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p While stuffing their pupils’ heads with ready-made truths, generalisations, and conclusions teachers sometimes fail to give 145 children the chance to even draw near to the source of ideas and living words, they tie down the wings of imagination, fantasy and creativity. Often a child can turn from a vital, active and energetic being into a memorising machine.... This should never be; children should never be isolated from the surrounding world by a stone wall so to speak. Pupils must not be robbed of the joys of the mind and spirit. A child only has a real emotional and intellectual life when he lives in a world of games, fairy-tales, music, fantasy and creativity. Without that he is no better than a pressed flower. (10, 57)

p I tried to ensure that before my pupils opened their first book or spelt out their first word, they should read the pages of the most wonderful book in the whole world, the book of Nature.  [145•* 

p Out among the beauties of Nature we teachers have a particularly vivid awareness of the fact that we are working with most delicate and sensitive of things in the natural world—a child’s mind. When you think of a child’s mind, you imagine a delicate rose on which quivers a dewdrop. What care and gentleness are needed to make sure that when you pick the flower the dewdrop is not lost! This is the care which we must show every moment, for we are working with that most sensitive 146 and delicate phenomenon of nature, the thought potential of the growing organism. (10, 26)

p The famous German mathematician Felix Klein compared a high-school pupil with a cannon which is being charged with knowledge for ten years and then fired after which nothing remains. I thought back to that sad joke as I observed the mental exertions of a child who had been made to learn by heart material he had not thought through and which conjured up no vivid ideas, images or associations for him. To replace thought with memorisation, vivid perception and observation of the essence of phenomena with rote-learning is a serious drawback which stultifies a child, eventually destroying his will to learn. (10, 109)

p Pondering this question I asked myself: why is it that after two or three years of instruction at school a child with a lively, vivid imagination, retentive memory, and sensitive emotional responses to phenomena of the world around him is incapable of learning a grammatical rule, how a word is spelt or what six nines make? This led me on to a conclusion no less sad than that of the German scholar: all too often the process of the assimilation of knowledge at school is isolated from the pupils’ emotional and intellectual experience. A child’s memory is sharp and tenacious precisely because a pure stream of vivid images, pictures, perceptions and ideas is pouring into it. 147 Children’s minds strike us precisely on account of their subtle, unexpected “philosophical” questions, because these minds are being fed by the life-giving source of that stream. How important it is to prevent the school door shutting out from a child’s mind the world around him. I strove to ensure that throughout their years of childhood the outside world and Nature were constantly stimulating our pupils’ minds with vivid images, pictures, observations and ideas, that the children should apprehend the laws of logic as a harmonious edifice, the architecture of which had been prompted by a still more harmonious edifice—Nature. So as not to turn a child into a storehouse of knowledge, a depository of truths, rules and formulae, he must be taught to think. The very nature of the child’s mind and memory demand that he should be ever aware of the vivid world around him, complete with all its laws and patterns. I am sure that the sharpness of a child’s memory and vividness of thought not only need not be diminished when he enters school but can be enhanced, if the medium in which the child will learn to think, remember and reason is the world around him. (10, 110)

p I am very concerned by the condescending attitude many school heads and inspectors show towards primary classes. When an inspector comes to a school he so often interests himself mainly in the senior and middle classes, while his attitude to the junior ones is as if he regarded what goes on in them as some form 148 of game rather than real education. Touched by the spectacle of this game inspectors’ emotions would abruptly change to anxiety when finding that pupils in Class 5 are ill-prepared.

p When embarking on my work with small children I determined to rule out any sentimentality. I made it my aim to ensure that by the end of Class 2 they should be able to read so fluently, expressively and intelligently that they could take in at a glance small sentences and phrases of large sentences as whole units. Reading is one of the levers of thought and mental development. I resolved to teach my pupils to read in such a way that they should think as they did so. Reading has to become a subtle instrument with which a child can master new knowledge and at the same time it must be a source of rich intellectual and cultural experience. (10, 37)

