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p We teach children that man set himself apart from the animal world and became a being endowed with talent not only because he made the first implements of labour with his own hands, but also because he beheld the depth of the blue sky, the sparkling light of the stars, the rosy flush of the sky at dawn and dusk, a crimson sunset heralding a windy day, the boundless vistas of the steppes, a flock of cranes spread across the azure sky, the reflection of the sun in transparent morning dew, grey threads of rain on an overcast autumn day, the frail stem and blue-white bell of the snowdrop; he beheld these things and wondered, and began to create new beauty. We too must stop in our tracks to admire beauty and then beauty will blossom in our hearts.

p Man came into his own when he heard the whisper of leaves in the wind, the gentle chirring of grasshopper, the rippling of a spring stream and the peal of silver bells in the lark’s song that soars forth into the bottomless abyss of the summer sky, the flutter of snowflakes and the moan of a blizzard outside the window, the 220 gentle splash of waves and the solemn quiet of night; he hears them and, hardly daring to breathe, listens for hundreds and thousands of years to the miraculous music of life. You too must learn to hear this music, children, and to take delight in beauty. (11, 373)

p The beauty of our native country which is revealed to us in fairy-tales, imaginings and creative activities is a source of love for our Homeland. A true understanding and awareness of the greatness and power of our Homeland come to us gradually and their source is beauty. I should like to advise the young teacher in charge of small children that they should be prepared thoughtfully and carefully for the moment when you first start to tell them about the greatness and power of our native land—the Soviet Union. Your words should carry inspiration, noble thoughts (do not fear accusations of being high-flown, if you are filled with pure and lofty emotions at such moments). Yet for that word to make children’s hearts beat faster, it is essential that the ground of children’s minds be carefully ploughed and planted with seeds of beauty beforehand.

p May children always be able to sense beauty and take delight in it, may images which embody their Homeland be ever alive in their hearts and minds; beauty is the flesh and blood of humanity, kindness and sincerity.... Smiles, delight and wonder inspired by beauty appeared to me as a path which would surely lead to children’s hearts. (10, 30)

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p There are countries in the world where the fields and meadows are more colourful than those of our countryside, yet for the children in our care it is their native landscape that they should hold most dear. Children should not merely be shown how the trees are covered with a veil of white blossom in spring, how bees hover over the golden bells of the hop-flowers, how ripe apples swell and tomatoes are flushed with red: all this they should experience as joy, as the fullness of life. May they look back on their childhood as a time of bright sunshine: an orchard decked out in white blossom, the inimitable sound of bees’ harps over a field of buckwheat, deep cold autumn skies with flocks of cranes on the horizon, dark blue barrows shimmering in a heat haze, a crimson sunset, a willow-tree bowing down low over the mirror of a pond’s surface, elegant poplars at the side of a road: may all these things leave an unforgettable imprint on the heart as the beauty of life during the years of childhood, infinitely precious memories.

p But this beauty should penetrate a child’s heart together with the thought that there would be no such flowering orchard, bees’ music, gentle mother’s singing, sweet dreams at day-break as mother gently makes sure her child’s feet are tucked under the blanket—none of all this, if on one far-away winter morning nineteen-year-old Alexander Matrosov had not covered with his body an enemy machine gun stemming the bullets so as to protect his comrades-in-arms, if Nikolai Gastello had not 222 steered his burning plane to crash right into enemy tanks, if thousands upon thousands of heroes had not shed their blood from the Volga to the Elbe. This idea we make a point of bringing home to children at precisely those moments when they are experiencing the joy to be derived from the beautiful world around them. I told my pupils of how Soviet soldiers fought for the freedom and independence of their Homeland right here in our native village, in these very fields, beneath these very trees. (10, 225)

p We would be sitting on a barrow listening to the tuneful choir of grasshoppers, while the scent of steppe grasses hung in the air. We would be silent. There is no need to say a great deal to children, to stuff them full of stories, words are not mere playthings and overdoses of words are particularly harmful. Children need not only to listen to what their teachers tell them but also to be silent for a while; in his moments of silence a child is thinking and assimilating what he has seen and heard. It is very important that a teacher should not overdo his talking. Children must not be turned into passive word-absorbers. Considerable time and nervous energy is required to think through every vivid image, whether visual or verbal. Knowing how to let children think is one of the subtlest skills demanded of a teacher.

p Out in the countryside a child must be given the opportunity to listen, look and feel.. . . (10, 27)

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p It is very important that the wondrous world of Nature, play, beauty, music, fantasy, creativity, which surrounds a child until he goes to school, should not be shut off from him by the classroom door. In a child’s first months and years of school life study should not become his only form of activity. A child will only come to enjoy school, when teachers open wide the doors to those joys which he knew before.

