. Anatoli.

Lunacharsky

On Education
SelectedArticles
and Speeches

Progress Publishers
ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

On Education
SelectedArticles
and Speeches

ProgressPublishers
Moscow
 Compiler and author of note:> E. Dneprov
Translated from the Russian by Ruth English
Designed by N il.-olai Paslmra

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 CO:\TE:\TS

TO THE READER
5

FR0:\1 THE EDITOR

8

SPEECH AT THE FIRST ALL-RUSSIA

CONGRESS ON EDUCATION
10

ON SOCIAL EDUCATION
31

WHAT IS EDUCATION?
45

COI\li\IUNIST PROPAGANDA
AND THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
59

THE TASKS OF EXTRA-MURAL

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA
65

ON THE CLASS SCHOOL

82

THE ROLE OF THE WORKERS' FACULTIES (RABFAKS)

110

\VHAT KIND OF SCHOOL DOES

THE PROLETARIA:-f STATE NEED?
119

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL

AND THE REVOLUTION
145

THE TASKS OF EDUCATION WITHIN

THE SYSTEM OF SOVIET CONSTRUCTION
170

THE ART OF THE WORD IN SCHOOL

197
 SOCIOLOGICAL PREMISES
OF SOVIET EDUCATIONAL THEORY
206
EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN
217
THE EDUCATIONAL TASKS
OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL
2~2

SUPPLEMENT:
A. V. LUNACHARSKY: A BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
261,

NOTES
266
NAME INDEX
327
 To the Reader

The book now offered for your attention represents the

legacy left us in the field of education by Anatoli Luna­
charsky, who was a major public figure in affairs of state
and of society, and made an invaluable contribution to the
development of socialist culture and enlightenment.
Lunacharsky was nominated by V. I. Lenin to take up
the post of People’s Commissar for Education, * and he,
along with other prominent people in the field of educa­
tion, succeeded in laying the foundation—under the un­
commonly difficult conditions of the first years of Soviet
government—of a new educational system, and in working
out the basic principles, theoretical and practical, for build­
ing a Soviet school. Under Lenin’s direct guidance, Lu­
nacharsky worked to materialise the principles of the uni­
versal, polytechnical labour school and created an exten­
sive system of preschool education, vocational and higher
education, and of institutions of a general cultural and
educational nature.
Lunacharsky’s educational principles draw their strength
and their power to convince from the facts that they are
grounded in Marxist-Leninist ideology and that he links
questions of education closely with the problems of social,
political and economic life. Lunacharsky’s articles and
speeches give a profoundly scientific, Marxist substantiation
for the organisational forms of the school system, they de­
fine the aims of education and the demands to the content
and the methods of teaching. Lunacharsky contributed sig­
nificantly to the solution of such important educational
problems as the relationships between school and life, the
individual and the collective, the individual and society.
The school, Lunacharsky considered, must be the most im­
portant factor in education, and the basic aim of the lat-
::The term then used meant, literally, “enlightenment”—the same
word as in the previous sentence.—Tr.
6 TO THE READER

ter lie saw as the all-round development of the individual

personality.
The individual is the ultimate value in a socialist so­
ciety, Lunacharky affirmed. “We want,” he wrote, “to edu­
cate a human being who morally and spiritually should
attain the greatest possible harmony, who should lie as
fully educated as possible, and should be able easily to
achieve high skill in any single field. It is also our inten­
tion to create a person who will be a true fellow-worker
and well-wisher to his fellow-citizens, we want to create
a comrade to all other men and a lighter for as long as
the struggle continues—for the socialist ideal.”
A passionate faith in a bright and beautiful future runs
through all that Lunacharsky did. In the grim years of
the Civil War, economic chaos and famine he never ceased
to dream of the ideal human being—“physically beautiful,
harmoniously developing, widely educated, acquainted with
the basic facts and the most important conclusions to be
drawn from these in widely differing areas of knowledge—
technology, medicine, civil law, literature, etc.”
A clear vision of the future, solutions for pressing tasks
found by the light of the opening prospects of building so­
cialism—these are characteristic of Lunacharsky. A sober
assessment of the difficulties of the period never blunted
the keenness of his eye for what would be tomorrow. “We
cannot allow the current difficulties of the moment,” he
said “to trample down the flowers of the proletariat’s first
hopes that all-round development of human beings is pos­
sible.” It was from this standpoint that Lunacharsky fought
for the socialist school to have a general educational char­
acter, and for it to be a polylechnical school.
The Soviet school has advanced a long way since the
time when its foundations were being worked out. But the
main principles of the Soviet school have retained their
enduring validity up to our own time.
Lunacharsky’s insight gives a contemporary ring to much
that he said half a century ago. Especially apt for today
are his remarks on links between school and life and on
the very direct relevance to economic and political prob­
lems of constructive work in the cultural field.
The Lunacharsky legacy in education is undoubtedly of
great importance in advancing our knowledge, because it
 TO THE READER 7

sheds so clear a light, and from so many angles, on the

history of the formative years of Soviet education. One
cannot but think that creative use of this legacy may as­
sist in solving many contemporary educational problems,
and in other countries of the world besides our own.
That is one of the objects of this present volume.

Mikhail Prokofiev,
Minister of Education of the USSR
 From the Editor

This book includes fourteen works by Anatoli Lunachar­

sky on matters of education, in the widest sense; this is
only a modest part of the legacy he left us in this field.
At the same time, these works give a sufficiently full idea
of the character of this legacy, of its scale and of its theo­
retical and practical significance.
For Lunacharsky there were no educational problems
which were of theoretical or of practical interest only. He
saw the whole complex of these problems in its unity and
indivisibility, and he approached their solution as a states­
man, as a theoretician, and as a practical worker. This
is a characteristic feature of his personality and of his
creative activities as an educationalist.
Any task, even the most limited and most practical of
tasks, was transfused by Lunacharsky with “the spirit of
scientific socialism” and subordinated to the general tasks
of building socialism; this enabled him to bring out the es­
sence of any educational phenomenon and its place in the
overall social and educational process. Such an approach
is brought out by the very titles of most of the works of­
fered here—“The Philosophy of the School and the Revo­
lution”, “What Kind of School Does the Proletarian State
Require”, “The Tasks of Education Within the System of
Soviet Construction”. “Sociological Premises of Soviet Ped­
agogics”, etc.
Lunacharsky saw distinctly the general strategy for the
school. From the tasks dictated by that strategy he then
went on to approach the concrete problems of schooling
and education as a whole. The logic of this progression
is to be seen in his every work. The organic fusion of the
tasks facing the revolution and education, the revolution
and the school, the revolution and pedagogical science—
this is the fundamental tenor of Lunacharsky’s activities in
the fields of formal education and of all education, this
 FROM THE EDITOR 9

represents Lunacharsky's main role as one of the first Marx­

ist educationalists in the history of education.
The works published here bring out different aspects of
the problem “the revolution and education”: how it emerges
in political, social, and cultural terms: the educational
content of its message. The reader can follow from one ar­
ticle to the next the development and the enrichment of
Lunacharsky’s educational ideas—from the works dating
from the first years of the Revolution and devoted to prob­
lems of “the philosophy of the school” and to urgent tasks
of a social and organisational as well as of an educational
nature, to the works of the late 1920s, which shed light on
the methodological bases of scientific pedagogics, on car­
dinal issues of the theory of education, the teaching pro­
cess, and some particular matters of method.
Through all the works collected in this volume, there
run the principal, leading ideas of Lunacharsky’s creative
work as an educationalist: education as the basis of cul­
ture; its indissoluble connection with the tasks of econom­
ics and politics; the general school as the foundation of a
socialist education system; the creation of the polytechni-
cal labour school as the central task of the development
of the school; the individual as the ultimate value in a
socialist society, etc. These ideas, indeed all Lunacharsky’s
work as People’s Commissar for Education, exerted a ben­
eficial influence on the development of the Soviet school
and of Soviet pedagogics, on the whole progress of the so­
cial and educational life of the socialist state.
 SPEECH AT THE FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS
ON EDUCATION
Comrades, permit me on behalf of the Commissariat for
Education to welcome the delegates of educational bodies
here assembled, and to proceed at once and immediately to
the report of that Commissariat. I do not want to make an
official speech here. 1 simply want to ask you forthwith
to get on with our discussion of business, and Ibis must,
of course, be preceded by a report. And here it is self-evi­
dent that the task facing the Commissariat over the last
ten or nearly ten months, the bringing into working order
of the apparatus of our Commissariat, and the work already
done by it, is something so far-reaching that it cannot be
set out in any sort of detail in any spoken report, and you
will therefore receive in some days the known plan of that
work, in printed form, and quite extensive additional ma­
terial, which you can use in our discussions.
My report will be in effect an introduction, and 1 shall
only endeavour to indicate the general direction of our
work, to mark some milestones, to acquaint you with this
extensive field in general terms.
Comrades, it is for us axiomatic that the struggle ol
the people for its freedom and its well-being proceeds along
three lines. The people can account itself victorious, as
having attained full power of the people, when it is in pos­
session of the means of production and in possession of
knowledge. Any of these conditions is insufficient without
the other. This is understood not only by us, by revolu­
tionary socialists, but by any more or less consistent dem­
ocrat, and in the United States of America, for example,
when they had gained their independence, their very first
president noted that if the people did not have a sufficient
scope of knowledge at command, then democracy would
not be free. 1
The eighteenth century realised that political power and
equality before the law were not enough, if knowledge
 THE FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS ON EDUCATION 11

was lacking. But that century did not understand that,

equally, any political and cultural programme would re­
main a good intention only, unless it was based upon the
transference into society’s hands of the means of produc­
tion. Only later did life make it. clear that the slogan “Lib­
erty, Kqualily. Fraternity" is unthinkable not only in an
ignorant society, but in any society other than a socialist
one. Now we know that people’s government, the genuine
power of the actual majority, is conceivable only given all
these three conditions: governmental power (so long as
this is needed anyway, until the stale shall annul it), eco­
nomic power, and the transmission of knowledge to every
man, i.e. wide educational work resulting in maximum
consciousness of the masses.
Political power can be taken quickly; it usually passes
into new hands by means of a coup. Contradictions gradu­
ally accumulate between the economic and cultural level of
a country and its political forms. The political forms hang
on until the moment of explosion arrives: then new classes
lake political power into their own hands by revolu­
tionary means. Since the process of organisation of govern­
ment casts light on school problems also, 1 shall dwell on
this in a few words.
When a political revolution lakes place, the organisation
of the new government does not appear difficult. In l'ob-
ruary/March the people deposed the old government. But
the whole bureaucratic machinery remained intact, and the
Provisional Government proposed to govern using this old
apparatus, for the revolution was by them seen as a politi­
cal act, the result of which was to be reforms only2. Polit­
ically this was a revolution, in real terms it was only a
series of pathetic—highly pathetic—reforms. It is another
matter when a revolution is of a social nature. Such was
the case in France, for instance, where there were demo­
cratic strata which had not shared in the governmental pow­
er to any extent whatever; in no wav could they make use
of the old state machinery in the future. In order to ren­
der harmless the old state machinery, they had to destroy it
and create a new one; this is of course a painful and a pro­
longed process. But the French Revolution could make bet­
ter use of the forces of the intelligentsia, for there the in­
telligentsia belonged to the grouping into whose hands pow-
12 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

er had passed. In this country the intelligentsia almost to

a man enrolled itself among the reformists, among those
who attempted after the February Revolution to preserve
the old system in a reformed version.
When there came a new revolution, the October Revo­
lution, the peasantry and the proletariat came forward with­
out any skills in government, being as far removed from
this as can bo imagined. The process of building up a state
government, a process which was painful and terrible
even in the eighteenth century, had to be carried through
by us with even greater difficulty. We are still in the cru­
cible of this work of creation, we cannot say that our state
apparatus is complete. We have a constitution, which
we look on as provisional3, and an apparatus of defence,
which is essential at the present time. \ e t in the course
of ten months we, working amid unheard-of difficulties,
have accomplished an immense work.
Before us lies the task of transferring all wealth to the
hands of the people. We all know that the first instinct of
a people in revolt, if that people is insufficiently disci­
plined, if it is uneducated, is to gain possession of wealth.
But this is often expressed in attempts to gain possession
of it on the part of the one who stands nearest, the one
who has been suffering in poverty at the very threshold
of some rich palace. And so that every man may not have
his knife out against his neighbour, they try to break
up or give out that wealth as quickly as possible. This urge
to share it out in little pieces made itself felt in the
highest degree during the French Revolution; it takes place
here too. Here we have the instinct to grab, an instinct
which does not reason; this grabbing by the hungry is un­
organised and ruinous for the revolution. Here too we have
the petty individualism of the kulak, aiming to create
equal, small economies on the basis of liberation from the
old regime. And here, too, there lives the great idea of
Communism, inherited by us from our teachers world-wide.
These teachers call for us not only to consider the Russian
economy as a single, people’s economy, but to realise it
as such.
This is a road which demands education in the highest
degree, a vast scope of knowledge, and exceptional self-
control. Of course, those who want to see only the reverse
 THE FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS ON EDUCATION 13

side, the smashed crockery, will moan and groan. But hon­
est observers, who can turn attention on the solid and
lasting qualities of the foundation, will understand us, and
we can say that never on earth has work been done that
will bear such fruit as the work of these months in which
it is our good fortune to live. The same applies to the
schools; we know very well that by no means can the peo­
ple get state and social life working correctly, by no means
can it assume real direction of the economy, unless it is
provided with all the knowledge essential for so doing. The
effort to build a new school is the third and no less im­
portant condition.
When 1 was appointed Commissar for Education, I could
not but feel the colossal responsibility which the people
was laying upon me. The task is to carry through, with
utmost rapidity and utmost breadth, the transmission to
the people of knowledge, to destroy the privileged right
to knowledge allowed before to only a small part of so­
ciety. And here it was just as immediately apparent that
it was not a matter of getting control of the schools, the
schools were just as decrepit and good for nothing as the
bureaucratic apparatus. We could not reckon, as the Pro­
visional Government did, that we would recommend to the
district inspectors that certain changes should be made;
we had to wipe out everything; it was absolutely clear
that the school was due for a revolutionary shake-up. I
shall not say “for destruction and re-creation”, because
the schools as an existing apparatus are by no means due
for destruction, and we could not in actual fact shut down
the schools for a certain time, simply dismiss their staffs
and build something new.
The bankruptcy of the old school was only too clear, but
within the old school there was the progressive teacher,
who was dissatisfied with the old system and desired to
re-cast it. Such teachers had their own ideal, a school more
perfect that that which existed in Russia, and they cre­
ated a certain apparatus or organisation of their own,
known as the State Committee on Education, which was
preparing a whole series of reforms under the Provisional
Government4. But the Provisional Government was a gov­
ernment incompetent to the last degree. It had no definite
programme, and each new minister in a constant stream
14 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

of changing ministers would promise the Stale Committee

that something would be done. We knew that there was
such a thing as the State Committee, that there was a
number of progressive teachers; we were aware that our
school reform did not coincide with theirs, that it would
go further, that it was the further continuation of the task
of producing a human being more educated, more disciplined,
more in harmony with the life of society. Now there
are no more ministers of education. Now the power of the
state has but one task: to give the people, as quickly as
possible, the greatest possible amount of knowledge, to cope
with the gigantic role which the Revolution has prepa­
red for the people. Previously teachers did not speak out
full-voiced; they were afraid of the ministers, thinking that
if they did that they would be hounded out: but now they
could have come to an agreement.
In the first days after I had become Commissar for Edu­
cation and had brought in five or six of the persons best
prepared for this work, I addressed myself to the teachers,
requesting them to come to our aid J. I indicated in gener­
al outline how I saw the tasks facing the schools, and
asked the teachers to cast politics aside and come to work
with us in schools given a new face. I was prepared to give
the State Committee a much bigger role than it had been
allow’ed before. I promised that no measures w'ould be put
in hand by me without previous consultation with the teach­
ers: the answer was the most ferocious sabotage. There
was a definite decision to awrait the rapid demise of “this
hateful revolution”, which they considered to be not of
the people, and the return of the old, pre-October order of
things, so that they could make of the schools what they
would need when the bourgeoisie returned to power. The
hope of peaceful constructive work in the schools fell to
the ground. In Petrograd we were able to avoid the reef
of strike action; but in Moscow a strike took place, and
has left traces deeper than those following our first con­
flict in Petrograd.
A profound mutual hostility and misunderstanding opened
up between the teachers and the people. It became nec­
essary to postpone reform of the schools, to map out ways
of achieving it which would by-pass the progressive teach­
ers and rely on the action of the people themselves. It is
 TIIE FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS ON EDUCATION 15

our aim to make that reform accord with the interests of

the working masses, and we shall go to them, by-passing
the bottle-neck which the Teachers’ Union has been mak­
ing of itself 6.
We knew very well that we could replace these people
with others, but we needed to hand over affairs, to hand
over the machinery, and we found empty rooms, empty
school halls 7. Now these people who did not see fit to come
to us are begging our permission, in the most demeaning
manner, to come back. If the teachers have received no
pay, if there has been no liaison with the teaching body,
if chaos has been caused in the whole organisation of the
Commissariat for Education, if w.e have spent almost a
year going out of our way in a vain attempt to get down
to business—the fault lies with those who refused to hand
over to us. In Petrograd we had just barely got the appa­
ratus into functioning order, barely dared to think that we
could now live in real earnest and that the newr machine
could now actually turn out a product, when the Geiman
invasion began. It was necessary to transler a consideiable
part of the Commissariat over here, to organise a major
department for the North in Petrograd, and to get organ­
ised here, in a new place, with new people. s You of course
know' what evacuation means, wdiat it means to transfer
all those papers, funds, archives, etc.
Different times are now* with us; w7e can work more or
less normally, wre can repeat “The danger is over , but
still great difficulties lie before us.
Not for nothing has the people of Russia—workers and
peasants —produced from out its inmost depths several
thousand people who have assumed the functions of So\iet
government. They represent a creative force. We are not
afraid of difficulties. No difficulties will be insuperable to
Soviet Russia. But there is a danger of another kind: the
struggle, the light with the foe that has just been over­
thrown! but is still ready to raise its head again . .. This at­
mosphere of war, the need to strain all one’s powers—this
is our greatest difficulty. We must bear this in mind all
the time as we organise our work. None the less, the Com­
missariat has assumed a definite, completed form, regular
relations with the provinces are being established, the teach­
ing body is moving more and more in the direction of
16 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

working together with us, and we must now get on with

real work, we must map out the reform of the schools in
its main outlines, in order to demonstrate that a revolu­
tion has indeed taken place in the schools, and that their
master now is none other than the working people.
In the first place of all, we had to provide a proper char­
ter for the authority responsible for education. It could not
be of an old-style bureaucratic character. We want true peo­
ple’s government, i.e. the transfer of all power to the masses
of the people. Our line is this: to arouse the interest of
the population at large in school affairs, to so order things
that teachers should be elected and checked up on by the
local population, which, organised in committees or coun­
cils should be the ultimate judge. 9 We knew that in many
places we would not be understood; those strata of the peo­
ple which have communist sympathies would go along
with us, but the whole mass of the petty bourgeoisie, the
mass of the peasantry or its unenlightened portion, those
who do not understand the hearing of the new reform, who
see only trouble, whose urge is in a backward direction—
and this mass is an exceedingly great one—they would
not come to meet our reform halfway, and for this reason
the final answer to many school problems must still be giv­
en by the government.
A people sunk in ignorance cannot receive full self-gov­
ernment, and the precondition of people’s government is
possible only given enlightenment of those same masses to
which power is to be given. Until this is achieved, the way
out which must be chosen is “enlightened absolutism”-
There is no power of the intelligentsia. There must be pow­
er of the vanguard of the people, of that part of the peo­
ple which represents the interests, correctly understood, of
the majority; of that part of the people in which its cre­
ative strength lies. That creative strength or power is the
proletariat, and the present form of government cannot but
be a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Under Russian conditions, this dictatorship would be im­
possible, if we did not know that the interests of the pro­
letariat coincide with the interests of the peasant popula­
tion, the interests of the poor peasantry. The proletariat
and the poor peasantry are out of themselves producing an
especial state machinery—the dictatorship of the proletar-
 THE FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS ON EDUCATION 17

ial —which is the heart and the brain of the people. The
small-peasant population, which did not understand the
true tasks of democracy, has not understood the reform
of the schools either. It has been frightened by the separa­
tion of church from state and of school from church, 10
and has viewed our reforms as something imposed from
outside. We could not hand the whole undertaking over to
the population at large, because it was not prepared. When
we saw that the population was not coping with the given
task, we had to correct its decision, to guide it, and in this
respect we were acting as the people’s assistants, saying
to them, “Look, this is what workers’ and peasants’ gov­
ernment really means.”
In countries with a higher cultural level the task would
have been easier. We here had to achieve our aims by
slower means; we had to organise local government, strug­
gle with prejudices among the masses, and to show not
only in words but in deeds that the school of the future,
the labour school, does correspond to the interests of the
people. We had to make that school a reality at all costs,
and we are certain that when it. has existed for two years
all the prejudices which have been induced previously
among the masses will be broken down, and people will say
“Thank you” to us for it.
Until we have achieved all this, the old body ol teach­
ers, the religious instructors, and the more conservative-
minded parents, will resist our reforms by all possible means.
Proceeding from these considerations, we have brought
into b eing local commissions, delegate bodies including rep­
resen tatives of democratic organisations. We could not
invite into these bodies our enemies, who do not agree
with us or even when they do agree, will certainly do every­
thing to prevent us being successful, those to whom it is
important that our every failure should bo an argument
to be used against 11s, a bullet to be hurled at the head of
the Soviet Government. From this angle, to let in alien ele­
ments here would have been equivalent to bringing enemy
officers into one’s own fortress. But among these enemies
there are technical specialists, people who know their busi­
ness. From this angle we were obliged to utilise such
forces, but to counter-balance them we have given the
guiding role to departments of Soviet institutions.
2-01120
18 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

Alongside the departments (of education) within the So­

viets of Workers’ Deputies we have created Councils for
Education, 11 in which a wider representation of hostile
elements is admitted. We knew very well that this was
dangerous, but we took this path because we want to build
up contact with the broad masses, we want propaganda
to continue ceaselessly, making our views get through to
people. In this way we shall make out of our enemies,
whatever their feelings when they first came to us, sincere
fellow-workers. And we are already seeing the fruits
of this measure. People get carried away by the work, and
I have heard more than once from those who have “given
way” remarks like, “Once one gets to work with you, one
feels one must go on till victory or till death, because the
grandeur of the thing sweeps you up.” And every decent,
intelligent person who is capable of creative action will find
his place with us and become a fellow-worker, one who
maybe is not in complete agreement with what we are
doing, but who under common conditions will become our
brother, our friend and comrade. That is what we counted
on, and we think that even in those places where these
Councils are not altogether measuring up to the tasks laid
upon them, even there they are an effective means of bring­
ing into action some of those who have the greatest inter­
est in the changes already made in the schools. Our prin­
ciple is—the minimum of “police” violence, the minimum
pressure on the masses, and the maximum of explanatory
work. When, sooner or later, the prejudices are overcome,
everyone will see the ardent love and true understanding
of the people’s interests which have guided us.
The faith with which we approached our work will help
us to overcome our enemies and demonstrate our right, our
truth. The best propaganda of all is the evidence of facts,
but only a government which is truly of the people can
be so bold as lo allow itself such propaganda.
Now, after that general outline, 1 shall pass on to a de­
scription of the machinery we have set up to replace the old
Ministry of Education. I shall enumerate some of the most
important decrees we have issued. First of all, we did away
with the remains of the old apparatus, discontinuing the
posts of district guardians, directors and inspectors of
schools. 12 This reform had been in preparation for several
 THE FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS ON EDUCATION 19

years; we completed it in earnest. Then it was necessary

lo remove from the schools features which were unaccept­
able to us, and wc issued the decree forbidding the teach­
ing of Scripture, and removing Latin from the curriculum;
we did away with matriculation as such, replacing it with
certificates attesting that courses in sciences had been fol­
lowed; we abolished the award of marks, and introduced
co-education of the sexes. Any teacher will admit all these
reforms lo be an essential condition for anything approach­
ing a normal school. 13
And we had only removed the rubbish weighing down
the school, only freed it from some only too evident de­
formations. After that we must set about the real, creative
reform of the school.
I have to say that in the given case I had not expected
any resistance or protest against these reforms, but they
did evoke a deep split among teachers. I am not saying
that pedagogical science as such is against our views on
the school, on the contrary, we are drawing from that sci­
ence a conclusion that begs to be drawn. So what is the
problem?
Of course, only one objective truth exists for each given
period, but it would seem that not every class dares to ac­
cept the whole of that truth. Only the proletariat is bold
enough to do that, while the bourgeoisie accepts science
only so far as it is profitable to it to do so. When science
reaches conclusions which are disastrous, lethal for their
class, the bourgeoisie closes its eyes lo them. It is a pe­
culiar sort of blindness, which allows one to see as far up
as the shoulders, but not lo see the head. And here matters
of pedagogics were no exception.
The bourgeoisie cannot accept a school for the working
people, a school accessible to all. The bourgeoisie cannot
accept those new forms in education which make it easier
to achieve the very result which is sought after by every
true teacher. A little while ago I took part in a debate
with some priests,14 and was pleased when they declared
that the previous regime did not correspond to the ideals
of Christianity, that socialism is “the true understanding
of Christianity and its ideals”. This merely indicates that
the regime, which trained these officers for itself, was un­
able even to use its own weapons. In spite of all the bans,
2*
20 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

in spite of all the means used to pervert its servants, it

was only able to call forth protests from them against it­
self.
Very different is the ability of the bourgeoisie to use sci­
ence for its own ends, and the stronger it is, the more im­
posing is the edifice constructed, and the better it is able
to blind the people, who will be quite prepared to believe
that these are indeed the true conclusions of science. In
America, that most cultured of countries, this skill reaches
its highest point. There the form of government is such
that it can be taken for a real people's slate. livery citizen
of America says that in their country the people rules. Me
says this, even after his eight-hour working day, after he
has spent the eight hours watering a machine with the
sweat of his brow; he will say it on his way home, to where
he lives in a room on the tenth floor; lie will say it in
front of a mansion belonging to, say, a Rockefeller, where
wealthy folk spend thousands in a day. Even there he will
say that yes, they have real government by the people.
And this only because in America the bourgeoisie has been
able to make full use of all the means at its disposal, has
succeeded in exploiting science to make the people, loo,
see only as far up as the shoulders, and not see the head.
The bourgeoisie has brought all available means into play
to pull the wool over the whole world’s eyes, and today if
is no secret to anyone that for this it employs, for one
thing, the class character of the school, and for another,
it tries to interpret objective truth in such a way that it
will profit only that class. The school has been worked out
to a scheme of producing people of two grades; in this re­
spect the most advanced countries have achieved amazing
success. There all available means arc brought into play
in order to use science to justify the crime and (urn those
whose whole lifeblood is being sucked dry into watchmen
defending the crime and protecting the robbery. This train­
ing of two grades of people, which the bourgeoisie’s instinct
of self-preservation dictates, is for us a curse.
Clearly we, who have destroyed class culture, can create
only a single, unified school. There can be no place in it
for the trend which has been directed to making a man the
obedient tool of the ruling class. From this point of view
! say to teachers who do not belong to the bourgeois clas-
 T ill' FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS ON EDUCATION 21

ses, and in particular lo teacher-democrats, that they will

go along with us. Not without justification has it been said
(hat a true man of science feels the advance of socialism
lo be, as it were, a liberation from captivity. Insofar as he
is a professor and an Actual Slate Councillor"' he has an
interest in the gilded cage in which he sits, but insofar as
he is a real man of science and a progressive teacher he
knows that the cage prevents him from spreading out his
wings. He languishes in it, and when he senses that he
has been released from it, it may be a frightening feeling
but lie will thank us for it.
We want to liberate the teacher and bring him back lo
the role of his vocation—producing people, and not just
individualists, but people who will be an element in the
sum of human justice. This is, for us, the task of the ideal
school.
Some representatives of the progressive bourgeoisie in
Norway 15 have brought into being a unified school. But
this school does not have the inner soul which would make
it not only unified but also a people’s school from top to
bottom. To give to this unity the imprint of the force, the
virtue, and the essential being that lies in the people, it is
vital that the school should also be truly a school of la­
bour. We carried through our revolution under the ban­
ner of labour. For us this revolution is not a matter of
getting rid of labour, for outside of labour life is merely
a name. Our idea does not lie towards not working, but.
towards distributing work correctly.
A man lives not in order to labour, but he labours in
order to live like a human being. In this vocation within
man’s nature lies his touch of the divine, his dignity, that,
which distinguishes him from the animals, for an animal
does not have consciousness. Man is a labourer, and nature
is his material. Ilis calling is to change nature to accord
with his ideal. Karl Marx’s words are indeed precious, that
up lo now science has only interpreted the world, our task
is to change it. 16
Every man must be a labouring man, for whom science
is only a support, for whom knowledge serves as a prelim­
inary preparation for labour, to make it useful, and direcl-
A high official rank under tsarism.—Tr.
22 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

ed along the line defined by the human ideal. This is why

we make our school a labour school (and here we in part
join up with the bourgeoisie, but in part differ from it).
As I said, the intelligent bourgeoisie, realising that Latin
will not get you very far, has spoken through the moulh of
Wilhelm II as follows—“Kindly give me as many people
with technical qualifications as you can from your schools,
and to hell with Greek and Latin. We cannot wail, we
have wars to light. .." 17
The most progressive teachers are close to what we are
now putting into practice; we of course, will make full use
of all that they give us. We accept labour as a subject of
study, i.e. study of the full range of technical subjects. We
also accept labour as an educational method, for we know
that only through collective labour can we inculcate a whole
sei ie.? ol qualities of character which are essential if
the personality is to be stable and valuable. We accept la­
bour also as participation by young people and children
in the general process of labour in which the population
as a whole is engaged. A child must realise that labour is
no joke, that this is the element by which society is main­
tained; he must feel himself to be a small worker within
the mighty element of collaboration. But we cannot allow
that collaboration to proceed in an uneconomical manner.
W'e shall see to it that this labour is kept of such a na­
ture that it can, with gentle care, make out of a little per­
son a full-grown worker in a socialist society.
I shall say comparatively little about the scientific edu­
cation which will be given in our future school; the same
subjects which are now included in the school curriculum
will be there, but we have the possibility of drawing them
together towards certain unifying centres. We know that
human society in its historical development has been in­
separably woven together with nature, that labour is the
very root from which natural science, i.e. the study of na­
ture, grows. The one and only subject of study that there
is, in fad, is human culture, for the natural sciences enter
into human culture as the reflection of nature in man’s
consciousness at every stage of his development.
The history of human culture is inextricably linked with
nature. It is the science we have studied best of all, and
there is no science which is not a branch sprung from it.
 Till-: FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS OX KDUCATIOX 23

Such an approach is dictated to us by Marxism, but some

eminent teachers who had nothing in common with Marx­
ism have come close to the same approach. Every teach­
er has said that the world is the only subject of study,
and that it must be studied in such a way that it docs not
become fragmented in the child’s consciousness. Nature is
an entity, and for this reason during the early stages of
the child’s development the boundaries separating one “sub­
ject'’ from another must be erased to a great extent. When
tlie foundation has been laid, a greater degree of diiferen-
tialion becomes possible. Bv then we shall not he afraid
that someone studying mathematics will not understand in
what relation all that stands to human nature.
Alongside scientific education, alongside the development
of human thought through the perception of knowledge
and through methodical study of labour, an immensely im­
portant part must also be played by physical education.
We shall not confine ourselves to labour only for this pui-
pose. because labour (inasmuch as il is aimed al accom­
plishing an external task) docs not yet make man entirely
free. Man has another task too to develop his body. This
is work, done on one's own body, to make it flexible, healthy,
beautiful. It can proceed along the lines laid down by
the hygienists; these include a whole number of special
exercises to make a person healthy.
Of course aesthetic education cannot be left out: we un­
derstand it as the development of man’s creative impulses
towards beauty. A basic task of man is to make himself
and all around him beautiful. Labour in general does not
aive a sense of free life. It should be our ideal to give that
life the maximum of joy. All the devices by which man
can make all around him elegant, beautiful, compact of
jo y _ all this must be the subject of aesthetic education,
and this too demands technical skill in the presentation.
Perhaps in future times the very act of birth will be the
occasion for people to apply techniques which may be able
to kill off the effects of bad heredity. From the time it
is born a child must be the object of society’s care and
efforts to make it as strong and as physically able as pos­
sible, for it is that physical ability which as a result gives
w h at ' we call the beautiful.
From this point of view aesthetic education occupies a
24 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

special place, and the very word “aesthetics” acquires a

particularly important meaning. If someone is lo be able
to perceive what is beautiful in the sphere of hearing or
of sight, he must first learn himself how to create things
in them. All this represents tasks of immense magnitude,
which we cannot by-pass. One of the school subjects which
has often been accounted “aesthetic”—drawing and model­
ling—is in fact not this alone. One cannot consider as edu­
cated someone unable lo express his thought in the form
of at least a rough working drawing or sketch. This is as
necessary for the teacher, who cannot leach without such
live illustration, as for the pupil. Aesthetic education is
tied in with technical and with physical education in our
view. Thus when we teach carpentry or metalwork we do
not want only to teach a boy a trade, we want to leach
him to be a human being of beauty, able to build a life
with beauty.
That is how socialists see the school of the future. When
properly trained teachers are teaching in it, they will take
care that when they are giving a lesson in drawing they
are also bearing the children’s physical education in mind,
and will organise their lesson so that it brings them joy
and not fatigue. This method is the only possible one for
our profoundly humane view of the world.
On school government too I have some words lo say.
Here the important point is this: to order it in such a way
that the attitudes of teachers and parents to the new school
should not turn out as sabotage of it. One has only to hand
over the schools completely to the teachers and the parents
and they will resurrect the old school and turn people in­
to spiritual cripples again. This we cannot allow. We do,
however, want the teaching staff to seek for and pul into
practice in their schools all manner of experiments. We do
not want all the schools in all gubernias and uyezds lo be
on one and the same model; on the contrary, the more va­
riety the better, although of course we can admit variety
only within certain limits. One must not compel children
to sit at desks for several hours on end, and force them
to breathe in dust and bad air. That would be not variety
but deformity. *
:;In Russian this is a play on two words with the same root—
raznoobraziije and bezobraziye.—TV.
 Till- l-IRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS ON EDUCATION 25

Tor us il is important that the teacher should be the most

all-round person, the finest person in the stale, for he must
make of himself a source of joyful transformation for the
minors who are in a process of gradual development of
their own powers. This is the high calling of the teacher,
and it is beyond question that no other profession makes
such demands upon one. The teacher has to make real in
his own person the ideal of humanity. At the same time
the teacher, being a specialist, may be a little one-sided,
and for this reason parents too must be drawn into school
government.
The third element in the self-government of the school
are the pupils themselves. We want to extend this self-
government as widely as possible; we want not only stu­
dents but senior school pupils too to run their school in
concert with their parents and their teachers. Everywhere
that a senior pupil can exert his independence, let him do
so. Let the children themselves menage their children's af­
fairs. One must try and influence them in such a way that
they should be capable of organising their own collectives,
and that the common spirit of solidarity should always ob­
lige the mistaken few to return to the true path. One of
the most luimaine of pedagogues, coming across this phe­
nomenon, has said that neither church nor school today
can educate a healthy young generation. He said that col­
lectives consisting of the young themselves must be creat­
ed. Only such organisations of youth can now save Ger­
many from crimes and suicides. 18 It is boredom that propels
towards mischief of all kinds, senseless tricks, grotesque
and disgraceful actions; where cheerful work is going
on, there is less need to fear such things. Let pupils them­
selves take on the greatest possible number of jobs and
duties of all sorts; in that way they train themselves for
self-government. Lastly, children musL be given full free­
dom to organise societies—for scientific research, for gym­
nastics, for musical activities—and theatres, and to create
all manner of journals, political clubs, etc. Best let the
teachers keep out of them, so that the presence of an adult
should not inhibit the children in their search for their
own road.
Concerning reform of higher education, 1 shall say only
that at a conference on this subject which took place recent-
26 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

ly 19 we consulted with Messrs, the professors, and they

graciously agreed to a common plan. We for our part with
all sincerity made certain concessions, in the interests of
getting on with the business. We know that everything
will not be achieved all at once, and they on their side
demonstrated a certain ability and readiness to feel respect
for a reform which many of them found rational. But a
memorandum which we received a little while ago indicates
that Messrs, the professors are now ready to take back
all their concessions. They declare that the university is
what it used to he, and that there must he no reforms.
1 his coincided with some failures of ours on the Bastern
front and with the appearance of certain prospects relating
to Nikolai Romanov. 20 Perhaps lime will bring a cure for
this unexpected relapse affecting the learned gentlemen. But
if this should not happen, we must declare straight out
that we will carry our reform through without them. We
will go to those professors who will take the viewpoint al­
ready taken by many, when they said that they saw noth­
ing new in our reform, that they had always wanted it.
les, you wanted it, but the government did not give
it you, and now the government is giving it you but you
for some reason do not want it. From this angle it could
be veiy important for this congress to sanction some meas­
ures from which Messrs, the professors may conclude that
their resistance means a declaration of war against the ele­
mental force of the Russian Revolution. That declaration
of war will be accepted by us, and if the professors think
it is within their power to barricade themselves in behind
their autonomy and command “Slop, do not enter our cir­
cle, Russian Revolution!” they are making a mistake. It
would be better to do all this by common agreement. All
the more so since the arguments already advanced had ap­
parently removed all misunderstandings, and we had re­
ceived a charter which was accepted by all. but which now
for some reason is being withdrawn.
Some days ago a consultative conference on teacher
training completed its deliberations. 21 I have no time to
speak at length on this important issue, but the results of
the consultation will be presented to you for approval. I
have spoken of the kind of training that the leaching body
receives at present. You know perfectly well that the num-
 Tilt: FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS ON EDUCATION 27

ber of teachers must be multiplied several times over, that

we have to speak of several hundreds of thousands of teach­
ers. We are at present sketching out a special type of
training establishments for teachers. In these we shall have
a profoundly humane school for young men who want to
become pedagogues. If only we have enough of the kind
of stall needed to give real knowledge to the thirsting body
of teachers. Without such workers the whole programme
would be an empty sound, for the school without the teach­
ers is a definite, absolute zero.
I shall not speak on the work of the departments of the
Commissariat for Education; I shall say only that every­
where much has been done. We have a schools section,
which is working out the curriculum for the future school.
Furthermore the Commissariat has been reinforced by the
transference into its hands of oil schools, ~2 so that they
may be reformed in the spirit of working democracy, so
that in the school as a whole all tendencies to turn a man
into an instrument can be eradicated. Today there can be
no place for this. Here one very serious question arises:
can we limit ourselves to general education only? No, we
also need technical education, which will make a man a
oseful member of society, not only a repository of univer­
sal knowledge. This can be started from a certain age up­
wards and can be done by education either within or out­
side the school, after a general education has already been
acquired and general development prepared.
Our state lias an interest in all becoming qualified work­
ers, whom we need in our economic struggle, for we shall
have to struggle still, not only with nature but with for­
eign competition as well. We need the country to be tech­
nically equipped. This is what dictates the plan for eco­
nomic utilisation of people. But we are not going to take
account only of what is dictated by our economic interests,
but also of the need not to deform people. On this aspect
we need lo find the median geometric line that will satisfy
both requirements.
This is particularly important for higher education: we
are calling together a special conference at which we are
going to talk with the representatives of higher schools in
these terms. But we cannot wait until the school gives us
citizens; we need adults too, who can build life without
28 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

waiting for the children to grow up. So we need to give

thought not only to the development of children, but to that
age-group which itself thirsts for development. From this
point of view all Russia is a school, for each of us is a
teacher, and if anyone knows anything he is in duty bound
to pass that knowledge on to others. This is done through
our extra-mural system, and here we are faced with a gi­
gantic, urgent work, because the Russian people has opened
its heart and its eyes, and lack of knowledge is a tor­
ment to the people, when it has to govern but is still liv­
ing as if in darkness. For this reason we have to provide
for this sector as well as we possibly can.
A Commissariat for Education of a socialist republic
which failed to understand the full meaning of organising
propaganda of the social ideas of revolutionary cooperation
—such a Commissariat would be no more than a conglom­
eration of persons incapable of consistent thought. In
this regard our extra-mural department is one of (he front­
line units on our educational front. Concerning the scien­
tific department, we have to mobilise all our scientific forces.
We do not grudge money, we are giving hundreds,
thousands, millions for all manner of expeditions, scientific
publications, laboratories, etc. We classify those who
are scientists and teachers as “of the first category11 among
specialists, we give them more than we ought to give them.
We ought to call a halt to our generosity, but we know that
Russia has need of knowledge, and for this reason we court
the scientific gentlemen. But they should accept our ad­
dresses not too coolly. Recently a newly-created technolog­
ical-scientific apparatus has been attached to the Supreme
Council for the National Economy, and this is mobilising
forces for the technological needs of the state. Its Colle­
gium is being appointed in consultation with us, and it is
under the indirect control of our Commissariat. 23
As regards the arts department, I must be quite brief.
The newly-created state machinery is trying to provide for
the people to the best of its ability without wiping out
anything of our old culture. We know that the proletariat
will build a new culture, while studying the old. In this
connection most worthy of admiration and regard are all
those sections of the department which so heroically defend­
ed the palaces and museums from being plundered. All
 TIIK FIRST ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS ON EDUCATION 29

excesses were pul a slop lo at once, and amid the greatest

dangers and difficulties we nevertheless preserved every­
thing. So Ihat now the palaces of the tsars are made over
to the public as museums, and people go there to admire
or more precisely to wonder at all that was collected by
the tsars. We are proud that we have returned and handed
hack all this to the people.
As regards the visual arts department, our current task
at present is to clear the city of monuments which defile
art. There are monuments which have no value either his­
torical or artistic; we want to annihilate them. We do not
consider that every tsar had the right to set up a brazen
hulk on every square and then declare it to be a creation
of Russian national culture. We are preparing to set up
monuments ourselves. We want to make use of Lenin s
idea —to use monuments as propaganda. We want to put
up inscriptions everywhere proclaiming great thoughts and
feelings, taking these from the great thinkers. Wc want to
raise up our temples, where the representations of gieat
men will be the icons. Our temple is dedicated to human­
ity. and we have our own teachers, lrom among whom
we do not exclude apostles of this or of that persuasion, so
long as they uttered truths that are eternal. Our temple
is a pantheon of humanity, a bringing together of all that
is valuable, all that is great, which has been created by
people. We want cities lo be not only market-places but
temples too, so that you, as you go to work, can lead
thoughts that evoke noble feelings. Education through stat­
ues and pictures is the example of a great culture. Always,
when democracy reached a great flowering- in Athens, in
the northern towns of Germany—always it made use of
this. All the grandeur of their culture, all the wonderful
edifices which were built there had the purpose of attuning
each soul lo the common emotion.
Things are hard for us now, we have to go up to the
neck in blood and filth, but after our Revolution, as after
every great revolution, a wave of creative power will come
and a new. beautiful, fragrant art will blossom. We are
at present inviting the best artists, in competition one with
another, to create monuments, maybe only temporary ones
as yet, so that on the squares of our great cities and our
towns the busts of great men may be raised up, and the
30 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

days of the unveiling of these monuments may be festi­

vals of the people. At present everything here bears the
nature of war, and our desire to create is also a factor
in the fight.
Now, when we are opposing not German garrisons but
the bourgeois system of the whole world, they are already
pronouncing our names with respect in the West, they
look on us as on cultured people who are building their
future on the correctly understood foundations of educa­
tion of the people. When the representatives of foreign states
come to visit us, they see that in our hands is a new
power, founded in the desire to raise up the people to the
very highest peak of culture; they see that our strength is
in our urge to create a new and a beautiful generation, and
they are obliged to admit that we shall succeed.
What we have achieved in these ten months compels the
world proletariat to believe in us. The proletarians in the
West are profoundly grieved by our mistakes, they are
rejoiced by our successes. There, in their own countries,
they are saying, “In Russia we have got this or that; in
Russia we are building a school of a new kind; another
sort of people is growing up there.” And the better we car­
ry through our building of culture here, in our country,
the quicker we shall gain for the whole world the beauti­
ful future we are conquering for our children. Our Revo­
lution will not remain fruitless. We came and took power
not so that one fine day we might hand it back again, but
so that we could build this beautiful new world. We must
carry our banner high and bear it on to the end, placing
our proletariat in the very front ranks of the world pro­
letariat.
 ON SOCIAL EDUCATION

