughter, but he was incapable of giving any other answer.
p In order to work more closely with children, Sukhomlinsky gave up his administrative work as early as 1947 and was sent to take charge of the school in Pavlysh, which has since become famous not only in the Soviet Union, but also in other countries.
p After that the days that followed were very much like one another, year in, year out. ... Every morning Sukhomlinsky would get up at four or five o’clock, set out from his flat in the school building and start work in the director’s study, where he would be until eight o’clock thinking out his books and articles and writing away at them in his clear, small measured hand.
p At eight o’clock he would leave his study and come out into the corridor to welcome the children. He was rarely absent from the school, even after he had been elected Corresponding Member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and he always hurried back home again after any absence. In the summer he would see all the other teachers leave for their holidays, while he himself stayed on at the school seeing to repairs and working away with the children in the school garden and vineyards. For the last few years of his life Sukhomlinsky knew he was dying; the shell 45 splinters in his chest were taking their toll after all, but no one ever heard him complain. His colleagues recall how Sukhomlinsky would suddenly turn pale, clutch at his heart, get up and reel away towards his study. A few minutes later he would be back again. When asked what the matter was, he would bid everyone to ignore the incident, and the conversation would continue where it had left off. He strictly forbade his fellow-teachers to talk about illness or family tragedies in the staffroom.
p That was how Sukhomlinsky worked for twenty years. The early morning was devoted to writing, during the middle part of the day he would give his own lessons and observe those of other teachers, then after school he would go for walks with his pupils and find time to receive enormous numbers of visitors. People used to travel thousands of kilometres to the school at Pavlysh, individually or in groups of as many as forty to fifty people— teachers, school directors, university lecturers, and educationists.
p In the Pavlysh school, as indeed in any other, there was a special book set aside for the comments made by school inspectors on their statutory visits. Here are some of the entries from another book containing comments made by unofficial “voluntary” inspectors.
p “I have only spent a single day in this remarkable and interesting school, but have learnt as much as I did as a student of education during four years.”
46p “I had read Sukhomlinsky’s books before and have now seen with my own eyes all that appealed to me in his books. It has filled me with even more inspiration than before.”
p “The secondary school at Pavlysh should be reclassified as a university! This statement is made in all seriousness: anyone who feels at all involved with children or school education cannot but be filled with a sense of amazement and admiration.”
p A whole series of books flowed forth from Sukhomlinsky’s pen. Initially he analysed the work of the teacher, concentrating first on one aspect of education and child care and then another: Fostering the Collective Spirit among Schoolchildren (1956), Fostering a Communist Attitude to Work (1959), The Inner World of the Schoolchild (1961), Moulding of Personality in Soviet Schools (1965). Towards the end of the sixties though he started summarising his ideas and incorporating them all into an overall theory of education. This attempt resulted in the big monograph entitled Pavlysh Secondary School (1969). That same year appeared another book by him, / Give My Heart to Children, concerned with the care and teaching of junior pupils. A sequel to this monograph dealing with teenagers The Birth of a Citizen came out a month after his death in 1970.
p Sukhomlinsky had known that his death was not far away and was preparing himself for it. At that difficult time he wrote to a colleague in Moscow: “My health at the moment 47 is such that in a short time two splinters of metal which got stuck in my chest back in the war will shift a few millimetres nearer a blood vessel not far from my heart, and believe me, I am soberly prepared for what will happen next, although I must admit it would be better not to know about it all in advance.. . . Unfortunately I do, since the doctor has told me. A further operation is out of the question, for my heart would not stand the strain.
p “I am anxious to achieve as much as possible in the time left me by these tiny splinters. I shall work all out to complete the most important tasks I have in hand, namely a number of as yet unfinished books.”
p A letter was also sent to a publishing house in Kiev that used to put out his works. It opened with the following words: “In view of my incurable illness and the unavoidable curtailment of my academic and teaching work in the near future”, which were followed by instructions in a businesslike vein. At the end of his letter to the director of the publishing house Sukhomlinsky wrote: “Until my work as a writer and teacher is cut short I should be grateful if you would regard the contents of this letter as strictly confidential, for your eyes only. This is the most important condition of our collaboration.”
p “The unavoidable curtailment of academic and teaching work" was the brave and restrained understatement with which Sukhomlinsky referred to his death.
48p Sukhomlinsky was a Communist who believed that man is immortalised through his work and the people to whom he devotes his love, through his experience and most important of all through children. He held that the death of near relatives should not be concealed from children: “when a child’s heart is confronted with the death of a loved one .. . this brings to life a new vision of life as such. In amazement a child suddenly discovers the true value of the very fact that he is alive, he feels, sees and revels in the joy of life and the attainment of knowledge.”
p Sukhomlinsky the teacher approached death —and even his own—first and foremost as a teacher.
p The whole of Pavlysh and all the pupils and staff from his school turned out to take their leave of Sukhomlinsky at his funeral, together with vast numbers of people who assembled there on that occasion. So that the youngest pupils should not be crushed in the crowd the Glass 10 pupils formed a ring round them and led them at the head of the procession. The whole of the road from the village club-house to the cemetery was strewn with flowers. Small boys and girls walked down the carpet of flowers followed by their teacher. So even in death Sukhomlinsky remained close to his school and now lies beside it for ever. The street on which his school stands has been named after him and naturally the school as well.
After his death the flow of visitors to Pavlysh continued unabated, indeed it swelled. 49 Visitors are received at the school by Nikolai Kodak, a friend and collaborator of Sukhomlinsky’s who worked for eighteen years as the director of a nearby school. The teachers of the Pavlysh school were allowed to choose the school’s director to follow Sukhomlinsky and it was Kodak they turned to. Everyone was anxious that the atmosphere of the school, indeed everything about it, should always remain as it had been in Sukhomlinsky’s day: each small detail of the school’s life has assumed special significance since Sukhomlinsky’s death, as so often happens in such cases, and each word the famous teacher spoke and wrote is studied with the utmost care.
p In this book the reader is presented with a selection of extracts from Sukhomlinsky’s main works and articles. It goes without saying that a collection of this kind can in no way take the place of study of the works themselves. Selected material of this type may well appear to be lacking logical threads linking adjacent paragraphs, which the reader must supply for himself. Yet meanwhile every effort has been made not only to preserve the overall logic of Sukhomlinsky’s thought process and theoretical searchings, but indeed to underline them particularly emphatically.
Notes
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