p At the same time study should not be geared to childish pleasures and deliberately made lighter, in order to ensure that children do not get bored. Gradually, little by little a child has to be prepared for the most important undertaking of his whole life—for serious, persistent, tenacious work, which is impossible without concentrated thought. (10, 95)

p The first lessons in thinking should not take place inside the classroom, but out of doors.... Really active creative thinking is always characterised by excitement; if a child has once caught the fascination of words, his heart will be filled with a wave of inspiration. Take your charges out into the fields or a park, drink from Nature, the source of ideas, and that lifegiving water will make of your pupils wise explorers, inquisitive boys and girls eager for knowledge, indeed regular poets. Time and time again I have been forced to admit that a child’s all-out mental development is impossible without that element of poetic, emotional, aesthetic inspiration. The very nature of a child’s thought processes demands poetic creativity. 224 Beauty and dynamic thought are as inextricably bound up with each other as the sun and flowers. Poetic creativity starts out from seeing and understanding beauty. The beauty of Nature sharpens perception, stimulates creative thought and lends words the vitality of personal experience. (10, 39)

p We devote considerable time to providing children with a wide range of aesthetic impressions; indeed that is the starting point of our efforts to give them an aesthetic environment. Everything a child sees, once he has crossed the threshold of our school, and everything he encounters is beautiful. The general view of the school is beautiful, as it stands hidden in a sea of greenery; so are the green vines with their amber grapes, and the climbing roses along the path from one building to the next. The trees in the school garden are beautiful at any season of the year. The porch of the school’s main entrance framed in wild vines is also beautiful.... (11, 389)

p In our school four buildings are used for classwork and near each building there is a green lawn; there is not a single patch of land without greenery; this is not merely important with regard to maintenance of sanitary conditions but a canon of aesthetics as well. (9, 174)

p The aesthetic quality of this environment is achieved thanks to the harmony of the wild and the man-made, which cannot but evoke a 225 sense of joy. We try to make sure that in the school garden the children should always behold the beauty of Nature, which produces as still greater impact because they have helped to make their surroundings beautiful through their own work.

p The harmony inherent in the things around a child makes his surroundings aesthetic provided that individual things in that environment do not call too much attention to themselves, are not too conspicuous. If, for example, one were to place several large pots of flowers on the sill of a window that opened on to an orchard, the overall harmony would be destroyed, for the flowers would overshadow the aesthetic qualities of other things, the orchard for a start. If, on the other hand, a vase containing a sinlge twig echoing the shape of the trees in the orchard and the same season (harmony can also involve contrasting impressions) then the twig, the orchard and the vistas of the distant fields would produce quite a different impact. (11, 389)

p It is very easy to persuade a child aged between 7 and 11 struck by the beauty of Nature or his surroundings to take part in active work.... Children enjoy work, which involves the creation of something beautiful or unusual. This natural inclination of a child ... should be developed in whatever way possible. We organise our teaching in such a way that the work activities of the youngest pupils should also be aesthetic activity (fret work, poker work, 226 needle work, laying out flower-beds, tending flowers and trees, etc.). Work which involves aesthetic stimulation and experience gradually develops and consolidates a child’s awareness of the beauty inherent in work activities and stimulates aspiration after not only highly productive work but also beautifully executed work. (6, 71)

p When gardens come into flower this is truly a special occasion for children. Early in the morning we go out into the school garden and admire the trees girt with white, pink or orange blossoms and listen to the bees humming. We explain to the children that at that time of year it is a great pity to linger in bed, for they might sleep through all that beauty! The children often get up before sunrise anxious not to lose those moments when the first rays of sun light up the flowers covered in dewdrops. In breathless wonder the children admire the beauty that confronts them. Children may well not pay heed to that beauty if it is not pointed out to them and if they are not told about it. (11, 376)

p It is difficult to wake a small child at dawn and lead him out of doors, to take him out into the fields—his slumbers are so sweet. Yet if you help him do this the first time and open his eyes to the beauty of daybreak, let him listen to the music of the new day and then he will no longer be lazy about getting up so early. He will rise to go out and admire the beauties of Nature and will not regret afterwards as the 227 years go by that he did not oversleep and saw all those beauties—-(9, 173)

p Those early morning outings later developed into the school’s Flower Festivals. There were several each year. The spring flower festival was the festival of lilies-of-the-valley, tulips and lilac. On that day we all went to the woods and the lilac garden which had been planted the first autumn after the school was opened. Each pupil picked a small bouquet, trying to achieve an inimitable range of colours. Then everyone came out on to the lawn and admired the bouquets. The children would then take them to their mothers and friends. The children in the nursery class were invited to join the festival and bouquets were picked for them as well.

p The second flower festival was the Rose Festival. ...