Comrades and citizens, I have been invited here to speak

about social education. At the very outset I must draw at­
tention to the point that this concept can be interpreted
in two ways, and both of these are of considerable interest.
The first question that arises when we hear the words “so­
cial education” is this: who is to educate or bring up chil­
dren the family or society? since social education can be
taken to mean education by society. The second interpre­
tation of the expression has another bearing—for whom is
a child to be educated, for itself or for society?
Both questions have a long history of their own, and a
variety of answers, which of course vary over the range
between these two poles. There have been supporters of
tainily upbringing, who held that any limitation on the fam-
ily as an educational institution, in favour of society, did
harm to the education of new generations. There ha\e been
those who came out categorically in favour of a strictly
social upbringing and conversely branded family upbring­
ing as harmful, as something which fragmented the stream
of humanity which is essentially one. In exactly the same
way, the second question produces equally talented and
equally convincing advocates of social education and indi­
vidual education respectively. The object of my brief talk
today is to give you some of the basic ideas bearing upon
the history of this question, and upon that solution of it
which we support or rather which we are now putting into
practice.
You will often find, expressed by the noblest of people
and the most profound of thinkers who have treated the
question of culture, the proposition that probably the only
truly cultured state, out of all states hitherto existing, was
that of ancient Greece, a state distinguished by a quite sur­
prising internal elegance or harmony. In the wondrous,
harmonious architecture of ancient Greece we see, as it
32 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

were, the reflection of the clear, calm stability of that cul­

ture's spiritual and social way of life, and even in our
times (starling from the Renaissance onwards), when people
want to create a building of imposing size and expres­
sive of calm and equilibrium, it is inevitably Greek exam­
ples that they turn to.
The Renaissance, and the Empire style which predomi­
nates in Potrograd —these are, essentially speaking, different
refractions of the same architectural theme that was dis­
covered by the Greeks, and this is no mere chance, because
Greek buildings reflect their spiritual and social culture
just as the Gothic style reflects the structure of the Mid­
dle Ages in both spiritual and social matters.
The Greek sculpture, still considered unsurpassed, whose
fruits adorned those beautiful Greek buildings, was no
chance achievement either. That sculpture expressed the
classical ideal, and was used as an aid in Greek pedagogics.
A cultured stale can only be such insofar as it is a pro­
foundly pedagogic one.
In order to construct a social system of such a kind that
in it all the parts should accord with the common whole,
of such a kind that in it harmony should rule (the world
“harmony” was invented by the Greeks, to mean a correct
inter-relation of forces, of any kind, including the cultur­
a l)—to achieve this it is necessary that all citizens should
from their first entrance upon life be undergoing prepara­
tion to become appropriate elements of that whole. What
is more, the cultured state can never remain static: it cul­
tivates its powers, and each new generation must he bel­
ter than its predecessor; at least society makes it its ob­
ject to achieve progress in this respect, to see to it that
the children, raised up on the shoulders of their fathers,
should stand on a higher level of cultural development
that their fathers. And those who ha\re noted the immense
importance which attached in that cultured Greek slate vo
pedagogical matters, an importance admitted by all the
statesmen, all the poets and the philosophers—those who
have noted this have been quite right.
The word “music” (musyka), used to denote a definite
pedagogical method, was in those days understood as the
totality of information and certain technical skills which in
sum ensured correct physical education, in the sense both
 ON SOCIAL EDUCATION 33

of normal bodily structure and of freedom and strength of

its movements, 1 and on the basis of this beauty of physi­
cal culture there was then cultivated a no less beautiful
spirit. The two words—“kalos” (xcd.os) and “agathos”
( a y a d o s ) were joined together by the Greeks into the gen­
eral terms “kalokagathia” ( xaXoxayadia ), i.e. beauty of
body and spirit- It was to this beauty of body and spirit
that the democracy of Athens strove to raise its sons, all
its free citizens without distinction of class (if we complete­
ly ignore the slaves, since the Greek culture did not con­
sider a slave as a citizen and gave no education whatever'
to the children of slaves).
Why did the Greek state, more than any other culture,
set itself this aim of education to harmony and beauty?
because little Greece, which had immense opportunities
(it would be superfluous to dilate on these here) of devel­
oping its trade and its industry, its art and its science, was
at the same time open to attack from the gigantic Oriental
imperialist (to use a modern term) monarchies, which
might at any moment have swallowed up that same little
Greece. For such a small country to be able to defend it­
self militarily against these colossi, an immense enthu­
siasm on the part of every citizen was needed. And tins
was why it was necessary to produce such a citizen that
one would be a match for a hundred others, a citizen whose
specific weight would he truly enormous. This was w a
brought Greek state organisation to democracy, to a cer­
tain egalitarianism in the enjoyment of worldly^ goods, so
that there would he none too poor to have an interest m
defending his country.
If we look into how this astonishingly pedagogical coun­
try tackled the question of social education, we shall see
that the Greeks regarded education as a necessary matter
of state concern and deemed family education, not only
for boys, but girls too, outdated.
In the age when Greece reached its finest flowering, care
was taken to bring children together and entrust them to
specialists—pedagogues. The word “pedagogue” ( nai] d y co
y o s ) was invented and brought into use by the Greeks,
meaning “a Leader of children”. These pedagogues also had
in their charge large gymnasia,2 where the children togeth­
er practised various exorcises—in gymnastics, dance, mu-
3-01120
.Vi ANATOLI LUNAC1IAHSKY

sic, history, etc.—these being part of the general system

of civic education of that period.
There were of course different degrees of socialisation,
in this respect Alliens never carried things Lo the point of
barracks-style communalisation of children. It was carried
much further by the Spartans. Thu citizens of Sparta, where
the aristocratic minority had not only to defend their
borders against onslaught from the East but also to main­
tain their own hegemony, their overlordship over their own
subjects, the enslaved inhabitants of the Pcloponncso —
these Spartans were obliged Lo live in a real besieged en­
campment. So instead of the Athenian semi-egalitarianism
an almost socialist levelling-out of property was introduced,
not in the country as a whole but as between Llie warrior-
aristocrats. They even went as far as crude practices such
as destroying children who were not horn healthy enough.
The education of men and women look on a predominantly
military character. In Athens they never resorted lo such
extreme measures, it was a mercantile, sea-faring, broadly
cultured stale rather than a purely military settlement.
VYhon the greatest of the Greek philosophers, Plato, de­
scribes the ideal stale—taking as a basis the experience of
Athens, i.e. a democracy of lliat age, and that of Sparta,
an aristocratic society of the same period—he comes in the
end to full realisation of the idea of social education. Pla­
to, drawing theoretical conclusions from practice, says that
no father or mother should have their children left with
them. A child should be given over to society; it may be
reared by its mother insofar as she is a good wet-nurse,
but then it passes into the hands of the specialists, who de­
velop it into a real man. This in his opinion is essential
for those whom he considers as real people; craftsmen and
workers he accounts half-people, and is not in the least in­
terested in what becomes of their children. 3
Now we may ask: how did the Greeks decide the ques­
tion of for whom children were to be educated? (I have
to tell you that very often individualists such as Wilhelm
vou Humboldt insist that Greek culture was an individual­
istic culture and put the individual in the foreground,'1
but tin's is absolute nonsense). When the growth of trade
in Greece in the IV-III centuries B.C. brought to the fore­
front, mercantile and manufacturing strata of the popula-
 ON SOCIAL EDUCATION 35

lion, this was reflected in philosophy by Sophism, and yon

know how philosophers true to the spirit of the classical
age looked on that sophistic decadence: they saw as mon­
strous the defence of the individual as an end in itself.
All the Greek tragedies, Greek theatres, Greek histori­
ans, lyric poets—they are all filled with the chorus prin­
ciple, the desire to make the individual harmonise with
one profound whole.
The citizen is in the forefront of attention as against the
individual, but he must be a profoundly conscious, enlight­
ened, flexible, richly endowed citizen, who can enter into
conflict with giant states and emerge the victor. Here one
must have citizens capable of dying for their native land.
The highest value the Greeks know is patriotism, the abil­
ity to subordinate one’s own individual tendencies, which
the Greeks called pride, or arrogance, to subordinate them
to restraint, to moderation, to the golden mean.
That is the ideal a man should set himself. Every Greek
leaches: do not try to elevate yourself above others. When
people become too eminent—never mind whether it may
be a famous general or a famous statesman—he is driven
out of the state, he is punished with ostracism, because
such a large, overgrown individuality may be noxious to
democracy.
So there can be no argument here. The development of
individuality is essential insofar as, having said “we need
the citizen” they then say “we need a strong, fine, skilful
and intelligent citizen, but one in whom individuality does
not become individualism”.
Such is the classical ideal of pedagogy. We have become
accustomed to calling all that relates to the Greeks “classi­
cal”. When people say “a classical column” they are say­
ing it is one made following a fine Greek example. From
this point of view one might say that classical pedagogy is
that which I have just spoken of. The continuation of these
classical traditions will be the socialist answer to the
question, i.e. development t h r o u g h society, development f o r
society; but that society must be truly just. One cannot
give children over into the hands of a society which is
based on internal contradictions, which is incapable of
standing up to intellectual criticism, which offends
conscience. If society is such that it calles itself a democ-
3*
36 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

racy but in fact all the vital concerns of the country are
controlled by a small group from a grasping bourgeoisie,
then of course—regardless of whether that society relies
on support from the church or not, whether it relies on the
nobility or not—one cannot entrust children to it. This is
a serious danger, for it will make of the children not what
should be. It will undoubtedly make, in this respect, what
are mistakes from the point of view of the ideal but no
mistake from the point of view of its own interests.
The existence of masters and slaves poisoned classical
culture too, of course. We let our attention be distracted
from the slaves and have spoken only of the citizens, in
order to get at classicism in a pure form—and this is ar­
tificial.
Today we are faced, in all countries, with the phenome­
non of masters and slaves, of some people having no rights
economically or culturally. Once that is so, then inevitably
in the schools they will produce on the one hand masters,
capable of dominating others brazenly and confidently, not
questioning their right to do so, able to maintain themselves
by tooth and claw in that dominant position; and on
the other hand, slaves, i.e. obedient people . . . .
And if we consider the history of pedagogics from this
point of view, and setting in our sights in most detail the
contemporary school, then we shall see that both our ques­
tions become strangely dualised and contradictory. If you
open a book by one of the well-known authorities on peda­
gogics, Foerster5 for instance, you will see that they are
protesting against the individualistic school. They say out­
right: the bourgeois school is no good to us.
We will leave aside for the moment the question of how
they worked for the lower orders, but among the middle
classes the schools developed individualism. The school
said: we will give you knowledge and a diploma, we will
arm people for their future careers and for the struggle
for survival. And the whole spirit of the liberal-bourgeois
school could be none other than this, because in it they
taught, for ten years at a stretch: the state is like a night-
watchman, let it keep out of our lives, let things pass you
by, don’t get involved, only preserve order. All things are
created through competition, they assert from Adam Sm ith6
onwards; in struggle people create wealth and high for-
 ON SOCIAL EDUCATION 37

tunc; any interference at once becomes an artificial factor,

a poisonous interjection into the natural flow of events- The
natural thing is to leave people to build their own and the
general prosperity in struggle, to compete with one anoth­
er, each separate individual striving to get rich.
But nowadays the new bourgeois pedagogics is up in
arms against such a view of the school. The matter is, that
the bourgeoisie in its economic development has come up
against the need to fight for the last available markets. It
has created a gigantic quantity of goods, and the world has
become loo small for it; alliances have had to be formed
for mutual self-defence and for concerted attack on some
other bourgeois group, and for sharing out the spoils in the
manner most advantageous to those concerned... But once
they have to get into fights “for an ideal - th e defence of
'be Homeland, to create gigantic armies for robbery and
for sharing out its proceeds, then they have to evoke pat­
riotism in a man, the readiness to die for ones country.
Pnce you need that, you have to arouse the social feelm*
him, you have to educate the citizen. And from 1
come the idea of “civic education”, which has become the
ideal in German pedagogics, or what the French call ethi­
cal” education. The whole trend is so to befool a man that
he shall feel love and readiness to sacrifice himself, tor
a state which is visibly based on injustice.
Friedrich Foerster, having written lengthy volumes em-
°nstrating the need to create patriotic schools, reaches the
following conclusions: it is essential, he says, to preserve
faith in God; if the Catholic faith should prove too feeble
in this respect, then one can have recourse to another iaith.
The state as it exists is not such that people can love it
just like that, unless you tell them that they are command­
ed to love it by some higher law. If, after all, one consid-
prs the state as it is, in real life, one is not going to love
it, so one must bring in some additional interpretation sucli
as God, heaven, hell etc., then maybe things will work out.
So, one cannot devise real civic education without a mys­
tical element. In Foerster it peeps out from every line that
the mysticism means deception: if one tolls the truth, the
citizens are going to hate the state, so the truth must be
prettified by the invention of supplementary lies. This is
what it boils down to.
38 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

We only have the full right lo speak of “civic education”

when we can see that it is a harmonious society training
its citizens, a society able to create a harmonious indi­
vidual.
From the angle of the relation between the family and
the state, one comes across some very interesting phenom­
ena. Here progressive bourgeois pedagogues are coming
out more and more definitely with the idea that social edu­
cation is essential, because education in the family devel­
ops in the child a high estimation of his own personality,
and a private citizen, a member of the population, who sets
a high price on his own personality is not going to make
a good soldier or civil servant, one who will serve the
whole.
This trend is developing more and more strongly as time
goes on, life itself impelling in this direction. The famous
thinker Paul Natorp7 states that the family is disintegrat­
ing, among the workers and even among the peasantry,
who are being drawn into the orbit of capitalist culture.
The mother is ceasing to be present in the nursery and in
the kitchen; she is going out to w ork-in an office, for a
lawyer, as a shorthand-typist, a journalist, etc. So the little
educational institution, the little kitchen, the little laund­
ry- -;111 that curse which has kept woman out of social life,
all that is receding into the past. Now gigantic laundries,
kitchens, etc. will be brought into being. So kindergartens
also will be brought into being: the upbringing of the child
will fall upon social organisations and the state. The state
must catch the child as the mother releases him from her
hands.
And then? will it, the state, kill the individual in him?
Yes, if it is a class state. That state reejuires iron discipliTie,
and willingly undergone at that. Loyalty must be incul­
cated from early childhood. When this is the lino being
taken by Messrs, the pedagogues, we cannot be surprised
when individualist pedagogues like Humboldt and Pestn-
lozzi 8 protest and cry wolf. This is indeed the anteroom in
the barracks, the preparation of the sacrificial offering.
The individualist teaches that the school must produce
only the harmonious personality and that in order to do so
it must approach the understanding of human personality
from the side of its inner laws, and all that is outside il
 ON SOCIAL EDUCATION 39

must l)o alien to the school. When a priest or a policeman

approaches such a school, it must say to them: your place
is not here, here the child is developing as his inner law
bids him. something which no society can create.
But look and see what is this harmonious, developed
personality in bourgeois society. You will see that it will
either he crushed as under a tombstone by need and all
the oppression of contemporary society which gives it no
chance of clambering out of its slavery, or it will break its
skull against the bars, but in any case it will accomplish
nothing, if it belongs among the poor. And if we arc talk­
ing about the harmonious development of a personality
from a higher estate, then here Foerster & Co. are lying
in wait, saying: do you know what sort of personality we
have here? This is an egoist, who says he wants to eat
well and sleep well, and for that he needs wealth. If Daddy
has left him money then he should be grateful for that.
Imt if there is no money then it has to be made. And the
“harmonious personality” will spend half its life making
money for itself, and later on, when it is already balding,
will start clipping coupons and living as a parasite; this
is a snob, a revolting person living only for himself—a
useless person, from whom no one will ever get anything,
because he is a hopeless egoist.
We, socialists, deal quite differently with the question of
education. Only in socialism does pedagogy find its natural
expression. The Greek ideal appears classical because in it
is expressed the basic law of human being, but this law of
human being could only live in Greece as a himeric dream.
Tn a tiny state, placed in exceptional circumstances, it was
furthermore being practised on the backs of slaves.
Socialism is the normal human society, its chief and
basic principle lies in the simple concept of the community
of all people for the good of all.
The point is, how to organise this in reality. It is a gi­
gantic problem. But the main thing is clear: one must have
not exploitation of man by man, but unification of forces
for a common aim. Thus, a normal society must be con­
st moled not for the good of the privileged, but for the good
of all. Only from this time on does pedagogy become nor­
malised, in hopeful prospect at least. Normal education is
social education, therefore—from the point of view of the
40 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

aims of education—the contradiction between the individ­

ualist and the social side of education falls to the ground.
Indeed, socialism agrees with the supporters of civic
education and says that one must develop the citizen in the
man, one must develop a personality so that it can live in
harmony with others, can achieve fellowship, can be social­
ly linked with others in thought, and sympathy.
But let no one reproach us that in so doing we may
cripple the personality. If they ask us, “Will individualisa­
tion be permitted in our school?” we answer: “Of course.”
If we were asked, “You want a well-concerted orchestra,
you want to achieve maximum perfection in harmony—
will virtuosi be allowed to play individual instruments?”
of course the answer would be, “How could it be oilier-
wise?” An orchestra presupposes a great multiplicity of
sounds, it presupposes polyphony combined with unity, not
such an allocation of parts that no one knows what he is
at, one trying to drown the melody played by the other or
to get another to follow and play his tune. Such an unna­
tural, crazy orchestra is bourgeois society. A natural orches­
tra is not everyone playing the same thing, it is a social
grouping in which each player plays his own instrument.
One person may work in art, another in science, a third
in technology, etc. And, furthermore, each of them has ac­
cess to everything: without being a musician a man may
come to listen to music; being a musician he may interest
himself in the conclusions of astronomy, know how cloth-
ing is made, and so on. He will not be a savage who looks
at a passing tramcar “like a cow at a railway train” as the
Germans say.
This unification of culture is what we are carrying
through from the school, even from the kindergarten, on­
wards. We must not suppress any single talent. We canned
be prodigal when we need every single item. We must look
and see in what direction a person’s abilities lie most, and
if he has ability in mathematics we must not compel him
to learn Latin by rote, or make a person with a lively imag­
ination study dull algebra or geometry.
The very greatest individualisation enters in as part of
the real socialist school, but the more the child develops
(and we see this in any school, in any kindergarten), the
more important it becomes to teach him from the very
 ON SOCIAL EDUCATION 41

earliest ago to respect another person’s social nature, to

find in games the way to spend time together, to get chil­
dren to work together.
Things like a school theatre, looking after a school gar­
den. or livestock, or library, or laboratory—all oblige chil­
dren to work together. Will not each of them come to un­
derstand that he cannot be satisfied by one aspect of school
only, cannot occupy himself only with himself and have
no concern for others?
A play is also a process requiring cooperation. Every­
thing in which the choral, harmonic principle works—all
this is social education, all this draws the child into the
complex but unified structure which a real society must be.
The aesthetes say that beauty is the unity of variety of
form—so socialism is beauty: the socialist school is beauty,
for in it maximum individualism blends naturally with
maximum unity.
We do not need lies, we do not have to drag people into
a service alien to them, hut in agreement, in sympathy, in
profound contact between fellow-pupils this society will
grow up of itself, for it is a society of people freely coop­
erating one with another.
The state itself is necessary so long as the sword is ne­
cessary, so long as we have to defend ourselves, so long
as there are people who would drown our socialist hopes in
pools of blood and go back to the past. So long struggle is
necessary, the state is necessary, the dictatorship of the
proletariat is necessary. In these times of the dictatorship
of the proletariat we cannot speak of normal conditions, but
we struggle for normal conditions. There is no need for us
to train this socialist fighting spirit into children; it. will
come of its own accord at a later stage. It is enough to
educate to full enthusiasm and love for the free society, for
human freedom, that of people who are also brothers and
bound one to another. When the children grow a little older
they will realise that between them and the ideal there
stands a wall, blocking the path, and in their own time
they will find within themselves the fighting spirit to break
through and free the road to the ideal.
We ourselves, whose life is to some extent deadened
compared to the coming generation, we ourselves will nass
.-.cross this Red Sea by which we come out of the bourgeois
42 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

Egypt; our children must prepare themselves for life in ihe

promised land, which waits for us on the far side of Ilie
Red Sea and which has been won by our hands.
Tt only remains for me to say what our point of view is
as to who should educate—the family or the school.
It should be said that both points of view were set out
in the clearest relief at the times of Ihe French Revolution
(this historical excursion does need to be made). Not that
Condorcct9 in his lecture on education was a supporter of
Ihe family, no, society plays the greater part here. But he
does none the less keep the child of an early age in (he
atmosphere of the family; the school is an .adjunct to the
family. He is afraid that the state may intrude into the
school and deface it. The school is a centre, a place, to
which one goes from the family, and then returns to the
family. Exceedingly carefully does Condorcet guard these
bounds against incursion by educators representing peda­
gogic communism. In this respect he is a true disciple of
the age of Montaigne,10 etc.
Another great democrat, Lepeletier,11 takes as his point
of departure the idea that it is impermissible to leave the
fate of children to chance; one child’s mother is silly while
another’s is clever, for one the family may be a place of
tenderness and loving care while for another it is one of
severity. All this may in the future create a mass of moral
cripples, spoilt pets, parasites, mummy’s darlings, who will
expect to be looked after forever. This is not to be tolerat­
ed; the state, like the sun, shines equally for all. Accord­
ing to Lepeletier, the state must take the education of
children completely into its hands.
Let us look more closely at what the family is.
The family in bourgeois society was created only through
the enslavement of woman. Schiller 12 expressed this excel­
lently when he said that for a woman her home is Ihe
world, while for a man the world is his home. Family life
was kept going by the woman giving herself to the kitchen
and the nursery. The man came to his family to rest. and.
as Behel 13 put it, to let the woman smooth the wrinkles
from his brow. The man had work to do: if he was a soldier
he was busy thinking of ways of killing, if a merchant
of ways of cheating.
The wife is busy taking care of her children: thanks to
 ON SOCIAL EDUCATION 43

lliis she develops the instincts of the broody lien, and she
becomes completely indifferent to other people’s children,
[f it should come to sharing a drop of milk with another’s
child, then the broody hen instinct turns into that of the
tigress, and she will be ready to send other children to the
next world. In this way a thing as sacred as the maternal
instinct—the prime source of true altruism—is transformed
into clotted philistinism, even with the best of mothers.
If a mother is poor she is overburdened with woik, hei
nerves are on edge, she cuffs the children over the head.
She loves them, of course, but at the same time she hates
Ihem: and the children run off to the street and there find
their own “social academy”, one not very beneficial tor
'heir minds or characters. If she is a lady, then she busies
herself with charity, goes to balls and theatres, she has suf­
ficient means to hire a pedagogue for herchildren tie^no­
torious governess, who heartily hates chil ren, w
like lo ho a lady herself but by the will of fate is>ob^ ef
f() l)o a govoi'iicss and to bring up the children o p
do god oi o gq

n This is known as family life. Outo f lOQ women there are

99 who find themselves beyond the pale of the family. The
"lore time goes on, the more there will be of tlie^ -
Can we set up such a stale of things as the ideal? No,
we cannot defend it. When the poor woman wasi
od to work in the factory, the child was left without ai fam
fly. When the middle-class woman was summoned to
work in the office, the child was left without a mot .
Then the woman’s eyes began to be opened, a"d she sa\v
that the world was not within the confines of hei home.
We are not going to take anyone s children rom
Not a single mother will have to defend her children, weep­
ing, as we drag them off to school. But an awful ot o
thorn come to us, bringing their children, and say, weep­
ping, “Take them, there’s nothing I can do with them.
There arc very many such. We, socialists, have to think not
of how to take children away from those who are trying
lo educate them in the family, but of how to provide for
those who find themselves without a family.
In order to provide for them, we shall call in the woman
who knows how to be a mother in the full sense of the
word, who will not have lo do the washing, go to the faelo
44 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

ry etc., who will earn her bit of bread specifically as a

pedagogue. She will be near the children all the lime, she
will give them the affection they need, will feed them in
body and in spirit. She will be trained for such work. She
will not be Kolya’s mother who hates Mitya, she will be a
mother in general, whose maternal instinct is awakened by
the sight of every child. These special pedagogical talents
are there in women in abundance, they are met with often.
In this field as in the fields of art, technology, science etc.,
we must have the specialist, in this case the woman spe­
cialist. Then we shall have a common reservoir for the
young generation, then the halls of the palestra 14 will be
resurrected. But this cultured society will be one without
slaves; the puffing and heaving will be done by machines,
by motors.
Ihen we shall really be able to educate everyone for so­
cial living, for society, and this will mean, too, educating
a harmoniously developed individual.
Such is the general ideal of social education, and from
this follow definite methods of educating and of leaching.
From this point of view we can take from the defenders of
individualism the methods by which the particular gifts of
a given personality are cultivated. And on this side we can
also take from the partisans of civic education some meth­
ods of “choral” education.
The bourgeois school is tossed between the ideals of the
individualist, through which peep the fangs of the beast,
and the ideal of the disciplined man, also known as the
slave, and it finds no way out. For us individualism and
the social principle are joined in harmony. How much
glowing light is shed on the education of the human race
by the social idea!
In spite of the devastation in Russia, in spite of the
exhaustion we all feel as a result of the war and our rev­
olutionary efforts, we can, with that lodestar to guide us.
go on in a very short space of time, a surprisingly short
one, from theory to practice, and demonstrate first by the
single example, then more widely, and finally full-scale, a
normal education, of which a normal pedagogue will say:
now I can obey the dictates of my reason and my
conscience.
 WHAT IS EDUCATION? *

In this short speech 1 shall try to make clear to you the

moaning which we attribute to the concept of extra-mural
education. . .
First of all, what is education itself? It is not so simple
to define this.
It used to be held here that a man who had been through
gymnasium ** or, even more, through university, was an
educated man. But one must approach this more critically.
It is not at all true that anyone who has been through
gymnasium or university is an educated man, and that by
the same token anyone who has not been through a partic­
ular educational institution is an uneducated person ...
Our word for education (obrazovaniye), like the German
Bildung, comes from the word meaning image or form
(obraz). It would seem that when our nation needed to de­
fine what every man ought to make of himself and what so­
ciety ought to make of him, they had a mental picture of
the image or form of a human being emerging from ma­
terial of some sort. An educated man is a man in whom
the human likeness predominates. You know how religious
people used to say that man was created in the image and
likeness of God, and that he had in him something of God.
One of our greatest teachers, Ludwig Feuerbach,1 who ap­
proached religious ideas from a scientific standpoint, very
rightly remarked that it is not man who is created in the
image of God, but God that is created in the image of man.
And how did that happen—the creation of God in the
image of mail?
If you look more closely at either the gods of Greece,
who were dazzlingly beautiful, immortal, wise beings, or

*Abridged.—Ed.
i '''Gymnasium in Russia a secondary school, roughly the equiva­
lent of the English Grammar or High School.—ZV,
46 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

ill the deiinilions Christianity makes oi its gods when it

says that their gods or their God (tile trinity, three in one)
is all-beneficent, all-powerful, all-righteous, all-present—
then you may think that man is not very like this, that
man is far from being all-powerful or all-beneficent. The
point is that the pagans in their gods and the Christians in
their God were creating the ideal of man. When from the
depths of his soul man dreamed of what he would like to
be, he produced the ideal of the mighty hero or the god,
who is a hero, only immortal, with the whole Universe at
his service and all possibilities for development to the ut­
termost.
That is what man wanted to be. Man bears within him
his own ideal.
Let us take, for example, the human body. The body car­
ries its ideal within it. If you ask a physical training spe­
cialist what the normal human body ought to be like, he
will not tell you to take a hundred people, measure their
chest, heart etc., divide out to get average figures, and that
will be your normal measurement. No, that is not what the
expert in physical training will say. He will say a human
body should be developed so that its muscles attain the
maximum size possible without damage lo the heart etc.
He will want to show you each organ of the body given
the maximum development possible without adverse effect
on the other organs. That is, he will want to demonstrate
harmonious maximum development of all organs of the hu­
man body: a healthy heart, healthy lungs, healthy stomach,
healthy muscles, strong bones—everything in its place,
everything prepared for movement, everything properly fed
by the bloodstream. And you will at once get an impres­
sion of a beautiful being, a harmonious being, whom it is
a pleasure to look at and who himself feels joy that he is
alive. The physical education of a human being should
bring its human material, misused by life, spoilt by heredi­
ty—our distorted modern human material—to development
into such an image. Such is physical education.
Now let us put the same question in the field of intellec­
tual education. When a man is asked what he would wish
to be, lie answers through his religion: I wish for omni­
science, I want to know everything. But to know everything,
given our brief human life, when we are far from winning
 WHAT IS EDUCATION?

eternal life, is not possible. To lit the full volume of all the
sciences into one head is an impossibility. What is more,
all our contemporary culture is structured in such a way
that one man takes certain duties upon himself, another
lakes otliers, and it is not possible at one and the same
lime to lie an equally good doctor, painter, musician and
technologist. It does not happen. Every good citizen in our
society has his own speciality, in which he perfects him­
self, which he knows inside out, to which he is accustomed
and in which, therefore, he works very well. So is the man
educated in general to be lost? Is no omniscience ever to
he given to man? Is it that one is to be an engineer, an­
other an agronomist, a third maybe a tailor, and each will
know only his own special trade, in the same way ia i
is not possible in our living body to unite the cells of the
•‘earl and the cells of the brain—for they are quite diffei-
°nt, having different purposes and separate existences.
No, of course not. Human society is moving in the di
'•action of division of labour. A genuinely humane, a piop-
ar society takes the path of division of labour in order to
acquire the largest possible common capital bot“ . ‘
ferial goods and of knowledge. But if no one was conscious
of this common store of knowledge, of what medicine
achieving in its field, sociology, geography, astronomj in
their fields, of what chemistry, mechanics, biology and pe­
dagogics in fact represent; if everyone knew only his m\n
work, and general conclusions from othei e v
were unknown to him—then our culture would fall apa .
An educated man is one who knows all this m general,
in summary, but who also has his own speciality, wheie
he knows his own business thoroughly, and who can say
of the rest ‘ nothing human is alien to me . A man who
knows the fundamentals and the conclusions in technology,
and medicine, and law, and history, etc., is truly an educat­
ed man. lie is truly moving towards the ideal of omni­
science, but not in such a way that he only skims the sur­
face of everything. He must have his speciality, his work,
but at the same time lie must be interested in everything
and capable of entering an area of knowledge. Such a man
hears the whole concert being performed around him; all
the sounds arc within his range, they all blend together in­
to a single harmony, which we call culture. And at the
48 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

same time lie himself is playing one instrument in it, ho

plays well and makes his valuable contribution to the com­
mon wealth, and this common wealth is all, as a whole, re­
flected in his consciousness, in his heart.
Such is an intellectually developed man, an educated
man.
Now let us take artistic, aesthetic education. Just as 1
mentioned doctors and lawyers, so one must also speak ol
artists. If you have talent, you may become an artist—a
specialist. But woe unto you if you as an artist say, "1
don’t understand music at ail, 1 don’t recognise its claims,
my business is painting.” And, equally, woe unto you if
you say, “What business of mine is astronomy, I still be­
lieve the sun revolves around the earth.”
No one should be an ignoramus. Everyone should know
the fundamentals of all the sciences and ail the arts. Wheth­
er you are a shoemaker or a professor of chemistry, if
your soul is dead to any of the arts, you are severely han­
dicapped, just as if you had only one eye or were deaf. For
the education or formation of a man lies precisely in this,
that everything in which humanity creates its history and
its culture, everything reflected in those works which are
useful to man, or console him, or simply give him delight
in life—all this should be accessible to each man, but at
the same time he should have some speciality. Not necessar­
ily just one only—there are some people of such great tal­
ent that they can have two: for instance, one of our major
composers, Borodin,2 was also a scientist, a chemist. Such
things do happen, and they can only cause humanity to
rejoice. But in no case should specialisation kill general
education, or general education kill a man’s specialisation,
for in the latter case one gets dilettantism, one of the most
offensive phenomena.
The dilettante, the man who does everything for pleas­
ure, who plucks the flowers and skims off the cream, should
not exist. It is vitally important that in some one field a
man should himself be a creator, that in it he should im­
merse himself in work, stretching his individual powers and
creating with his heart’s blood and his brain’s sap inven­
tions of real importance to humanity. If a man has not this
within him, if he is only a dilettante, he cannot be called
an educated man.
 W1IAT IS EDUCATION? 49

Wo will now pass on to ethics, to morality. Even when

we were speaking ol the intellectual, technical and artistic
development of a man, we might have asked ourselves
'Wait, you say that all humanity should be at the service
of each man, that everything produced in the mines, the
fields, the gardens, in the mills and factories, in artists'
studios and workshops of all kinds, in theatres and acade­
mies, in universities and laboratories—that all this should
be accessible to each man, that each of us should roll up
his sleeves and work in his own place for, say, eight hours,
and then go to the temple of human culture and there de­
light in the work not of his own hands only, but of those
of all society. But does this happen in the bourgeois
world?” No, the vast majority of the so-called “common
people”, which bears the main burden of labour, is com­
pletely cut off from this culture, is absolutely unable to
make use of it.
Furthermore we see that almost everywhere specialisa­
tion has been carried so far that it disfigures the image of
man. They have gone so completely into their special fields
that even in a comparatively progressive country like Ger­
many the specialisation cripples the real man. And at the
same time there is a mass of parasites eating the bread of
idleness, who distort the image of man in that they only
enjoy themselves, they create nothing, which causes the
creative power of their spirit to atrophy. They are like the
parasites which gradually lose both legs and wings and be­
come nothing but a bag of an insect nourished by another
organism. This is the greatest disfigurement, and however
it may be adorned with brilliant artistic refinements, it
still remains disfigurement, ugliness. It infects the whole
of life. And for this reason over practically the whole face
of our contemporary culture we do not see a truly educated
man.
When man drew his ideal in respect of ethics in the
image of God, he said that God was all-beneficent, that he
was bounteously loving, that in his love he comprehended
all men. All men? No, that one cannot say. . .
When the gospel says “Be ye therefore perfect, even as
your father in heaven is perfect”, listen to what iliai Fniilm.
in heaven says: “Vengeance is mine, I wiU r “nav’’ H*
perfection is not impaired because he is going t<j sit '
4 -0 1 1 2 U 111
50 ANATOLI Lli N ACLLAKSK Y

judgement on men on the judgement day, and send unre­

pentant sinners to a torment such as human power cannot
summon up—eternal fire. So, God in man’s imagination is
a being of great love and of great wrath. Love can triumph
in its final form only when there shall he no more objects
for wrath, when there shall be no ugliness and no malice.
But until then, so long as they do exist, they are to be ex­
terminated. So one day man in his triumph, when he shall
have to struggle no more, will perhaps be an image of pure
rejoicing—“The countenance with triumph gleams”.^ Bui
until victory comes, until then we must send our shafts
whining into the target—the monster that would break
apart our culture. Until then man must be a fighter. What
lor? For the image of man, for its forming, for the educa­
tion that forms it.
And the revolution, the socialist revolution, is a revolu­
tion in education, both in and ouL of school. This revolu­
tion is a revolution in the formation, the education of man,
a revolution of great love not only towards those who today
are disfigured and deformed and so uneducated, but to­
wards our sons and grandsons, whom we love because in
them we find that man we should like to have been, hut
that we ourselves, unfortunately, cannot be. This absence
of realising oneself as a fine human being turns into a ter­
rible yearning lor the ideal, and into wrath against what­
ever stands in the way of humanity on its way to the ideal.
From this point of view the revolution is the revolt of man,
who forms or educates himself not in separate individuali­
ties hut in the whole of society, for one cannot give a man
an ethical education if a real society has not been created.
Only in a proper society, in which each person in truth
works not in order that someone else should make use of
his labour, but in order to make his contribution to the
common capital, to the common temple in which he himself
lives and he himself prays to the great and the beautiful—
only in such a society is a truly educated man possible,
only there can he open his heart, and cease to say with
Maupassant that man is always alone and even his best
friend is an enigma to him.4 Such mistrust of one to an­
other has been sown in men’s hearts by the fault of social
conditions, of private property; it must he melted, hearts
must join with other hearts in an atmosphere of brother-
 W1IAT IS EDUCATION?

