p It was later that I would begin to reflect on the mysteries of the need to communicate with children. In responding to that need one’s very essence craves for the purity that only children have, but such a feeling can arise only on one condition, namely, that one gives in return the best within oneself. No emotions other than those that are absolutely the highest are needed in order that barriers vanish.

p No, this is not self-sacrifice. But rather a happy discovery of the teacher within oneself, or more precisely, of new active principles. I expected that my discovery would make everyone happy. But in actual life not everyone shared my raptures and my novel ideas. Moreover, I, too, began with something else.

p ...I am walking straight along the corridor and am looking down out of the corner of my eye to see who there is not yet silent. And under my gaze, as in the case of other teachers, everyone trembles with fear. As I enter the classroom I freeze everything with my stern stare. I open the class register but, at the same time, keep my eyes on Romuskov who sits in the last row. And simply for the sake of general order I say quietly, hardly moving my lips: "Romuskov, making trouble again...” Romuskov quickly and timidly adjusts his books, though they had already been lying neatly, and grumbles something to himself. In the meantime, looking at the class register I quietly and slowly ask Romuskov to rise. As he does the entire class is quiet; that is discipline, order, and now I can work. And a few weeks later other teachers will tell me: "Well, you have succeeded in what matters most; you have taken control of the class.”

p To my inexperienced ear the words "taken control" resounded like a victory, and yet to take control is not the same thing as to gentle in the sense of Saint-Exupery, to win a person’s liking in Tolstoy’s sense, to awaken in the sense of Chernyshevsky. It is to override the will and wishes of another. It is only later that I understood that teaching activities can develop in two directions. The first is based on natural authority, in the sense of the authority that I commanded when telling children fairy-tales. This is an emancipative, unrestricted development in which spiritual values become a means of communication, of uniting and drawing closer, and which opens paths to human freedom and ensures the full play of a personality’s spiritual and physical forces.

p The second is authoritarian. It places emphasis on constraint and on strengthening various forms of dependence on the teacher.

p I have often asked myself why is it that many great writers were so attracted to children?

p What explanation is there why Tolstoy, not Tolstoy the artillery officer, but Tolstoy the great writer and philosopher who had already written War and Peace, was so drawn to children and spent so much time with them. (“Now bring up some mud from the river bottom, Your Excellency,” a peasant boy orders, and to redeem his forfeit grey-haired Tolstoy dives, brings up some mud and shows it to the other children, then someone would shout "Sacks on the mill!" and everyone fall in a heap on the Count.) And the great author received untold happiness from his play with these delighted children.

p There is also the case of William Faulkner, a most talented American writer who, as a scoutmaster, created something like a children’s colony. He would spend hours each evening telling the children fairy-tales. It seems to me that the more outstanding an author, the deeper he understands childhood psychology and the stronger is his need to be with children. In effect, that need is a measure of his degree of culture and of society’s spiritual development.

p In all countries, progressive forms of pedagogics are creating humanistically oriented games. In the very first years of the founding of the Soviet State, Nadezhda Krupskaya, an experienced revolutionary and gifted educator, the wife and associate of Lenin, actively supported the development of games designed to educate future citizens and working people. It was her view that games were mostly evaluated in terms of some specific type of activity, physical education or technical 42 creativity, while there was a need for games that would foster the team spirit in children and would serve their spiritual development and enrichment.

p Games serve to put to use a reserve energy potential that Anton Makarenko, an outstanding Soviet educator, described as "a major key”. And today Soviet pedagogical practice makes wide use of this potential not only at school but also at summer Pioneer camps for rest and work. This is vividly apparent at the widely known international children’s camp Artek.

p I groped for my understanding of game empirically. At some point I defined that in order to come closer to the spiritual world of a child one should always remember the best experiences of one’s own childhood. And that which one wishes to convey to children should be combined with the best experiences of one’s childhood. We forget the shocks and discoveries that we experienced as children. We often betray that which was pure in our own development. We are occasionally embarrassed by the remarkable flashes of sincerity that we experienced in our childhood. We do not revive those states that were accompanied by children’s tears, now expressing joy, now hurt feelings or purification.

p When a teacher turns to his own childhood to revive the sensations of that age within himself he is brought closer to children and carries out his educational objective. This presents us with a certain contradiction. For, on the one hand, the posing of any educational goal betrays a rational approach, while on the other, sincerity and purity in approaching children removes the rational aspect, as it were. Frequently a teacher’s creativity becomes an art. And here, any paradoxes or violations of logic can only help establish what is most important—whether the teacher’s efforts yield results.

And a final observation. The development of a teacher’s skills requires constant effort and patience, as well as fearlessness. One’s calling must withstand a long series of challenges. What is most difficult is to overcome one’s own inner constrait, and a tendency towards authoritarianism.