p Lessons out of doors taught me how to open up for children a window into- the outside world and I attempted to impart that expeTience and knowledge to other teachers. I advised them not to inundate a child with a regular torrent of knowledge, to avoid telling children everything they know about a subject at lesson-time, for with the torrent of knowledge they risk washing away inquisitiveness and love of knowledge. I urged them to learn to reveal things in the outside world one at a time to a child but in such a way that each fragment of that world revealed shone before that child in all its true rich colours, always to 149 leave something unsaid, so that a child will be interested to return again and again to what he has newly found out. (10, 33)

p Even among a group of pre-school children it will be possible to pick out the “ theoreticians" and the “dreamers”. The “theoreticians” show interest in minute detail, persevere till they reach the heart of the matter and show a marked inclination for deduction. The “dreamers” and “poets” apprehend an object or phenomenon in its overall contours, they are impressed by the beauty of a sunset, a menacing storm cloud, they take delight in the play of colours, while the “theoreticians” will be asking why the sky is sometimes blue and sometimes red....

p In each child ideas develop along their own paths; each one is clever and talented in his own particular way. No child is completely bereft of ability or gifts. It is important that his mind and his talents should provide the foundation for success in his studies, and that every pupil progress according to the best of his ability. (14, 8)

p Children should live in a world of beauty, play, fairy-tales, music, drawing, imagination and creativity. This world should still surround a child when the time comes for him to read and write. His whole future progress in study depends on how much he feels at ease when he climbs the first step of the ladder to knowledge, on what he experiences at that 150 vital stage. It is terrifying to think that for many young children this first step turns into a stumbling block. If you study closely the life of schools, you will observe that precisely at the stage when children are first learning to read and write many of them lose faith in their own ability. Let us, my dear colleagues, resolve to alight on that step in such a way that the children should not feel tired; in such a way so that every step towards knowledge should be like the proud flight of a bird and not the tired trudge of an exhausted traveller worn out by the overwhelming burden on his back. (10, 66)

p I strove to make words more for the children than mere designations of things, objects or phenomena; I wanted them to see words as something which bore within themselves emotional implications, subtle flavours and nuances all of their own. It was important that the beauty of a word and the beauty of the particle of the world, which that word reflected, stimulated interest in those drawings which convey the music of sounds that is human speech—namely letters. Until a child has sensed the flavour of a word, has grasped its subtlest nuances, there is no use even starting to teach him to read and write, and if a teacher does so then he is condemning the child to immensely difficult toil (a child will come to grips with the task eventually, but what a price has to be paid in the process!). (10, 66)

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p For several years now I have been thinking to myself, what a difficult, exhausting and uninteresting task it is for a child to tackle reading and writing at the very beginning of his school career, how many setbacks children have to face on the thorny path to knowledge —and all because their studies are made a purely bookish affair. I have watched children at class straining every muscle to make out letters, how the letters seem to jump around on the page before them and then merge together in a pattern in which it is impossible for them to understand. Yet I have also observed how easy it is for children to recognise letters, put them together to make words, when this occupation is enhanced by interest or made part of a game, and what is particularly important, no one insists that the child must memorise everything because there will be trouble in store for him otherwise. (10, 64)

p The process of teaching children how to read and write will be an easy one provided that this activity is presented to pupils as a colourful, intriguing slice of life, rich in vivid images, sounds and melodies. Things which a child has to remember must above all be made interesting. Instruction in reading and writing must be closely linked up with drawing. (10, 67)

p In our “journeys” to the sources of language we set off armed with drawing books and pencils. On one of the first such journeys I set 152 out to show my pupils the beauty and subtle nuances of the word “meadow”. We sat down under a willow-tree with branches stretching out over a pond. In the distance we could see a meadow bathed in sunlight. I said to the children: “Look at that beautiful sight before us. Butterflies are fluttering over the grass and bees are buzzing. Over there is a herd of cows so tiny as to look like toy ones. The meadow looks like a pale green river and the trees like its dark green banks. The cows are bathing in the river. Look how many beautiful flowers early autumn has spread out before us. And let us listen to the music of the meadow: can you hear the faint buzzing of the midges, and the chirring of the grasshopper?" (10, 67)