Iiuud, au atmosphere of love and mutual help. And for tile

very sake of that love a man must feel a burning indigna­
tion every time he meets with the monster, injustice; it
must be swept from the face oi the earth.
So it is clear what the aims of education should be. It
should strive Lo create out of a man deformed by today’s
society a person of physical beauty, able to perform abso­
lutely all that is dictated by the presence of those organs
which now we see repressed, not developed. He must de­
velop all his organs harmoniously, so that they should not
hiuder one another. And society as a whole must also de­
velop all its organs in such a way that they should not
hinder one another. Just as in the organism of an educated
man every cell lives and functions for the good of all, aim
0very thing blends together in llie sensation of happiness, so
*U society everything must serve the common cause, ana
uuch separate individual must exert his maximum crea ivc
efforts so that all should blend together in one harmony.
And this harmony of all, which we call culture, is e u
nation. The schools must serve this education. But how
van they do this? Can they give a man an education sue
us this, in all its fullness? No, this cannot be attained m
uny term of yoars, the process oi such an education goes
with a man from the cradle to the grave. As long as a man
jives, he is still learning. And there is no period.at whic
*10 ought not to he learning. Life itself is so c
that one lias to learn, not only because every art and every
lienee is continually progressing, but also because the life
around us sets us new tasks every month, obliges us to
accommodate ourselves to something new. A iamous apa
uese arlist said that only at the age of seventy did he at
last understand what draftsmanship really was, only a
seventy did he feel himself Lo be a real artist. And this in­
cidentally was a true, a great artist, who had done a great
deal of line work before then, but at the age of seventy he
performed literally miracles with the brush and had per­
force to be acknowledged practically the greatest draftsman
who ever lived. 5
i\ot only has one to learn all the time, one must at the
same time be constantly alert, flexible, one must be open
to new' impressions, llow terrible, if by education one
means that at twenty-two years of age a man is set once
54
2 ANATOLI LUNAC1IAHSKY

and for all in a final mould. No, lie mu si continually ac­

commodate himself to the new, he must respond lo every
nesv sound, be capable of catching each new shade, each
new discovery.
You know that there are old people of such a type that,
however much one may show them that is new and line,
they will still say, “No, in our day things were belter, eve­
rything in our day was better, it was another race of peo­
ple then. No stuff of heroes ye.,! In fact this is of course
nothing very terrible, just a clinging to the forms of life
of the time when a man was himself formed.
It is a great art to be a child, but life itself teaches ns
this art. Almost everyone is capable of being a child, just
don’t hinder his child’s joy. Do not hinder, do not destroy
this capacity one of the marks of genius—to rejoice in
lile. Later, when we pass on to youth, then to maturity and
then to old age, the great art of life is the most important
art of all. Yes, it is one of the great arts—to be a fine old
man. And it is perhaps in this that humanity finds a fuller
expression than anywhere else—in the wise elder whose
heart is open to all that is new, who welcomes the new'
generation, who passes his experience on to it, who can say
that his life has indeed been lived by the light of love.
And then that life comes to iLs calm and majestic setting,
when a man full of days, not troubling himself about life
beyond the grave, dies in the knowledge that what he has
done is now given over into the hands of future genera­
tions . . .
All this has to be learned. A man has barely accustomed
himself to seeing himself as young, when another time is
already upon him, and if he cannot meet face to face that
which for some others means misfortunes and horror, he
will go down. We must learn always. So, education is not
a matter of school only. The school gives only the keys to
education. The school must teach a man to work, it must
lay a foundation of certain definite methods of approach­
ing all the mystery represented by the world, it musL in
this way give the first push, and after that life will roll
further on, and no one can say in advance what a man’s
patfi will prove to be.
Extra-mural education is the whole of life! All his life
a man should be educating himself, because the ideal is
 WHAT IS EDUCATION? 53

rlislanl and there should be no moment spent quite with­

out gains. If there is one, that is a moment he has stolen
from his own life. Of course sleep is necessary, rest is nec­
essary. But the sleep and the rest are necessary only in
the proportion that will enable him afterwards, having
gained new strength, to catch up on the time lost. There is
a saying “No who sleeps sins not". No, the man who sleeps
too much sins terribly, he is losing lime, killing lime; and
lie who kills lime is"killing himself, killing the image of
man in himself, killing society and killing the very ideal
of true humanity. When one or another group of clerks
gels together and says, “Let’s play a few rubbers of whist.
1° kill the lime” they are describing their occupation abso­
lutely accurately: they are four murderers, engaged in kit ­
ing one another and killing socially useful time. Their life
is so shallow and impoverished that only here, at the greon
•able, can some customs clerk or register-keeper feel in
•hero is some chance of a bit of luck coming Ins ^ay, o
bis being in on a “big deal”- l h a t is a great event for him.
be has no other events in his life.
A man who seeks to educate himself should not lull time,
■'or him all events, every insignificant happening raises a
question, and to find the answer ho has to dig into book..
ask questions, and then take in fully what lie has discov­
ered. And what does “taking in” mean? To make some­
thing part of him, make it an element in Ins own riches, a
man’s real wealth is that which he has taken in, made lus
W *V11. . 'll

There are amateurs who have their own picture gallery.

Iheir own theatres. But they have taken in none ol tins,
and so I]1 o owner of these things is not they, but the pen
niloss artist who will come to the gallery and be able lo
admire with full understanding this or that picture. He is a
thousand times more its owner than the one who paid a
thousand roubles but did nothing to take in the picture, to
make it a source of his own joy.
The school gives opportunities for making things one s
own.
And what is ouL-of-school, extra-mural education, for what
have* you been gathered here? You are gathered here so
Mini you can leach, and learn, out of school. Extra-mural
education is the business of creating, and utilising, centres
54 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

of culture which can help a man to make his life not a

mere passing of the time, not a simple process. This is the
essence, this is the aim of what is called extra-mural edu­
cation: museums, libraries, theatres, people’s universities,
courses, gymnastics clubs, etc. Make all this accessible (o
the population, draw the population into all (his, so that
they can learn, and teach how learning should be done, so
that they can give their soul, all that they have which is
of value, into the common treasury.
Here in Russia this work acquires an especially keen
significance. It is one thing to say, “Life is a sea of every­
day living, one must be able to swim and to make one’s
way to the distant, promised shores of better living.” If is
another matter to say, “People arc drowning, we must
learn to swim in order to save them.” Here in Russia there
have been no real schools, no one has been through a
real school. Our schools disable people, tear them apart
from one another, give portions of information which is
then forgotten. And how many people there are who walk
about with closed eyes and do not know that they arc blind,
that they have only to open their eyes and they will see
the sky, the sun and the earth! For us extra-mural educa­
tion is a gigantic apparatus for propagating a number of
educational, i.e. scientific and artistic values, a gigantic ap­
paratus for the cultural enlightenment of the people that
lias been kept in dark basements, that has been kept in
inole-borrows under ground, that has been given no chance
to spread its wings—in order that the people should be
able to make full use of its won victory.
Politically it has triumphed already, economically it is
beginning to take all the centres of production into its pow­
erful hand. But how will it govern, how will it run its
economy, if it has no knowledge? It will gain knowledge in
the schools, but “the snail is on its way, it will get then*
sometime”. We must give knowledge now, and not to the
rising generation only, from whom we shall, let us hope,
make men of a new kind, but to the very people who have
just won the victory. Clive them the opportunity to change
society, give them knowledge!
The physical hunger we feel now is much less dangerous
Iban the spiritual hunger, than the malnutrition of the pen
pie in the cultural sense. How many mistakes the people
 WHAT IS EDUCATION? 55

is making, how many evil men it is advancing, men who

disgrace the workers’ and peasants’ cause by their disgust­
ing trickeries! But what is the people to do when it has
not got knowledge, when it is obliged to snatch at all those
who come forward? What is it to do, when its state power
was in the early days sabotaged by the intelligentsia out
of political prejudice? Mistakes are being made at every
step, but the people has faith in itself, it has the sincere
and firm conviction that it has to triumph, it has the sense
of thirst for knowledge, all the more so since it has brought
down the building of the old culture, is living among the
ruins and laying the foundation of a new building.
In order to know what to demolish and how to demol­
ish, in order to lay the foundations of the new building
correctly, a mass of knowledge is needed. And we fear lest
the people-in-blindncss. although it has realised its own
strength and has become the master politically, may prove
unable to got rid in the economic order of the evil inherit­
ed from its tsars and its gentry. That is why this matter
arises so very urgently here and now.
And your business is to carry out all that is normally
carried out by the school, i.e. to give simple literacy, but
at the same time never to forget that the ideal is not in
Ibis, nor in pulling a man through to master this trade or
that, but in making him a fighter for the humanity of man.
And a man can only become that when he knows what the
w'orld is, how it came to be what it is, how the present
juncture arose from the capitalist system, what relation to
this is borne by our scientific, artistic and economic tasks,
and what place I, Ivan or Stepan, have in this world, and
what 1 am to do. Give him the ability to do what he ought
lo do, in the period of the greatest revolution the world has
ever seen!
That is why, comrades, our worker-peasant government
cannot but attribute the very foremost, colossal significance
lo extra-mural education. That is why no resources can pos-
sibliy be sufficient for this, and that is why the workers’
and peasants’ government will spare nothing to help the
cause of out-of-school education.
If we had a sufficient number of teachers, we could even
now cover the whole of Russia with people’s universities.1’
But this is not so easy to do, because the number of people
56 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

capable of acting as bearers of light in this wav is not

great. We must first train lecturers, train those who will he
the leaders, and this must be the top priority job, it would
seem, that we have to get down to. In the meantime we
must be satisfied with the little that we can do for the
masses straight away.
None the less I must say that while extra-mural educa­
tion is a mighty lever raising up the masses o[ the people
to a new level, it is a no less mighty lever for transforming
those who consider themselves educated. We will make
educated people work in this field, even those who do not
themselves want to do it; we will draw in those who do
coiTio halfway to meet us, so that they can use their edu­
cation to serve the people. The crumbs of knowledge they
have they must give to the people, and in giving them they
will not become poorer, on the contrary, they will become
richer.
Working with adults is not the same as working in
school. Although even in the school we demand that (he
loacher be a co-worker with the pupil, there we are after
jail dealing with an immature pupil and a mature teacher:
heic we have a man who has been cut off from labour, who
has known no real hardships, who has no social instinct, no
revolutionary sweep of a creative soul—he will quite simp­
ly be a learner from the workers and the peasants to whom
he comes, whom he starts to teach. Yes, in teaching he will
have to learn! He, coming to them, must with hands trembl­
ing with happiness pass on to this hero-people what he
knows about physics, chemistry and so on. And he must
know that the thanks wc will receive from the people, in
simple cooperation, will give him new strength. The Rus­
sian intellectual drags out a repressed and pitiful existence.
If he can, from being a lackey of autocracy, which mould­
ed him as a future overseer of slaves, become truly a citi­
zen and imbue himself with that which fills the best among
Ihe working folk, only by working together with these
working people will he be able to become a true cilizen.
Making use of this, we shall be able to tie together in
one knot the huge chain of the people, which, filled with the
sufferings of the past, is forcing its way forward to the fu
lure, with the tiny chain of science and art, which bear so
much of value in them and which must pour their com-
 WHAT IS EDUCATION? 57

parativcly small streams into this troubled and dark river.

The confluence will bring good, for this troubled and dark
but mighty river is the medium which can give the chance
to develop and to shine lo all the good in contemporary
culture that there indeed is, for who can deny that there
is a vast deal of immense value in the science and the art
of the past. From contact with the people all this will burn
op with a new light, will lurn from a dead thing into a
live one. All this will catch alight with the flame of real
creativity and will at the same time light up the inner
depths of the gigantic but so far still dark soul of the peo­
ple, a soul dark but burning, dark but rich.
We call upon those who know to give their knowledge to
the unknowing and to become infected with the powei of
the labouring people. From the union of the two theie wil
gradually be started the creation of the educated man, the
titanic fighter who will bend all his powers to transform­
ing the face of the earth, then of the man-god, the being
lor whom, perhaps, the world was created, who will be ie
king of the natural world, but a king such as we dream ol
when we say: an educated man.
Our ideal is the image of man, of man like a god, in
relation to whom we are all raw material only, merely in­
gots waiting to be given shape, yet living ingots that bear
their own ideal within themselves. .
And at the present time—a molten time, a feverish time,
a revolutionary time, which has the power to make an im­
mense leap forward—it is we who have to go, all together
in concert, to whatever level we may belong in degree of
education —all together towards this shining future. Under
such an order of things as this the starting up of any cour­
ses. in which the workers’ and peasants’ government, that
is the bearer of the burning faith and thirst for knowledge
with which the Russian people overflow's and which thal
government is trying to arouse in you also—the starting of
such courses is a great event.
Comrades, during these recent days when Soviet power is
beginning to win victories, when the nightmare sense that
at any minute we can lose our footing, that at any minute
Ihc sword of internal plotters or the monster of external
hostility may stop the breath of the infant child that social
ism still is, lying now in its huge all-Russia cradle—now
58 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

that that is to some extent past, when our chests cnn fake
a breath of good cheer, when we see how imperialism is
everywhere crumbling, starting with Bulgaria.7 when we
feel that the time is not far distant when our victory will
be more or less complete, when we are being joined hv
thousands upon millions of our brothers who until now have
lagged behind us—during these days, travelling about Pe­
tersburg. making speeches at the opening of courses of all
kinds and clubs of all kinds, I feel a happiness that over­
flows my breast, when I see so many people ready 1o work,
and not only at the bottom level, but among the intelligent­
sia too, from whose ranks many are coming to us with great
readiness, asking onlv. “Ts what we know of any use? Take
it if it is of help.” And thev bring us their valuables,
things of great price, whose existence the man who was, in
the old terms, an educated man. sometimes did not even
suspect, and which they now place at our service.
Russia, following in the footsteps of her very own red
Petersburg, is full of the vastest spiritual potential. We
have a vast potential at our disposal in our work of building
anew, and given this potential the fear melts away that we
are very ignorant, very young, very immature, that, we are
Ihe youngest brother in the European family, a young broth-
el who has set himself to solve a problem which seems
beyond the powers even of the elder brother. We need pa­
tience, but not the patience that delays—the patience that
bends all its powers to the accomplishment of the task, that
does not despair when the whole structure is not raised u p
at once. It does not follow from this that we can work with
no great sense of urgency. All into energy, all into the great­
est possible exertion of effort—and we shall create the new
man!
The eyes of the whole world are upon us. Some have
watched us and said with secret, malicious joy. “Look, now
they stagger, now they are down—now they are up again!”
Now they see that we are putting firm roots down into the
ground, that we are about to celebrate our proletarian anni­
versary. and if there are as yet no golden fruit on the young
tree, there are already the first small leaves, the first buds
have already appeared. One among these buds, one future
blossom on the tree, is your courses, which, comrades. T
greet on behalf of the Commissariat for People’s Education.
 COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA
AND THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

The business of education in a class state, as we have

frequently written, always bears the imprint of class.
Let us leave aside for the time being the spheres of what
is called “objective knowledge”, the data of the exact sci­
ences, although even here we may mention that the aroma of
class manages to creep in the most pervasive manner even
into what might seem the most inaccessible corners of sci­
ence, up to and including mathematics.
But if we concentrate our attention on the humanities,
wo find that here those thinkers who are known for greatest
precision of method have in fact recently been establishing
the existence of huge doses of subjectivity.
A study of the methods consciously and unconsciously
used by, for instance, historians, leads one to the conclusion
that the personal equation plays a major role here, 1 and
that. even the most objective piece of historical research is,
in the last resort, a quite original bringing together of ma­
terials, from which other historians may, with equal con­
scientiousness and scientific justification, deduce the oppo­
s e conclusions. . . .
Over and above the involuntary class bias which is im­
parted in this way to the fruits of scholarly labours, and
therefore to teaching based on them, we have before us also
Ihe more or less crude forms of direct falsification of a giv­
en science to suit these or those class prejudices or to serve
these or those class interests.
Education, as a sphere of state activities, has from this
point of view always been an instrument for adjusting the
psychology of the masses to suit the intentions of this or
that class government. It goes without saying that the over­
all educational policy of a class government would appear
refracted in various ways in various strata of the social en­
vironment.
The teaching given had different aims in view as regards
Ihe education of the ruling classes, of the middle groups
60 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

(the groups of what one may call overseers), and of the

lower orders, who were for the state merely an objccl to
be worked on, and a source of labour power.
We are not denying for a moment that the socialist sys­
tem also, in the first stage of its development, i.e. in the pe­
riod of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is a society of
classes. It definitely has a politically ruling class, to wit.
the proletariat, and furthermore it must essentially be ad­
mitted that this class finds itself in a state of bitter strug­
gle to maintain its dominance and under the constant threat
of the wheel of history being turned back. Under these con­
ditions education can in no way be viewed as other than an
important weapon of class struggle in the hands of the pro­
letariat.
The whole difference between the rule of force by the
bourgeois state and the state of proletarian dictatorship lies
in the fact that the efforts of the former are directed towards
strengthening and establishing for all time the state itself,
and with it the enslavement of some people by others, while
the efforts of the latter are in the direction of suicide, so
to speak, that is, towards the creation of conditions under
which the stale itself will cease to be necessary, and
towards the full liberation of every human personality.
But the means used, the way taken, is nevertheless
force.
These are reflected in the field of education in that edu­
cation and the whole state apparatus of education must be
utilised for the purposes of communist propaganda; force
may come into this in the sense that persons forming part
of Ihe state educational mechanism who do damage to (he
business of communist propaganda, or who refuse to be a I
least its passive transmitters, must be relentlessly expelled
from the state machinery.
This apparatus must at the same time be filled, so far as
is possible, by elements capable of serving as active trans­
mitters of communist propaganda.
In accord with the vital difference between the state as
a form of force used by the bourgeoisie, and the state as a
form of force used by the proletariat, we see here also the
efforts exerted by the bourgeoisie to impose through the
school (just as through the press, etc.) their bourgeois
falsehood.
 A1U.NISI l'UOl'AUA.NDA AND THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM (jl

And tiie communist dictatorship, not flinching from the

use ol force, does its best to spread to the maximum the
lruth which is the proletariat’s and at the same time be­
longs to all humanity.
The tendentiousness of the bourgeois state is repulsive,
just as the sword of the bourgeois state is an accursed
weapon of anti-humanity.
lhe urgent propagation of communist knowledge is also
tendentious, hut the tendency is a noble one, wholly serv­
ing the interests of the development of the human race, just
as the communist sword is in Lhe transitional period an en­
tirely chivalrous weapon, defending the oppressed against
l lie oppressors. . .
Up to the present time there has in our practice been no
conjunction—not only no conjunction, 1 would say not so
much as any simple rapprochement— between communist
propaganda and the educational system.
For a communist, what kind of educational system can
exist outside of communist propaganda? Have we, propa­
gandists of communism, ever concerned ourselves with any-
tliing other than the education of the people? Is not revo­
lutionary propaganda the most genuine education oi tne
people, in the most essential held, that which touches the
people most nearly? . . »
Whenever the question arises of the Commissariat
People’s Education having the duty to act as an instrument
(,f communist education, as a powerful body for the propa­
gation of communist ideas among the entire population ol
Soviet Russia, then objections are at once raised liom two
sides.
What the supporters of “pure” and “objective” education
say is, “What! You want to subordinate the sciences to the
line of a particular party! You want to sacrifice the school­
ing of the population to the effect of mass-meeting appeals
by agitational orators?”, etc. etc.
To these objections we reply: no one is trespassing to the
slightest degree either upon freedom of scientific investiga­
tion, or upon the widest possible—ideally much wider, in­
finitely wider than anything that has existed up to now—
the widest possible education of the people through objective
knowledge: knowledge of the language, of mathematics, of
the natural sciences, of the arts, of technical skills, etc.
02 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

This general school education can with us proceed quite

Ireely precisely because the proletariat and its ideal have
not the least fear of the light of truth. Lassalle long ago
pointed out this natural affinity between science and llie
‘‘fourth estate”. 2
But we know that the schools are bound, firstly, to pre­
sent to children and young people the past of the human
race, to give a picture of the present and to illumine hopes
lor the future, and that to do this with absolute objectivity
is something no one on earth can achieve, for this absolute
objectivity is a thing hidden from the eyes of men.
We know that under the guise of objectivity people are
trying to present history to children and young people from
an outmoded point of view, from the point of view of the
outmoded classes (the landlords, the bourgeoisie) or of in­
termediate between-classes groups, from the point of view
of various petty “intellectual” ideals.
As to their being scientific or objective in nature, these
are of course mere potsherds compared to the basalt solid­
ity of a scientific socialist approach to the history of cul­
ture.
While demanding for reasons of proletarian tactics that
teaching both in and out of school should he inspired with
the spirit of scientific socialism, wo might equally well,
and with hand on heart, demand the samo for reasons of
the highest scientific objectivity.
There is actually no science or technique which would
be quite unrelated to the idea of communism or to the build­
ing of Communism.
On the contrary, all knowledge, be it the most remote
from social issues, such as knowledge of the laws of nature,
and every technical skill likewise, is illuminated with
new light when we look aL the natural world as a staircase
of laws in the increasingly conscious self-construction of a
rational, happy collective embracing all humanity, and when
we can view all work as a part fitting harmoniously into the
ever more rational plans of social and cultural construction.
So the rationalising objections made by the partisans of
independence of the school need not trouble us in the slight­
est degree, the school will be independent of the sad past
of humanity, and as objective as possible, and as scientilic
as possible, if it becomes as communist as possible.
 i.u.UMUN'IST PROPAGANDA AND THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM GU

But wo meet witli objections, unfortunately, irom the op­

posite side also—from some comrades, themselves commu­
nists, including and in particular some individual propagan­
dists o! our party.
They are afraid that if the Commissariat for People’s
education is recognised as the ruling body for propagating
the communist truth, then the current of purely party prop­
aganda will flow into the broad stream of general educa­
tion, and that burning questions of the day—politics, tactics,
teaching the programme etc.—will be watered down and lost
in the shoreless expanse of general education.
1 have even met with objections that formulated this idea
with greater naivetei some comrades have with serious faces
assured me that one must not take the business of prop­
aganda away from party people and entrust it to high
school teachers. f. _
It goes without saying that it would be monstrous
lo allow even for a single minute such a thinning down
with other elements of our party propaganda; the point is not
itt weakening it, but in strengthening it.
The party propagandists, both personally and in the veiy
same organisational associations which now exist for them,
remain as before, and they are subject to no new control, on-
iy to that of the Central Committee. Their link with the
local parly branches remains absolutely inviolable, and they
now have at their service the entire apparatus of the Com­
missariat for Education. They can establish themselves with­
in it, they can make use of our schools, people s universities,
social centres for common people, libraries, theatres, con­
certs, exhibitions, etc. _ . n
It is not a matter of subordinating the Party to the Com­
missariat for Education (and taking that to include the teach­
ers and scientific workers who are its direct employees, and
who are in their vast majority very far removed from com­
munism); it is a matter of just the reverse, of subordinat­
ing that apparatus and that staff to the Party, as directly as
possible.
I repeat, the work at present being carried out cannot
suffer any damage, for no changes are being made in the
business of party propaganda by its being brought closer
to the work of the Commissariat; but a very essential change
is being made in the work of the latter, inasmuch as it,
 ANATOLI LUNACHAHSKV

striving to convert itself into an instrument for sprcadine

communist science and scientific communism, cannot per
form this task without the most especial help of the Com
munist Party.
Thus the idea which I should like to see discussed and
grasped by our party propagandists is not that party propa­
ganda should be part of the Commissariat for People’s Edu­
cation, but that the work of the Commissariat for People’s
Education should be a part, and a very, very important part,
of the work of the Communist Party.
 THE TASKS OF EXTRA-MURAL EDUCATION
IN SOVIET RUSSIA *

Comrades! The phenomenon of education is, essentially,

llu* main pivot of rational being for every human individ­
ual that deserves to live, and for the whole conscious life
of human society. If the old proverb says that man does
not live lo eal, but eats in order to live, one cannot by any
means say that a man is educated in order to live and does
not live in order to be educated. He lives exclusively in or­
der to he educated, to educate himself. Each minute of life
and eacli action in life which does not strengthen our spirit,
which does not widen the channel of our life, is a gift lost.
Through a long succession of millennia men got their edu­
cation in dependence on cosmic and elemental causes and
were led, as it were, by nature. Driven by need and by na­
ture at one stage of development, one group after another
then emerges into the band of sunlight, the light of self-
understanding and self-knowledge, and then sets itself a
goal—its own spiritual development, a conscious, ultimate
goal of its own. And when we hear the words “extra-mural
education”, we are seized with involuntary fear at the sweep
of the tasks it sets.
Certainly the main part, the main segment of work in
the education of a human being falls on his youth, and it
may be that skills of living acquired and work done when
a child is of pre-school age are of boundless importance. We
all attribute immense importance to pre-school education
(which was the theme of the congress 1 which look place
a few days before this of ours), but pre-school education
does none the less have elements of primitive simplicity.
Acquaintance with life, art, technology and the past of hu­
manity is gained after school has been started, and happy
are those countries where every citizen finds all of this in
school, under the guidance of a freely acting and highly
^Abridged.—Ed.
5-01120
0(3 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

qualified teacher. But even in these countries, which are

hypothetical rather than actually existing, school learning
can never achieve perfection. Through all his life, even
though grey locks may cover his head, a man can, will and
must go on receiving education, and thus all education re­
ceived outside of school, since all life cannot be fitted into
a school framework, is in fact the process of extra-mural
education.
It would however be paradoxical and absurd to take the
tasks facing the Commissariat for Education, or this con­
gress on extra-mural education, in as wide a sense as this.
By extra-mural education in its technical sense one must
understand the help which the state and the school give in
the matter of education to people who have been left with­
out help in this aspect, that is, those to whom the school
gave too little, and those who did not go to school. To help
them to go further, to fill in and even up the education of
those who in school failed to acquire enough knowledge or
who received an education disabling the soul rather than
assisting its growth such is the object of extra-mural edu­
cation.
Although we have thus narrowed down the task of extra­
mural education, we still have a boundless expanse before
us. In Russia especially, where there is an enormous num­
ber of illiterate people, workers in extra-mural education are
faced with a huge task—to ensure the right and the duty
of every person to be literate. This problem must concern
all of us in every way and to full capacity. This is the daily
bread of extra-mural education in Russia!
It is pleasanter, of course, to get carried away by matters
like people’s theatre, to sketch in the prospects of wonder­
ful social centres, but this is something not to be dreamed
of merely, but worked for. First of all one must descend to
the basement floor of extra-mural education and remember
that the basic, hard, mass work is precisely the struggle
against illiteracy, against the most crude and primeval ig­
norance.
We can never, of course, limit ourselves by dividing off
the road before us with mile-posts, as it were—saying that
in this stage we simply have to make the people literate. It
need hardly be said that literacy is a functional concept,
which under our very hands develops into a concept involv-
 THE TASKS OF EXTRA-MURAL EDUCATION 67

ing ability, power. VVliat use is a literate person who reads

no books':’ This would be someone condemned to relapse back
into illiteracy. And we know that the number of people in
Russia who learned to read and then forgot again is mon­
strously great; and not only in Russia, even in more developed
countries one meets a similar phenomenon.
Literacy is a key. And you have given a man nothing ii
you have given him only a key but not the chest or treasure-
box it will open, and similarly, literacy is not a value in it­
self although without it other values are almost unattain­
able. We must start from the same point that the school does,
i.e. one must think not of mere literacy, but of giving the
whole adult population, accommodating ourselves to all levels
of its spiritual development, the general-educational food
which it vitally needs. In speaking of accommodating our­
selves to different levels, 1 mean that all kinds of courses,
Sunday schools, evening courses, continuation schools, sep­
arate lectures, etc.—all must be calculated to provide men­
tal food for beginners who have no scientific concepts, no
basic training, and likewise for those at a higher level edu­
cationally, perhaps right up to meeting the needs of the best
educated. Here, in Russia we must not reduce culture to
primitive terms and make the further development of edu­
cated people impossible.
We can raise up the masses only if scientific and cultu­
ral work at the top level continues. In order to carry on ex­
tra-mural education we need extra-mural teachers, and in
order that they should be able themselves to learn, we need
extra-mural professors.
We need a living culture of the highest order. The social
organism must develop evenly, from the lower levels of cul­
ture to the higher.
The popularisation of scientific knowledge, the populari­
sation of the arts, social and political propaganda—such
are the basic tasks of extra-mural education.
Very frequently a school-teacher takes up extra-mural
work. He has the same attitude to an illiterate adult as to
a young pupil. But a worker or a peasant can sometimes
stand higher than the teacher, in experience of life. For this
r e a s o n one must not, in teaching adults, use the usual meth­
ods practised in school. Teaching an adult to read is a
process that must take place in an atmosphere of general
5*
68 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

extension of knowledge, must be biised on leading books,

newspapers, decrees.
The same link with life, with working experience, must
remain in the case of popularisation of scientific knowledge.
Here it is desirable to reduce actual lecturing to a minimum,
replacing it with practical work in the laboratory, the facto­
ry etc.
But can one say that lectures are not needed at all, that
they are mere school-work? No, of course not. The living
word of the lecturer is of immense importance, especially
here in Russia, but so far as possible a lecturer should al­
ways and everywhere use visual aids, the magic lantern,
films in a word, draw’ the extra-mural student by every
available means into the process ol operative, active percep­
tion of knowledge.
But to what extent can the actual content of scientific
information contribute to the communist enlightenmen of
the masses?
The natural sciences are the least debatable. The very
foundations of their view of the world have to be more or
less objective, owing to the very nature of the capitalist or­
der. How can you expect either conscious or unconscious
falsification of a science dealing with plants, animals, law-s
of mechanics etc., if the economy cannot be carried on given
a falsification of truths of this kind? Inasmuch as the econ­
omy lias to be run, that machines have to function prop­
erly, that ailing stock has to be treated, that the earth has
to be fertilised, so far objective knowledge is required. For
this reason this area of knowledge is in every country pro­
foundly honourable. Its job is to question nature, using the
least wasteful and the most deeply probing methods, and to
formulate as precisely and economically as possible all that
nature dictates. We have therefore a considerable number
of scientists, both those of the very highest category and,
descending the scale, popularisers of grater or lesser de­
grees of talent, or at the very least well-informed lecturers,
to whom we can without fear entrust the whole business of
teaching the natural sciences, all the way from cosmography
to the smallest details of applied techniques.
Things are quite different in the field of the social sci­
ences. Here everything is debatable in the highest degree.
For according to how a man looks at history, what he un-
 THE TASKS OF EXTRA-MURAL EDUCATION 69

derstands as his ideal, what he sees as the most significant

factor in his present life—on all this depends which direc­
tion the man will take, what lie will do, how he will work.
Society until now was based on social inequality. Particu­
lar classes were successively dominant to a greater or lesser
degree in various countries. After the feudal lords, the cap­
italist. bourgeoisie became dominant everywhere. This cap­
italist bourgeoisie was compelled to falsify science at all
costs and all the more consciously, one may think, as time
went on.
For as time went on there appeared before the bourgeoi­
sie an increasingly dreaded foe, which it had itself brought
into being—the proletariat, which saw the past, present and
future of humanity in quite another outline, having quite
different criteria by which to assess it. And when bourgeois
science had to enter upon a life or death struggle with the
young proletarian science, that struggle was not confined to
the matter of ideals, the facts themselves were falsified and
altered to suit the ruling class—even statistics, the language
of “impartial” figures.
I am not saying that bourgeois science as a whole, or all
official university science, was worthless in the area of the
social sciences, I do not wish to say anything of the kind!
And Marx, when he counterposed bourgeois scientists such
as Adam Smith and David Ricardo to one such as Thomas
Malthus, said that Ricardo and Smith operated under the
pressure of the phenomena surrounding them and perfectly
honestly took these into account; it was only as representa­
tives of a particular class and a particular time that they
could not reach the full truth, since their eyes were turned
in another direction and so did not see it. But Malthus, said
Marx, consciously distorted science; by his life and his
writings he showed himself to be a conscious apologist of
the bourgeois class. 2
Of course both kinds of elements are represented in sci­
ence. So far as consciously falsified science is concerned, it
is the less harmful, it dies naturally as soon as criticism
touches it. So far as involuntary falsification is concerned,
here the matter is more complex. And when we, represen­
tatives of the young proletarian science, talk to various
hoary-headed professors sitting on their twelve or fifteen vol­
ume's of Collected Works, they are convinced that they are
70 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

uttering exceptionally objective, exceptionally significant-

thoughts when they say: “Science is objective”, “Science is
free” . And when we Marxists speak of class consciousness,
the proletarian world outlook, the proletarian scientific move­
ment. they assert that this is a narrowly class approach
or even a purely party one.
Where we see white, they see black. They think that the
social science which they took in with their mother’s milk,
likewise from the lectures of their professors, who for them
were great authorities, that that science is “objective”. While
from our point of view it is from the very root upwards
infected with a thousand prejudices horn oT bourgeois gov­
ernment, which distorts the essence of social processes and
puts them in a false light. Here the disagreements between
them and us are so serious that one cannot help asking the
question. What are we to do about the major part
ot the educational army at our disposal for extra-mural
work?”. . .
We must turn our attention to the most concentrated
work of both the lecture/scminar type and the teacher-train­
ing college type, in order to get the great yeast of social
science, based on scientific socialism, multiplying and mak­
ing the dough of education rise both in and out of school.
Without energetic work being done in this direction we
shall continue to hear all the time, from our comrades in
the localities and even from those in Petrograd and Moscow,
declarations like this: “Now we have a syllabus written, an
excellent syllabus, with the object of raising the level of so­
cial knowledge among the masses. The reading of courses
on it should be entrusted to people who are at least definite
socialists, but there aren’t any. And we have to entrust work
on the syllabus to people who are hostile to it, who will say
‘No’ at all points where it should he ‘Yes’. And then the syl­
labus is turned into its own opposite.”
And often there is no way out of this situation. I have
remarked on this difficulty. Tt is a difficulty which Ihe Com­
missariat for Education has to wrestle with continually. And
we get people saying to us from one side, “Think nothing of
it. The lecturer will teach something or the other, and the
masses—our own people—will sort it out for themselves; if
they should drink a ‘cup of cold poison’ it won’t actually kill
them!” And on the other side we have others saying, “Whal
 THE TASKS OF EXTRA-MURAL EDUCATION 71

have wo got being taught here? This is straight counter­

revolution!”
So what do we do? Close down most of the schools, most
of the institutions of the extra-mural system? Destroy the
framework of cultural work, and leave it to grow up from
below, like the grass in springtime? This too, of course, is an
absolute absurdity, and it is clear that there has to be a
golden mean.
There must be a certain amount of sifting out, a certain
amount of cheking, and the most energetic work possible on
producing social science teachers of a new type. I know
that many people intentionally or involuntarily are adjust­
ing themselves to suit the new times: intentionally when
they get careful about propagating those truths which are
not quite the thing at the present time and instead empha­
sise those elements which are new: and involuntarily when
they are really carried away by the sight of the working
class in struggle, which they have in progress before their
eyes. And before our eyes we have many people being re­
born, some suddenly, as Saul was changed into Paul, some
slowly and gradually, but emerging as new people. And
this process will gather momentum as time goes on, for
teachers, the army of those who give instruction, are recruit­
ed in the main from the intelligentsia and not from the bour­
geoisie.
While the intelligentsia, being for decades under pressure
from tsarism and capital, did sometimes without realising it
(urn untrue to itself, it is now quite natural that the firmer
fhe new system becomes, the faster—rising in an ever
erreater wave—will the intelligentsia flow towards us—the
new master of the world, who will free it from its imagined
“objectivity”, who will liberate the intelligentsia for real,
trenuino free creativity . . . So there is no need for us to let
our heads droop too much. These difficulties are temporary,
and the methods I am speaking of—selecting the most sui-
fnble elements, laying greater stress on factual knowledge
gather than interpretation in those cases when the latter
cannot be entrusted to someone who is far removed in spir-
jl from the new Russia, and at the same time working
0iost energetically on the training of appropriate staff—lliese
methods will relieve us of these difficulties.
Concerning popularisation of the arts, this is a matter
72 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

which may at first sight seem a luxury, and people very

often think that extra-mural education has to deal with art,
maybe, in order to “instruct while entertaining”, as
the Latin fag has it. This is an entirely r i d i c u l o u s
view of the tasks facing extra-mural education on the
arts side.
I will not touch upon abstruse theories of art of one kind
and another, about which one might talk for a very long
time. I shall dwell on the more or less generally accepted
fact that dominates all theories of art: art is a force which
affects the feelings of the mass of hearers or spectators,
evoking particular sentiments expressed by the artist. This
is undoubtedly true. One speaks of the art of speech only
insofar as the orator is being not only propagatory (i.c. ex­
tending the area of his hearers’ knowledge) but also a g i t a ­
tional (i.e. moving their feelings)... A man’s character
changes when he is carried away, when he is fired, when
he loves, when the chords of his emotional, feeling essence
are touched. And this is what art does! And all peoples,
even at the dawn of their existence, have recourse to all
manner of social dances and songs.
Art organises human hearts in the mass as science organ­
ises heads, and yields as its direct result a moral uplifting
of the masses. But for this to be so, the art must not be of
the corrupting kind to which the bourgeoisie has resorted in
the most recent period of its existence. . .
At the same time, in the art of the past very many groups
of the intelligentsia have rebelled in the most active pos­
sible manner against the bourgeois spirit. Throughout the
course of history they have constantly sought to create an
artistic consciousness for themselves, a religious-artistic art.
In the epochs of highest development of any given human
group we find great art, even in the past, art which can
serve as a source of every conceivable inspiration and joy for
us. And on the basis of this art, of these great treasures
we have inherited from the past, we can foster an art which
corresponds to our great times, especially seeing that it was
at the time of the great French Revolution that the foun­
dations of a new, mass art were laid. Half the nineteenth
century lived by that art. In music, (he French Revolution
produced Beethoven, in architecture—the Empire style,
which is the greatest style that modern Europe has created,
 THE TASKS OF EXTRA-MURAL EDUCATION 73

and from the literary works of the Revolution flowed two

mighty streams—Romanticism and Realism.
The lime of that revolution, which many considered “pro­
saic”, and saw in its actual art only tendentiousness, in fact
gave a giant push forward to creativity. The people’s festi­
vals which Paris saw in its time are now being carried on
here, in red Petrograd and in Moscow, at a higher level of
the movement than that achieved by the French Revolu­
tion.
In just the same way we see in the field of science also
a whole series of the greatest possible changes, evoked by
the Revolution or accompanying it.
Thus we are inclined to think that art has a direct con­
nection with all work on the education of the soul of socie­
ty. For the word education has, after all, a three-fold mean­
ing. On the one hand, that, of a man forming himself, i.e.
bringing himself closer lo the form or image he has set as
his ideal. On the other hand, such an educated man, who
has been turned from a human semi-finished product, a hu­
man “ingot” or “pig”, into something approaching that
majestic concept of Man, who has perhaps not yet been
born, whom we want to bring to birth—this educated man
as an individual unit cannot exist without the appropriate
conditions being provided. He needs an appropriate atmo­
sphere, a society of people who are not just an agglomera-
lion, a plenary meeting of educated persons, but a new or­
ganised society, a super-organism in the full sense of the
word, in which resides a great, social soul. This is social­
ism, this is communism, this is what we counterpose to the
society that is just an accumulation of people. Here individ-
unlism and social sense blond together. The business of
education is not only that of educating a person, a person­
ality. but the business of forming the human race, form­
ing society.
Lastly, man forms not only himself and his social en­
vironment, but his physical environment also. He not only
clothes himself, creates tools, buildings, cities etc., but also
extends his parks and orchards around those cities; changes
the course of rivers; alters the outline of the sea-coast., mak­
ing bays or isthmuses where there were none before, and
in this way he creates a life that meets all the spiritual de­
mands of this man who has created himself.
74 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