p The third was that of wild flowers. That was the one the children enjoyed most of all. In the morning we went out into the fields early when the flowers were at their loveliest. Picking beautiful bunches of wild flowers is a real art. Then the children brought back their flowers to the school, had a rest and dreamt how wonderful it would be if all the wild flowers grew in our garden as well. ...

p The autumn flower festival or Chrysanthemum Festival was a sad farewell to the summer. The pupils went out of their way to see that it was held as late as possible.... We shielded the chrysanthemum bushes from cold 228 winds and frost and covered them up at night with paper hoods. After the autumn festival we took the chrysanthemum plants into the greenhouse.

p In their third year at school the pupils took part for the first time in the Snowdrop Festival. At that time there was still snow on the ground in the woods, but the earth was waking from its winter sleep nevertheless. The first mauveblue and white bells were to be seen in the meadows and on that day the youngsters all took bunches of snowdrops home to their mothers.

p It would be unfortunate if readers were to think that my pupils’ childhood was one long “picnic”.... Each of those festivals required a good deal of work.

p I made sure that the children should look upon work as a source of aesthetic pleasure. It is important that man should work not merely to obtain food and clothes and a roof over his head, but also so that flowers always bloom beside his house bringing him and others happiness, and that even as children men should learn to work to create happiness. (10, 214)

p Probably there is no work that gladdens and ennobles the heart, combining beauty and creativity and humanity, more than the cultivation of roses. I tried to encourage every child at the school to start up his own flower-garden. In Classes 3 and 4 my pupils were already taking delight in roses they had grown in their garden plots at home. (10, 212)

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p If a child has tended a rose in order to be able to take delight in its beauty and if the only reward for his labour is that delight in beauty, the achievement of that beauty for the happiness and joy of other people—he can be incapable of evil, base behaviour, cynicism or cold indifference. This is one of the most complex questions of moral education. Beauty in itself does not contain any magic power, that might foster noble qualities in man. It nurtures moral purity and humanity only when work which creates beauty is rendered humane by lofty noble motives and above all when inherent in that work there is respect for man. The more profound the humane element in work creating beauty for other people, the more the individual respects himself and the more intolerent he becomes of deviations from moral norms. (10, 213)

p That which a man loses in childhood he can never make up for as a youth and still less so in maturity. This rule applies to all spheres of a child’s emotional and mental development and particularly his aesthetic education. Sensitivity and receptiveness to beauty is incomparably more profound in childhood than in later periods of personality development. One of the the main tasks facing the teacher in primary school is to foster children’s need for the beautiful, • which to a large degree determines the whole tone of a child’s emotional life, and his relationships within a collective. The need for the beautiful enhances the 230 individual’s moral stature or beauty, making him reject and refuse to tolerate all that is ugly and trite. (10, 168)

p “With a violin in his hands, man is unable to do wrong" goes the old Ukrainian proverb attributed to the remarkable thinker Grigory Skovoroda. Evil and true beauty are incompatible. One of the educator’s important tasks is to place that “violin” in every child’s hands so that he might feel how music is born. (10, 168)

p Aesthetic education can be presented magnificently, but if other elements and components of communist education are seriously deficient, then the educational impact of the beautiful will be diminished and perhaps even lost altogether. Every influence exerted on the emotional world of a child only acquires educational significance, when it comes side by side with other equally important influences. In certain conditions someone can carefully cultivate flowers, take delight in their beauty and at the same time be cynical, indifferent and cold: everything depends on the other factors concomitant with the particular influence we teachers are pinning certain hopes on. (10, 213)

p For children and young people it is particularly important to find and sense within oneself beauty of character, and to be able to take delight in the beautiful humane elements within oneself. One of the fundamental patterns of 231 character development is the path to humanity by way of beauty. (14, 2)

p For youth the following maxim is particularly apt: man’s apprehension of the beautiful in Nature and art reveals to him the beautiful within himself. (6, 207)

p Young people sense beauty and nobility not only in perfection of external form, but also in the creations of human reason (for example, in grandiose technical structures, and in new machines) and particularly in intrinsically moral deeds, ideas and other manifestations of the inner world of men, to whose lives the norms of communist morality are fundamental. (6, 147)

p Communist ideas in themselves are a supreme manifestation of the beautiful for young boys and girls on the threshold of adulthood. At that time more than ever before the striving towards the beautiful is bound up with the striving towards what is moral.

p This explains young people’s uncompromising rejection of all that is immoral. All that is immoral or amoral is seen by young people as vulgar and ugly. (6, 206)

Pupils show interest above all in man within communist society—what he should be like. Their dream of the beautiful centres round man and this is why their aesthetic ideal is linked with a moral ideal. .. . (8, 74)