p Then I drew the meadow in my drawing book: I drew the cows and geese scattered about like white down, the trail of smoke almost out of sight and the little white cloud over the horizon. The children were captivated by the beauty of that quiet morning and also started drawing. Under the drawing I wrote the word: meadow. For most small children letters are indeed drawings in themselves. The children wrote the same caption under their drawings. Then we read the word together. A sensitive awareness of the music of Nature helps children to get the feel of a word’s cadence. It helps them to memorise the shape of each letter; the children impart a life of its own to each drawing and the letter is easy to memorise. The shape of a word is 153 apprehended as an entity and then the word can be read easily—such reading is not the fruit of lengthy exertions in the analysis and synthesis of sounds, but the conscious reproduction of a sound or musical image which corresponds to the visual image of a word, that the children have just been drawing. This coincidence and unity of visual and aural perception possessed of a wealth of emotional nuances, inherent in both the visual image and the musical cadence of the word, ensures that both the letters and the little word itself will be memorised simultaneously. Dear reader, this is not a discovery of some new method for the teaching of reading. It is the practical implementation of what has been demonstrated by science: it is easier to memorise something which you are not obliged to memorise. The emotional implications of images to be apprehended play an outstandingly important role in memorisation. (10, 67)

p Days and weeks passed as I kept on taking the children out for “journeys” to the sources of living language. Particularly interesting were our encounters with the words: village, oak, willow, wood, smoke, ice, hill, wheat, sky, hay, grove, lime, ash, apple, cloud, acorn. In the spring our “journeys” were centred round such words as: flower, lilac, lily, acacia, grape, pond, river, lake, mist, rain, storm, dawn, pigeon, poplar, cherry. On each occasion, the child, for whom the word evoked the most colourful ideas, emotions and memories, drew the relevant picture in the class album entitled 154 Our Native Words. No one proved indifferent to the beauty of his native language: ... a mere eight months after joining the pre-school class the children knew all their letters and could write words and read.

p At this point I should warn teachers about mechanically adopting my methods lock, stock and barrel. Instruction in reading and writing using this method is a creative activity and stereotypes are alien to any creativity. Taking over something new must be done creatively. (10, 69)

p It is very important that children should not be confronted with an obligatory task of learning off their letters and learning to read. My pupils made their first steps on the road to knowledge in the course of games; their studies were illumined by beauty, fairy-tales, music, fantasy, creativity and their imaginations given free rein. The children memorised firmly what had appealed to their emotions and bewitched them with its beauty. I was struck by the ardent desire of many children not only to express their feelings in words but also to write down words. (10, 69)

p Why do children read in such a monotonous expressionless way? Why when children read they lend no emotional overtones to the content before them? It is because in many instances reading is presented as something quite separate from children’s intellectual experience, from thought, feelings and ideas. One 155 set of things fascinates a child and he is made to read about quite different ones. Reading only enriches the life of a child if the words, the stories relate to what is dear to their hearts. (10, 71)

p Why did my pupils memorise their letters so easily and learn to read and write with such little trouble? Because reading was not presented to them in the form of an obligatory objective; because for those children each letter was the embodiment of a vivid image which thrilled them. If I had apportioned to each of those children a daily “ration of knowledge" —showed them a letter and demanded they learn it—nothing would have come of it. This of course does not mean that the ultimate goal of his activities should be hidden from a child. Teaching should be done in such a way that children are not thinking about their ultimate objective as they work towards it. This lightens their mental exertion no end. (10, 101)

p I have deep respect for didactics and abhor wishful thinking. Yet life itself demands that the mastery of knowledge should commence by degrees, and that study—a child’s most serious and painstaking task—should at the same time be happy work that consolidates his intellectual and physical potential. This is particularly important for very young children who are not yet able to grasp the ultimate objective of their work and the essence of the difficulties they encounter.

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p It has been said a thousand times that study involves hard work and cannot be reduced to anything but play. Yet no rigid dividing line should be drawn between work and play. We should study carefully the place which play occupies in a child’s life, particularly at the preschool stage. For him play is the most serious undertaking of all. In play the world is opened up to young children, the creative capacities of the individual. Without play there is no and indeed cannot be genuine mental development. Play is an enormous radiant window through which the life-giving stream of ideas, concepts about the surrounding world pours into the child’s emotional and intellectual world. Play is the spark which kindles curiosity and love of knowledge. What then is so terrible about a child learning to write through playing, about play being interwoven with work at some stage of a child’s intellectual development? And as a rule quite rare is the case when a teacher lets children have some play before getting down to their work. (10, 81)

p If we adults were able to look at the world and at ourselves through the eyes of a sevenyear-old, in that most artless play we would pick out serious things, phenomena and events.