From this point of view, work on self-education, work of

a social and political nature, and aesthetic work—all these
are channels of education, all these make their way towards
the image, the prototype, which we picture to ourselves and
call the ideal.
Proceeding from this, one must say a few words about
two further tasks which we cannot neglect.
We cannot neglect technical extra-mural education. One
must not dream about the education of the individual, one
cannot think of^ attaining social ideals of whatever Icind.
if society is sitting on a branch that has gone rotten. We
shall fall down and break our heads, be we ever so excel­
lent ambassadors and leaders. Our Red Army can be victo-
lious on all fronts, our political leaders can amaze the whole
world with their foreign policy, but we can none the less
suFFer disaster in our revolution, if we have no railways and
no bread and produce nothing.
ITere in Russia, this depends to a largo extent on gen­
eral causes, on the destruction wrought by war. on economic
backwardness, but besides this, of course, we also have in
all respects insufficiently trained workers—this is what
chiefly holds things up. We have people who are insufficient­
ly trained technically, insufficiently trained in point of ac­
tual labour discipline, insufficiently trained in poinl of mor­
al comprehension of the tasks before us. All these aspects
merge into one unbroken whole.
We cannot address ourselves to the economic tasks if we
have not got workers who know how to work. We have few
skilled workers, a derisory number of engineers, still fewer
middle-rank technical personnel, in general a very small
number of people* trained for anything. Wo have to increase*
that quanlily by all available means, and to improve
quality also.
At the present time we see urban culture seeping away
in the countryside. Perhaps this is a process that will bring
salvation in the current situation: perhaps thanks to this
tens and hundreds of thousands of working-class people
have taken root in the villages; perhaps this will create the
groundwork which will enable us to build a real bulwark of
Soviet ideals in the countryside; perhaps thanks to this the
load will he taken off the cities, which in these grim days
cannot food themselves. But if we tip over on to the far
 THE TASKS OF EXTRA-MURAL EDUCATION 75

side of tlio watershed and turn into a typical agrarian re­

public, Ilien however much we may talk about communism
and socialism there will be no communism and no socialism;
the laws of social development will produce instead the
srrnwlh of a rural bourgeoisie. . .
For both political and economic reasons we need techni­
cal education.
Very shortly the Commissariat for Education will publish
a declaration stressing that the unified labour school could
not and was not intended to damage technical education
proper, that the unified labour school on the contrary is itself
a technical school and aims to transform itself into a poly-
technical school. In this declaration there will be directives
to workers in the localities to the effect that the labour
school must not cause closures of special technical schools.
And a corresponding note must be sounded all the time in
extra-mural education too. The tasks of extra-mural tech­
nical education must in no way be neglected.
I know what difficulties await us in this matter, but 1 al­
so know what, immense prospects we have before us. It we
could march firmly forward along the road we have indi­
cated, there is no'doubt that extra-mural technical educa­
tion could turn those who want to acquire technical skills
into cooperative groups in various trades which, worung in
the factories, would bring their experience to bear, would
raise the labour potential of the work-force in general and
so raise the level of production. They could act as a power­
ful motive force in raising the country’s production. I can
only dwell briefly on this aspect. At this congress there
will be a special report made by people with a deep know­
ledge of this side of extra-mural education and up-to-date
information on the economic tasks facing Soviet Russia, and
you will then receive fuller elucidation of this question.
We should make mention also of physical education. I
will not expand too much on this, because this theme has
been generally well dealt with and is familiar to all. It can­
not be dealt with in detail in an introductory speech such
as mine. It is absolutely clear that through physical edu­
cation too we can achieve a higher level of consciousness
among the masses, in fostering proper care for health, which
is the foundation of all life. By developing strength, skill
and beauty, and bringing them together in group activities
76 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

in such a way that this becomes an element in social life,

the appropriate results have been achieved even in some
bourgeois countries (Germany, for instance). Their associa­
tions (Vereine) for sports and for gymnastics have attained
a high level of physical culture, and at the same time some
of these associations have become continuing cells of work­
ing-class organisation and have been used as such in case
of need. Physical education should be a collective activity,
not an individualising one, and in this field very consid­
erable achievements are possible here.
If we recapitulate that we must fight illiteracy, popularise
scientific knowledge, make people acquainted with the arts
and help to bring forward those capable of creative work
in them, and take due care of technical and of physical edu­
cation-then you see what an immeasurable field of work
opens out before you. And meanwhile we must not fail to
recognise that all this needs to be shot through with the
red thread of political propaganda. . .
By this present time Marxism has already essayed in
such depth the retelling of the whole history of humanity,
the re-investigation of all the foundations of the societies
that surround us, and has achieved such enormous results
that we can say: there is no branch of knowledge, no field
of science that cannot be taught in such a way as to form
a part of the edifice of a socialist world outlook. We can
open up the road thither starling from any science. We can
enter the innermost recesses of the social structure starting
from any science. ..
I could take any example, any science, any scientific prob­
lem, and demonstrate that nothing is easier than to link it
up with the basic stream of social propaganda. And con­
versely, there is no political problem or theme for a
meeting which cannot be treated scientifically, to demon­
strate which you could not quote a number of facts from
various branches of knowledge. This is what we should
aim to do.
We should aim, whatever knowledge it may he a man is
acquiring, to tell him what it is for. In order that he may
work better, he needs to know that he is working to build
up the country’s economy. He must know that he is a true
citizen of a new world of labour, just now awakening and
uniting. Every piece of information should be so presented
 THE TASKS OF EXTRA-MURAL EDUCATION 11

lliul il becomes, as it were, a lool in the listener’s hands,

lor llie further propagation of scientific principles.
1 could say the same thing about art. Of course everyone
understands that a lecture is a work of art when it is well
given, that that ail is not merely a matter of the lecture
having many figurative images and being delivered in an
ardent Lone, but of how it is put. This is the art of construc­
tion, and in this sense leaching is one of the greatest arts,
by which the teacher, the extra-mural lecturer, works upon
the noblest material of all—human spirits. And one must
know how to form them, first softening them, making them
responsive lo your touch, to your action upon their noble
side.
This can be done only when you have won a certain in­
fluence over people, when between them and you currents
have been set up inspiring in them a certain sympathy to­
wards you. And that means you have appeared before them
as an artist. „ , ,
If you use singing and music, as we often do at our pub­
lic meetings if the painter’s art wings its way to us of it­
self, as it already alights on our banners and our posters, it
the whole flower-garden of the arts blossoms to help you
then that is how it should be. And you do not have to wait
for your listeners to feel the need of it themselves, you can
call in all the nine muses to help you in your work.
There is no activity, from an amateur theatrical group
to painting murals on the walls of a club, which cannot
he utilised lo further the development of people s taste, to
make them sense a fresh wave of delight in life, to speak
to them with the voice of art, which is paiticulaily easy to
comprehend, of the great truths which are the sun of heaven
lo us.
Comrades! 1 should very much like to have the opportu­
nity of expounding these ideas to you, bringing them togeth­
er in the shape of the People s Social Centre which is af­
ter all the basis and the ideal of extra-mural work. Extra­
mural work can of course go on in self-education groups,
workers’ and peasants’ clubs, courses of all kinds, through
libraries, through theatres, but all these forms of activity
are brought together and take on an organic, integrated
shape in the concept of the People’s Social Centre. This con­
cept is even wider than that of a centre of out-of-school
78 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

education. The Social Centre should be seen as not only a

cultural and educational centre, but also a centre of po­
litical, trade union and cooperative life.
But this idea of the ‘‘integral” People’s Social Centre
I should like to present to you in more detail if 1 make a
report specifically on this during the Congress, and if I do
not do that, at least make some additional remarks on this
to complement the articles 1 have already written, which it
may be possible to publish as a separate pamphlet. Just now
I think it is more important to indicate some features of
the structure of extra-mural education, of its existing appa­
ratus.
Iheie is no doubt that the point hinted at by Comrade
IN. k. Krupskaya in her speech is of unquestionably
gieat importance in the building-up of extra-mural
education. 3
If we are to understand extra-mural education in the sense
which I have been expounding, then clearly it has to have
contact with a number of oilier departments of the Com­
missariat. It would, however, be incorrect and paradoxical
if we were to say: since the theatres, libraries, museums,
galleries, exhibitions, and cinema—all this, and even books
themselves, are all educational media, and media of extra­
mural education at that, then all this ought lo be dealt
wilh by the extra-mural department.
Of course, if you went to a theatre and did not come out
of it a better educated person than when you went in, that
theatre should be closed, for it is not theatre but light en­
tertainment. Tou get there the same kind of recreation as
if you had a sleep, and only from that point of view docs
it have some faint right to exist. The theatre is a means of
education. And all social life is a process ol education for
each individual, but this is the business of the Council of
People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), not of the education de­
partment.
We will outline the limits of our task quite definitely.
The extra-mural department’s business is to come to the aid
of those among the population who cannot acquire educa­
tion purely by their own efforts, who need help lo be given
through extra-mural educational establishments, i.e. schools
of a sort, of a slightly different nature from the usual, but
none the less educational establishments. Since this is so,
 THE TASKS OF EXTRA-MURAL EDUCATION 79

our theatre section can look for direct kelp in education

from the theatres.
But Lite theaLres exist independently, they have artistic
responsibilities to discharge too, they are building up a wide
artistic repertoire and attempting to achieve the greatest
effects possible lo the art of the stage. Come along to the
theatres and learn, if you want, hut they will not come to
you! But if you want lo arrange a special performance pre­
ceded by a lecture, then that is the business of the extra­
mural department. For that purpose the extra-mural depart­
ment can come to an agreement with a provincial city thea­
tre, or with the Maly Theatre, saying: give us a perform­
ance which will illustrate, say, this or that moment m the
history of mankind, or even live or six plays which will il­
lustrate successive epochs—lhat is the proper business of the
extra-mural departments staff, hut for the rest one must
leave the theatre free lo develop according to the laws ol
its artistic advance. , , , .
Man must open up his creativity in both arts and sciences
as widely as may he, for on this tree grow the fruits that
later must nourish all. And in art we must not reduce eve­
rything without fail to the popular level. We must take
thought in order to raise up as many people as possible, by
means of popular entertainment, lo artistic cieativity, o le
ability to work in the world of science, to absolutely free
creative work. Of course the state cannot simply turn the
department of theatre into a sub-section of the department
of extra-mural education, but it would be sad if from 111s
another false conclusion came to be drawn; then in that
case the department of extra-mural education has nothing
lo do here, let the department of theatre make its own ar­
rangements for amateur theatrical groups or theatres^ pre­
senting simplified productions, let it work out what is an
appropriate repertoire and recommend it to the theatres, let
it worry about popular exhibitions accompanied by lectures,
etc.
A conclusion of this sort would be extremely inappropri­
ate. The single structure of extra-mural education would
then be fragmented. Who then would be in charge of the
People’s Social Centre, in which there will be theatre, and
exhibitions, and concerts, where each function will proceed
intersecting with other departments? Of course this would
80 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

mean llial our business of extra-mural education would be

disorganised. This would be especially obvious in the case
of library work. A library is an arm of extra-mural educa­
tion. At the same time tiie library department lias the task
of extending libraries of all types: it would mean that half
of its work would be taken away from the extra-mural de­
partment.
One can solve this problem in another way. Let there bo
departments dealing with libraries, with cinema-fine, but
we will set up our own little theatre section, our own lit­
tle cinema section, our own little library section, which
will be just for us, for extra-mural education people. If that
little section does not have concentrated within il the best
artistic and scientific forces we have, if all the main bo­
dies dealing with the arts arc not brought within it, the
lesult will be very small beer, a sort of cottage industry
within the extra-mural department. And that department
will cease to have the ability to use all the resources of
the state.
The only way out, therefore, which 1 would recommend
the Congress to consider carefully, is that each of the de­
partments related to ours should have a sub-section within
it developed more or less specifically for dealing with the
extra-mural educational aspect of their task—to put at the
service of the masses, in popular form, that particular art
or science which in the given case is the main concern of
that department, and that each such sub-section should come
within the extra-mural education sector as its auxiliary
body. It is quite essential that the Congress should think
about this organisational centre, because in the localities,
in the guberniyas, something of the sort may be repeated,
perhaps in truncated form, and approximately the same so­
lution should be applied there. . .
Of course the introductory speech I have made cannot
deal with all the issues with which this ten-day congress
has to deal, and on which, however great its capacity for
work, it will not be able to say the last word either. I should
like to think that in this introduction I have at least partial­
ly achieved what I set out to do, that is to remind you of
the vast scope and importance of the work being done in
education outside the schools, and to note at least its cen­
tral problems. These I have looked at in the light of that
 THE TASKS OE EXTRA-MURAL EDUCATION 81

line, red moment of world history which we are now liv­

ing through.
We, gathered together here one thousand strong, must
not let our heads drop and say: this is not the time to hold
a congress on extra-mural education, when the advance of
our foes threatens on every side, when Soviet Russia is de­
fending itself against all these unleashed dogs of war with
an arm unweakened, it is true, but none the less wearied
in the light.
No, this is grand, this is symbolic, this shows the might
of our movement, that at the present time, when we are
calling people into battle, to the fronts, to repel these shame­
less onslaughts, we are at the same time bringing hun­
dreds of people together here, in the centre, in the heart of
Russia, to discuss questions of educating the people. For of
course 1he sword in one hand and the torch in the other—
that is essential for us now. Both the one and the other is
for us an equally important condition of victory. Thus we
here are also holding a council of war, we here are also in
the same great battle.
And as the representative of the Red Army has already
said here—it is serving us, and we are serving it. All this
together, comrades, is so vital now for the whole of the
world’s history: our service is one of majesty, for the fate
of all mankind.
 ON THE CLASS SCHOOL
The Bourgeois and the Communist Labour School
In a class society everything that the state does lias a
strictly class character.
There are two dominant opinions on the state: that put
forward by the liberal bourgeoisie, and that held by Marx­
ists.
The liberal bourgeoisie asserts that the state is the or­
ganisation ol order. While not denying that separate classes
exist in present-day society, and that they may light
against one another, the liberals say that the state and its
iaws stand above classes and have the duty to see that these
classes do not, in the course of the strife between them?
destroy the general unity. It guards justice, and at the same
time sees to communications, hospitals, schools—those
sides of life, in short, which are essential to everyone and
which therefore come under the charge of the common bo-
rp,^le highest body of a social character—the state.
1he liberals consequently demand that the state itself
should depend upon parliament, elections to which are free,
so that each class may send its own representatives there,
n this way parliament is in their opinion a reflection of
" ^ i 1. a^ ons k^ween forces within the country.
Inis theory of the state as a compromise, as a contract
wedding together the differing classes in a society, gets some
ieinfoicement under a democratic parliamentary regime.
Yet this theory is quite incorrect. In fact the reality does
- t ut into it. In fact the state, as many suspected before
Maix, and as Marx quite definitely and precisely demon­
strated, is the organisation of the government of the ruling
class, and no more.
The ruling class is a minority exploiting the majority,
living on the labour of the majority, and having to control
land, equipment, stock, and its own workers. It can exert
this control only by creating a vast machinery of force, and
all states in the world have armed forces and police forces
 ON THE CLASS SCHOOL 83

which arc at the service of the ruling class, and which put
a stop to any attempt on the part of the majority to reach
out to the huge property in the hands of the minority, em­
ploying the cruellest reprisals to herd the majority back in­
to obedience.
It was so in the slave-owning slate, where the slave-own­
er was armed and the slaves were not, where the slave­
owner had men of his household ready at his command to
overpower the slaves should they dare to rebel. And it is so
*n the most relined democracies, where the labour move­
ment’s protests against exploitation evoke judicial reprisals
or outright punitive expeditions, even in Britain, even in
America, even in Switzerland. (Not long ago the Swiss po­
lice shot down workers in the streets of Zurich.)
The principal object of every stale is to ensure the domr-
nalion of the ruling class. But as the majority starts to ac­
quire education and organisation, when there is a proletar­
iat already thinking in political terms and a petty bourgeoi­
sie indulging in radicalism (that happens where the big
bourgeoisie is either close to power or has already taken
power into its hands, where there are good communications
where
wjicre there is a certain levelicvui of
u± capitalist development),
-r then
ho big
the hi or bourgeoisie
hrmrerfioisifi finds itself unable to establish an oi
der of things whereby power belongs to it without conditions
and without disguise. It has tried to do tins by opeia ing
the so-called property-qualification form of government,
which only admitted rich people to parliament. But this was
difficult, this was obvious to mature democratic sectl°“®
(even among those who owned property), which became
restive; there was even fear of revolution. So for these rea­
sons there has been introduced by the bourgeoisie (some­
times quite voluntarily) the ingenious machinery oi uni­
versal suffrage, which appears to give political equality to
all citizens, but at the same Lime ensures that powei le-
mains with the rich.
In America, Britain and France universal suffrage exists;
these are the democratic countries (democracy means the
power of the people”), but the vast majority of the people
there live a beggarly life, while an insignificant minority
owns the factories, mills, mines, houses, properties of vast
extent, and lives in imposing luxury. And these are the mod­
els of the democratic state. And if there should appear
G*
84 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

people wlio say that llie macliiiies, and Llie buildings, and
llie land should all belong lo llie people, and only then will
there be people’s power, those people are seized and pul in
prison, tlieir newspapers are closed down—in a word, such
teachings are mel with cruel repression.
This cannot be achieved by force alone. Of course, the
bourgeoisie can be belter armed than the workers, but at
this stage of development the bourgeoisie is obliged to main­
tain very large armed forces. Both to deal wiLli the country,
which is large, with the large numbers of people in revolt,
and likewise to defend itself against the attacks of other
predatory states, a large standing army is needed. So on
the military side the bourgeoisie has to rely on universal
conscription.
But an army of the people might easily join the rebels.
The point is that never, at any time, has the state relied
on crude force alone. The principal means of suppressing
the lower orders has been Ike sword, crude force, but along­
side this have gone methods oj poisoning the consciousness
of the lower orders of society.
firstly, one must not give the lower orders knowledge,
llie masses must remain ignorant; secondly, on the basis of
that ignorance one must inculcate in them such views, such
a state of mind, that the slave should consider the existing
situation quite right, that he should see it as a proper order
of things; one must pervert his common sense and make
him voluntarily submit to the conditions under which he
lives.
Our own writers have depicted a character—the serf or
household servant who waits on his master’s pleasure like a
dog, waits on him hand and foot, who is convinced that
God bids him lay down his life for his master. Remember
bow the soldier used to be convinced that to lay down his
life for the tsar was a feat of heroism. You see how people
have been tamed, brought to hand! They were brought to
hand so successfully that they became slaves to the mar­
row and blessed their slavery. This was done with the aid
of religious perversion, through the priests. From child­
hood upwards, sometimes, they began to fill the heads of
subordinates with the idea that this world is not the real
world, there is another world beyond the grave, in which
everything is different, and which one must know about in
 ON THE CLASS SCHOOL 85

order to know how to behave here. Religion most cleverly

teaches that, the world is so ordered that here the poor man
drags out a miserable existence, but so that he may in the
next world receive his great reward, while if, on the con­
trary, he should to any extent rebel against fate here, he
will suffer terrible torments in the next world.
Those ideas have been knocked into the skulls of the
peasantry, along with a mass of other prejudices, and thus
the peasants, the lower orders, became permeated with this
idea.
There is a great- monarch in the world, against whom one
can do nothing —God, to whom good harvest and bad, the
fates of men, life and death, sickness, success and failure—
everything, is obedient*, all depends on him. He is not your
mere earthly tsar, who can put you in prison: on Him de­
pends a man’s fate not only while he lives, hut the fate
of his eternal soul. And what is man’s short life on earth
compared to that eternal soul? And this great tsar has es­
tablished the existing order on earth.
Christianity savs that it is the poor man whom God loves,
that. TTo is on his side. Nobody knows, maybe the rich
man will really catch it in the next world, one just, has to
withstand this brief temptation and obey the rich man in
this world. This doctrine is advantageous, of course, to the
rich man. and the poor man in his ignorance believes and
supports the whole ingenious device. Even in Western Eu­
rope we see the same thing: we see vast sums of money
being spent hv the state (or, where state is separated from
church, by “society”) to maintain this army of poisoners,
darkeners of human understanding, the priests of all sorts.
And the more cultured a country is, the more refined and
ingenious Christianity becomes, to remain a sufficiently
effective narcotic.
At the stage of development of the more or less civilised
state it receives into its hands enormous resources for the
poisoning of human consciousness, it gets the national bar­
racks. Universal conscription means that every young man
finds himself for a time in the iron grip of the military ma­
chinery. Tn fact two or three years’ military service for ev­
eryone is not necessary. War experience ha^ shown Iha I in
three months at the most one can produce a good fighting
man.
80 AN ATOM LUNACHARSKY

Bul. the young man wont to ho a soldi or for a long lime,

so that the officer casto and the NCOs can rol) him of all
will of his own, so that lie will be prepared 1o shoot al
anyone when they order him to do so. Under the guise of
“patriotic” duty men are turned into dummies, trained lo
perform tricks, and a man thus trained carries in his soul,
not only for the duration of his life as a soldier, but in after­
life too, the submissiveness, the faculty of being hypnotised
by the word of command.
Then, the state gets the press, i.e. the ability to dissemi­
nate on vast quantities of paper (either as itself, the stale,
or through the organs of the press which it buys over or
maintains) any slander you please, lo write whatever you
please, to carry on a lie campaign against socialism, lo put
out a web of gossip, rumour, false news. A whole river of
lies runs through the veins of the press, especially in the
countries of the West. Tt penetrates everywhere, literally
into practically every peasant’s hut, and there does its de­
vastating work. The mercenary newspapers create what is
called public opinion. This public opinion, which seeps
through into the very midst of the masses of the people, is
in the literal sense of the word fabricated. The state says:
kindly prepare public opinion thus and thus—and all the
papers start to buzz, to a given line; they are believed. Then
they have to fight the “alien” press, the socialist press. Tn
democratic republics one cannot just close down socialist
newspapers, but even without that the fight against them is
comparatively easy. To run a big newspaper you need big
money. The workers do not have this, the workers’ news­
papers are published on a shoestring. Then, the bourgeois
hanks and firms do not give them their advertisements,
and in order to sell a paper for one sou, as used to be done
in France, you must have advertisements, otherwise the pa­
pers cannot exist. For this reason the socialist press has in
many cases been just a poor relation of the bourgeois press.
Lastly the bourgeois slate had yet one more resource—
buying up and bringing over to its side leaders of the op­
pressed people and the irorhing class.
From among the workers themselves men are often elect­
ed lo parliament, men numbered among those who under­
stand this whole mechanism, who start to preach to the
masses that t.hnv should open their eyes, should look and
 ON T1IK GLASS SCHOOL 87

see llial tin's is not. democracy at all, that it is deception all

along Ilie line, that with the aid of barracks and press, and
bribery, they are being governed by an insignificant minor­
ity that makes their lot in life miserable.
To begin with, such men were simply wiped out by all
available means, but later that became impossible, there
were- loo many of them.
As under a parliamentary regime these men get elected,
if they are eloquent speakers, to town councils or the wid­
er council'* corresponding to our former zemstvo of the
gubernia, or in the end to parliament, it is found convenient
In buy (hem off. Such a man is promised all kind of good
things, accepted into the club: some of them marry bourgeois
girls, suddenly get appointed to high posts, are sold or get
given shares in companies. Some workers’ representatives
give way to these temptations and sell themselves, ^ome
sol] themselves completely, body and soul, like a Brian ,
becoming utter lackeys of the bourgeoisie, but still preserv­
ing a thin veneer of socialism as camouflage. They mouth
nil sorts of revolutionary phrases, but put the revolution
off a few hundred years into the future, and warn the work­
ers not, God forbid, to follow those who frivolously want
>o implement, socialism now. They become evolutionary so-
citdisls. Thev are made ministers. They are able men ana
Uie bourgeoisie entrusts its entire fate to them, makes them
the chief helmsmen of the ship of state, because tiey, vei
ing themselves in a fog of socialist phraseology, are of more
use as politicians than an ordinary bourgeois whose wolf­
ish fangs are too obvious to the people.
They did the same thing here in Russia. As soon as
bourgeoisie attained power in February-April ( 1 J 1 /. fca.)
it demanded that socialists should be made ministers. It
summoned up Chernov, Tsereteli etc.2 It set them up as a
screen, and they travelled around putting out the fires of
r e v o lu tio n like real masters of the hose-pipe. They served
as a blind in every way, while real power was in the hands
of the capitalist Konovalov, the landowner Lvov, the banker
Tereshchenko. 3 We did not have men to whom the bour­
geoisie could simply entrust all power, but in Western Eu­
rope there are some men risen from Iho people, like Lloyd
George and Millerand,4 who become prime ministers and
presidents. Of course they are kept on a short leash.
88 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

There are some who only sell themselves partially. Tlieir

circumstances become more or less comfortable, they stop
hurrying, hut in words Ihev remain, apparently, entirely so­
cialist. They go about, all the time, they carry on agitation
among the workers, they set up organisations, hut in real­
ity it is all by arrangement with the bourgeoisie. They say
that the goal, i.e. revolution, is nothing, hut the way to it,
i.e. reforms, are everything. Today working time was cut
by half an hour, tomorrow there will he ten kopeks on the
wage-rate. This is the reality of “parliamentary struggle”.
Softly, softly, take it gently. The bourgeoisie is happy to
make such concessions. And a huge parly such as the Her­
man Social-Democrats, up to and including the most left-
wmg people, like Kautsky, 5 finds itself completely bogged
down in this parliamentary silt. Thus does the ‘ working
class lose its leaders.
You see what immense powers the bourgeoisie has. but
far from the least; important among these is the school
which the bourgeoisie also turns into a tool for perverting
the consciousness of the masses.
The first task a government of the ruling class sets itself
is to keep the lower orders undeveloped, without powers of
critical thought. When one thinks of a country like Russia,
there right to the very end of the tsarist regime the Min­
ister of education was more of a minister of ^-education.*
in Shchedrin’s phrase.6 Tf a society wanted to open a school
the Minister would not allow it: if a town wanted to have
a university the Minister would not allow it: if there was a
talented professor he was driven out, abroad: if the stu­
dents fought for the schools to extend their scientific activ­
ities. the students were sent to serve in the nrmv. Th\<
was the regular policy of the Ministry of Education. The
Ministry of Education was like a department of the Minis­
try of Home Affairs. The latter Ministry took care that
schools should be under its authority.
Rut even in Russia the Ministry of Finance (which had
an interest in balancing the budget, and realised that for
this one needed developed capitalism, that without it Rus­
sia must fall hopelessly behind other countries, since a non-
capitalist country will always be beaten by a capitalist one)
*The Russian phrase, here attributed to Shchedrin, plays on the
word for “education” literally meaning enlighten men!. so (he
Minister was one of “darI\enmenl,\--7V.
 ON THE CLASS SCHOOL 80

insisted on the need to build up the schools, and got into a

sharp conflict with the Ministry of Education. The Ministry
of Finance established its polvtechnical colleges, its schools
of commerce, on the best West European models. And in
truth you cannot keep the people in ignorance if you want
to have skilled workers, if you want good shop assistants,
if you want a peasant who can read a popular journal on
agriculture and improve his farming accordingly.
Countries with general literacy, countries with a good,
even if bourgeois, educational system, can have relatively
good soldiers? farmers, and workers. And when Western Eu­
rope became convinced of this it paid concentrated attention
1° the people’s schools.
However, it did not want the people s schools to give the
People full" knowledge. What good would that do them?
Thev needed training so that they could read and write,
hut you must, have the priest, right there to see that they
ent. ns much Christian poison as possible fed them at- the
same time. A man of the people should acquire technical
knowledge up to a certain limit, but without any serious
scientific training, and the most, important thing was to
bar his Wav forward from the narrow sphere of the element­
ary school to any higher school. .
And this was done so skilfully that in Russia, or exam
Pie. the number of people of peasant and working-class
origin who went on from elementary school to secondary
school wik only a quarter of one percent. One in tour hun­
dred might got to a school of a higher level, if someone used
patronage on his behalf or if he was the sprig of a rich
peasant, etc. 7
Thus a man from the people receives education for at the
most three or four years and is then thrown out of school.
Tf he should succeed in getting any further education at
continuation classes in the evenings, that will he only to
raise his skill in his trade. Tt is all done with a view to not
letting a man get Tull knowledge and so too easily turn into
a S o c i n l - D e m o c r a I . For instance. This is why in Germany,
in France, in England, in all the European countries, there
is no way onwards and upwards out of the lower schools.
Tn America it is not quite the same. There the percentage
of workers or small farmers who reach higher schools is
much greater. A to 5 per cent at least. Why is this so? Amor-
90 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

ica is not so afraid of men risen from Hie people'. The

schools are structured in such a way there Hint a small per­
centage of urban workers and of farmers do gel there, but
the school does ils best to cultivate a bourgeois conscious­
ness in them, to give the schoolboy the idea that he should
turn away from his own people. And one cannot imagine
anything more repellent than these people-ashamed of
thoil parents, ashamed of their comrades in the lower school,
because these dress differently, eat differently and are treat­
ed differently by the ruling classes. And it is a great point
that the German policy of not admitting workers and peas­
ants to secondary school has its disadvantages for the bour­
geoisie, because talented workers remain within their own
wot king class, and for this reason there are very many tal­
ented working-class leaders in Germany. Eventually the
numbci of class-conscious administrators and organisers be­
longing to the Social Democratic party increased to a very
imposing level in Germany. America,’on the contrary, is
cleverer. She has no remnants of feudalism, she makes these
men officeis in hei army, raises them up to be engineers
(but meek ones), and if it were not for the emigration which
has taken a constant flow of poor folk into the country—
from Poland, from Russia, from Germany—there would be
absolutely no socialist leaders in America. The socialist
leaders there are in most cases Italians, Jews, Poles and
Irishmen, who have gone there from Europe. The American
of established stock, as soon as he goes to school and it is
noticed that he has ability, is trained —to do the right tricks.
Tn school the knowledge imparted is exclusively of a practi­
cal nature. There history is taught in the spirit oT “patriot­
ism and class, there religion is taught and poisons the
child’s understanding, after which all the sciences are taught
at a crude, basic level, and only for a period of four years. At
twelve years old a boy has nothing more to learn, he goes off
as an apprentice to mill, factory or workshop, he is pushed
out of school, his education is finished.
The bourgeoisie has trouble with the teaching of reli­
gion. The famous German pedagogue Paulsen,8 for instan­
ce, asserts that the leaching of Scripture in school, which
is obviously at variance with the scientific lessons given by
other teachers, gives pupils a sense of mistrust, towards the
school. When they have realised that the Bible tales they
 ON THE CLASS SCHOOL 91

are (old are anti-scientific inventions, the children stop

believing the other teachers with their “patriotic” tone and
oilier preachings. This is why, in Paulsen’s opinion, the
class school whose task it is to process small humans in
(lie interests of the ruling classes should get rid of its
weakest point, that is teaching Scripture. Another famous
pedagogue, on Ihe other hand, Focrster,9 insists that all
a Hem pis to run the school without Scripture do not come
off well for the privileged classes. In no way is it possible,
lie complains, to convince little peasants and proletarians
(hat they should shed their blood for a homeland in which
Ihey are exploited pariahs. The justice of such an order of
(lungs cannot be rationally defended, and only if one brings
in the will of God and the idea of the next world can one
“patriotically” educate, i.e. in fact poison, the heads and
hearts of the pupils. The French, having abandoned Scrip­
ture for roughly the same considerations that Paulsen in­
dicates, have tried to replace it by bourgeois civic ethics.
The textbook of these ethics, according to Buisson,1 who
is a radical and no socialist, is the limit of idiocy.
Tims bourgeois political thought tosses and turns: with
the priests you get stupidity, but without the priests you
cannot get by; education really does become a more and
more difficult matter. The cultural level has already risen
high enough for it to be hard to lead a little Gciman 01
Frenchman by the nose. He is beginning to use his own
eyes to look at everything, lienee the crisis in the schools.
How can one manage things so that the schools send out
loyal subjects who will go off without question to die for
the prison in which they are exploited? It is a difficult
problem.
But do not think that matters arc any better when it
comes to the secondary school. In Western Europe the sec­
ondary school was organised in such a way that children
of the same age as those in the elementary schools started
to attend it, but these were children of the bourgeoisie. So
that poor children should not get in, fees were set high.
They are fee-paying schools, and the fees arc such that, a
worker has no possibility of paying them; there are some
free places, so that children from pelty-bourgeois families
can get in. Here we find put, info practice the slogan pro­
claimed by D. A. Tolstoi, that high school is no place for
92 ANATOLI LUNACTTAUSKY

flip children of cooking women 11—this is n slogan common

to all the bourgeoisie. The principal product of these
schools is officers for the various services—whether this is
the army, or industry, or bureaucracy in general: here we
have the mass on which capital relies as on its very own,
these are its assistants , there to govern the rest.
When a government is very rotten, when it is behind the
times, when it is a monstrosity, as it was in Russia, then
such a government displays the greatest possible distrust,
of even its own officers. When the intelligentsia is in every
respect repressed, when the country is kept in such a stale
of ignorance, of barbarity, that a doctor cannot earn a liv­
ing although there are no doctors, that writers live in Si­
beria and are forbidden to write although there are no jour­
nalists available-then it is only natural that, the intelli­
gentsia too should he against the government. This is a
feudal, landowners’ government. Tts mistrust of high school
is expressed in the fact, that only the Black Hundred men
get appointed heads of high schools (gymnasia). Textbooks
and other hooks of colossal stupidity are produced, and the
vast majority of educational establishments are so organised
that they are of no use whatever even to the state. Pride of
place goes to the dead languages. Once upon a time these
dead languages, Latin for instance, were very important.
Once in a Europe that was Catholic throughout writers
wrote all their hooks in Latin: Englishmen. Italians and
Poles all wrote in Latin. Tt was the international languago
of those days.
Todav Latin has lost all importance. Utterances to the
effect that the worlds of Greece and Rome can he studied
only using the dead languages are just not true. Tn the
“classical” secondary schools somewhere in the background
von find the history of culture, falsified and distorted, and
[aught by the history teacher for two or three hours a week,
while every day you have grammar, rules and exceptions,
drummed into you —all attention is concentrated on Ihe
mere form of the language.12
The justification produced for this is that it all supposed­
ly forms the mind, that it is good for a child to learn some­
thing that boros him, something quite unnecessary to
him. A special sort of gymnastic training! Tn fact it. is done
to block up the brain of a person who has no need of gram-
 ON THE CLASS SCHOOL 03

mar, wlio will forget il all, hul who (loos need lo display
submissive obedience, lo listen and read whal he is lold lo.
Those poor dummies oi high school hoys sil there in their
uniforms not daring lo stir, Ihey must answer wlien called
on and keep quiet Lbe rest of the time. Lessons are sel from
here to here, they have to learn oh what is sel; all the way
it is obedience to orders just as in army barracks. The
amount ol knowledge they lake away wilk them on leav­
ing high school is minute. The universities and technical
colleges, lor instance, used to he horriliod by lack oi prep­
aration ol the human material they were sent.
Those who attended "modern' high school were a hit
better, hut Lo make you see the difference between the mod­
ern schools and the old high schools 1 will tell you the foi-
iowing. When Wilhelm 1 1 came to the throne, he was ap­
proached by pedagogues who were in favour of the mod­
ern schools, who said, "We need good commercial travel­
lers, we need good captains, we need good book-keepers
and engineers. Why the devil do you clutter up our chil­
dren's minds with Greek and Latin? We categorically de­
mand to be given useful schools.” And Wilhelm, who had
imperialist aims in view, in consequence ol which Germa­
ny is now brought to ruin, Wilhelm Look the same stand­
point: one must leach useful things, because Germany
needs Lo extend trade and industry, and in war it is good
organisation that wins.
Gut the dyed-in-the-wool “classical” teachers replied,
••Your Majesty, you are about to make a great error. The
modern schools will give you, it may be, better specialists
in this held or that, but not nearly such good and loyal
subjects. If you want really loyal subjects, only a classical
oducalion will provide them.”
JNow this is a perfectly correct statement of the case.
VVilhelm just replied that he didn’t mind if they were not
good subjects, so long as they were a bit cleverer. Later on
lie repented. At a later period he became a positive oppo­
nent of science, to the point of sometimes expelling iam-
ous workers in the natural sciences from the universities
0n account of their political views.
The bourgeois school in America and Western Europe is
^ouiewhat better than the Russian version. There the intel­
ligentsia has been reliably bought over by the bourgeoisie,
)4 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

so there is no reason lo be particularly nervous about let­

ting such an intelligentsia have knowledge. An efficient
engineer is well aware that arrangements will be made for
him to acquire stocks and shares in the company that lie
will work for, that he will have a very high salary and
live all the betlcr, the more money he manages to squeeze?
out of the workers on his employer’s helialf. A lawyer, a
journalist, a doctor—in the majority of cases these are peo­
ple who were well and truly bought over in advance, in
their fathers time, people who represent a force support­
ing the bourgeoisie of its own free will rather then under
compulsion. For the Russian government, though, the words
revolutionary and student used over a long period Lo be
synonymous. The government was obliged to wage a con­
tinual struggle against the people as soon as it got any edu-
cation, yet it was not possible to provide no education —
officials and specialists were needed. And the Russian gov­
ernment writhed on the horns of this dilemma. But note
that as soon as bourgeois freedom arrived in Russia, part
of the student body was found on the side of the bourgeoi­
sie, against the proletariat and its ideals. During the Mos­
cow revolution students fired on workers and formed the
cream of the White Guard units,1* because they believed
things would be better for them with the bourgeoisie than
with the proletariat: Deuce knows what will go on with
the proletariat, they are a rough, ignorant lot, we shall have
to take orders from some clodhopper or other; that won’t
suit.”
In Europe the secondary schools are more rationally or­
ganised, but none the less badly organised, the bourgeoisie
simply cannot bring itself to abandon the scholastic ap­
proach. r h e secondary school is best run in America, and we
need to look very carefully at how the American bour­
geois have arranged the schools for their children. Much of
what we are introducing into our unified labour school is
a socialist application of methods made current in the best
bourgeois schools in America. But the bourgeoisie is scared
to make teaching entirely realistic.
When a science has to be pursued to its ultimate con­
clusions, every science invariably turns out lo be full of
socialist tendencies. These ultimate conclusions not only
shatter any religious ideas into little bits, they also make
 ON TIIE CLASS SCHOOL 05

il quite unthinkable to defend the bourgeois system. If an

intellectual, a real intellectual, a sincere one whose mind
is not occupied with thoughts of how much he will be earn­
ing, whom he will marry and how he will set up house,
hut who really wants to be a good doctor or a good teach­
er—if lie devotes himself seriously to his science and thinks
it through lo the end, he will inevitably become a socialist.
For how is a good life Lo be built? Is it not the natural aim
of every thoughtful, socially thinking man lo work with
others to organise a harmonious life, in which all sides of
a man shall find development and in which these developed
people shall live in brotherly cooperation one with an­
other for |he happiness of all? Such great educationists as
Kousscau,15 Peslalozzi,16 Herbert17 and Froebel 18 could not
fail to approach this task in the light of just such a wide
ideal. Science has always pushed people in the direction ol
socialism, if they were honest and had a broad enough
outlook.
The engineer has to pose the question: how to produce as
much as possible with the least expenditure of elfort? how
to organise the economy so that competition does not cause
losses? And he will say that first of all one must get rid
of capitalism, since competition is an immense waste o ie
sources, since the basic task of technology is to enable man
to produce as abundantly as possible while working in con­
ditions ns little noxious as possible to himself, and to knit
enterprises together into a rational system. An honest doc­
tor will realise that treating illness is a palliative, that the
thing of iirst importance for a doctor is prophylaxis, social
and sanitary work. What is needed is good housing, lemov-
al of the need to work too hard, and proper nourishment,
and people will become a hundred times healthier and
only socialism can give all that.
Not a single intellectual who considers his work as a
specialist in all its implications can fail to be a socialist.
So if he is not to become a socialist one must kill his con­
science, make him into a being without conscience; but it
is not always possible to do this.
In consequence of this, outstanding intellectuals often
rebel, and a whole list of famous names, especially in the
recent period, have come over to socialism. Middling people
are more easily bought, but it is not a bad idea lo pull the
06 ANATOLI LUNAGIIAUSKY

wool over llioir eyes hrst, ua u precaution. In Lire lual ro-

aorl it ia alill bettor lor them not to know the lull truth.
Hence lalailication and trickery ol all kinda. Hence you will
lind the secondary schools even in Europe keeping to the
old style ol teaching. You will meet any number ol people
who have been through secondary school hut who cannot give
you a sensible account ol the simplest production process.
Their education has been predominantly literary. The sec­
ondary schools ol a technical type turn out people with
specialist knowledge who are barbarians in every other re­
spect; their graduate knows only his own little part, and
nothing about anything else. This is how the secondary
school is organised.
What can we, as socialists, oiler instead ol' this class
school;1 First ol all we must not have separate elementary
(or "people’s”) schools and secondary schools. Every hoy
and every girl, whatever family he or she is horn into, goes
to one and the same hrst class, to the unified labour school
(lirst stage). Equally, each one has the same right to go
on, after completing the four years of the hrst stage, to the
four years of the second stage. There is one, unihed school
for all.19 Of course there is a proviso here: in order to give
every hoy and girl the right to schooling, we must have
more schools, an incomparably greater number of schools
than we have now. Until the country’s economy gets on
its feet the school will remain far from its ideal, for it de­
pends upon the economy. But it does not follow from this
that we should not have these ideals before us. Far from
it, we must take this sacred obligation upon ourselves.
Matters are worse when it comes to the schools of the
second stage, for this second stage is what corresponds to
the former classical high schools (gymnasia) and modern
schools (realnoye uckilishche ) . There are very few of them
in Russia, they were introduced purely for the bourgeoisie
and the bourgeois intelligentsia; there are so few of them
that whereas the primary schools were able to take in bO
per cent of all children, these could not cater for even 10
per cent. We have to increase the extent of the second-stage
school system ten times over, and second-stage schooling
requires laboratories, equipment for studying physics etc.,
properly trained teachers, and so on. So huge is the task
lacing our country. It can he tackled only over many years.
 ON THE GLASS SCHOOL 97

VVIl i I arc we (loins*', I lion, proclaiming the principle that

every child I’rom llie lirsl-slago school can go on to the sec­
ond si age, when we have not the ability to ensure this for
all children':’ We must lake the standpoint of transferring
the most able. Often the more able child will prove to be
the one who has had more preparation, who has better home
surroundings and can extend his knowledge more rap­
idly Hum the peasant or proletarian child. Therefore it
seems lo me right, in the highest degree, to give preference
to children from the labouring part of the population. We
run no risk whatever in this. It is not true that in doing
this we shall be transferring slower and less gifted children
to the second-stage schools. On the contrary, there is a vast
number of talented children among the mass of peasants
and workers’ children who previously could not go to sec­
ondary school just because their circumstances were worse
than those of children with a bourgeois-intellectual back­
ground. , , ,
Wo call our school the unified labour school. What does
this mean? It means that the bourgeoisie inherited rom
the scholastic school its “schoolroom” way of teaching, i.e.
the school of the book, the textbook, the oral lesson given
hy the teacher, and the oral answer given by the pupil, who
is silting still at his desk for a given number of hours, the
school of the strictly divided time-table and of learning oil
hy heart. We consider this school to have been utterly con­
demned by pedagogic science. Even bourgeois educationists,
Hie best of them, have moved away from this.
The first idea of the labour principle is that the child
should perceive the subjects of instruction through labour,
he. through living, active processes. When a gnl plays wit i
dolls she is preparing to be a housewife and a mother,
when a boy plays war games he is preparing to be a fight­
er; children are forever imagining themselves as grown­
ups, forever playing at being grown-ups, and by play they
are practising what later they will be doing in reality.
Play is a method of self-education. “Schoolroom” teach­
ing ignores this fact, it says: a child wants to run about—
make him sit still; a child wants to make things himself,
to occupy himself with something interesting—sit him down
to his Latin! In a word, it is a struggle against a child’s
very nature. We take exactly the opposite standpoint. We
7-01120
98 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

say: the whole task of the kindergarten and of the first

years at school is to help children to play usefully! When
children dance, sing, cuL tilings out, mould material into
shapes, they are learning. Those in charge of them must so
choose their games that every day fresh knowledge is emerg­
ing, every day the children are gaining something, every
day they are able to learn this or that small skill. And all
this in such a way as to be interesting for them.
In the first-stage school the same trend prevails, but
from play the transition must be made to work, in the wid­
est sense of the word; things must be so organised that the
children acquire knowledge while playing, but at the same
time iboiking. Work, after all, is a cheerful thing so long
as it does not go too far and produce fatigue; the teachers
must help the children to form themselves into groups,
must select occupations and direct them towards the ac­
quisition of specific information. They must set particular
aims to be achieved, they must give the children prepared
material on which to work and reach conclusions. The es­
sence of the new way of teaching is not rote learning, not
setting a lesson and asking for answers from it, but going
on excursions and walks, making sketches, models, all man­
ner of working processes through which the child himself
enriches his own experience.
Let us take, for example, geometry; you say, “Here is
0 1 1 1 ’ yard: divide it up; on part of it there will be a garden
foi growing plants, on another places for keeping animals,
etc. Lets do that together.” And the children will start
thinking and wondering how the yard can be divided even­
ly into the parts needed. And at this point you show them
simple methods of measuring, surveying—the measurement
to plan means surveying. In just the same way, when you
go on to three-dimensional geometry you and the children
together make and paste up cubes, pyramids, spheres. The
child is doing the sticking together himself, he is making
these bodies himself, getting acquainted with them at first­
hand. “Make a regular cylinder out of this piece of wood.”
The child will spoil one piece and then another; let another
child give him some help.
Instead of teaching geography from a map, you first go
out and show what a real hill and a real river are like,
what a plain is, how one can measure the ups and downs
 ON THE GLASS SCHOOL 99

of the ground. Together with the children you make a pla­

teau and a mountain peak out of clay; the whole class can
produce a map ol their own locality, and later on one ol
some part of the Republic—the Crimea for instance. This
is what is called “teaching through work”. No one can for­
get knowledge acquired in this way.
Let us take for instance another method, teaching
through theatre. The children, for example, are to prepare
a show for some school lestival, using their own resources.
This is a marvellous lesson, an act of group laboui! I lie
main point here is that dramatisation is of course a piin-
cipal element in play. When children play with dolls or at
“ b e i n g ” robbers, this is something very close Lo theatre!
Suppose we are learning about the primitive period of hu­
man cultural history. Lets live for a week in summer as
savages, go into the woods, light fires by using flints, cook
()ur own food, and so on. We can live it through in t ie
same way when studying life in the patriarchal family.
Let’s act it, and we have something really interesting.
You are studying, say, medieval times, the children have
lo grasp it themselves: get them to try and describe, to
draw, what the relationship was between a guild artisan
and his customer, or between a suzerain and his vassa ,
with the clergy represented too: describe the scene so that
the child’s interest is roused; from such a lesson he will
take away such an understanding of the Middle Ages ia
he will never forget, for lie has lived through it, it is in
fiis blood. . i - i
This kind of teaching through play is extremely impol
ant.
A great deal of emphasis has to be given to drawing, in
all this. 1 am not speaking of aesthetic demands, of teach­
ing artistic skill, but of drawing as a necessary means ol
communication—like writing, or speaking. He who can­
not draw is illiterate. In America a schoolteacher has to
draw the whole of the lesson he gives. When he is asked
how a caterpillar is formed, he will draw you one straight
away while you watch, and each child has to try and do
the same. A pencil or a piece of chalk in a man’s hands,
when lie is addressing a large audience, is one more organ
of his speech. One must be able to illustrate one’s words.
Children are out for a walk—have them draw it. There’s
7*
100 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

such and such a building —draw il. There's a Iree that we

liavenT seen before—once you’re home, jol down a draw­
ing of il from memory. As a crofjuis -° or skelch, draw the
house you live in, a plan of how it is built, where the bed
stands, where the window is. These sketches and illustra­
tions are exceptionally important things, because in life
such things will be required a million limes. If you have
given the children an assignment to organise this undertak­
ing and that,—-take a sheet of paper, map out a scheme or
organisation. The pencil as a draughtsman’s tool and as a
means of illustration is an absolutely essential item.
Such is the first realisation of the labour principle in the
school.
Besides this, the labour school has another purpose also.
We cannot turn out literary intellectuals as the former scc-
ondaiy school used to do. The labour school must teach
all to work. That is, we must not only pay attention to the
subjects of school study being perceived through work, but
teach the children work itself.
lleie we hnd many supporters of this idea, including in­
tellectuals who are disciples of Lev Tolstoy,21 they too
preach orientation on work, it is easy to understand this
mm not in the Communist sense but in the Tolstoyan. The
Tolstoyans believe that a man must be able to build his
own stove, bake his own bread, make his own boots, so
that he can himself perform all the services he needs, and
the better lie can do this the less he needs other people.
This is a petty-bourgeois ideal.
The Communist system is based upon large-scale indus­
try, on factories and mills. How can you make a man who
works in a factory producing straps, say, or nails, do every­
thing for himself when he gets home too! No, we do not
want his wife to do the washing, we want there to be one
large steam laundry where everyone’s washing is done, we
do not want him to make his own dinner, wo want there
to be well-equipped mess halls for all. The Communist sys­
tem transfers everything to an industrial basis, it aims not
at everyone doing everything for himself, but at emerging
from the tyranny of petty labour to huge social establish­
ments.
Of course we cannot give all this to the children imme­
diately. Of course petty-bourgeois and peasant households
 ON THE CLASS SCHOOL 101

exist in Russia and will continue to exist for a long time

yet. And the peasants, so far as they set us their require­
ments on trade schools, tend towards the craft approach:
“You tcacli my lad so he’ll be able to forge horseshoes and
make clothes too.” We cannot say that today this is al­
ready unnecessary. We have to give knowledge of this
sort, especially in the countryside, but our basic trend is
not in this direction, so when the labour school is, often,
given the character of Tolstoyan doing-things-for-yoursclf,
this is quite contrary to the true socialist idea.
Sometimes you ask children what they have been taught
in the last year They sav, “Not much, we didn’t have time
for lessons.” “So what have you been doing?” “We’ve been
doing things for ourselves, every day we carried firewood,
got tin* food ready, peeled the vegetables. Now if childien
•stoke tlu* stove in school it should, maybe, not be done
for the sake of ‘‘doing it yourself”, but in order to discover
in practice what combustion means, why wood burns and
Rives out heat. Through every action, even preparing soup,
one can explain the whole world and its laws. Bui ollen
we do not find any regard for the instructional aspect. e
are told, “Well at least they have been taught how to work,
they used not to like getting their hands dirty, and now
that does not scare them, they carry the slops and every­
thing” This is a purely Tolstoyan approach. The point ol
the exercise appears not as the production of a true citizen
°f a Communist republic, but as breaking down in it
children of intellectuals the repulsion felt lor ciude loims
of physical labour.
1 have heard from not very clever supporters of the lim­
bed labour school even the following: every factory in Rus­
sia must be productive, so the school has to justify its exist­
ence loo. One can get the children doing dressmaking or
woodwork, sell what they make on the market or use it
for barter, or hand it over to the Council of the National
Economy and get money in return, and then the school
will be costing nothing. This displays utter lack ol under­
standing that a school does not produce goods, but people
with knowledge. That is its product. The product is in the
knowledge and skills of the pupils, everything else is sub­
sidiary. Of course children should be accustomed to real
work which is actually useful; one must not invent unreal.
102 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

unwanted work lor schools, making little fretwork frames

and suchlike, work of that kind is worth nothing. One must
think of work children can do with results that are educa­
tional. Work in school must he educationally justified, i.u.
it must be done in amounts which enable the child lo learn,
and if a child works and gains nothing, then that is a crime
on the part of the school.
Work has no right lo exist in school for even one hour,
unless through it the child becomes more knowledgeable
and more skilled. This does not mean that we should con­
demn the idea oi work being done in lirst-singe schools.
On the contrary, the Americans quite correctly are devel­
oping the idea that skill in using the hands needs (o he de­
veloped. So it is very useful if the children of a first-stage
school have a workshop for metal-work, if they can have
some training in woodwork and in turnery, if they learn how
to measure up, set up and make some little thing. To teach
children in the first-stage school to use simple tools is a
good thing. Even “doing things for yoursolF’ can he excel­
lent if it is skilfully guided. Carrying our minor repairs lo
school premises, or working in a kitchen-garden, or look­
ing after the smaller animals—rabbits, goats,—Ibis is ex­
tremely important, but care must be taken that the chil­
dren are not over-tired, and that always observations should
be made and experience enlarged. One should not star!
keeping cows simply for the sake of getting milk —this has
in some places led to unfortunate results—but one should
help children lo acquire, through taking the trouble lo look
after cows, a whole range of zoological, physiological, tech­
nical, and veterinary knowledge, etc.—in a word, the max­
imum amount of information must be extracted.
As regards the second-stage schools, things are quite dif­
ferent here. At the second stage, starting from age 10-12,
we must accustom children lo real, technical—accessible to
their age-group—large-scale social production in the fac­
tory setting. According to our syllabus this is to be done
poly technically, i.e. we are no I aiming lo turn out by the
end of this period —12 lo 10 years of age—a trained crafts­
man or skilled worker, someone fully qualified lo work in
a particular department in the metal-working industries or
in tanning. We must make it our aim 1hat. at 16 a hoy
should leave school having some idea of what industry is
 ON THE CLASS SCHOOL 103

in general, tliaL lie should have a clear understanding of

Iho structure of a factory, of a steam engine, of a dynamo,
of transmission systems, of the most important types of
lathes, of how a factory is divided up into shops and sec­
tions, that ho should know how the stores and the despatch
department operate, how the raw material comes in, how
the works office functions—that he should visualise all
these things clearly. Ho should have worked in all the parts
of a factory, maybe only for two weeks in each.
A school comes to a factory, it splits up into groups,
goes off to various shops to work, and after a few days the
work-places change over. When the children get back to
school they sum up what they have learned by giving re­
ports and by debate: then the teacher brings it all together
into a single picture. He will put questions to this pupil and
that, and the idea of what that factory is all about will be
fixed firmly in their memories. If they already know one
factory, they will find it easier when they go to another. The
teacher wili point out what is the same and what is dilfci-
ont, and why. It does not matter if the children do not gel
acquainted with a great number of different types of pro­
duction. It is sufficient if they have gained a knowledge
of the most important of these. It would be desirable, ideal­
ly, for every boy or girl leaving school to have already
some knowledge of the metal-working industry, the textile
industry, and the chemical industry. These types of pro­
duction they should be shown.
Our country is backward, there are not many lactones
and mills There are some towns which have none, lhero
are many factories not working. We encounter enormous
difficulties in this direction, but the chief problem is the
lack of training among teachers. If several factories can­
not he viewed, then visit one, as an example, and then by
reading, through discussion, using drawings, bring out hov
one sort oT factory differs from another. If there are no
other places of industry, the railways can be of great help,
the sludy of locomotives and of railway workshops. Large
sleamships, post and telegraph stations—these can be made
use* of in small towns. One can utilise any steam-pow­
ered machinery, ho it a print shop or a power station pro­
viding electric light. As (he network of factories expands,
as we become able to take children to see what they should.
1 04 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

to make longer excursions, this will get evened out.

During their four years the children will see a consider­
able number of industrial establishments, and these must
not only be visited, but stayed in for a sufficiently long
period. Then it will be possible to make this the basis on
which all school subjects rest.
The central, basic subject is the history of human cul­
ture—how all the forms of human culture have developed
on the basis of the economy. In studying the steam engine
you will relate, with illustrations, how this appeared, what
there was before it: every lesson will be made very much
moie fruitful by the impressions the child receives from it^
acquaintance with industry. Industry is such a rich field, it
includes questions of chemistry, physics, health and hygiene,
stnctly economic matters and those of class and politics
a so. The teacher only rarely has to tell the story himself,
he will say to the pupil, “You look in such and such a
nook, ask the workers questions yourself; work it mil for
yourself. 1 In this way the ability for independenl mental
activities is acquired. Later you can introduce the giving of
reports or papers. On the textile mill in Russia, for instance
ilow rii aPPearecl, when it appeared, and how it is struc­
tured The pupil is to prepare himself lo make the repork
to collect his material; you must indicate some main threads
to be followed up in books, indicate whom he should
question; and he himself reads the report. Then there will
be discussion of it.
T h in gs m u st be so set up that the pupil learns noth in g
by rote, but discovers ev eryth in g for h im self.
Not long ago a talented man who wants to reform a
pharmaceutical business was saying to me that one could
achieve immense resulls if one got children to look for cer­
tain medicinal plants, using an information sheet, and then
to dry these. At one and the same time you are teaching
children to look at and understand the characteristics of
plants, giving them an excellent lesson in boLany, and yon
are amassing a vast amount of valuable material for the
pharmacist. It is an absolutely right idea. Let the children
know that they are doing independent, useful, needed work.
Of course one must not overlax a child, one musl assist
him, bill Jet him look, let him search around a liltle. 'Then
you can say to him that there exists such and such a law.
 ON THE GLASS SCHOOL 105

such and such a formula, which will explain a lot to you;

now try and make sense of this particular case in the light
of this law. Suppose you want to give the children a con­
cept of the air. You draw the child’s attention to the fact
that objects fall at different rates, a stone faster, a feather
more slowly, while an airfilled balloon goes upwards—now
think about it, find an explanation of why this is so. Per­
haps he will say that the last object is lighter than air, the
second of approximately the same weight, and the first
heavier than air. Maybe he will think that it depends on
the volume of the objects, but will not be able to give you
iinv other formula, and you will have to give him a lead.
The children must acquire, at first through play and
later with an evcr-incresing element of work, knowledge
of a number of items which must be previously indicated
in the syllabus, so that the leacher can at the years end
check on himself—has he given lliem all that is needed.
He can divide his year into shorter periods with calendai
stages. In the period of the first-stage school children
should learn particular forms of work carpentry, metal­
work, perhaps, and so on. And the sort of thing that went
on in progressive bourgeois schools: vegetable-growing anc
gardening generally, looking after animals, the terrarium,
tile aquarium —all this is useful during the first- stage. Dui-
ing the second stage we transfer the centie of giayity, as
the main things, to technology, but we are producing not
specialists, but people who have a knowledge of all tech­
nology, more or less. He knows what industry is in general,
and, accordingly, he has received a lively conception of so­
ciety from the economic and historic point of view, and of
the laws of physics, of chemistry and of biology.
Russia, being an agrarian country, can never lose sight
of agriculture, for the vast majority of the Russian popu­
lation the town is something to which they have little ac­
cess. Although it enters into" our plan that country children
should at least make extended excursions to towns, this
involves difficulties, and it will be rather the town children
who make excursions to the country. There are not so many
of them, and the countryside is vast. Rut for those who
live in the country the labour school willy-nilly assumes
an agricultural rather than an industrial character. Indeed,
we shall not have got our labour school properly under way
106 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

until we have made every village school inlo an establish­

ment for the study of agriculture.
The country school must be agricultural. Just now I have
travelled round not less than thirteen uyezds, T have
been in Russia and in the Ukraine, and have seen many
different schools and talked a good deal with the peasants
about schools.
By and large, the peasants are dissatisfied with the la­
bour school as it is today, although in very many cases the
teachers, both men and women, are doing their best lo
make this idea a reality. But what is the situation? A wom­
an teacher has received, say, Blonsky’s book or a pamphlet
by Kalashnikov,22 she has a fair idea of the industry-
based school, but there are no factories, there are no lathes
available How can she put it all into practice? But she has
aJso read that eurhythmic gymanstics is a good thing, that
modethng is a good thing, and so is drawing, while a lot
0 learning from books is bad. So she organises things so
that the children study grammar very little, arithmetic very
itilc, but spend an enormous amount of time modelling,
diawing, dancing and singing. The peasants are alarmed,
say, “There you are, they took the icons away, they
don t loach you what’s what any more, they stopped teach­
ing bcnpture, now they spend the whole lime singing and
dancing. It used to be better in the old days —if the" kids
got a bit cheeky the teacher would give them a good clout,
but now its got so bad that if I raise my hand lo my lad
' p? , Sa^’ that’s forbidden under Soviet power!’
1 hey re going to turn out good for nothing, that’s no good
(o us, we don t want that sort of school and we’re not going
lo feed that teacher.”
And in his way the peasant is right. He thinks that as
in the good old days a child should be drilled, and beaten,
and have the fear of God put into him, and be Iaught read­
ing and writing, and all the rest is quite unnecessary. These
fire bad ideas, but it is true, after all, that in the coun­
tryside aesthetic schooling is a secondary thing. When I
came lo one school and saw all the walls covered with
children’s drawings, and realised flint a very great deal of
lime had been given to this, I understood that it must have
a depressing effect on the peasants. The 1rouble is dial the
teacher knows little about agriculture and nature and, there-
 ON THE GLASS SCHOOL 407

loro, eamiol leach much to the children, “she can’t tell a

rake from a shovel”, as the peasants say, and so they can-
nol respect the school.
At tlie same time, the Russian peasant is terribly igno-
ranl himself on agricultural matters; if the Russian peas-
anl practised the kind of farming you find in Germany, we
should have harvests six times the size of the biggest yield
you can lirid in Russia now. And if the scientific methods
now used in America were followed, one cannot even fore-
loll the results, as the Americans have got matters so organ­
ised that they need neither sun nor rain. They have quite
done away with the concept ol the bad harvest. They de­
termine wlial the length of grain should be, and what the
number of grains in the car, for this or that variety ol
wheal; they change the characteristics of soils by adding
various substances or by introducing micro-organisms, and
perform real miracles in ensuring a good harvest. Com­
pared to them our peasants are real, genuine savages—but
if our schools could give them some help on this point, then
they would pay if some respect.
Russian scientific agronomy must reach out its tentacles
lo the peasantry through the teacher and through the chil­
dren. Km* this purpose we are at present doing our best to
organise autumn and spring campaigns of our own, during
which the children will take part, under the teachers guic-
a nee. in the work in the fields, and will get simultaneous­
ly a lesson in natural science and a lesson in agriculture
We have to bring teachers together for short courses a
which agronomists will give lectures. In the first year ol
course we cannot do much, but in a few years time Ave
shall succeed in giving every country teacher a fundament­
al knowledge of agronomy, in seeing that he or she receives
journals on agriculture and builds up a library of books
on the subject, and will really be able to tell the peasant
something—about the new types of agricultural equipment
and how to repair them if they go wrong, and to advise on
rational use of fertiliser, and so on. To change the whole
peasant economy, to raise it to a new level—that is the job
of Narkomzem 23 (the People’s Commissariat of Agricul­
ture); but if the school can introduce knowledge of this kind
into the irrational peasant economy, the peasant will have
respect lor the school. We have issued directives that every
108 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

school is lo have a piece <>T land. The teacher needs Lo de­

velop gradually on that land a model orchard, a inode! api­
ary, and within the hounds of possibility a model held.
One must add the political dimension. As the resolution
of the Eighth Congress of the Party staled, the school must
be a source of knowledge, of labour education and of civic
education.2'1
Every village school must be a centre of education not
only for the children, but for adults as well, i.e. every
school—this is our aim —must have a small bookshop and
a library/reading-room, and a small extra-mural centre
where lectures are given for the adult population.
The school must be a centre of propaganda, an agitation­
al centre. As part ot the system of school and extra-mural
education it must strive to do one better than the priest,
to kill off religious prejudices, lo light the power of the ku­
lak, to combat prejudices of all kinds including those of the
Social Revolutionaries; lo lay out before the peasant a cor­
rect understanding of what the Communist system is, what
the Soviet Republic is, what the revolution is and how it
happened, what its aims are; to use the newspapers, to use
each day’s information to carry this propaganda on con­
stantly, both through the children to the parents and to the
parents directly.
And then our teachers, who should of course have not 50
lo 00 children each under their charge, but not more than
25, will become the bearers of enlightenment to the coun­
tryside. And we must not say this with scepticism: it. will
be so one day. Now is the time we must do this. The most
important thing is to set our aims correctly.
The state is in our hands. Yes, we are overcoming our
enemies, we shall cope, not at once but we shall cope, with
the economic problems. The lime will come when the edu­
cation front will be denoted as the most important front,
when the slogan will be “All for Education” —then we shall
go forward, and all that 1 have spoken of will be made fact.
There are some people who say that for two and a half
year’s we have been struggling like mad, and nothing has
been done yet. But everything cannot be done at once, here
one has to go through definite stages. And to say now
that it would be better to be realistic and to go back to
the old school —this is the greatest possible mistake.
 ON THE CLASS SCHOOL 109

We cannol relreal from our Coiniminist ideals, even

111 <»1 1 11 Ilie real isnl ion of them may be very dilTicult. JJolli
Ilie peasant and Ilie worker know very well that nothing
can be made on the lines of “One, two—and there’s your
ship". When the task is a great on e— to build a gigantic
odiiice — one must pul a very great deal of labour and per­
severance' into it, and not complain Ihat the roof is not on
when we are only just beginning to lay the foundations.
The Unified Labour School is different from even the
best schools of Western Europe. When our Declaration on
the Unified labour School was translated into foreign lan­
guages, (lie newspaper Norddeutscher Allgemeine Zeitung,
a paper which is bourgeois in the highest degree, wrote:
“Kor the first time a government is mapping out a programme
for a school genuinely of the people. If the Bolsheviks
succeeded in achieving this, then of course they would have
a school incomparably higher than in any other coun­
try . . . . But this is, of course, a chimera, it. is of course
utopian—they cannot do i t . . .”
At that time the bourgeois thought that the Russian Rev­
olution in general was just an episode, an experiment.
Only now have they started to howl about the Bolshevik
menace, now they think that it is not an experiment, but
a slorrn on a world scale that may be their ruin.
 THE HOLE OF TIIE WORKERS’ FACULTIES
(RABFAKS) *

The role of llie Workers’ Faculties lias from the very be­
ginning been defined, in the many utterances J have made
on the subject, as being a triple one. In llie first place, the
heaviest damage suffered by any educational institutions
has been that borne by the second-stage schools, in other
words by the upper forms of the former high schools (gym­
nasia) and modern schools (realnoye uchilishchc). This
type of school, class-distinct in its intake of pupils, run by
teachers who were of course better educated people than
teachers in the lower schools, but who were at the same
time more deeply dyed with political opinions hostile to
Soviet power—opinions sometimes of the Black Hundreds
(in line with the tendency of the Ministry of Education
to staff places of education with its own faithful hacks),
or sometimes of the Kadet** or Social-Revolutionary par­
ties (in line with the highly intellectual background of this
section of the teaching body); a school in its methods as
far removed as possible not only from our ideal of the uni­
fied labour school, but from any more or less normal leach­
ing establishment—this type of school was naturally sub­
jected to severe criticism, and lo experiments which had
not always been fully thought out, and it has also been the
scene of some pretty vicious sabotage. If to this one adds
the fact that the second-stage school is a very delicate
plant, which needs great care and great expenditure given
lo it, then it will become clear just bow much this system
was bound to suffer in the transitional period . . .
The Party conference which met in parallel with the
Eighth Congress of Soviets went on record in favour of
shortening the course in the general school to end at 15
years of age, and of organising technical colleges (tekhnik-

::'Abridged.—Ed.
•':*Kadel—Constitutional Democratic Party.—Ed.
 THE ROLE OF THE WORKERS’ FACULTIES U{

unis) in which the first two years of the course (lasting

altogether lour years) would also serve as a preparatory
course lor entry to places ol higher education .. .*
The issue is clear. 11 the institutions ol secondary edu­
cation arc not l'unctioning normally, one must take entrants
to higher education Irom elsewhere. The laws ol the Soviet
Republic alford wide scope lor this, since they provide
practically every 16-year-old with the right to register as
a student. True, this law has had to be limited, as might
have been expected, firstly on account ol shortage ol places
and secondly by the lact that practical studies inevitably
require a certain level ol knowledge, which must be checked
on beforehand. None the loss, the profoundly democrat­
ic direction ol our legislation on higher education would
seem to offer the possibility ol renewing the student body
by this kind of lateral intake.
But is it enough for the state to allow all young men
and girls over 16 to make the attempt to penetrate into
the university, and to urge the university to give them a
sufficiently friendly welcome? No, of course it is not
enough, not by any means. We have an extremely great
interest in what kind ol young people get into higher edu­
cation in this way, and this is where the second role of
the Workers’ Faculties comes in. Their first role, arising
precisely from the above-mentioned need to create addition­
al, lateral channels lor the intake of fresh forces into the
universities and other higher schools, lies essentially in
the necessity of having, for the many young people who
have not been through secondary school, preparatory courses
attached to the university itself. But we do not take
just this simple view of the matter. We must, in essence,
bring into being one- or two-year courses, which perhaps
might be put under the control of the university teaching
staff, and might lake in whatever students Fate sends. But
when wo speak of the Workers’ Faculties this is not, ol'
course, what we have in mind. Their very title makes it
c]car that these are places of education intended first and
foremost to increase the chances of getting into universily
for young people of proletarian origin.
The second aspect of the significance of the Workers’
Faculties, then, is that they are not called on merely to
fill the first-year courses of various higher educational in-
112 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

sliluLious w ith persons who have dune normal preparatory

work, at a lim e when Ihe secondary schools are fu n ction ­
ing poorly; they are also In make it easier for the prole­
tariat to conquer, in practice, these places of higher ed u ca­
tion, and m ak e them its own. W hy, if we held that the pro­
letariat could on ly penetrate the universities by goin g
through the normal schools, we would then au tom atically,
under the conditions now existin g, he obliged to put off the
proletarianisation ol the universities for m an y years to
com e. And when our view point is that such a proletarianisa­
tion is vitally necessary, i.e. that both the interests of the
universities them selves and of culture as a whole demand
it, and that the proletariat itself has an im m e n se need to
gain possession ol know ledge and to bring forth as great
a num ber as possible of proletarian s p e c ia lis ts — then
the task of ensuring the appearance of a s w e e p in g
w ave of proletarian students b ecom es of prime im ­
portance.
The Workers’ Faculty is not simply a lateral channel
bringing in more students, it is a channel calculated to
bring into the universities a specific category of people —
workers from mill and factory, and only secondarily ele­
ments from the Red Army and from the peasantry, not di­
rectly linked with industry. Of course the business must
be put on the most correct organisational basis possible.
One cannot simply accept those workers who express the
wish to come in, this would cause an unhealthy overload
in the Workers’ Faculties, and many of those entering later
become disillusioned as to their own powers, fall behind,
abandon their studies, etc. There are some who do not
leave, but do not study properly cither, who are for various
reasons incapable and who so become in the main a some­
what noisy group, treating the Workers’ Faculty more
as an arena of political struggle than as a place of study,
and this is absolutely undesirable. The political struggle
with the remnants of the ruling classes and with, say, the
retrograde nature of the world outlook held by the univer­
sity teachers —this is not the business of the Workers’ Fac­
ulties. This is the business of the Communist Party, of
the Soviet Government, and, first and foremost, of the Peo­
ple’s Commissariat for Education and ils Board for Voca­
tional Training (Glavprofobr).2 The business of students
 THE ROLE OF THE WORKERS’ FACULTIES M3

in Mu' Workers' Faculties is to study, to soak up knowledge

all day ami every day, knowledge which our comparatively
very ignorant proletariat needs desperately.
From the foregoing it is obvious that the factory com­
mittees. the Party bodies and the trade unions must select
and put forward for the Workers’ Faculties candidates who
are able young men and women, full ot keenness to learn,
and with some background of preliminary study. The last
point, however, should not he loo slrictly applied. Bettei to
add an extra preparatory year to the Workers’ Faculty and
so give the opportunity of going to university to particu­
larly talented hoys and girls even when they know nothing
beyond the three R’s, by making their course in the Work-
ms’ Faculty correspondingly longer, than to bar from en­
trance those who may, formally speaking, be not very lit­
erate hut who have natural talent and the ability to absorb
essential knowledge. .
There is a mistake often made here. Many people are in­
clined to think that the Workers’ Faculty will not provide
very many students, in fact, for the place of higher educa-
lioii lo which it is attached. Those defending this belief
consider that the Workers’ Faculty will decline to the status
of something like a technical college or place of ‘ higher
secondary” education, which will produce graduates from
ils third year, say, who will be more or less skilled work-
e rs-an d ‘that will be the end of it. Maybe, they say one
in ten will become a real student, and let us rejoice u this
is so but three or five out of ten will complete the full
course at the Workers’ Faculty and will leave it as educat­
ed people with certain specialist skills.
This point of view’ is fatal. The object which the pessi­
mists of the Workers’ Faculties are thus making their own
is that which is openly and properly pursued in the tech­
nical colleges. The Workers’ Faculty is not a technical col­
lege, it is not a secondary school producing technicians
with secondary qualifications, it is a preparatory course lead­
ing to serious university study. It is quite possible, of
course, that a certain percentage of students will leave af­
ter the first, or second, or third year of study there, having
acquired some knowledge which will serve them in good
stead, hut this is clearly not the normal course of events.
The main stream must complete the preparatory course nor-
y _ 0 l 120
114 ANATOLI LUN ACIIA US K Y

m ally and flow on from Micro into Mil* firs I year of I ho uni­
versity.
I p ersonally am in favour of their going on to, specifi­
ca lly , the first year of the university, rather than of the
sen ior courses of I Ik* W orkers’ Faculty being seen as Ihe
eq u iv a le n t of the university first year. I musl d issociale
m y s e lf as en ergetically as possible from Ihose who suppose
that the W orkers’ Faculty will ilself be Iransformed into a
u niversity, i.e. that the senior year of the W ork ers’ Fac­
ulty w ill become parallel to the first year of university.
T hen the latter’s first year will starl lo wither, lo lose
ground, and the W orkers1 Faculty will start lo edge mil llie
hrst and then the second and Ihe ihird year, and so on, and
will in practice turn inlo a W orkers1 University, by crowd­
ing the old university out of its walls. T his concept is rad­
ically unsound. A process of this kind, of struggle be­
tween a W orkers1 F aculty grow ing outwards and upwards
and a university being enfeebled from (lie bottom upwards,
will be a most painful and a boundlessly u neconom ical one.
We m ust conquer the u niversity as such for proletarians,
and for this purpose the W orkers’ Faculty m u st be an ap­
propriate channel, from the further end of which will issue
forth, so to speak, a supply of stu d en ts for the normal lec­
ture-theatres of an institution of higher education.
Many people, b asin g th em se lv es on a false view of Ihe
W orkers1 Faculties as insliluLions hostile lo the university
and due lo displace it, w hile b eing sincere friends to these
Faculties none the less are gu ilty of heresy in d em an d in g
their separation from places of higher ed u calion, their in­
d ependence of these. W e find a curious situation. T he uni­
versity teachers, or that part of them w hich h ales the
W orkers1 ("acuities, are pressing d em ands that Ihe W ork ers1
Faculties should be pushed out of the u niversities, walled
off from them; and the m ost fervent defenders of the W ork­
ers' F acu lties are also pressing dem an d s that they should
he taken out of the u niversities, they also wanL to erect
w alls b etw een the two, and so are b ringin g grist to the
mill of the university teach ers’ worst prejudices.
If however we see the W ork ers’ F aculties as a quite s p e ­
cific proletarian preparatory sch ool lea d in g to the u n iversi­
ty, then we shall grasp Ihat the closer its lin k s with the
university, the more its sy lla b u s and m eth ods are guided
 t h e r o l e of t h e w o r k e r s ’ f a c u l t i e s lib

by Ilie aims of (lie university, the more use is made by it

oi' the lecture rooms, laboratories, libraries and teaching
staff of the university, the more advantage will accrue to
us, and the more rapid will be the upward movement of the
true line of organic, not hostile, conquest of the university
hy the Workers' Faculty.
.\o w to the third aspect of the significance of the Work­
ers' Faculty. W hile I am an ardent supporter of the w o r k ­
er.v’ incullies being indeed faculties, i.e. a definite organic
part of the university, I am far from opposing the idea
that the Workers’ Faculties will have a powerful transform­
ing effect upon the university itself. The immoderate, m ili­
tant supporters of the Workers’ Faculties see m a t t e r s as
som ethin g in the nature of the old university frigate being
sunk hy the new proletarian dreadnought which is being
gradually constructed. For mo the picture is somewhat dil-
ferenl. Not that 1 am s u p p osin g—far from it— that it is
only a matter of altering the constituents ol the living
blood circulating in the veins of the aging university body.
No, we must, go deeper than that. But before I say som e­
thing on that subject, I would like to clear up some m is­
understanding over the word "laculty .
A s w e know, Faculty is the name given to one stream,
m oving parallel with other streams and representing one
specialisation or another, these then com ing together as a
unity, the university. It is not the place here to give a cri­
tique of the old system of faculties and university, which
was inherited by us from the Middle A ges and w h ich
is in m any ways quite outmoded, but however that m ay bo,
Workers' V acuities do not in the least resemble a Faculty
ol Medicine or ol Social Sciences, etc. In the one case fac­
ulties are divided according to the particular subjects
dealt with, and have grouped around them the disciplines
required for study of the given subject. In our case wo
have a preparatory institution, not m oving parallel but being
as it were a doorway to all the universities. Of course
within the Workers' Faculty itself there m ay be appropriate
separations of track, so that within it there m ay be so m e­
thing resembling faculties of medicine, science, m a th e ­
matics, etc., as in the university. B ut this m akes the W ork­
ers’ Faculties even less like faculties in general. The nam e
is an absurdity, it should be changed.
116 ANATOM r.lJNAOHAnSKY

B u l llio n am e is hardly lik ely lu mislead anyone, and il

is hardly w orthw hile to argue over winds. M eanw hile,
c h a n g in g the n am e “ W orkers’ F aculty” to so m e th in g else
is pregnant with dangers. It is dangerous to separate off
this w ork ers’ section of the university from other sections.
W h en we have W orkers’ Faculties we are stressing, we are
g iv in g notice hy so calling them, that this is an integral
part of the university, with rights equal to those of other
parts. And this is of particular importance. W e m ust w ith ­
out tail m ake the Workers f a c u ltie s a living organ of the
u niversity, or a living organ of the higher technological in­
stitute if that is w hat it is attached to.
So, the third task of the W orkers’ Faculties lies in that
they not only pump new blood into the organism of the
liighei^ educational system , hut ch an ge the actual m orphol­
o gy ol these institutions. T he W ork ers’ Faculty, after all,
has to leach scien ce to a quite distinct category of people.
The students of the W orkers’ Faculties are in one w ay less
easy 1o leach than those coining Irom the old secondary
schools. B ut it is true to say that this lack of previous train­
ing on their side largely relates to that n eed lessly s c h o la s­
tic el omen I which is still present to a considerable decree
in u niversity education. All that is needed is so m e addi­
tional instruction in the Russian language, and perhaps in
a foreign lan gu age, in inalhem atics, and m ech a n ica l draw ­
ing) and som e system atisation ol elem en tary scientific
know ledge and the lormal entrance requirem ents can he
mol. And w hen it com es to taking in sp ecialist k now ledge,
the W orkers’ Facu lty students are extrem ely well qualified
to do so. Workers from the transportation s y s te m , so m e of
them with considerable experience behind then), are of
course ex c ellen t material w hen il com es to ap preh en din g
disciplines and technology related to that exp erience, etc.
A worker is in general more mature, more developed s o ­
cially, more active and more ind ep en d en t than the former
high-school or modern-school hoy. l i e will not permit h im ­
self, as a yo u n g man drilled behind those accursed d esk s
m igh t do, m erely to m em orise as far as p ossib le a lecture
lie has listened to, although Ik* m ay have listened with
som e attention; the worker will besiege the lecturer at his
rostrum after his lecture w ith a m a ss of different q u e s­
tions; he will drag him back to practical ap plication s, he
 THE ROLE OF TIIE WORKERS’ FACULTIES 117

will keep up practical work with especial interest and al­

ways, Ihanks In the fact, that he has technical know ledge
and skilful hands trained by labour, he will master m an y
things, particularly in the technical field, which a boy with
secondary education would have never been able to do. The
worker's particularly fresh practical common sense, his ap­
proach from the angle of practice to both the aims and the
methods of technology, cannot help but have a h ealth y
effect on the actual teaching given. All this will oblige som e
individual professors, to begin with, to re-consider their
courses and adpist them selves to a new audience, and lalei
will have a powerful effect on the curriculum, syllabi and
methods of tin* whole university, l h e students of the W o ik -
ers7 Faculties, as they enter the main stream of the uni­
versity, will not only force a change in its leaching in the
direction of greater *contact with life, greater practicality,
they will gradually educate a new type of leaching stall,
particularly from am ong the you ng scientists and you ng
lecturers who work m ainly in the W orkers7 Facu lties— a
stall that will he up to the new demands made upon them.
In this way there will come about a conquest of the uni-
versilv which is not m erely external, going beyond the fact
Ihat s illin g in the lecture theatres there will be not only
Urn sons of intellectuals but real workers and peasants. Ao,
il will not be limited to that, there will be a conquest from
within, a sh ift in all the values of the university, a purge
rem oving from if all the old scholastic attitudes still deal
lo the heart of the intellectual, and an adding to the uni­
versity of d isciplines which the m ighty voice of life pio-
clnims Lo he vitally n eed ed — and the proletarian ear is e s ­
pecially sen sitive lo that sam e voice.
Such is the significance of the W orkers7 Vacuities, and
from it follow the conclusions: careful preparation of the
best qualified workers, particularly industrial workers, for
lhe W orkers’ Faculties; constant, close contact betw een a
Workers' Faculty and its own establishm en t of higher ed u ­
cation; especial care lo be taken that the Workers h acu i­
ties in the course' of their natural growth should not trample
on or damage', under any circum stances, the normal in ­
stitutions of higher education, that the W ork ers7 F aculties
should not spit in the university well from which they will
later on be drinking; and equally great care to be taken
118 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

tlml the institutions of higher education should not hinder

the* growth of tin* Workers’ Faculties. The instil ill ions of
h ig h er education must realise that the Workers' Faculties
will provide their food for tomorrow, that they a re their
future, that they arc a promising young son, and they have
no other. 11 the university wauls to live (and this applies
to oilier places of higher education also) it must lake par­
ticular care of the normal development of its Workers’
("acuity.
 WI1AT KIND OF SCHOOL DOES THE PROLETARIAN
STATE NEED?