p In play no one is more serious than small children. As they play, not only do they laugh but they are profoundly moved and sometimes suffer. But if a teacher tries to rechannel that youthful seriousness to study activities, nothing will come of it. It is impossible to 157 transmit to the mind of a small child the importance and social significance of the mastering of knowledge. He senses rather than understands the respect shown by society to the intelligent and erudite. This instinctive awareness must be used in our efforts to find access to a child’s mind, gradually to convince him of the need to study.... It all depends on the art of the teacher whether a child comes to regard his studies, his acquisition of knowledge as an activity which is useful and essential to society. Experience has shown that the earlier a child comes round to this view, the richer his intellectual life will be, and the more profound will be his awareness of his own sense of dignity. This attitude to study takes shape first and foremost on the basis of the child’s experience of positive emotions, such as joy and satisfaction, in connection with the successes he scores in this domain. (6, 77)

p During the opening weeks of the school year I used to introduce children gradually to this new life. Their lesson^ at this stage differed in essence little from the “School of Joy" they had known before, and this indeed was what I had been working towards. In September we spent no more than forty minutes actually inside the classroom, and in October no more than two hours. This time was devoted to writing and arithmetic lessons. The other two hours we used to spend outside. The children would look forward impatiently to their real lesson as they called their indoor sessions.

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p I was glad to see that and thought to myself: “If you only knew, children, how other children of your age, worn out in a stuffy classroom, long for the break-bell.” (10, 97)

p If the time spent by a child in the classroom is measured in terms of lessons, then in the first two months of the academic year there was one lesson a day, in the third and fourth months there were two, in the fifth and sixth months two and a half, and in the seventh and eighth months three lessons. In the first two months these lessons lasted for half an hour each and later for forty-five minutes. If a child needed to leave the classroom before the break-bell he would do so after asking permission. If it was at a time when it was inconvenient to interrupt the teacher, then a child would go out without asking permission: the teacher would see that the pupil needed to leave the room, and he would give his silent consent. However, some children found it difficult to adapt to the school discipline that the overwhelming majority found so easy to comply with. Tolya, Katya, Kostya and Shura used to tire quickly. They were more likely than not exhausted by the strain they experienced, sitting at their desks and realising that their free scope for action was now far more circumscribed by a set routine than before. Of course it is wrong to indulge all pupils’ wishes: gradually all pupils have to be brought round to painstaking, serious work, but children’s wishes should not be quashed or their habits broken too decisively. 159 For a few weeks I allowed these children to leave the classroom in the middle of lesson time, gradually training them to embark on painstaking work. Three or four months after the beginning of the academic year all the children were keeping to the school routine. (10, 99)

p Experience has shown there should not be any lessons in “pure”, “unadulterated” reading, writing or arithmetic for pupils who have just entered Class 1. Monotony quickly tires young pupils. As soon as the children started to grow tired, I tried to switch to a new type of work. An effective means for livening up their work routine was drawing. When I saw that reading was starting to tire the pupils I would say: “Children, open your drawing books, and we shall do pictures of the fairy-tale I have just been reading to you.” At that the first signs of tiredness would disappear, and bright sparks would appear in the children’s eyes—joyful glints, for repetitive monotonous activity was giving way to creativity—-(10, 98)

p A child thinks in images, colours and sounds, but this does not mean that he has to go no further than the stage of concrete thought. Thought based on images is an essential stage for the transition to thought involving concepts. I set out to help the children gradually to master such concepts as: phenomenon, cause, consequence, event, dependence, difference, similarity, community, compatibility, incompatibility, 160 possibility, impossibility. Long experience has convinced me that these concepts play an important part in the development of abstract thought. Mastering these concepts is impossible without investigation of actual facts and phenomena, without elucidation of what a child sees with his own eyes, without a gradual transition from concrete objects, facts and phenomena to abstract generalisations. Questions which occur to children as they study Nature are precisely such as facilitate that transition. I taught my charges to observe concrete phenomena of Nature, and to distinguish causal relationships. Thanks to the close link between the thought pattern and concrete images the children gradually assimilated abstract concepts. Of course this was a long process which took several years. (10, 114)