\Vlirn Ilu1 Ilinno of ill is debale was announced, som e

■oMirndes were asking me, “ Is there going lo be a debate
),,, ‘What Kind of School Does Ilie Proletariat N eed ?’?”
| | ( *i v we have wlial seem s a slight difference in formula-
lj(M1 - | lie proletariat inslead of Ilie proletarian state. I can-
nol call lliese hvo different trends of thought, but recently
1 1,(»r(* has been a glimpse or two of som ething in the nature

n |‘ a slight deviation, to which we should perhaps pay

s()nie attention right at the start, in order to put in a correct
light those few hut basic theses which 1 shall attempt to
expound lo you now.
Over the recent period one has glimpsed in some state­
m ents and in some interpretations of these statements, in
som e resolutions and reports, for instance at the Young
C om m unist League (Komsomol) Congress, 1 the idea that
one should devote care first of all, and maybe even e x c l u ­
s i v e l y (in view of the limited resources available), to schools
for proletarians, and that the idea of a monopoly of
(‘duration being in the hands of the class which is now
leader and dictator might perhaps be the most economical
and rational educational policy for this country.
1 repeal that 1 cannot give a single name, cannot indi­
cate even one group that would lake this standpoint. There
h only a little deviation to one side, a tinge, a hint of
this interpretation, this formulation, which we must from
the outset condemn as a heresy, one maybe arising from
very honourable feelings and very rational considerations,
hut none the less an undoubted heresy and deviation from
the correct statement of the educational problem.
If someone were now to develop that approach, that th e­
ory, and to say: you have very few good teachers, you have
very little proper school equipment: you know that the la­
bour school you <1roam of can only he realised given organ
ic, basic links with factory and mill; and you have bun-
12 0 ANATOLI LUNACII AKSKY

rirods of th ou sand s of proletarian children and young peo­

ple, not all of whom by any means are assured at present
of a normal education- why not concentrate all your forces
on this vanguard? why should the y o u n g e r generation
c o m in g up to take our place not have all your attention
and the benefit ol all the resources you dispose of at pres­
ent? If som eone were now to formulate the problem in
th ese terms, he would be falling into an error which may
perhaps have been justified by the special features of our
situation during the war. but which today would run
counter to the fundamental line of our political think­
ing.
If you give thought to Ibo slogan which was put for­
ward, with a question mark and for discussion, by Vladi­
mir Ilyich a year ago at the Party Congress, and which
more than a year later was again mentioned by V. I. Lenin
at the Fourth Congress of the Third In tern a tio n a l- (hut
this lime as a statem ent of the considerable success achieved
by the policy laid down on lilt* previous o cc a sio n ), you
will see that the inner m eanin g of that policy lies in the
following.
Outwardly, and formulated in brief, it is alliance wdth
the peasantry, and m ovem en t forward, maybe at a slower
rate, but m ovem en t forward which will be the more irre­
sistible,. the more fully the main labouring mass of the
people— the p easan try— falls in behind the proletariat, the
vanguard of the Russian people. And if wo develop and in­
terpret this formulation further, it m eans that the task of
the p r o leta r ia t is to build its own proletarian stale out of
the e lem en ts it finds present in the country, a ssig n in g to
each of them its place u tilisin g each of them for (lie com ­
mon aim. Isolation of the proletariat from the rem aining
mass, its isolation from the rest of the population, Irans-
formation of tiie proletariat into a special camp, oven though
a camp of people more advanced than the rest in their
level of organisation and their clarity of visualisation of
their own aims —such an isolation would ho a policy
fraught with disaster. Only can* by tin* proletarian govern ­
m e n t— care in all possible re sp e cts— for the whole coun­
try, for the whole econom y, and first of all, of course, for
that m ost fundam ental of all foundations of R ussian eco­
nom ic life and of the further developm ent of our p eop le—
 W1IAT KIND o r SCHOOL DO WE NKHD? 121

Ilie peasantry; only this is a truly correct, and furthermore

profoundly proletarian policy.
Thus we must, of course, put the theme we are today
discussing in its correct form, as the problem of providing
llii* best kind of school for the proletarian state , i.e. a state
led by the proletariat in the spirit of proletarian ideo-
logy, which has as its goal the complete annihilation ol
classes, and which benefits all except exploiters and reac­
tionaries.
I could speak today, in the fifth year of the Revolution,
in terms as it were proper to more or less revolutionary,
Marxist ideals in the sphere of education. What kind ol
school does the proletarian stale need? .. . As we arc speak­
ing of the school of the proletarian state, we are therefore
speaking of the school of the transitional period.
But even at the time of the Declaration we issued at the
very start of the Revolution we foreswore revolutionary
utopia. Normal ideals are like a guiding star, ideas of the
very best kind of school we can visualise, given full reali­
sation of our best pedagogical principles, can have some
significance. In any case we then, in the Declaration, were
more mapping out a type of school which could be realised
in pracLice in our very best, model establishments, oi which
seemed achievable within the years immediately following.
Today it. would hardly be practical to pose the cjuestion
even from this angle. It would not be difficult to repeat
the basic tenets of our ideal scheme of education, but it
would harillv be particularly useful.
When we'say, “What kind of school does the proletarian
state need?” we can promptly counter that with another
formulation - “What kind of school is possible in proletar­
ian Russia?" And we are obliged to look for some sort of
combination, some sort of median between these two ob­
jectives. For if we were inclined to be too opportunist, if
w.e took much account of possibilities, i.e. of what can
easily be realised, we could find ourselves giving up even
those ways of putting our ideals into practice which are
far from unattainable, given maximum revolutionary en-
ergy.
At the same time, while relying on that maximum revo­
lutionary energy, which of course in the overall scheme of
things we have got, but which only in some small part,
122 ANATOM I.IINAC,ITARSKV

il. is Iruo, lias been coining the way nl' Ilie* scliools ((horn'll
in 1 1 1 is respect we hope for boiler th in g s). relying on
Ibis, w e slill must not pose our problem in these terms:
if there existed, somewhere', a more or less com plete prole­
tarian state, as a transition to com m unism , w hat kind of
school would be most suitable to it? W e still m ust set b e­
fore ou rselves our own direct task: w hat marker posts, what
i m m e d i a t e marker post can we set up to guide us in our
very poverty-stricken, our very neglected educational scene
— to guide us along the road and in the direction that
will bring us closer to the unshakable ideals of our com ­
m u n ist educational theory, ideals which still remain dear
to us and beyond question?
If we are going to discuss this in the stale dimension
and not in the purely class dimension, we must first of all
be clear in our own minds as to w h a t kind of school sys­
tem a proletarian stale should recognise as valid and light
for. Iri this respect, can any essential changes be made” to
(he plan we laid down earlier, or what aspects of that plan
have proved impossible to realise, on what points have
doubts arisen?
You remember what this plan was. It was a plan for
the creation of the unified labour school. In idea, the uni­
fication of the school as understood by Com m unists means
that all the separation between the class school for the la­
bouring lower orders, and the privileged class school for
the middle and higher estales, m ust he done aw ay with.
The school must bo one and the sam e for the whole popu­
lation, in the legal sen se — in the sen se of the level of ed u ­
cation to which every child has a right.
Please do not confuse, as som e Com m unists, in clu d in g
som e not unacquainted with educational ideas, h ave done
on the pages of respected Soviet publications —do not con ­
fuse the word “ unified” with the word “ u niform ” , since
unification does not in the least presuppose absence of ad­
ju stm en t of the school to the particular conditions of the
area in which if is developing. Thu school is variable, in
regard to different pedagogical exp erim en ts and to certain
differing em ph ases for groups of children with particular
gifts, it even permits of individualisation in children's de­
velopm ent. All these forms, varyin g w ith in the particular
school, w ith in the school system of a particular area,
 WIIAT KIND OF SCHOOL DO WE NEED? 123

;»nd williin lhnl of the .schools of tlio whole country,

we* not only admit hut con si tier useful in the h ighest
degree.
But 1 shall now point out that in this respect the Com­
missariat for Education over a long period committed an
error in I he opposite direction. It believed for a long time
Mint (lie body of teachers, and the persons in charge ol
schools in the provinces (guberians) and districts (u yezd s),
would be able to adjust to their own prevailing conditions
the general ideas laid down, by and jor themsel ves. And
•n our official curricula, maybe deliberately, we did not
give enough material worked out in detail. True, in the
localities a certain amount of creative work, work on (he
production of svllabi, did then follow, and we had many
syllabi which were* satisfactory, and some which were pos-
itively good, produced in various places throughout Rus­
sia. But we now see clearly that here we perhaps ovcish ol
in (he direction of excessive decentralisation. V\ e aie now
com ing round to the idea that we must make our recom­
mended syllabi (inner, and insist more strongly on (heir
actual application, i.e. w7c must firmly and unequivocally
lay down a certain minimum programme, a certain liam e-
work of basic requirements ol the state in (he education
ol children. 3
Idle unification of the school which 1 w:as just talking
about-—(o what degree can it, a priori, he achieved in R u s­
sia? We could, of course, have declared the lower forms
ol secondary school to be Soviet schools of the first stage
and pul them in the same official category as the village
schools. W e could have chopped off from them the upper
lorms of secondary schools and declared them to be schools
ol the second stage, accessible in equal measure to all
those com pleting the first-stage school. But wre wrer.e not
of course so blind as not to see that this would still not
mean real unification.
Even a comparative degree of unification (given the huge
disproportion between the numbers of elem entary schools
in tin* country and the number of second-stage schools
which could have been created in the w ay just m en tion ed ),
(‘veil this demanded that there should at least he some
guarantee of equality of material opportunity as regards
entrance to the second-stage school, so that those g ain in g
124 ANATOLI LUNAGILALSKY

en tran ce sh ould be on ly the most f ille d , tin* coni ion

of w h o s e education would undoubtedly be more valuable
th an in the case ol those whose education we musl per­
force bring to a halt at the elem entary school.
Y ou know that in round figures we have enough lirsL-
sta g e schools for only half our children, and that the num ­
ber of second -stage schools would barely suffice for JS lo
0 per cent of children. So it is clear that roughly nine out
of ten of those com pleting first-stage school cannot find
places in second-stage school. And Ibis fact puls at an ox-
tLonie disadvantage those who Jive in the country as com ­
pelled lo those who live in towns, which destroys even com ­
parative unification of the school system . T he pi ain fact
is that the child ol a peasant family, in the vast majority
of cases and irrespective of his natural talent, is going lo
have immeasurably less chance of going to second -slagc
school than the urban child h a s — in S oviet Russia, for
some decades alter the Revolution, even given that tbe
schools do as well as they possibly can. *
As regards one reproach often made, on the subject of
iailuro to realise the ideal of the unified s c h o o l - t h a t even
now our second-stage school takes in a much greater per­
centage ol children from privileged fam ilies than of ch il­
dren from Iho labouring population this reproach is not
altogether just. A partial explanation is that we would of
c o u ise be quite wrong to throw out ol school those on their
w ay to com pleting it, and lo replace them, som ehow , bv
youngsters with no previous sch ooling whom wo had so m e­
how picked from som ewhere. Of course this would be
im possible. B u t over the past five years the process of deni-
ocratisalion of the second-stage* schools, and of prolclar-
isation ol those schools in the towns, has advanced a long
way. Ol course it has not yet advanced as far as it should-
W e have not at present got precise data, but if we
could collect up detailed q uestionnaires on social origins
(w h ich I do not consider particularly useful ed u cation al­
ly, and would rather refrain f r o m ) — if we could do this,
it would probably em erge that the proportional representa­
tion in the second -stage schools of various strain of the
population is far from corresponding lo llie general percent­
ages w ithin llie urban population represented by particu­
lar social groups. B u t none the less there is no com parison
 WITAT KIND OF SCHOOL DO WE NEED? 125

hero b etw een the present situation and w hat there was be­
fore tli.i‘ Revolution.
In this respect, then, the uniiied school is a definite ad­
vance, in terms of breaking down formal, legal barriers
and m o v in g towards democratisation and proletarisation
of the second -stage schools. But this is still an on -going
process, and of course it meeds with a certain resistance.
In between Ibis legal reform and those reforms, or that
revolution, which has to take place in the internal work­
ings of the schools them selves, and which flows from the
principle of p olytechnical labour education in between,
there lies an area ol reforms which it would not be diffi­
cu lt to carry through without a radical transformation of
the school. Such as liberating the schools from obviously
sch olastic subjects, which the dead langu ages are and have
been for the im m en se majority of boys and youths. -Ihcn,
breaking down the system of single-sex education, which
is absurd, ed u cation ally harmful, a legacy from the past;
som e progress has also been achieved in the direction o
rational au ton om y within the school, exerted d n e ct y y
the pupils. Across almost the entire face of the Russian
land the liberation from clearly scholastic subjects has
taken place, and almost everywhere, with very few excep­
tions (alth ou gh in the course of this year 1 came upon one
town w here co-education had not been introduced, and quite
a large town too), a l m os t everywhere co-education has
b een put into operation. A lm ost everywhere, too, there arc
the b eg in n in g s of su ccessfu l school self-governm ent, and
Ibis is one area where there is very little precisely worked
out as yet. where there are m an y searchings in prog
ress, som e of them m ost interesting.
A ll th ese th ings do not call for major expenditure, they
are th ings which can be prescribed on paper in the foim
of a decree, w ith som e reasonable expectation that they
will be put into operation and take on life, that only ill-
will and inertia can paralyse their application. It is quite
another m atter w h en w e come to reform of the spirit of
teach in g itself, i.e. to the principles of the polytechnical
labour school. And here the greatest num ber of doubts
arise.
Is a labour school, and a polytechnical school, necessary
to the proletarian state? Let us start with the first asp ect—
i2 6 AN ATOM UJNACIIA USK V

w h eth er llio labour school is necessary to Ilie proletarian

stale. Here it would seem Ihat. we have on our side an e x ­
ce p tio n a lly large num ber of voles — those, at leash of a
w h ole large section of our im m ediate comrades in the (lorn-
n n in ist Party and of ed u cation ists close to it. Workers in
ed u cation who to som e extent part com pany with us when
w e pass on the issue of the polytechnical school, are our
unconditional supporters so far as the labour school is con ­
cerned, i.e. they, like we, are convinced that school must
be based on labour, but the “left-w in g ers” am on g them
consider that it should also be a trade or vocational school
right from the start.
Let us first pause and consider the principle of tin' la­
bour school. That the school should be based on labour is
beyond doubt in the m inds of proletarian groupings and
ol‘ educationists who ally th em selves with these. T he prole­
tariat is itself a labouring class, a practical class, which
can fu lly appreciate the educational and social significance
of scientifically organised labour, based on applied scien ce
and through it on science in general, i t can appreciate this
excellen tly well, and therefore has no doubts of it being
correct to organise the schools on this basis. B ut there can
be gradations here, and if we understood the labour school
in the sam e w ay as it is understood by som e ed u cation ists
in Germany, and particularly som e in Am erica, we would
then have an even wider circle of people sh aring our views.
In all conscience, there hardly can be at the present time
ol a progressive pedagogue or oven one with any degree
ol en lighten m en t, who doubts I hat the material under study
should bo apprehended not by book learning but by
visual and active m eans, through walks, excursion s, labo­
ratory work, drawing, m odelling, con structing etc., by ac-
lively working up given them es — addu cin g ind ep en d en tly
found material, elaborating tin's in group work through d is­
cu ssions, group compilation of data and so on. All this is
today not subject to doubt. B ut this side of the school is
still as yet more a matter of educational e x p e r im e n t than
of an educational system , not on ly in this country, but also
for those countries and those progressive sch ools which
have taken this road long ago, more or less.
To defend learn in g on ly from books would today be as
ridiculous as to defend learning to read and write by re-
 WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL DO WE NEED.' 127

Im-aIi1 1 A, J3, C ole.5 ll is an entirely old-fashioned approach,

and any eduoalionisl who lias not grasped this is real­
ly a hoary backwoodsman. But this is not enough by any
means for proletarian educational theory, although even
this is a considerable advance for the children in first-stage
schools. I consider that this is the most important ele­
ment in the first-stage school, and it maybe that here those
working in the Commissariat for Education made a great
mistake.
The point is that the next step in carrying the labour
school further and deeper is teaching not only by means
of processes similar to social labour, active processes (in
which the whole human organism participates, not only
memory, not only the brain), but teaching labour itself as
a social technique, and in a practical manner at that. The
most acceptable labour processes are those which will nev­
er turn a child into an exploited worker, but have him ex­
ecuting the work process for the sake of, for the purposes
of, his own physical and mental growth. Karl Marx too
understood the educational effect of labour on pupils in
this way. And this is one of the most hopeful, important,
basic ideas in the field of proletarian educational thinking.
And s i n c e one can fully accept this proposition as it relates
lo industry, in the eyes of some educationists “doing
things for oneself” (i.e. domestic work—chopping wood,
c a r r y i n g water, cooking, cleaning rooms) has acquired mer­
it,, as being a preparatory stage and a very closely relat­
ed preparatory stage leading up to the later one of real
labour, an adjusting stage suitable for the first-stage school.
I am far from denying that in children’s activities in
school a certain place may be allocated to this doing things
for oneself, but one must treat it with the greatest caution.
And in the early days, especially in view of the poverty
of the schools and the impossibility of hiring auxiliary
staff, big mistakes were of course made in this respect.
This fact was missed—that educational value attaches on­
ly to work of a specific kind, work through which more
•ind more useful skills are learned, acquired and establish­
ed and which also yields an appreciable amount of Know­
ledge gained, “along the way” and just because the child
jg working.
When John Dewey G describes how one should cook and
128 AN ATO U I.U X ACHARS KY

in doing so give excellent, lessons in chemistry, physics,

botany, zoology, health care, and physiology, lie is absolute­
ly right. Although objections have been put Lo me, Lliat
il" one talked such a lot while preparing a dinner some­
thing would boil over, something else would start burning,
etc.—none the less 1 believe that his approach is more or
less correct. If one approaches it in this maij, all this can
of course have educational value. But if today children arc
chopping wood, gcLlmg the dinner, carrying water—and
doing exactly the same tomorrow and the day after tomor­
row, then the result is not any great mental development,
or even physical development. It is work of a pretty dead­
ening nature. We Communists strive by all the means at
our disposal to get rid of this kind of work altogether. Our
ideal is to save woman, who wastes her life at such work,
and the child, who gels dragged into it—lo save them from
all this washing of clothes, preparing of food, washing of
dishes, by replacing it on a vasl collective scale by indus­
trial execution of all these chores.
Our socialist soul revolts from, would escape from this
mean and petty work which makes victims of many of us,
the female half in particular. To accept it as an element
in education is something to be done only with the most
extreme caution. And the labour school of the (irsl stage
has acquired the character of “doing things for yourself”
to such an extent that one has had to hear from the mouths
of children, when asked about their school work, such re­
marks as: “When would we he learning anything--there’s
no time left when we’ve finished doing everything for our­
selves!” Often this was due to the difficulties faced by the
school itself. The schools have often been lighting for sur­
vival through the feeble strength of children, and often
Lhis has not been the fault of the teachers but their mis­
fortune.
Jn the first-stage school there should be play, the acqui­
sition of elementary knowledge through active pursuits,
which imperceptibly change from play lo something more
and more serious. Only older children can directly, defi­
nitely enter on the way opened up by the second stage of
the labour school, i.e. learning actually to work.
Here I must make a small exception, a proviso, which is
especially important in Russia, so important in fact that
 WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL DO WE NEED? 129

il Iruns forms ilself from a small proviso or exception into

one ol' the basic rules of our school policy: labour on the
land, which one can visualise over a whole range starting
from ils simplest elements, from the “work” of children’s
games with earth and water, through the growing of plants
that even four- and five-year-olds can he allowed to share
in, and the caring for animals like rabbits, or maybe a
goal, right up to the gigantic prospects of scientific agri­
cultural technology—this variety of labour (which with
anything like proper handling is an extremely healthy pur­
suit, and one which brings one face to face with the might
and the beauty of Nature) is something which must be giv­
en particular emphasis here in Russia, for nowhere else
can it or should it be so widely practised as in this coun­
try.
The elementary, first-stage school (practically the only
school we have in the countryside, for we have very few
second-stage schools there, comparatively) must base it­
self wholly upon the vegetable garden, the orchard, the
school animals etc., because this kind of work—given cor­
rect teaching—permits of the same variety of conclusions
being drawn from it as from factory and mill, so long as
we do not let ourselves be limited by peasant horizons, so
long as the teacher can contrive to use this tiny school-
house economy so as to draw from it, by practical means,
conclusions on the horizons it opens up, trusting to the
youthful reason of his or her small fellow-workers. In this
respect the applicability of the labour school principle is
beyond all argument, even in our industrially very back­
ward country. Much of this programme can be carried out
without any especially complicated equipment, without spe­
cial workshops. Given the right approach even the urban
first-stage school, and the country school especially, can
be correctly orientated on this, utilising just a small plot
of land, a small school “agricultural economy” (even with­
in the confines of a town), or making extensive use of sum­
mer schools. This is a more or less possible thing.
It is quite another matter when we come to the second-
•ylage school, when we come to teaching labour itself. Here,
first of all, we arc faced with the question: why the pol-
ytechnical school, rather than the technical?
The disagreements which there have been, which are
9 —01120
130 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

maybe still to be met with, have their own history. View­

points have changed. Some people, for instance, used to
agree with our basic principle. That the point is not to
teach young boys a particular craft (if we arc speaking
of a correctly orientated school) or even a particular trade
in the industrial setting. That is not the aim. The aim is
to acquaint the young person with the nature of scientifical­
ly organised labour. Now some supporters of vocational
education have taken this point of view, but have said: if
you want to give an adolescent a real idea of labour as a
serious thing, you cannot have him or her flitting super-
licially irom one labour method to another, fluttering or
arming around different branches of industry; let him or
ler really work for a few years in one particular shop or
department, so that he gets into it in depth, so that he un­
derstands it properly.
We too consider that good use can be made of one place
ot production, one sector of production, as an example, if—
“i,0,* 1 , il is 01>ganised at all scientifically. This is
a half-way house” kind of viewpoint, it is an arguable
point. And I make no bones of saying that here one can
tip the balance too far, to one side or the other. One can
get too carried away along one channel of production, and
one can also take polytechnical education to moan acquaint­
ing childien with practically all existing techniques, or
making it so to speak pantechnical. That is not what we
intend.
If we had the possibility—and I will say here that some­
times we do have the possibility—of organising a pol­
ytechnical labour school, what wo would require is two
oi three sectors of industry, say communications, textiles
and mining. One can get into each of these in sufficient
depth, from the polytechnical angle, in the course of those
four or five years during which the child will have them
as the basis on which to build up its world outlook and to
gain acquaintance with all aspects of science. But if we
lake a closer look at tlie matter, it is possible to study pro­
duction over a wide range of differentiation even within
one factory, since every factory has its main production
process but also has repair shop and its commercial de­
partments (office, accounts, packing, dispatch), and last­
ly industrial health and safety etc., which surround every
 WHAT KIND OP SCHOOL DO WE NEED? 131

factory with a quardian wall and wliicli likewise present

a basis for very interesting studies. So that in every fac­
tory producing on anything like a serious scale we always
find several major sub-sections which together offer the
possibility of organising polytechnical education.
Other opponents with a hostile attitude to polytechnical
education have said: all this is not the point, the point is
that in our poverty-stricken land such delicate considera­
tions are beyond our means; polytechnical education may
be a very nice thing, but you are building castles in the
air while there is stern reality facing us and saying, “Give
me a boy of 14-15-16 who has been trained enough to
be put into circulation straight away, because we must have
trained hands or the country is ruined.”
Again, this is a point of view with which it is in some
respects impossible not to agree. It is possible that from
the angle of the general, practical economic situation we
might have to reach the conclusion that we cannot do
anything other than this, that we must make a temporary
retreat from our ideals. One can have a situation when peo­
ple receive on their ration cards a minimum which from
the point of view of health and nutrition is not the mini­
mum but below it. That means there is famine in the land.
And in our land there is now such a famine so far as know­
ledge is concerned, that no one could be surprised if we
were obliged to beat a retreat in the given respect. But this
does not mean beating a retreat ideologically, that we
should abandon the idea of the polytechnical school in those
places where it is more or less possible.
At the present time this contest of opinion has led to
some fragmentation of our school system. Thus the Ukraine
has completely done away with the top forms of the
former secondary educational establishments and has merged
their lower classes with corresponding first-stage schools,
and in this way has created on the one hand a net­
work of truncated schools (we have these too, of course)
—i.e. four-year schools, and on the other hand some
seven-year schools, which can exist only in very small
numbers in the Ukraine itself. The others were destroyed;
at the same time it was announced that young people com­
pleting the seven-year school at the age of fifteen have the
right thereafter to enter technical colledge.
9*
132 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

At the time we expressed doubt as to the possibility of

bringing this system into working order at all rapidly. But
these doubts are not the main point, for we are in favour
not of technical hut of polytechnical education. We were
obliged to narrow' down our curriculum, and the Central
Committee of the Communist Party publicly, in the name
of the Party, confirmed that Communists had the right to
depart from our curriculum and to settle temporarily for
seven-year school.7 So we did not quarrel with the propo­
sition that given our great all-Russia poverty even seven-
year schools must be considered the height of luxury, but
we did argue with the idea that our school system will be
considerably improved by issuing a decree to authorise this
chopping-off of classes, and another decree to call into being
numerous technical colleges, which are to spring up out of
the ground where Pompey’s foot has trod”. 8
Of course not nearly as many technical colleges have
been brought into being in the Ukraine as would be required
if all those completing seven-year school were to find
places m them. And in actual fact, as I discovered after
a congress of workers in education,9 when I questioned
very closely the Ukrainian teachers present, from various
parts of the Ukraine—the vast majority of children com­
pleting the seven-year school proved to be unfitted for any
practical work, and equally unprepared for entry to any
other educational establishment, since the proposed tech­
nical colleges were not in fact in existence. And down there
they have an unheard-of development of what is known
as coaching (or cramming). This coaching on a colossal
scale is to replace the old top two classes of the schools.
Jt goes without saying that we would inevitably have
found ourselves in exactly the same situation—indeed we
alieady have quite a development of coaching here, because
our secondary schools are in a poor state—but we
would have found ourselves in precisely the same situation
as them, if we had taken the same line. Recognising, then,
that it is impossible at the present time to proceed to the
organisation of a large number of technical colleges to take
the children who complete seven-year schools—even if one
did sacrifice the second-stage schools and their top classes
—we consider that extreme caution is needed here, that
schools should not be destroyed when there is no guaran-
 WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL DO WE NEED? 133

tee that all adolescents will really find places in techni­

cal colleges.
At the last congress of the Young Communist League
(Komsomol) the delegates energetically demanded that the
second-stage school should rapidly be wound up, and were
inclined to press us to go over without delay to a seven-
year school; they were not content with a promise to speed
up this process to some extent. But I will say frankly that
1 consider it a grave mistake, not only to make an in­
stant change-over to this system, which from our point of
view is an opportunist one, but even to speed up to any
significant extent the tempo at which this process has so far
been proceeding. And the congress of heads of Gubernia De­
partments for Education (Gubono) 10 came out in favour of
even slowing this tempo down—might we not remain true
to the nine-year school!
You understand, of course, that when we come down, in
this discussion, to entirely practical reality, we have to admit
that, to have even a seven-year school is a great good fortune.
We are dealing here with the “upper crust” of our chil­
dren’s education. Not everyone gets so far. Leaving aside the
point that a correct approach to the matter would involve se­
lecting the most able to form this upper crust—even if such
selection is not being made, even if we have no guarantee
that the ten per cent who get into second-stage school are re­
ally the ten per cent with the highest ability—once you take
due note of that point in our current policy which proclaims
that our first and most urgent task today is to create a new
proletarian/peasant intelligentsia, then you will realise that
the second-stage school is one channel, and should be one of
the most important, leading to the creation of a new intelli­
gentsia.
If the Chief Committee for Technical Education (Glavpro-
fobr) stales that there is an awkward gap between the estab­
lishments of higher education, in regard to their entrance
requirements, and the human material being provided by
the second-stage school—a gap in quantity and, particular­
ly, in quality—then we should pay very serious heed to this,
and should remember that when we defend the second-stage
school, one must not talk as though the first-stage school is a
democratic institution but the second-stage school is a petty-
bourgeois establishment, a more aristocratic affair. One must
134 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

not talk like this, and by so doing take what is, essentially, a
petty-bourgeois, populist (Narodnik) viewpoint. It is ter­
ribly important to the state to raise up the masses in gen­
eral, and closest to this general upraising is the elementary
school, which needs multiplying by two in order to make
it universal. But we shall never achieve this result unless
we conquer science from above, unless we bring into being
contingents recruited from that same people, contingents
many in number and trained not only in the practical ex­
perience of life, as is the whole proletariat which now holds
power in its hands, but also taught systematically in the
schools. This can be done by the second-stage school or
some substitutes for it, which have a certain value but
which cannot replace it, and should die off gradually as the
second-stage school comes to occupy its rightful place.
It is necessary, then, to pay great attention to the second-
stage school, to make efforts to turn it into a labour school.
Whether it is a seven-year school, i.e. two final school classes
and then a technical college, or a nine-year school fol­
lowed by entry to higher education, is comparatively unim­
portant. But it is this point, this bridge of transition to ei­
ther higher education, or working life, in the latter case as
an already semi-qualified speacialist, it is this point that we
need to strengthen by all the means in our power. So, leav­
ing aside for the present the question of whether the school
is to be polytechnical, or polytechnical up to age fifteen, or
whether we are now to have a strictly technical school-
leaving this aside, we ask: is labour education in general,
whether polytechnical or technical, labour education in the
profoundly Marxist sense of which I have been speaking,
i.e. based on the power of labour to develop and to educate,
and linked basically with industry—is this, in general,
possible in Russia or not? It is clear that it is possible—
given the very greatest effort.
The first task is direct contact with industry. Russia is
poorly developed industrially, she has not enough major in­
dustrial centres, and at present our industry is not working
to capacity. This means, of course, that the actual surface
space or area of her industry is not extensive enough to
afford anchorage for all her schools, it is not possible to or­
ganise Russian schools in general around it, not even the sec­
ond-stage schools alone. That is point one,
 WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL DO W"E NEED? 135

Point two, this is an exceptionally painful process. We

have been speaking, after all, not of boys and girls from
the second-stage school coming along and gaining a slight
acquaintance, as best as one can manage, with how this or
that is done in a factory or mill. This is not, of course, what
we are after. What is needed is that they should really, se­
riously, work there. At present it is only with the utmost
difficulty that this can be organised when the school is a
long way from any factories or mills, when much time has
to be spent getting there and coming back, and when, in
addition, the factories and mills themselves often do not see
the matter as something vital and important, but in terms
something like this: “Some teacher-woman comes along
with pupils from a second-stage school, and they all get un­
der our feet. We are serious people, we are doing a job, get
the hell out of here with your labour school. You are no­
thing but a nuisance.”
This is very often what happens. True, sometimes it is
different. Sometimes the Factory Committee comes to meet
us with open arms, but this is exceedingly rare. I will even
say that nowhere has such a thing been seen as a normal
second-stage school getting its relations with this or that
factory on a correct footing. At best we have a more or less
correct organisation of the excursion method. That is fact
number one. Actually, for the immediate future, when we
speak of the normal second-stage school we have in our
minds those schools which are in provincial towns, often
without any industry, or in those quartres of big cities which
have no factories in the vicinity; schools where they are
at best condemned to the excursion method so far as their
industrial education is concerned. And perhaps our task in
this respect must be, for the immediate future, to structure
our programme for this section of the child population, for
children of working families attending normal, ordinary sec­
ond-stage schools along the lines of extensive use of ex­
cursions to industrial establishments.
Another method is to organise small school workshops
in the separate schools, and bigger ones calculated to serve
the schools of a whole district. N. K. Krupskaya, for instance,
has said that in France the labour, technical schools often
base their work on just such school workshops and even pre­
fer these, since they are equipped with teaching in mind.
136 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

But she correctly remarked at the lime that this is of course

a substitute method, not a Marxist approach. It is a meth­
od simply borrowed from the trade school, the trade school
which has its own laboratories and workshops. But where
this is possible, let us use it and he thankful. Where it is
possible to adapt a well-equipped workshop for Ihe use of
several schools, or even lo set up a small laboratory or work­
shop, that will be a step forward in the direction of correct
orientation of the second-stage school.
We must welcome both these lines of advance, or if you
like these three: fresh attempts—-attemps to create constant
links with real industry—that is one step; the second is
utilisation of local industrial establishments by the excur­
sion method; and the third is the setting up of school work­
shops. It is evident that these are the lines along which we
must progress towards making our school a labour school,
and we are now progressing along them. Indeed, the expe­
rience of Petrograd, and Moscow, and of the provinces,
shows us a whole series of individual successes in this field.
It would be too optimistic to say that the whole body of
the schools has taken this road, but neither are matters lim­
ited to a mere handful of good examples. Whatever town
one might now visit, one can find a goodly number of
schools which are combining these methods, relying main­
ly on one in some cases, another in others.
But at this point another difficulty raises its head—the
lack of training among teachers for this kind of work. The
labour school (both the rural school orientated on agronomy,
the predominant type of school here in Russia, and the in­
dustrially-orientated school) presupposes new teaching
skills: not only some aquaintance with technology itself,
but the ability to use technology, lo make educational use
of the factory, and so on. The teacher must be able lo bring
out a whole number of educationally useful features and
phenomena in the course of the labour process. This is such
a difficult business that the natural world offers us few spe­
cimens of teachers with real virtuosity in it, or even with
the ability to handle it with reasonable skill, and our “poor,
bare Russian landscape” offers even fewer. People of this
sort can be counted only in ones or twos, and they must he
used not so much as actual teachers in the classroom as for
providing “nursery gardens” to rear such teachers, as heads
 AVI I AT KIND OF SCHOOL DO AVE NEED? 137

of model pedagogical establishments. Even for such a pur­

pose ayc have a comparatively small number of suitable
people.
When some of our comrades, in respected Soviet publica­
tions. raised an outcry about the Commissariat for Educa­
tion failing to notice the fact that teachers too have to be
(aught, this was a fairly fruitless exercise. For what do avc
need in order to produce teachers? Two things—1) that
people should be eager to enter teacher-training institutes;
2) that those doing so should not be those avIio can find
nowhere else to go, hut the real, militant vanguard of our
youth, young people avIio understand that the teacher’s
place* in life is s ome thi ng sacred, a place of the greatest
honour!
13iil we know that the teacher’s actual position is grim.
Even now lie is still deprived of that share of social respect
which should surround him, and deprived loo of normal lw-
ing conditions to m ake his working lot CAren rem otely satis­
factory. And in fact the inflow of ncAV recruits is very weak.
At this m om ent, in reply to the grotesque, entirely exagger-
aled figure giAren by the Central Roard for Social Education
(Sotsvos) 11 as to the n u m b er of teachers required (250
th o u s a n d — this is some d erangem ent of the im agination)
in response to this astronom ical figure avc point to the fact
that we can train one thousand teachers per a n n u m for the
whole of Russia, Avhich has now, even at this time of grea t­
est crisis, not less than 45 thousand schools, tak in g only
those of the first stage. Clearly this n u m ber of trainees is
barely sufficient to replace losses from n a tu ra l m ortality.
So, avo have a very weak inflow; on top of this avc hereby
announce that it is also Avcak in quality.
A t the Y oung C om m unist League congress it Avas said
th at in the schools there are too m any young ladies. I do
not consider this very dam aging, since a wom an teacher is
no less capable of being a good teacher, b u t Avhat kin d oT
you n g ladies avc have — th at is the question. The sta n d a rd s
of the teaching profession in general need to be raised. W e
have Aveakcned them. In spile of all the poAver of attraction
in the very idea of educating, in spile of all the im m ensity
of im portance that attaches to the role of the teacher, avc
have Aveakened the position oT the teacher, and part of the
blam e for this lies with the leaching profession itself (and
138 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

its Moscow section not less than any other), which over a
long period provoked misunderstanding between itself and
the proletariat. This too is a word that cannot be left out
of the song. *
The training of the teacher, then, is also an immense busi­
ness, and we also have to find the trainers themselves, to
seek them out and collect them up. They exist, but only in
small numbers. And since they are the salt of the earth,
they should not be left to hide their light under a bushel,
but must be raised up on high. If this salt is not of very
high quality, danger threatens us. We must cry out in a
loud voice, not without a note of desperation in it: “Come,
you who understand what the labour school means; come
with both your hands and all your brain to meet this need,
and be assured that the Soviet government, and the Com­
missariat for Education in particular, will value you at your
weight in gold.” I make that as a serious promise.
As we are to make a report at the Congress of Soviets, we
shall be putting up a fight there for the teacher, and it will
be a hard fight. 12 That the state can find resources for mass
wage payments only with great difficulty, that is something
we understand, but that the state should find it impossible
to pay high specialist rates to the few score or maybe hun­
dreds whom we now need to summon to perform highly
qualified pedagogical work--that, is not true. It can be done,
and what is needed here is only a final tightening-up of
the ties between the progressive social educationist and the
specifically Soviet educationist—ties which are already being
formed, I may say, which are every day growing stronger
and more numerous.
That relates to the unified school of normal type. But there
is also the “supernormal” school, though this too has its
faults. If it is incorrect to pose the question of the prole­
tariat having something like a monopoly of education, it is
still more incorrect, monstrously incorrect, for proletarian
youth to be almost outside the field of vision, almost outside
the care and attention of the Committees for Social Educa­
tion and for Technical Education (Sotsvos and Profobr).

*i.e.. a factor that cannot bo loft out of the reckoning—there is

a Russian proverb which says, “You cannot miss one word out of
the song”.—7V.
 WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL DO WE NEED? 139

And here one must stress the great debt we owe to the
Young Communist League for not only obliging us theoret-
icaly to concentrate attention on young people in the fac­
tories and to increase the provision made for them, but for
actually doing something about this itself, and for produc­
ing results here which in quality also come close to being
the most heart-warming achievement of the recent period.
In the Russian Federation alone, not including the Uk­
raine and the Caucasus, we have now for some time had at
our disposal a system of over 500 Factory Training Schools 13
(jabzavuch) for adolescents, providing for 50 thousand
youngsters, and the numbers are going up all the time. Even
if there is much th a t is organisationally unsatisfactory here,
none the less this organisation is comparatively good thanks
to the support of the trade unions and of the Supreme Coun­
cil for the National Economy. Here too there are not enough
teachers. But here the technical staff of the factories and
mills often act as teachers, even though they have not any
specifically educational skills. And here one of the happiest
omens for the future to be seen anywhere are the courses
for instructors now taking place in the former Empress
Catherine Institute, training these new teachers. 14 Here we
have a centre from which this truly noble work for labour
education will spread outwards to all other schools.
And the aims of labour education cannot fail to come up
here, not because the factory is engulfing these youngsters
in its embrace, in its iron grip, seeking to exploit them^
on the contrary, the educational community, the Communist
Party, and the Young Communist League are exerting great
efforts to provide maximum labour protection and attention
to the educational aspect in these schools. Here it is an im­
possibility to lean too far towards what has been called the
literary approach to education. Rather the contrary is pos­
sible—too great concessions on the side of getting work
done, and this is something to be resisted. It would seem
that the thing which is most lacking in the unified labour
school—organised contact with the factory—is here too firm­
ly established. This is why attention should be concentrat­
ed on the Factory Training School, so that we can take into
account the experience being built up there, for as far as
the labour school is concerned this is of course our van­
guard detachment.
-140 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

Now I must say a fow words about higher education,

about its significance in the educational scheme of the pro­
letarian stale, and in general about this thing that is often
referred to as a cultural luxury. I repeat yet once more:
this is not the proletarian nor the Marxist point of view;
it is a regurgitation of the harmful ideas of populism, when
people say, “Take care of those at the bottom first of all.”
For one cannot take care of those at the bottom if we have
no strong top.
One cannot lake care of the pupils without taking care of
the teacher. This is like saying, when building up an army,
“Why bother about officers, let us worry about raising up
the soldiers.” This is stupid. However democratic we may
be, we know very well that in battle you need officers, that
they need training, that at the head of an army there must
necessarily be a centralised, powerful organ of thought and
will, from which a whole mass of transmitting links reaches
out to the executive apparatus, to the immense mass of
rank and file soldiers. There will come a time when there
will be no difference between the country’s intelligentsia
and its working masses. But it would have been sheer uto­
pianism if V. I. Lenin had said not that we should replace
the majority of the old civil servants, but that we did not
need any civil service at all—what, for? we are all well
enough educated ourselves. But we are so far only reaching
out to education.
Herein lies the impracticality of even the best anarchists,
when they do not accept the transitional period leading to
Communism. The Communist Party never plays for popu­
larity with “democratic” ideas of the wrong sort, it does
not say, “Let us get dissolved in the masses”, but that it
leads the masses. In those cases when the masses are dis­
orientated we go against their current, using all means of
energetic action upon them to oblige them to move in the
right direction. But in this respect the Communist Party,
while seeking to do away with aristocracy of any sort
whatever, is in practice, and according to V. I. Lenin’s
formulation, the most disciplined of all workers’ parti­
es. 15
In exactly the same way we must forge for ourselves, in
the dimension of the stale, a steel-hard intelligentsia that
will cast utterly aside all the flabbiness of the Rudins and
 WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL DO AVE NEED? 141

Oblomovs, * llial will bo capable of operating as ihe stralum

that gives slate leadership. YVe have need of Ibis, and we
cannot accept illiteracy as a point of departure. All this is
profoundly important, colossally important, and “let this
not be forgotten, but taken iuto observauce”. 16
We cannot separate one thing off from another: either we
increase the flow upwards, to the top, of real people from
the masses below, or those helow will get no help and will
slay down where they are. This is why the question of high­
er education is also a democratic question. It is with deep
rejoicing that I welcome the fact that now, in response to
the movement from out the depths of the people, the Com­
munist Party is also taking a great step forward, recognis­
ing that one of its prime tasks is to get in among these
young people, not to let them become disillusioned, to give
them education; there can indeed be no more important and
fruitful way to this end than the use of political education.
Among the mass of the peasantry political education is
extremely important, just as the acquisition of literacy is.
These things are dispersed throughout this enormous mass,
we need them, but there is not enough of them. Here we
have them in concentration, in the persons of these people
who are coming up from below, coming from the villages
and the factories out there, coming with a colossal thirst
for knowledge; they can truly serve later in bringing en­
lightenment to the masses, whom we cannot enlighten with­
out the help of this transmitting link. Thus it is a matter
of importance to us to support these youngsters from the
people, to turn them into young people capable of studying
at university.
We have examples of this happening. Undoubtedly the
Workers’ Faculties are proving (heir worth. A little while
ago I was greatly saddened to read of the death of Profes­
sor Zernov. Professor Zernov was if anything our political
enemy rather than our friend, hut he was an enemy of a
kind it is good to meet: a man of real breadth of mind, of
exceptional tact, who was able to appreciate what was good
in our work, and who in all his dealings with us cooperat­
ed not only loyally hut exceptionally helpfully, although he

^Characters from classical Russian literature, epitomising in­

decision and flabbiness.—Tr.
142 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

maintained a position of constant sceptical opposition, con­

demned a great deal of what was done, shook his head over
it and never “yielded” his full independence. A few days
before his death, after he had taken the chair at a meeting
of the Examining Commission testing graduates from the
Leningrad Workers haculLy who were hoping lo enter tech­
nical school, he declared that they were not only better
qualified than all the other applicants, but in general very
well qualified. He said one could only rejoice to see the en-
perseverance and the talent they displayed.
Though it may not be everywhere true that the level at­
tained is high enough to cause a gray-haired preceptor to
give his blessing to the young people before going to his
£ifaYe’ to sa.Y ^hat Hiey are well enough qualified to take
affairs into their hands, still it must be admitted that the
level ot training achieved is unexpectedly high. At the present
hatVe- , mta,ke. 0f three and a half thousand former
students of Workers Faculties entering places of higher
education and next year there will be eight thousand; the
o a number of places in higher education is thirty thous-
totai AS y° U SC6’ LhiS iS already almost one-third of the
Another source from which places of higher education fre­
quently receive entrants directly are the Party schools. Here
we have dO thousand young people, members of the Com­
munist Party, studying extremely intensively and with ever-
mcreasmg success, to fit themselves lo take up posts in the
middle ranks, and later in the higher ranks also, of our
state system. Here there is a whole number of things to
observe that cannot but rejoice our hearts, that against the
general background of disintegration in the school system
(I am not speaking here of the lack of material things,
common to all, about what is called the “material basis”)
cannot but give us great joy. This is a column advancing
towards higher education.
On this point, the Rector of Sverdlovsk University has
told me that this year the Examining Commission for entry
registered even better results than before, and they had ne­
ver been low enough lo cause concern. These young peo­
ple, he says, have somehow, goodness knows how, found the
time to learn everything, they are quite good, thinking
Marxists. And do you know what it means for a Communist
 W h a t k in d op sc h o o l do w e n e e d ? 143

lo say that these are quite good Marxists? It means a great

deal. This is a matter of a whole world outlook. And when
did they find the time to learn? Out there, serving in their
Red Army, lying in the trenches, travelling through a dozen
different provinces entrusted with various commissions, work­
ing in posts of social responsibility, they found time to learn
all this. And when today we see such a phenomenon as
this: that 30 thousand copies of a book such as a work by
V. 1. Lenin were bought up within a few weeks, and another
print is needed—then the question arises: who is read­
ing such books? The old intelligentsia? Social Revolution­
aries and Mensheviks, now retired, who have a lot of time
on their hands? I do not think so! It is the young people
who are reading. And they read tens of thousands of cop­
ies of Marxist literature, read them until they are worn
into holes.
Now, regarding present arrangements for entry lo places
of higher education. I know very well that many mistakes
have been made here. I shall give one example to show the
kind of mistake that can be expected here.
Take, for instance, the higher school for the arts. I think
it is necessary to take this example because it brings the
point out in especially sharp relief. I am told this kind of
thing: that a number of students have been accepted for the
Moscow Conservatoire whose level of talent and ability could
not be put higher than two and a half. * And why? Because
they were recommended by organisations. If this is to
go on, it is nothing short of a crime against the state. Make
him into a bad singer? Someone like that should be taken
aside and told, “You have no training and no talent, you
should be serving the people in these hard revolutionary
times—and instead of that you are going to sing, with a
voice like a goat?” I would be happier to sec a counter-rev­
olutionary, so long as he had a good voice, getting into
the Conservatoire.
And in allocating grants the same sort of thing happens.
Tie hasn’t much ability, but his social background is good.
It happens any number of times.
Clearly this is a profound mistake. First place should go
to those who are indeed proletarian in origin, in way of

*In Russia, marking is made out of five.—Tr.

14-4 A N A T O U LUNACHARSKY

t h o u g h t anil iji their whole character, and who hast* talent;

second place to lliose who just have talent; and (here should
be no third place in such establishm ents o! learning.
Now let us see how this point of view is applied lo other
places of education. Of course, if we applied it too broadly
to other educational establishments, we should be making
an immense mistake: a good specialist can determine
straight away whether you have musical talent or not, there
mistakes are practically impossible, but here the situation
is quite different, here one musl take into account not only
the degree of qualification present, but also the fact that the
vast majority of these young people have not had any chance
to make themselves qualified. If we set up filtering appa­
ratus that is too strict and heavy, we could completely cut
off any penetration of proletarian entrants into higher edu­
cation. Here we must bear in mind their immense drive,
their perseverance, their ability lo progress. They may be
insufficiently qualified on the intellectual level, but their
social experience and their energy is so enormous that they
will find it easy to catch up. Here the social criterion can
be fully brought into play.
All things considered, from this year forward we can
welcome, alongside our victories on the fighting fronts,
where wc have brought the war lo a close, alongside var­
ious diplomatic victories and some victories in the fields of
industry and agriculture—we can welcome a great victory
on the educational front as well. We now have a student
body exceptionaly dedicated to the revolution, that is enthu­
siastic, able, avid for learning—a new, uncommonly ap­
pealing type of student. I have had sufficient contact with
them already to allow me lo speak of this with full con­
fidence. This victory wo must now build on, and here ques­
tions of the material basis again come to the fore. One
could subject these young folk to such trials that they will
fall prey to disillusion. We are taking people out of their
jobs (for they have all been carrying out one kind of So­
viet work or another)—we take them out of their jobs in
order to have them study, and we must give them the chance
to study. This calls for fairly considerable expenditure,
and this is one of the problems we have to raise in all se­
riousness.
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL
AND THE REVOLUTION *
I wish lo present for the attention of my listeners here
some of Ilie most important ideas embodied in the princi­
ples of our educational policy.
A year ago I might perhaps not have had the heart to make
a theoretical speech dealing with general principles, treating
lo some extent the philosophy of the school, for it is only
in the very recent period that we have begun to see that
perceptible improvement on the “third front” as we call it,
which has inspired in us the confidence lo feel it possible
lo turn again to those immensely important cultural prob­
lems which the Russian people has set itself to solve,
through its People’s Commissariat for Education. While we
were liaving to struggle—and it has been something of a
fruitless struggle—with danger that threatened the very
existence of schools, it seemed in the highest dergee foolish
to talk about any ideal forms of school, or even about tran­
sitional forms on the way to the ideal. Today this is not so:
at the present time the Commissariat (lo be precise the
Scientific-Pedagogical Section of the Stale Academic Coun­
cil (GUS) 1 is busy working on curricula and methodologi­
cal questions, that is on the construction of the temporary
bridge which will allow us over the next few years to move
in the direction of the unified labour school and of the whole
■school system determined by the central features of this
school model.
We know that in the localities, almost everywhere without
exception, questions of leaching methods, and of the prin­
ciples lo be followed in the education of children, have once
more come lo the forefront, more or less.
It is these facts, these clear signs of the opening up of
active work in the fields of educational theory and school
policy, that have moved me lo give an address devoted to
the fundamentals of our policy for the schools.
“'Slightly abridged.—Ed.
10-01120
Ue ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

Very frequently, during the first years following the Rev­

olution, teachers of second-slage schools and in higher edu­
cation, the professors, flung this reproach at us: you want
to permeate the schools with class feeling, you want to make
even little children the objects of your propaganda and
agitation, you are tampering with objective classless edu­
cation for the younger age-groups and with Great, Objective
Science (not forgetting the capital letters) in Lne case of
students at technical colleges and universities; you are ten­
dentious people, you are people with a particular political
partisanship, and you want to introduce that terrible thing,
a party attitude, into the sacred business of educating the
young, which must be entirely objective and to which po­
litical partisanship is quite alien.
A great many people, maybe, still share this point of
view today; it bears witness to how little scientific educa­
tion a teacher has had, if he can use such language. This
does not mean in the least that I make this a reproach to
him: I know that if the Russian teacher is not so very well
qualified, that is not his fault. Even professors are poorly
qualified in this sense, and not only histologists etc., (they
do not work in the area of sociological issues, one cannot
expect loo much of them here)—oven professors of sociolo­
gy, of law, of education, even they are capable of saying
such absurd and uninformed things. And this means that
if a teacher himself, even a professor, who has gone through
the whole educational process maybe from nursery school
right through to the chair of a university department has
still not learned the simple truth that the school has al­
ways been and cannot help but he a class weapon; if he
himself, being a teacher and putting curtain definite trends
into practice, has still had as little suspicion that he was
acting as the bearer of definite political tendencies as Mo-
liere’s hero had that he had been speaking prose all his
life 2—then that is clear evidence of how wrongly the schools
have been organised, if a man knows nothing either of
himself or of his own functions, or of the truths by which
lie lives.
What is education, in essence, and what forms does it
assume, what role does it play in the course of cultural his­
tory? They talk about this in such terms that the result is
complete distortion of the truth, which is dimly visible as
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 14?

through u log. A student teacher just completing his course

at a specialised training establishment does not know the
history of education and the import of that history, the very
essence of things is for him hidden by falsehoods both
consciously and unconsciously purveyed, and it is these
falsehoods that 1 shall attempt to uncover in the first part of
my lecture today, to the best of my ability.
What are, in general, the aims of education?
The history of man from his earliest years, from the very
first stages of his development, from the times when we
first find him observable by historical and ethnological re­
search, leads us to note the great part played by education.
In the animal kingdom we often see as miraculous facts
such as these: a creature that has, say, been isolated and
artificially reared, that has never known its parents, will
when it reaches maturity build a nest or spin a cobweb,
and so on, with such skill that it is hard to know how it
was acquired. But we do know how it was acquired: it is
something innately proper to the given organism bird,
spider or beetle—just as it is proper to a clock mechanism
to go and to tell the time, so long of course as the mechan­
ism is not damaged. We know that in essence there lies
concealed in the structure of organs and nervous system an
accumulated “materialised experience”, which in answer to
a particular natural stimulus makes a tiny creature respond
without fail, always in the same precise and complex way.
Over innumerable years this experience accumulates,
through the death of those creatures that had not made the
right adjustment and the reinforcement of correct adjust­
ment when it occurred, through the anatomical or physiolo­
gical change of organs and tissues in pursuance of a partic­
ular function. Thus it comes about that a beetle or a cat­
erpillar knows what it has to do so that larva or butterfly
will find itself in a favourable environment, knows what
will be needed for another creature quite different from it­
self in all its ways. Just as we are not surprised that a baby
does not need to learn anything in order for its heart to
beat and its stomach to digest the milk it sucks, so we
should not be surprised that an animal functions almost all
its life on this experience acquired by inheritance, which
does not presuppose a conscious process, or presupposes ve­
ry little of such.
10*
148 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

Man differs profoundly from this pallern. Wo see as enor­

mous the difference between a little black child in Central
Africa and the son of a professor in London: the develop­
ment of language and thought is quite different, the accept­
ed codes of life are different, there is an immense new proc­
ess of adjustment to life, a colossal quantity of social con­
nections within an unusually complex society, for the Eng­
lishman, while all this is very primitive, simple, half-ani­
mal, for the savage. Yet we arc well aware that if the little
Englishman, complete with all his instincts inherited from
a long dynasty of English professors and cultural figures,
were to be transported to Africa and brought up there from
his earliest days, he would probably be distinguished from
the small black child by practically nothing, or by absolu­
tely nothing, or maybe there would be just a tiny difference
—he would maybe less well fitted physically for that en­
vironment. And conversely, despite all malicious assertions
that the “lower” races of humanity cannot be raised by
education to a higher level of development, we know that
this is a lie, that the difference between a child of average
ability belonging to a backward nomadic people and some
aristocratic sprig is absolutely nil. If the two are brought up
in the same home, educated in the same school, then only
individual abilities will decide who goes further.
Man as we take him, as we are considering him, is al­
most entirely created by education. From mother and father
he has inherited what is called (again, of course, mistak­
enly) tabula rasa—an empty page: on this is inscribed all
that is common to humanity as a whole, a whole mass of
organic functions proper to man as a particular genus among
the animals; but what he will believe in, what he will
know, what he will possess—90 per cent of the content of
his personality—will depend on education. And the degree
of culture of each people is determined precisely by the ex­
tent, the degree of elaboration and the fitness to its condi­
tions of life of the collective experience, accumulated from
generation to generation, which is transmitted by means of
education to succeeding generations.
Not as with the animals—the organism has itself chang­
ed, developed and now determines the fate of the young
through direct heredity—but an immense experience at the
highest stage of development, recorded in universities, lab-
 TIIE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 149

oratories and libraries, in a colossal technological appara­

tus—that is what determines the degree of development of a
small human boy or girl. And that little boy or girl (such
an empty small being, such a small grub, in a highly de­
veloped society as much as in a less developed one) begins
to be subjected to quite different external influences, and
acquires artificially, through education, the collective expe­
rience that here is not fixed in nerves, muscles and bones,
but is found in books, in knowledge, in instruments, in the
wealth of modern society. This peculiarity of human soci­
ety, that it fashions its fellow-citizen in its own image and
likeness, out of the small human being, by means of sug­
gestion, by communicating to him its customs, its knowl­
edge, its ideals—this peculiar feature is education, and it is
so singularly proper to man alone that one could add to the
definitions homo sapiens (thinking man) and homo faber
(man the toolmaker) another one—homo educatus, or edu­
cated man, man who is educated.
J u s t as for one order of anim als, the m am m als, one fea­
tu r e —th e fact th a t in their early stage of developm ent the
young are fed on m ilk from the m o th e r—has been taken as
definitive, so for m an the defining feature is th a t through
language, th rough a complex system of signs, society edu­
cates and raises to its own level a completely helpless being.
B ut ju s t because education or upbringing is a procedure
which lias two elem ents in i t —the elem ent of ceaseless
growth in the organisation of h u m an experience, know n as
progress; and the skill of bringing children in to each stage
of this progress by their assim ilation of the experience b u ilt
up over thousands of y e a rs —this very fact, this characteris­
tic of education obliges us to reach the conclusion t h a t it
never was and could never be objective, it always w as and
had to be distorted by class prejudices and class tendencies.
Why? Because we see no healthy society throughout the
whole history of humanity. We can distinguish in some
cases a faint approximation to a more or less healthy society,
but in the vast majority of cases we sec nothing of the sort.
We know little of the more or less primeval communist trib­
al group. And in the succeeding stages of development we
see that war, hunting, and the subordination of poor tillers
of the land to rich owners of the land arc stratifying society
into those that have and those that have not, into rich and
150 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

poor, noble and ignoble, those with knowledge and those

without it. And do not think that this means that from that
time on social experience will not bo inculcated into the
poor, that it will be used only by the upper classes. But
experience, knowledge, education do become a privilege of
the rulers, and that is only a small part of the evil inherent
in education at this stage.
That is not all that is clone: the little aristocrat, the little
privileged person is poisoned by his awareness that he is
something special, that ho is descended from gods, that he
has blue blood, that he is a noble, a warrior, that others
must serve him, that the life of other people is nothing
when set against his interests or even his caprices. From
the very beginning he is roared to be the young beast, acting
with violence and with pride towards others. From the very
beginning he is told that it is right to bear the sword, that
he is a nobleman, he is a soldier, a professional murderer—
that is an especial honour, for such are the gods, such were
his uncommonly noble ancestors; the gods were murderers
too, and you are a murderer, you have the right to set your
foot on the heads of others.
For such an aristocrat the whole of his education will be
tailored to correspond to this, all the sciences will be taught
him in this spirit. Any truth which might cause the small
aristocrat to have doubts of his right to act in such a way
will be taken out of circulation as unsuitable educationally,
as inapproprite for a “noble” child, or it will be distorted,
as we know that Christianity is often distorted at later,
higher stages. Christianity, after all, is essentially a com­
plete denial of all noble rank, of all noble birth, of any
war, of any vengeful feeling. But we all know that our for­
mer officers and nobility were taught Christianity, they were
told that the Son of God himself said, “Unto him that
smiteth thee on the one check offer also the other.” But if
tho 'e officers had done that, they would have been drummed
out of (heir regiments. On the contrary, anyone who in­
sulted them in such a way must be challenged to a duel
and killed—that was part of their code of honour. And it
was the job of the pricsl, or the Jesuit, or any other accom­
modating cleric, to find some ingenious loophole and say
that one must understand what the Son of God said in a
spiritual sense, that it is not to be applied in everyday life.
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 151

But surely the message of the New Testament, which

enmo into being among the lower classes, is imbued with a
feeling of brotherhood and equality? True, it ic quite with­
out any feeling for Sniggle, it adjures us mystically to
wait for help from above, it fosters passivity and patience
among the lower orders—and this is a terrible shortcom­
ing—but it is none the less a doctrine which was born
among those of low degree, it bears their stamp. Tn order
to trick the lower orders and keep them for ever patient,
the ruling classes declared it, Christianity, to be the ruling
faith, declared themselves to be soldiers of Christ and kings
to be the Lord’s anointed. Does this mean that they there­
fore changed the spirit, of their schooling? Tt was all left as
a matter of words only, and is one more proof of wbat I
have been saying.
Education is tailored so that the aristocrat (and the same
goes for the bourgeois) can develop to the full his class
identity, his pride, his sense of honour, his thirst for blood­
shed, his administrative talent as a slave-owner. And only
that educator is approved who can develop all that in the
child.
The lower down the social scale we go, the more the
school changes. The ruling classes demand that those who
find their way into schools for the common people should
be educated in a spirit of submission, in a non-critical atti­
tude to the society in which they live. An aid here js the
pseudo-patriotic government-approved teaching of history,
and another is the teaching of Scripture, which gives a per­
verted portrayal of the whole of Nature, and through which,
with the help of a few fantastical ideas, one can disguise
lust enough to get by the absurdities which otherwise would
be glaringly obvious to each of the humbled and the oppres­
sed. Discipline is brought into the schools, and teaches the
child to think from his earliest youth that he is a creature
■without a will of his own, that he is allowed to do practi­
cally nothing that he would like to do, that he is a small
Other Rank with a non-commissioned officer over him, there
to drill him, that he will be the human material with
which the state performs its functions, that he is there to
be fleeced.
Tf one were to look at the schools in any country you
like, not through the dark glasses of one’i own inner, decep-
152 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

live illusions, bul with one's real eyes, it. would at once be
apparent, standing out as it were in bold type, that these
schools are institutions in which a particular stale power
trains each social class to perform those tricks, politically
speaking, which it requires. The child from the upper clas­
ses is taught its tricks, the middle and the lowest classes
in society are taught theirs, and science, knowledge and
skill are only taught in that proportion to each which is
essential for the slate, to provide efficient workers knowing
their job, but always taking care not to go loo far, since you
don’t want that same science, full of the pride of Lucifer
and of a stiff-necked, critical spirit, to be leading the chil­
dren on to bo too clever, and to lose the Molchalin * attitude,
so pleasing and necessary to a class society.
That is what the schools are like everywhere. You can of
course object and tell me, “No, not everywhere. We remem­
ber our Russian universities in the darkness of absolutist
rule by the tsars. The University of Moscow, now, protested
against schools being like that.. There used to be some good
teachers in the high schools, in the Cadet Corps, who put
across other ideas. There were good village teachers, who
did not want to be gendarmes at the blackboard, as it wore,
under obligation to clip the child’s wings and turn it into
a domestic fowl rather than a man.”
Of course there were some who wore different, I will say
the same, there were. But this is no contradiction. Let us
take the most striking example—that the universities, a con­
siderable part of the teaching staff there and an even great­
er proportion of the students, over many decades were a
bastion of struggle against absolutism. Why was this so?
Because at that period the struggle was beginning between
two classes—the land-owning class, supported by the high­
er clergy, the power of the army officers, and the adminis­
trative apparatus of petty officialdom run by the govern­
ment which wanted at all costs to keep Russia in a state
of darkness, backwardness and frozen winter: and on the
other side, the bourgeoisie, which was beginning to amass
considerable resources, which needed railways, steamboat
lines telegraphic communications, well-organised medical

7~A_"characlor from cla£sical R"S:;ian lilcralurc epitomising ob­

sequious obedience.—Tr.
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 153

services, exploitation of natural wealth, engineers, doctors,

etc.—the whole cultural environment outside which capital­
ism cannot develop, outside which profits cannot bo made.
On this ground conflict arose at once between the old and
the new.
Even Peter the Great was in part a bourgeois revolution­
ary. inasmuch as he became convinced that the nobility
alone was an insufficient prop to roly on, and inasmuch as he
saw the necessity of educating the broad social strata: he
felt able to make a former errand-boy a Minister, he look­
ed with favour on wandering foreigners of bourgeois ori­
gin—Dutch skippers and Swiss artisans, setting them in
high positions. Insofar as it was in line with the European­
isation of Russia, Peter sought to give scope to mercantil­
ism, to merchant capital and the first beginning of indus­
trial capital. The old nobility said, “What, kind of a Tsar is
this, this is a dock-tailed tsar, who chops off our beards
he’s not ours.” This happened because government was ob­
liged to take the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, and from
that bourgeois standpoint to start, fighting the ingrained con­
servatism of the class on which it had up till then relied.
And that was the origin of the Russian universities. It
was a matter of necessity to draw in the middle elements,
to take their children to be taught everything the state need­
ed when its neigbours were countries with highly-develop­
ed capitalism. And the result was a long-drawn-out conflict
within society. The bourgeoisie, along with the intelligent­
sia that had itself been called into life by the bourgeoisie—
the lawyers, engineers and so on—demands schooling of
another kind: more of the objective sciences, more natural
science, technology, less of the barrack-room approach.
It is an entirely natural collision: one secs in sharp relief
the good businessman, the factory-owner, the banker, the
railway builder. He says unequivocally, “What use is it to
me, dammit, for my boy or girl to be buried alive in dead
Latin, why should they be smothered with senseless Scrip­
ture, which is the faith of the past, which doesn’t fit in
with a modern view of the world? You teach him, make
a man of him, in a real, modern school.” (That is why in
Germany those schools where the bourgeois spirit was strong­
er were given the name “real” schools, and this name lat­
er came into use here too.) “Teach him about veal things,
154 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

give him qualifications, the knowledge he needs to become

a trader, or a sailor, or a builder—-that’s the sort of man
I need.” But absolutism said, “1 need a civil servant who
will say ‘Yes sir’, ‘If you please, sir’, I need a man who
will wear uniform; I cannot give way to you as easily as
that; you make yourself very busy with those students, but
students turn out revolutionaries.”
A little analogy, to help you understand why such a colli­
sion as this can take place between the land-owning and
bureaucratic interest and the bourgeois interest. Take the
army. Up to the time of the imperialist war it was held
that a soldier could be trained in two, or maybe three,
years; France switched from a two-year to a three-year pe­
riod, (otherwise, they say, you cannot get a good soldier).
After^ the war all the generals who have dealt with this
question—French, American, and German —all admitted
that one can produce an excellent soldier in four months.
Drill is not necessary. Barrack-square manoeuvres, all the
military service and military drill that used to be carried to
such lengths, that was still haunted by the ghost of Frede­
rick the Great of Prussia, all goose-stepping with your boot-
toes up to nose level—all that is nonsense, useless clap­
trap. The business of killing people with poison gas and
artillery has nothing to do with barrack-square drill.
So do you think the generals were just fools, that they
did not understand this earlier on? They understood per­
fectly well that it was technically speaking idiotic to waste
the time of large numbers of people in that way. They were
being taught not what was needed in wartime, in reality,
and they were not being taught the right way either. So for
what purpose were they being taught? In order to get sol­
diers who had been cowed and hypnotised. The barracks is
a place which makes it possible to induce in a man such an
inner state that he, the soldier, will without hesitation fire
on his own father or mother, if required. The need is to
stupefy men, to turn them into automala, numbskulls —and
then they will do as they are ordered with no pang of con­
science. To reduce a man to that kind of stale, three years
of barrack-square drill were indeed needed.
Exactly the same thing is true of the classical high school
(gymnasia): eight years of drill were needed, in order to
produce one of the most monstrous phenomena of European
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 155

—and Chinese—life: the official or civil servant. And a

greater or lesser number of living human beings were turn­
ed into automata, their living souls done to death and only
their bodies left alive. This was a quite definite line of
policy.
The bourgeoisie saw schooling quite differently. It fought
for the “real” or modern school. And this was at a time
when the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia were
in leg-irons, when Russian absolutism viewed them with
the greatest distrust, when the Ministry of Education was
a Ministry of De-education, when it had been given its or­
ders of the kind “Now you watch it, the common folk are
not to be educated any too far”, when the main aim was
“The Provincial Councils (zemstvo) want to provide edu­
cation, do they?—Forbid it!” and “Free thought is stirring,
you say?—Send in the priests, to see w'hat’s going on there
in the schools!”
When this sort of thing was going on, the liberal-bour­
geois schools became riddled with a feeling of opposition,
of a sort, and this is the reason why it appears as though
this liberal-school-in-opposition was standing in defence of
something of importance to all men, something that every
teacher needed to know. You will tell me, “Of course, I un­
derstand that the Ministry of Education as it was then want­
ed to drill people into submission, but there were, after all,
schools of a different kind—the private schools, the zemstvo
schools: 3 they did not want this, they wanted to edu­
cate real people, independent people.” Let’s have a closer
look.
1 have to warn you straight away that I am speaking of
the mass school; I am not speaking of the exceptions, about
which I shall have something to say later. Let us consider
how the bourgeoisie has organised its very own schools.
There is only one country where the bourgeoisie has organ­
ised its own schools more or less freely from start to finish,
a genuine school of the bourgeoisie—and that is America.
I will at once make a proviso here, that there is one more
interesting type of school—to some extent the Swiss model,
and further the Norwegian school; the latter is a school
of petty-bourgeois/peasant type, it has features all
its own, which are class features in a quite individual
way.
156 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

But we are going lo speak of the bourgeois school as such.

The bourgeoisie in France and in Germany have been un­
able to organise their own kind of schools. To illustrate the
extent, to which they did not dare to do so, I will quote two
examples.
The bourgeoisie took a realistic approach, it said: one
must not clutter up children’s minds with superstitions, one
must not teach them things that from a scientific point of
view are clearly lies; one must teach them to know the real
truth about nature, so that the end product, broadly speak-
ing, will be a good engineer, a man able to deal with na­
ture in the aiea in which he will be set to work; we need
a ical contest with nature, the development of industry, of
commeice, of agriculture. And so the bourgeois teacher ejcct-
1(? P1*05^ fi’om the school; the bourgeois teachers said,
We do not want the priests, you can teach religion as you
teach myths and literature, tlial these arc myths arising at
a particular stage of development, but vou cannot leach it
as being the truth.”
This attitude was expressed with outstanding clarity quite
recently, a few years ago, by one of the greatest Ger­
man educationists, Paulsen, who advances a very character­
istic argument, one that places matters in such sharp relief
that it will reveal the nature of the bourgeois school better
than anything else: 4 “One cannot have Scripture taught in
the schools because Bible history, and to a large extent the
New Testament narratives, contradict the spirit of all else
in the school. School must educate in the child a conscious­
ness of the rule of law in all phenomena. What use is a
school which has not given a child, by twelve years of age
at least, an understanding that miracles do not happen? lie
has to grasp, as clearly as twice two is four, the laws that
say matter is indestructible, that it moves through a cycle
of energy, that nothing produces nothing—and in the next
classroom Herr Pfarror (the pastor) is going lo be telling
him about miracle. Whom will the child believe? He will
say: ‘Please explain how this or that miracle could happen,
from the point of view of physics’; lie will say: ‘You arc
talking some strange nonsense! Why arc you telling me
that Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale?—it
doesn’t fit in with what the teacher told us about whales in
Nature Study!’
 T11K PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 151

‘'This occurs because1 one teacher is teaching the science

that was in force two thousand years ago, or a thousand
years ago, or even with a stretch five hundred years ago,
while another teacher is teaching science the way it exists
today: its tail end slill hack in the views predominant among
country folk, the most backward strata in society, who draw
their mental nourishment from outdated notions. But the
schools cannot be a party to that, it is the schools that have
to lead children forward, out of that old view of the world—
which means that there is no place for the clergy in them.
If parents wish, let all that go on, outside the school; but
what is said in school must be only the truth, confirmed by
modern science—nothing else.1’
Paulsen goes further, and stresses the class nature of the
thing. He says, “Do you not think that the small son of a
proletarian, once he has ceased to believe that the world
was created in seven days, and in other rubbish, will say in
school: ‘Why are you telling me such nonsense the geo­
graphy teacher disproves it himself7—and if he does not
say it, that does not mean that he believes. And what hap­
pens if he ceases to believe anything, any of what he is
taught about the laws of property, about the state order,
all that is the law and the basis of our society? You arc
offering him something tenuous, easily destroyed by criti­
cism, and later on he will not trust you in anything.
And in order to preserve the possibility of pouring into
the souls of small proletarians and peasants, through edu­
cation, the bourgeoisie’s views on the world and on society,
the bourgeoisie has thrown Scripture overboard, as a piglet
is thrown to the wolves when they arc catching up with
your sledge. Goodbye Scripture —it’s our weak side. Here
you are then, Progress, take it and tear it apart, maybe we
can manage to save the rest!
But 1 have already said that the bourgeoisie had not the
courage to make their school “theirs” consistently, all the
way. And in this respect the talented Foerster, an Austrian
educationist who touches on the matter of the schools, has
this to say: “Before the war our schools were in many ways
wrongly ordered. We were filled with the spirit of liberal
individualism, we thought that the state was something sep­
arate, a sort of night-watchman, while the important thing
was to prepare a man for life. Moaning to give him sharp
158 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

teeth and long talons will) which lo light for his own culti­
vation.” 5
A marvellous critique from the mouth of one of the great
teachers. You might meet a boy of 13 or \ \ and ask him
why he needed to pass his examination in physics. 4*So that
1 can go to university.” “And why go to university?” “So
that I can get a post.” “And why do you need a post?” “So
that 1 can have money and enjoy life, be a privileged per­
son.” Thus all knowledge becomes—teeth and claws. That
boy is well-adjusted to the struggle for survival. So that 1
can get a post more easily, the school must help me to ac­
quire, with the least possible effort, all the knowledge 1
shall need. Because I personally count on achieving this or
that appellation in the Table of Ranks; like in the school
for mandarins, where when you have mastered another
branch of learning you get another button or tassel on your
cap, and great honour and reward is yours. It is these “but­
tons and tassels” which are the exclusive aim of bour­
geois study.
And what, says Foerster, was the result? The result was
bad citizens. As it turned out, we survived, or half-surviv­
ed, the last war. As it turned out, the instinct of the peo­
ple still told them they s ho ul d all die for W i l h e l m II, for
“great Germany”. But things might have been far worse,
and it is time to pause and think. Here we have the in­
stinct of a bourgeois of the imperialist period, when the na­
tions can no longer reach agreement peacefully, but have at
every step to be at one another’s throats, when the cry is
“All for one!” Every firm—-“great Germany” or “great Rus­
sia”, has to be united from top to bottom, everyone must
put the interests of the firm before his own. “Patriotism”
is the feeling which makes a man devoted to a firm which
gives its profits to a few capitalists and high officials only:
the feeling that makes that man ready to sacrifice his per­
sonal interests, his family, his health, his life.
“Patriotic education” in this respect has an especially an­
ti-human tendency. . . Because here “patriotism” is simply
a call-up of subjects, irrespective of their faith or nationali­
ty, lo bolster up one particular firm of brigands that has
massed together as many people as possible.
Foerster says the child must be educated in the spirit of
patriotism, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the spirit of social
 TI1E PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 159

unity, the spirit of collectivism — patriotic of co u rse— and

he asks liim sell: liow can this he done in the bourgeois
school? llo w sh all we instil into the son of peasants or pro­
letarians that he m u st sacrifice h im self to LHe whole? W hy,
he will ask, should 1 sw ea t and suffer all m y life through,
and die in the sa m e state, and for some reason be a patriot,
while a few score thousand people in "my country” live in
i u \ ury ?
Is it possible, Foersler asks, for the lower orders to love
‘ their cou n try” as it is today? No, he says, in the lig h t of
scien ce it is not possible. If you give scientific developm ent
to a boy or girl from the lower strata, they will not love
their country, they will be outraged by the order prevailing
in it The bourgeoisie has never been able to carry its
kind of school through to the end, because a gen u in e school
m u st be absolutely h onest in its scientific aspect, l o state
aif facts scientifically, as they are, lo place problems b efoie
the child ju st as they are posed by the whole of l i f e — that
would m ean settin g the child against the bourgeoisie, i h e
bourgeois sy stem contradicts the progress of technology,
the progress of science.
We do not need exploiters, bourgeois people. We need
engineers, technologists, workers and peasants, we need the
whole mass formation of people who carry through the
great work ol creation, and w hose loss it is if someone is
drawing a proiit from it. A factory is a place w h eie the
struggle with nature proceeds, the struggle Lo change the
face of nature Lo serve the hum an race that is the social­
ist conception. Here w e have a conjunction of h um an p ow ­
ers, a great assem blage oi m achines, the action of certain
energies, the cooperation of certain people, w oild-w ide links
through the sen d in g and receiving of raw materials, through
the despatch oi material now processed for use by man.
But, it appears, this factory belongs to som e ‘Titus, son
of T itu s ”, and all the surplus produced by it goes to him:
he can stop the factory working if iL is not proiitable to
him — if it brings no proiit to him to produce boots, or cloth,
or to introduce a n ew m achine, seein g hands are cheap
anyw ay.
A nd this fact, that Lhey compete with one another, that
they bring the world to war, in w hich all is brought to
ruin and destruction and the earth crimsoned with b lood —
160 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

this is what must he looted out. From the point oi' view of
technology and science all this is an outdated ossification,
a survival from the past, a monstrous distortion of the hu­
man race and of our properly relations. Science and la­
bour strive to free themselves from this dead weight, plead­
ing for human life to be organised on the basis of scientific
truth, regardless of any rights and privileges. Could a bour­
geois government allow the schools lo say this? Never—
not in France nor yet in America will any teacher say such
a thing. A teacher or professor who did so would be thrown
out at once. In America a man who dares to teach social­
ism in the lecture-room will be out within 21 hours, and
we see a whole series of examples of this happening, let
alone what takes place in oilier countries.
The school, then, cannot bo honest under the bourgeoisie,
it cannot be scientific under the bourgeoisie—just scientific
up to a point, so far as learning is concerned, llow can
your bourgeois educate a child? lie has just as much of
an interest in discipline as the nobility had before him.
Does he not need an army, docs he not need people Lo break
their backs with work in his factory?
The school which Communism brings with it is lirst of
all a unified school, i.e. a school the same for all classes,
applying the same methods of teaching for all. Ideally the
school we want to have—one that offers all children, regard­
less of origin, the prospect of further development—
makes no distinction as between “people’s” schools (where
you go through four classes and then get out, thank you
very much) and schools for the rich—it is a really non­
class school: boys and girls enter the preparatory class
and complete their education with their last term in uni­
versity. Opportunities are equal for all. And since the
country is not yet able to take the whole chi Id population
through all stages, on that account it is the most able
who are accepted for higher education.
Secondly, this is a labour school. A labour school, i.e.
a school which has got rid as far as possible of learning-
by-role, which enables the child, exercising its abilities,
lo develop as far as is possible through play, gradually
transforming this play into simple labour processes, then
into more complex and fruitful ones yielding practical
knowledge. It will draw the child all the more surely,
 TIIF, PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 161

through giving him mental food via his own interests,

into Ihe sphere of practical knowledge and skills, since
all has been apprehended by the external organs in the
course of active work involving the entire organism.
In (Ins respect the Americans have done what they
could: they have no unified school and cannot have such,
but so far as the labour school is concerned, in the mat­
ter of giving precedence to active methods of apprehen­
sion, a very great deal has been done by the Americans.
Much can be learned from them at this present lime, and
we know how this method of education through work,
through going outside the school, making drawings, hav­
ing the child or a group of children work independently
on a given theme, producing reports, having discussions,
making models, acting themes out as drama, etc. how
this method gives acquired knowledge deep roots within
Ilie child, almost completely avoiding the danger of for­
getting what has been learned, of relapses into ignorance,
which has been a universal phenomenon with our old-
style schools.
But this is not all that we understand by the labour
school.
For the second-stage schools we have in mind not only
leaching the various subjects through the active method
of apprehension, with subsequent summing-up of the con­
clusions reached by means of talks and notes. Here we
also have teaching of labour itself. This teaching of la­
bour (as distinct from technical studies, where the object
is merely to turn a human being into a good workman)
we understand as part of general education. That is, it
is not a matter of producing a good turner or a good tex­
tile worker, but of leaching someone what labour is.
Today’s scientifically based agricultural or industrial
labour is an entire, pure crystallisation of science. If you
look a child and with him made a study of a factory, with
its repair shop, its store, its internal discipline, its ac­
counting system, what would you have been studying?
You would at the same time have been studying all the
laws of nature. You will encounter a million living ex­
amples of physics, chemistry etc., you will come upon the
sciences that deal with living organisms, you will acquire
an enormous mass of information on mathematics,
1 1 -0 1 1 2 0
162 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

mechanics, on the practical processus of thu given type of

production, and so on.
We call our school "polytechnical”, because we would
wish labour to be studied not in one example only. In
studying factory history, you study the development o!
labour relations, you lind out what industrial diseases
are, you encounter public health, anatomy, physiology —
a whole group of medical sciences. There is no group or
branch of knowledge which is not somehow woven into
that gigantic conjunction of human and natural relations
presented to us by a developed industrial centre, factory
or mill. But great difficulties still await us, of course,
along this way: to bring children right into work within
mills and factories, for educational purposes, is at present
not possible, we are obliged to limit ourselves to excur­
sions, and that only in the places where there is a suffi­
cient number of factories and mills. In a word, the ques­
tion of turning the second-stage school into a true labour
school is a very complicated one, and the curriculum
which we are now recommending solves this question
only by indicating substitute measures along these lines.
This school, which Marx so longed for, is in fact possible
today only for the children of the proletariat, and for those
in the Apprentice Schools —lor them, one can take advan­
tage of their position as part of the labour force, and see
that their labour has an educational aspect also. Sucli
work is being developed most intensively, in the field of
the Factory Training Schools (Fabzavuch).
But our school is not only a unified school, not only a
labour school, not only a polyteclinical school; these arc
the epithets which define it as a scientific or strictly as
a teaching establishment. We have still the task of edu­
cation proper: this can be discharged by means of the cor­
rect teaching of history and the science of society, and
by means of correctly organised school life.
What object are we pursuing in this? We want to edu­
cate a human being as harmonious as possible morally
and spiritually, one who has received a full general edu­
cation and can easily acquire full skill in some particular
field. We likewise have in mind the creation of a true,
well-disposed fellow-worker to his fellow-citizens, wo want
1o produce a comrade to all men and a fighter, so long as
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 163