p An important role was assigned to the game of chess in our work designed to develop more sophisticated thought patterns. Even at the “School of Joy" stage the small boys and girls had often been absorbed in chess. It served to discipline their thought and help their capacity for concentration. Most important of all it helps to develop memory. Observing young chess-players I noticed that children were capable of mentally reproducing a situation that had existed and imagining one that would develop during the game. I was eager to start Valya, Nina and Petrik off on the game. I taught them how to play, and they were soon working out their moves in advance. Chess 161 also helped me ascertain Lyuba’s and Pavel’s mathematical bent. Before starting to play chess (these children started playing in Class 3) I had not noticed their acute mental vision.

p Without the help of chess it is impossible to develop a child’s mental ability and memory to the full. Chess at the primary school is an essential element in the child’s intellectual development. It is precisely at the primary school stage when intellectual guidance is particularly important and demands special forms and methods of work. (10, 132)

p I recommended to other teachers that if a pupil did not understand something, if as he grappled with ideas, he was floundering helplessly, like a bird caught in a cage, they should pay careful attention to their own work and ask themselves whether the mind of the child had not become a small dried-out lake cut off from the eternal life-giving source of thought, the world of real objects, of natural phenomena? If the little lake is linked to the ocean of Nature, of things and the surrounding world, you will then see how the spring of vital thought pours forth. (10, 147)

p However it would be wrong to consider that the world around a child teaches a child to think on his own. Without abstract thought, things remained hidden from children’s eyes as if by an impenetrable wall. Nature becomes a school of mental activity only when a child is able to abstract himself from the things around 162 him, when he can do his own abstract thinking. Vivid images from the real world are essential to help a child discover the interactions which are one of the principal features of the surrounding world. (10, 148)

p I thought over everything that was to become a source of ideas for my charges and decided what they should observe day by day during those first four years and what phenomena from the world around them should be sources of their new ideas. That was how I amassed the material for the three hundred pages of my “Book of Nature”. It consists of three hundred observations, three hundred vivid pictures which imprinted themselves on the minds of the children. Twice a week we went on country walks to learn to think; not just to observe, but to learn to think. In essence those sessions were lessons in thought—lessons, not just entertaining walks. Yet the fact that a lesson can be very entertaining and very interesting makes it all the more emotionally and mentally stimulating for the children concerned. (10, 111)

p The more abstract truths and generalisations have to be taken in during a lesson, the more concentrated the mental exertion required, the more frequently a pupil should turn back to the original source of knowledge—to the world of Nature—and the more vividly the images and pictures from the surrounding world will imprint themselves upon his mind. 163 Yet vivid images do not imprint themselves on a child’s mind as easily as on celluloid. Mental pictures, however vivid they might be, are not an end in themselves and not the ultimate goal of instruction. Mind training begins when theoretical thought emerges, when active meditation is not the end but a means to an end: the vivid image from the surrounding world should provide a lever for the teacher, the various forms, colours and sounds of which should stimulate thousands of questions. As he unravels the resultant questions the teacher is, as it were, leafing through the “Book of Nature”. (10, 111)

We live at a time when mastering scientific knowledge is essential for our work, a basic understanding of human relationships, or the performance of basic civic duties. Study cannot be an easy or pleasant game, a source of nothing but delight and pleasure. The young citizen’s path through life will not be a casual walk along a well-trodden route. We must prepare highly educated, diligent and persevering people ready to surmount difficulties no less considerable than those surmounted by their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers. The level of knowledge attained by young people of the seventies, eighties and nineties will be immeasurably higher than the level of knowledge characteristic of the younger generation in earlier decades. The wider the range of knowledge that needs to be mastered, the more important it will become to bear in 164 mind the peculiarities of the human organism at the period of rapid growth, development and character formation—that is childhood. As before, man will still remain a son of Nature and that which brings him close to Nature must be used for his initiation into the riches of our cultural heritage. The world that surrounds the child is first and foremost a natural world of inexhaustible beauty and diversity. The eternal source of the child’s reason should be sought in Nature. But at the same time every year increasing importance must be ascribed to those elements of his environment which are connected with social relations, with work. (10, 12)