Iho light lasts, lor llio socialist ideal. The fact, is that
these tasks have been formulated long ago, at the times
when the greatest clarity of educational thought was
achieved, either during whole epochs or through the person
of individual men of genius as educators.
In the book Problems of People’s Education 6 1 give an
outline of how the Greek school (inasmuch as the Greek-
state was obliged to set itself the task of creating a fully
qualified citizen) posed the problem of how to educate
each Greek so that he should be on a much higher level
of qualification than a barbarian—as a warrior, as a work­
er, and as a thinker. But. this was not all, there was still
Ilie need to create the maximum possible solidarity among
themselves. And all Greek legislation, all Greek culture
and poetry had an educational object—to train up a fel­
low-citizen of uncommon perfection, strong in body and
spirit, filled with great friendship and devotion to every
other Greek. The signilicance of this education was that
a Greek should thus be distinct among the family of
other peoples, and distinct also from the slave, captured
in war among the barbarians. Even religion itself was
used for this purpose.
Let us take the educational significance of Greek sculp­
ture. A boy sees a statue. “What does that mean?” he
asks. Me is told that such-and-such a one gained the vic­
tory—in running, wrestling, chariot-driving, poetry-read­
ing or some other form of contest at the great national
examinations which the nation provided for all fellow-cit­
izens—and because of that a monument has been put up
to him, and the victor-athlete was rarely represented in
a portrait likeness; the sculptor strove to create a general
model, so that a boy should think, “So that is how one
has to develop one’s body, there is the model of what men
honour, the pride of my town, and 1 too must try to be
like that.”
But Greek education was not limited to the athlete, above
him was the hero, the half-god, and the god himself,
the god of human form, more a man than was man him­
self. All Greek religion through its sculpture was saying:
man is hindered from being truly a man, by illness, by
.suffering, and by death; if we imagine a man immortal
(and 'immortal” was the epithet most often applied to
n*
164 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

the god), a man untouched by age, this is what In* would

be like; this is how his countenance would relied Ihe wis­
dom, the calm, the harmony of a being assured of him­
self, rational, and beautiful —all together.
Thus the staircase rose higher, up almost to the unat­
tainable ideal, and everything was a call, making clear
what heights were to be scaled, what goal reached by
means of all the gymnastic exercises, theatrical specta­
cles, moving festivities, even the wars themselves, which
also had an educational significance, since they furthered
the civic object of defending from the barbarians the cen­
tre of the World—Greece. This is why one can find ex­
amples in the pedagogy of the ancient world.
At Ihe time of Ihe French Revolution we see how the
progressive bourgeoisie, striving to draw in the popular
masses lo follow its lead, also begins to formulate the
tasks of the school as the tasks of educating the most
perfect possible man and citizen. In France there appear
the school plans of Talleyrand, Lepeletier and Gondorcef,
which remain classics even today.7
But every sincere teacher can say, “I want to produce
a person who will be happy and who will make others
happy. But how can you expect me Lo do this when your
society is imperfect, when it is cannibalistic, when it is
torn by contradictions?” And it is only one step from here,
a step which the majority of great teachers have made, to
socialist or semi-socialist ideas.
A teacher, who looks at things from his own point of
view, says, “Now if one could succeed in educating all
people in the spirit of love, comradeship, solidarity, beau­
ty of mind and body, then society itself would change.
“But society does not allow this to be done, it keeps its
wild-beast likeness. That is why the revolutionary starts
from the other end, and in answer to the idealistic soar­
ing flight of Greek pedagogy, or to the dreams and the
practical work of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Fichte
and Ilerbart,8 he says: “You, teacher, rightly pose the task
of producing the person beautiful, the fellow-worker and
comrade of others within the great fellowship of all men,
but you will 1 1 0 L be allowed to accomplish it. First of all
it is necessary that I, the revolutionary, relying on the
inward indignation of the masses, should clear the way
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 165

for you. And then, when I shall have shattered to bits

IIk* slave-owning slate of the landowner and bourgeois
type, shattered all these Ministries of De-education of the
people, freed you from the power of the church, and told
the Irulli to those of your kind who have ears to hear
and who need to be liberated, because within them is a
living teacher waiting—then you can set to work. This
earthquake will bring many buildings down, the struggle
will cause lights to Lite death among you, and bitter har­
dening of hearts, but still you cannot but sense that for
you freedom has come.”
Education is a pouring, into new, clean human vessels
unstained by vice, prejudice and egoism—into those small
and enchanting beings that children are—a pouring into
them of all the data (appropriate to their age) of our im­
mense scientific knowledge, all the skills of our vast tech­
nology, all the beauties of our enormous artistic wealth
with the object of bringing forth in them, through physic­
al culture and mental exercise, a truly developed person,
developed intentionally according to plan—the person you
and I, teacher, once dreamed of, the person we ourselves
could not become in our day, but whom you can now edu­
cate, because a proper social framework for doing so has
been created.
You may glance out of the window and say, “Have we
not still with us lakers of bribes, men dizzy with power,
hypocrites, the sick and the ignorant?” We have them all,
because the path on which they proclaim, “Make men bel­
ter and society will become better” is self-deception or
most ingenious falsehood. That way must not be taken,
so we have made society much better than men.
“Our Constitution, our ideals, are glorious, but in prac­
tice”—you may say to us—“in practice our life differs lit­
tle from ordinary animal existence.” True, because man
has not yel been re-educated. Re-education is necessary,
sometimes through a severe purging of oneself and of
others around one. We have to be freed from all the
“opium” that was once poured into our veins, from all
the egoism and dead weight of prejudices that handicap
each one of us, and our generation must make immense
efforls in order to bring itself little by little up to the lev­
el of the preliminary, preparatory educational work which
166 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

w e are now carrying through. But we do this, in hopes

that yo u n g e r brothers and our sons who are now 15 or lfi
years old will be belter prepared, though not. fully so.
Our hopes rest on you, teacher, that you, despite the hard
conditions prevailing, will be able to clear, or at least
begin to clear, the great road forward so that in the fu­
ture, under Communism, the stream of education m ay be
cleansed from the taint of class, so that only the pure
waters of science, art and truth may he poured into the
souls of children, so that for the first t ime ever education
m ay become classless a thing not of class hut of hum anity,
and so indeed communist.
Not every teacher by a long way will hearken to this.
There are some who do not want to hear, who stuff their
cars with cottonwool . . . At periods of history such as ours
one cannot live without immense enthusiasm, without sac-
Jihce. It is a very great time, and those whose legs are
very short must try at least to stand on tiptoe.
But there are m any who are so sunk in the old ways
I lat they say, And where are you going to re-educate
me- My head is grey already, praise be. And they want
me to teach the new way . . . W h at new way, when there
aicn f any textbooks to tell me? How am I to work it out
for myself? T’m not used to that sort, of thing . . .” T h a t—
in crude, caricatured form — is what m any are indeed sa y ­
ing, to themselves and to others.
And there is the martyr teacher, who hears all this, res­
ponds to everything, and says, “ I can’t do it, I h a v en ’t the
knowledge, T haven ’t, the knack . . . I understand with all
mv soul what an awesome work I am called to do. I rea­
lise that it is T, the Russian teacher, who bears the re­
sponsibility for several generations of children w h ose hap­
py, and dangerous, chance it was to be born at the time
of turning, when the law of the jungle is ending and the
true law, the human law is beginning, at. the time of
change, taking place in pain and struggle and for that rea­
son all the more pregnant with risks of all sorts . . . Help
me . .
And we, the Communists, who call him to this work,
say that in this department our powers are small. W o have
been able to fasten together sloppy Russia, the Russia
of the petty-bourgeois and the peasant, we have succeed-
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 167

ed in organising her into iron unity under the dictator­

ship of the proletariat. She has fought her way through,
she is independent, she is deciding her own destiny, but
we, the Party, can do no more alone: we must have a
union of all forces, we must have deep cooperation of all
the forces of labour.
It is time to cast aside all misunderstandings, all old
accounts, all doubts. It is time to realise that the awesome
upheaval has taken place, that we have emerged from the
chrysalis, that soon we shall learn to fly, but for the mo­
ment we are blinded by the world that opens before us,
and we are surrounded by a host of enemies: both within,
by reason of a mass ol elemental dangers, and without,
in the person of the competitors and sworn foes who sur­
round us. The hour of our great liberation is an hour of
great, danger, and we must draw together in single unity
throughout the whole Union of Soviet Republics, mindful
(hat this will draw to ns the whole world of those who la­
bour, and that gigantic majority will ensure our victory.
We must close our ranks. And when the Communist
Parly calls upon the teachers, it does so in a voice trem­
bling with emotion, it understands how infinitely much it
needs them, how all. absolutely all the work of building
a socialist culture, of fighting ignorance which is the gan­
grene eating us away—all this depends on whether the
teachers can, as we put it, re-adjust themselves, that is
educate themselves to the realisation of the fact that they
are the ones called on to organise, for the first time in
history, a truly human school, and to finding the skill to
do it.
In this sixth year of our common struggle we are al­
ready well on the way to a coming together of this kind,
to a joint solution of the question. And if we have among
us a third type of teacher—teachers who know which way
to go, who are progressive people, who may make mis­
takes but who have firm ground under their feet, in the
sense of having a good grasp of classical pedagogy and
an understanding of American labour-school methods, and
wilhin them the concept of the unique situation of the
Russian school in these matters —then such leachors
should be valued not just at their weight in gold, but at
their weight in I know not what: they are the yeast with
168 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

whose help we shall leaven all our lump and make it rise,
for knowledge is a thing oven more infect iou< than
plague.
If proper use is made of a knowledgeable person, lie or
she can with remarkable speed, in the course not of de­
cades but of a few years, enrich with knowledge a consid­
erable mass of people, the knowledge passing from one
to another. We have such people, however few they may
be. There is an immense desire to learn. We have a new
breed of young people, thirsting to help us, who are weak
in knowledge but strong in spirit and in enthusiasm —
young people studying in poverty-stricken training colic-
ges, often poorly provided in respect of good teaching, hut
studying along the right lines, and filled with a high con­
sciousness of the mission awaiting them and with readi­
ness to make many sacrifices both during their time of
study and thereafter, for all the sacrifices are repaid by
the immense results the teacher’s work yields.
I want to conclude this speed) with some notable words
said by a person 1 am in general not greatly in sympathy
with, but. who was a great reformer—Martin Luther. In
an epistle to German teachers Luther says: “If 1 were not
a preacher I would wish to be a teacher, for as a preach­
er I speak to people whose backs are bent and whose
hands are horny, to people maimed and soiled by life,
but you, tlie teachers, you speak to pure souls. The truth
which I preach falls into a soul perverted, and there is
itself sometimes perverted or lies and gives no growth:
the truth which you bring to the receptive and pure soul
of a child will there burn up as a bright flame.” 9
We might say the same thing, for if we were not agi­
tators, called on to preach our truth to crippled adult souls
since only they, men maimed, but with men’s strength,
can bring about the change that will be salvation to all
men—otherwise each of us would find it sweet to address
ourselves to that pure audience, to those fresh small
hearts, to those bright, open little minds from which so
terribly much can be made, from each one of which can
be produced, given the right educational approach, a true
miracle.
They used to maim the human race, they used to make
a human being into a petty official or some other spoil
 TIIFi PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCHOOL AND THE REVOLUTION 169'

monster, but now we have lo mold a child into a miracle,

a real human being, such as was rare among us or among
our lathers, but which must be found ever more frequent­
ly among our younger brothers and sisters, yet more fre­
quently among our sons and daughters, and which will
become the predominating type among our grandsons and
granddaughters. This miracle is being wrought by the rev­
olution, wrought by life, hut without teachers it cannot
he wrought. It is the one miracle that science can reco-
gnise —the transformation of the human race.
And every teacher, if he understands his mission aright,
must, whenever he enters the classroom or any premises
where children are playing, or takes children outdoors, to
the lap of nature, feel that something solemn is taking
place, something touching the heart with joy: they are
living through the miracle of humanity’s transformation.
If they can comprehend what vast freedom of operation
and creation will be theirs in this sacred calling, and how
passionately the revolution calls them to do this, how rea­
dy it is, for all its poverty, to come to their aid with all
speed: then surely they will with full hearts, in spite of
all difficulties, speak their own word of deep gratitude to
the revolutionary proletariat and to its leader, the Com­
munist Party of Russia!
 THE TASKS OF EDUCATION WITHIN THE SYSTEM
OF SOVIET CONSTRUCTION *

T he principal, fundamental and all-em bracing task of

Soviet power is to bring Communism into being. As m e m ­
bers of the Comintern, as representatives of llie interna­
tional thought and the international struggle of the work­
ing class, we, the Russian Communist Parly (R K P Ros-
siiskaya Kom m unislichcskaya Partiya). whose will and
whose thought determines the policy of the S o viet gov­
ernm en t—we of course seek the establishm ent of Com­
munism throughout the world. B ut in particular Soviet
power seeks the establishm ent of C om m unism within our
Union, or more precisely seeks to follow within our Union
that policy which will lead most rationally and m ost di­
rectly to the victory of working people throughout the
world.
And in this our country finds herself placed in quite
unique circumstances. On the one hand, it has outstripped
all other count lies as regards the road of political d evel­
opment. and in this respect she stands closer to C om m un­
ism than all other countries, Tor she has in actual ex is­
tence a Soviet government, a government of workers and
peasants, behind which stands what is e s s e n tia lly a work­
ers’ Communist dictatorship. In no country of the world
besides those belonging to our Union is there an yth in g
of the kind. But at the same lim e our country is. as re­
gards the economy and as regards cultural matters, one of
the most backward countries, and she remains so to this
present lime. She thus Finds herself surrounded by a
world hostile to her, and furthermore lagging behind the
civilised nations of Europe and America. From this flows
an agonising contradiction, which wo have con stan tly to
take into account.
We find ourselves in constant, though so m e tim es con­
cealed, conflict with the governm ents of the rest of the
"Slightly abridged.—Ed
 THE TASKS OF EDUCATION 174

world, and wo realise only loo well that the ground un­
der our feel is very treacherous, as Lenin said—boggy
ground, since under us is an immensely deep layer, which
a! presen! is whal chiefly supports us economically, of
small peasant economies that are very far from having
reached a stage enabling (hem to grow sufficiently mature
for a transition to Communism. And along with this, the
cultural level of the country is in no sort, of accord with
the huge tasks (hat the Ociobcr Revolution has set. itself.
From this one can draw the following conclusion on the
immediate aims which arise from the general goal of mov­
ing towards Communism: we have to defend ourselves, we
have to organise the defence of the country. The first front
is defence of the country. This first, front has for a long
lime, as you know, loomed so large as to obscure all the
other fronts. It was, in effect, the one and only front. It
could not be otherwise, because in the first years aftei the
devolution our conflict with the bourgeoisie of the wbo e
world became acute in the extreme, and we had to defenc
ourselves, arms in hand, in direct and open war.
Then, obviously, it was essential to bring the economy
()1 the country into order, for a whole number of reasons.
■I was impossible lo live at the level of poverty in w h c i
we did live in 1918 and 1919. The continuance of such
poverty would of course have spelt death to the Revolu­
tion, for one thing: for another, only given development
of the economy can we find ourselves sufficiently stiong
•o pul up some resistance to the onslaught of the bour­
geoisie: and thirdly, because the higher the economy can
raise itself, the stronger we shall prove as the main weap-
on oT (he world proletarian Internationale in its strug­
gle—and not only that, the brighter, too, will shine the
example we shall set, the more definitively we shall shat-
ter into fragments the slanderous assertions of our ene­
mies, assertions which give pause to the proletariat itsoll,
when it is assured that the road which we have taken is
the road to ruin. Our economic development will not only
enable us to live like human beings ourselves, not only
make us firmer fighters against our foes, it will also prove
that the power of the worker, supported by the peasant,
leads to Ilie most beneficial results even in a country as
backward as ours, even given the hostility of the whole
172 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

world towards Ikt. And such a conclusion is si l onger

than any propaganda and agitation, to the whole of the
West European proletariat and to the peasantry of the
whole world.
The third front is what we have usually called our edu­
cational battle-line. And of course, comrades, no one ac­
tually produced a theory staling that defence had to come
fir^t, then the economy, and education in the third place
no one has advanced such a theory. But life itself ob­
liged us willy-nilly to assess these tasks as having these
placings in the perspective.
Why could no one have advanced such a theory? It is
clear enough. Is it conceivable to wage a war without an
economy? It is utterly obvious that an army can be fed,
clothed, shod and armed only if there is an economy
functioning at a certain level. Countries reduced to com­
plete beggary can maintain no army whatsoever, and to
maintain seven millions at fronts extending over eleven
thousand kilometres is a colossal economic task. So the
hrst front was inconceivable without the second. But the
very nature of the second front was to some extent dis­
torted, of course, during the years of the Civil War. Very
little thought could be given to rational, planned devel­
opment and very much had to be given to shock-tactic
economics, to squeezing out somehow or other a certain
quantity of goods, of food for the front, and to keeping
going the railways which could be of strategic importance,
and so on.
It goes without saying that the third front also was in
Ihe same stale, but then how can one wage warwithout
education? Of course one cannot. In the Civil War, educa­
tion, like the economy, played an immense part. But where
was it to be found, in what form was it expressed? It
took the form of work in the army. That was the point
where impact was concentrated: the work of enlighten­
ment, the culture sections of the political departments,
that enormous force, most of it Communist, which set its
work in train in the innermost depths of that army of
seven million in order to turn yesterday’s deserter, yester­
day’s green peasant lad with no understanding of what
it was all about, who said, “You promised peace but
you’ve given us war” —in order to turn such men into the
 THE TASKS OP EDUCATION 173

Hud Army soldiers who won victory ou all the trouts of

the Civil War.
In effect all three fronts were in operation, but they ad­
justed themselves to the first front, and it is only now,
over the years just past, that we have been able to sort
out in our minds, objectively and in a normal manner,
the inter-relations between them. Now we can repeat—and
not only we ourselves, the people of the third front, we
can speak, in repeating it, in the name of the whole So­
viet government—that, the third front is inextricably in­
tertwined with the first front and the second, that it is
impossible to separate them, and that at the present lime
we are face to face with the following problem: that nei­
ther the defence of the country, nor the government of
the state, nor the development of the economy, is conceiv­
able without rapidly expanded work on the third fro n t...
To train people for defence, Lrain people for economic
work, train people for posts of command in our state—
this means educating true Communists who will be dedi­
cated heart and soul to this work. And tin's loo is an edu­
cational task, a work of enlightenment.
First of all, life itself plays an enormous part here. In­
sofar as the worker and the peasant begin to comprehend
their situation, they begin to lose the feeling that they are
slaves to their Father the Tsar, to lose their childish trust
in the priest, or simply the inert feeling that you can L
slop things happening anyway. In place of this there ap­
pears a real, genuine, active awareness of their own inter­
est, a desire to make life relate closely to their own direct
interests.
We cannot put our trust in life alone and say that all
that is developing and happening is right. On the con­
trary, the essence and purpose of the existence ol the
Communist. Party lies in discerning the direction in which
life is moving, and in struggling with that which turns
aside, to a false path, away from Communism. We give an
active education, and this kind of education does not
mean the propaganda of “morality”, approved by the
bourgeoisie as a way of propping up the crumbling walls
of bourgeois education and bourgeois religion. Our educa­
tion lies in bringing all stages of the educational structure
closer to life. Life leaches, or not so much life itself as
174 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

the body of public opinion which has now becom e an in­

tegral part of life.
W e m u s t work to strengthen the links our y o u n g peo­
ple have with reality, and this m eans d evelop ing links be­
tw een reality and the Young Com m unist L eague (K om ­
s o m o l), the daily lives of our children and of our institu­
tions for children.
E very m em ber of the Young C om m unist L eague has a
deep pride in, and awareness of b elon gin g to the League,
lie is proud of this L eague which is bis very ow n and
which also bears Lenin's name. For him, lo belong to the
League is the h igh est happiness; expel him from the League
and he will in the majority of cases die, m orally or
physically.
The sam e applies to the ch ildren ’s m ovem en t. T he small
Pioneer, a thimble of a man, considers h im self one of
Lenin's pioneers and is proud lo be a participant in revo­
lutionary development, l i e is prouder of his red scarf than
any general ever was of his St. A n d r e w ’s ribbon.
Even the best loved teacher cannot influence a boy or
girl better than a good collective is able to. If a child is
told by his comrades in the organisation that he is a bad
Pioneer, the effect is colossal.
One of the foremost German ed u cation ists, P au l Na-
lorp, in a book which he wrote before the war about the
increasing incidence of vice and su icide am on g adoles­
cents, said: k4I have to state that the on ly m eth od of com ­
batting this has been found by the S ocial D em ocrats, for
if is their youth organisations that have the best record.
Willi them these cases are very few, and this is because
a health y corporate pride and m u tu al, corporate control is
built up am ong their y o u n g sters.” 1
B ut can one even compare the youth o rgan isation s then
in existence, which had n o th in g but vag u e p hrases about
socialism to offer, with the organ isation of our y o u n g peo­
ple? For we live as it were illu m in ed by B en g a l light, un­
der which everything, even that which perhaps is grey,
appears lo us as a great festival of socia lism . In this re­
sp ect we arc particularly fortunate.
Our y o u n g people in I he Komsomol are not suppressed
and kepi down, driven into an underground existence,
they are pari of Lhe slate's work of con struction, they
 THE TASKS OF EDUCATION 175

hold Iho childish hand of the young Pioneer and lead him
loo behind them, bringing him iorward into iho country’s
economy as the son and heir, for the master of that econ­
omy is the worker, the master is the peasant, and the Kom­
somol member and the Pioneer are their heirs and will con­
tinue their work.
That is why such vast opportunities for Communist edu­
cation lie open to us. That is why, instead of discussing
whether one ought not to introduce disciplinary measures,
and what measures would be good ones to combat hooligan­
ism among adolescents, etc., instead we must keep before
our eyes just this: correct organisation of the Komsomol
and Pioneer movements is the direct, broad and true road
of Communist education, but here I repeat correct organi­
sation.
We can here note some harmful deviations, for instance
L11o overloading of youngsters with work in the organisation,
something which everyone is loudly complaining of just
now. Youngsters rush headlong into social work and turn
away from their studies. We are going to make a special
study of all these questions and set them to rights, with
hrst and foremost the sensitive and careful assistance of the
teacher, for the teacher is the specialist in questions of the
development of Lhe small soul and the small body, the
child’s consciousness and the child's personality.
Without science, without the school as the main axis of
development, we shall of course get nowhere. But there has
never been anyone so carried away as to suppose that the
Pioneer movement could take the place of the school and
of higher education. Of course no one has gone as far as
any tiling so wild. One must be linked with the other in
harmony, in the mosl inward, profound and friendly man­
ner. That, in brief and in general, is the cultural task of
the Soviet government.
We need culture, starting with the ABC and ending with
science, culture in the field of thought and culture in the
field of feeling. Here I must tell you that the place occu­
pied by science in the field of thought is in the field of feel­
ing occupied by art. And in the degree of its achievements
the old arl (many parts of which are anything but harm­
ful for us), the works of the world’s great masters have a
lot lo offer. On this basis we are developing the new art,
176 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

which grows up from the soil of the old. 11. guides, develops,
forges, leads onwards, organises our feeling, just as science
organises and leads onward our thought. And if culture is
thus necessary to us for our onward march to Communism,
one can also say another thing: Communism makes no sense
at all if it does not serve culture. Culture, education,
science, art—these are not only a means whereby we move
forward to the goal we set ourselves. They arc at the same
lime a most high end in themselves.
VVliat, after all, is Communism? Perhaps Communism is
only the organisation of a particular policy, leading to the
victory of the proletariat? We all know very well that it is
not. It would be senseless to seize power if we did not make
these people happy. Power is taken precisely in order to
give people happiness. Perhaps this is a purely economic
question? Perhaps we set ourselves the aim of leading peo­
ple to freedom in order that they should work without
wearing themselves out, that they should have a roof over
their heads, food, clothing—and that is all? Of course not.
Does man live in order to vegetate only, to put his trou­
sers on each day, eat his piece of meat at midday, and in
tlie evening go to bed? No. All this is merely a means by
which to achieve a happy life.
Man does not live for the sake of these means. He needs
to dress, eat, rest and work in order to extend his knowl­
edge, develop his feelings and sensations, in order to know
happiness, to be happy himself and give that happiness to
others. Our final aim is to create a fraternal unity of peo­
ple, such that it should raise itself higher and higher and
fully extend all the material goods, all the wealth and op­
portunities open to a human being . . .
Culture is thus not only a means but an end. And the
worker on the third front can say of himself, to the workers
on the first front: I am helping you, and without me you
cannot move one step, but the happy time will come when
this first front—the bristling bayonets and roaring guns—
will be no more. And to the workers on the economic front
the third front man can say: you cannot hold on without
me, but one can look forward and glimpse a coming time
when economic achievements will be a matter of course,
just a kitchen, in which most of the work will be done by
machines. When these questions are solved, then we step,
 THE TASKS OF EDUCATION 17?

in Engels’ words, from the realm of necessity into the realm

of freedom. - Then cultural questions will remain, as the
main questions, and then the first front and to a considera­
ble extent the second front will merge in the third front.
This, the third front, is the last but not the least worthy of
attention; it is the last front in the sense that it realises
the last, final goal, for the sake of which all are struggling,
living, and dying.
Comrades, 1 ask your pardon, but I cannot limit myself
to that part of my report which outlines our common tasks.
A report on those lines, within those limits, could have been
given by anyone, not the Commissar for Education of the
Russian Soviet Republic. 1 want therefore to devote some
time to considering more concrete tasks, that is, what we
are now doing and what we can now do on our third front
towards the fulfilment of that general plan which 1 have
just sketched out for you.
First of all, it is absolutely clear that without a material
basis any advancement in our work is unthinkable. We our­
selves do not make money either directly or indirectly, we
do not print money, as in the recent past at least the Peo­
ple’s Commissariat for Finance did, and can still do in case
of need. We do not produce any goods which can be sold
abroad, we need the state to assign us money from local
resources. These resources have up to this day been made
available to us only on a very grudging scale.
I say this not for the sake of grumbling. We have moan­
ed a good deal, and cursed as we argued with our comrades
over the division of the meagre resources on which the state
had to exist. And 1 think it would be taking a narrow
departmental view of tilings if we were to say that up to
now the third front has been starved of resources. No, we
were given as much as was possible in view of the paucity
of our means, in view of the importance of military tasks
and the need to close up at least the most gaping holes in
our economy. And now it would be shameful if the increase
in the resources allocated to the third front were to be held
up even for a minute.
And what do we see? In my report to the last session of
the All-Russia Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) I al­
ready shouted very loudly and sounded the alarm, drawing
the Committee’s attention to the fact that on our front mat-
1 2 -0 1 1 2 0
178 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

tors arc really intolerable.* And 1 did this quite deliberate­

ly, since 1 know that there are resources now available and
that one must tell the Executive Committee the truth. 01
course scribblers abroad, 1’rom among our emigres, draw
conclusions from this about how poverty-stricken we arc.
They quote me, they quote N. K. Krupskaya, every time
there is any mention by us of shortage of money. But we are
not going to build Potyomkin villages 4 and give ourselves
and the Executive Committee rose-coloured spectacles to
look through, merely for Tear of providing food lor their
chatter.
We know the deficiencies and the harsh need in which we
live, brought down upon our heads mainly by the crimes
of these people. This is a thing from which we will recover
and are recovering. And the lirst condition for recovery is
that we should look properly aL each wound and learn how
it is to be cured.
Since that time we have moved forward to a quite excep­
tional degree. Then we named 78 million roubles as the
ideal sum. We were given less—(50 million. Now we have,
in essence, the lull amount that we were then asking. It
has been said here that just recently nine and a half mil­
lion has been added on to our allocation. This is incorrect.
Ihe amount added is 18 million, because one must include
three and a half million out of the five million allocated to the
tund for backward nationalities, one must include all the sub­
sidy lor teachers, for raising their pay, and in this way we get
18 million. Overall, the whole budget for the entire Union —
the central budget—was lasL year 85 million. This year it
is 140 million.
If we continue to advance at this rate, very soon we shall
be home and dry. Of course the Commissariat for Finance
(Narkomfin) 5 tells us: we guarantee you an increase of 10
per cent for next year. But we leave this unheeded, as the
Commissariat for Finance is there to cut things down, what
else. If Narkomfin says 10 million, we say to ourselves:
probably 30 or 40 million, we shan’t settle for less.
Comrades, the situation is even more cheering as regards
local funds, if, of course, one is to trust the calculations
presented by Narkomfin, which they assure us are not exag­
gerated. Last year more than 80 million was promised, but
in actual fact over the USSR as a whole 62 million was
 THE TASKS OP EDUCATION {%

allocated in real terms. This year we are promised 240 mil­

lion, bat let us be great pessimists, and suppose that a
smaller percentage than last year will actually transpire,
say—as people with "a good eye lor ligures”—180 million.
Even that means three Limes as much as before. Thus, if
we add it all up, it appears that last year we got by on 147
million, and this year we are going to have 320 million to
live on.
At the same time it has been declared that the slogan now
is—hrrnly, debnilely and for a long time to come—“All
Attention to the Countryside”. A large part ol' these resour­
ces will go in precisely that direction, to the countryside, to
work in the villages. Then maybe we shall make a concerted
effort to set about the main task.
For we must make a reality of universal compulsory edu­
cation. And how many of our children are in fact attending
school? In some places the percentage is below 20, and the
average is 50 per cent (or it may be a bit less than lifty).
We must double the number of schools. We need to have
250 thousand more teachers, or even more. You will see
why. Can we do this now, or not? In part, comrades, only
in part, for the network of schools which we now have is
full of holes in many respects, or is made up of material
that is rotten and can easily break apart. This network
must be strengthened, and then we can talk about extend­
ing it.
Of course in places where the peasantry itself wants to
build schools, they must be set up. We have a constant
stream of petitioners at the Commissariat for Education,
coming to us and saying, “We want to build a school, we
contribute the timber, we provide the labour, we will pay
the maintenance of a teacher, but we are short of so-and-so
and such-and-such.” Not long ago, for instance, we had the
following case. A petitioner arrives from Kursk province—
a loan of 400 roubles is needed. “And as far as that goes,”
lie says, “we’ve already sown a special field which should
give a harvest worth that much. When the corn is ripe, we
will pay your loan back.” They had asked for the loan from
Lhe District Education Office, from the Provincial Education
Office—no, they were told, we haven’t got 400 roubles.
This comrade even showed me a paper whereby the higher,
provincial office authorised the issue of 10 planks for the
12 *
180 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

building of a school. And the answer of the oi’iice lower

down the line: no planks in slock.
So these comrades come to us. Of course we have not got
resources of this nature, we are not a bank, we cannot is­
sue loans, but none the less 1 arranged that these 400 rou­
bles should be found, because it hurts to see the good intent
of peasant people frustrated for lack of the odd copper.
Locally, then, one has to manoeuvre as best one can. YVe
must meet the peasantry half-way, otherwise there is dis-
grunted talk among them, and rightly so. We too dream
of the time when our youngslers will not have to trot six or
seven versts to school, but will have a school in their own
village. Insofar as there is this desire to build, insofar as
there are provinces prosperous enough to do so, we do not
object to building programmes.
But let us consider a little how matters stand in reality
with our school network. When we did calculations to dis­
cover how much money would be needed to repair our
schools so that they should not he standing without roofs,
without stoves, like a ruin in a fairy tale (for this question
is really one that cries to high heaven) —when we worked
out how much would be needed, it emerged that it would
be a round sum in the neighbourhood of 25 million roubles.
That would be just to put the already existing schools into
something like a presentable state. We brought this to the
attention of the All-Russia Executive Committee, and it
passed a resolution that as from next year a special building
fund6 should be organised under the Commissariat for Edu­
cation and the Provincial Education Offices, this fund being
for the primary purpose of repair work, but also, 1 think,
able to advance money to the peasantry when they wish to
build schools themselves.
When school buildings have been put in order, there ari­
ses the question of textbooks and school equipment. There
aren’t any? Perhaps there really aren’t any? Read the re­
port of Gosizdat (the State Publishing House) 7: there are
up to 23 million copies of textbooks available, that is about
the number required, roughly. We could provide these text­
books for almost all the pupils hungering for them, but the
books are lying in the stores, either at the Commissariat or
in the provinces. They are not moving, or only moving ve­
ry sluggishly.
 THE TASKS OP EDUCATION 181

Those aro new textbooks, chocked by the Stale Teachers’

Council, but out in the localities the old textbooks reign,
and from what our teachers tell us they reign right royally.
The teacher cannot get away from them. Tt is they that
dictate to the teacher, in cracked and ancient tones, what
he is to do in school. These are ancient, tattered old books,
for which the peasants pay high prices, pay by the pood.
(This is true, they say that in some parts of Russia the
price of a schoolbook is so many poods’ weight of grain). This
is an enormous mix-up, which everyone must help to sort
out.. Teachers’ representatives have come to me and said,
“Gosizdat has bad material, the cooperatives pay little atten­
tion to such matters, put the whole business into the hands
of the teachers.”
Tn this connection T think that. Tsekpros8 in particular
should develop its book-publishing side, as it is successfully
developing its book-trading side now. Perhaps we must
bring into this business the Provincial and District. Educa­
tion Offices, the education workers out in the sub-districts,
because there are textbooks, and textbooks which are not
excessively expensive either, and yet none the less they are
not moving. And they should be moving. Where the price
is high everything must be done to bring it down, because
we must not fail to put books into the hands of the children
whose education we are speaking of as being a most urgent
need. . .
The problem is not to think out, write or print, textbooks.
They have been thought, out, written, and printed, they are
lying on the shelf—but they are not in the schools. This
abnormal state of affairs must, be done away with. New text­
books bring with them new methods. N. K. Krupskaya9
will he sneaking esneciallv about this, so T will not dwell
on this. Tt is clear that this must be one of our central
tasks.
We cannot bo satisfied with the sort of schooling that
used to be considered sufficient. We have to find the road
to a school with life in it. At a consultation meeting with
teachers T was told that the peasants are not satisfied with
the new school. The peasant says, “The old school taught
you your letters, but now a lad comes home and you ask
him, ‘What have you learned—to write, do sums, read?’
and he hasn’t learned much reading and writing. When you
182 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

ask him what he has learned he replies, ‘We go on excur­

sions, we make models, we draw’.11 And the peasant is not
happy about it.
I think this is already in the past. I remember how in
11)10, in Kostroma province, in one of the villages a peas­
ant complained to me that flic teacher made idols and sang
songs and did nothing else. Of course what is new in our
school is not that we do not tench children to read and
write, not that we don’t have the ABC but we do have
“work in complex”. 10 The first task of the school, and the
first task of the new method, is to bring the school closer
to the understanding of the peasant.
We are unable at present to bring the school closer to
the peasant’s understanding, because the peasant wants us
to teach his little lad to bow to prejudices, i.c. to educate
him in the fear of God and of man. 1 remember one peas­
ant, true he was a peasant of kulak type (since he had a
small starch works of his own at the time), complaining
that not only had they taken the icons out of the school
and stopped teaching Scripture, but when he gave his Va­
nyushka one over the ear-hole, the latter told him that the
Soviet government said people weren’t to he beaten. And
tha t was the influence of school. Tn that kind of connection,
of course, we cannot bring the school closer to the peasant.
We cannot beat children, but we must bring the school clo­
ser to the peasant in such a way that he will understand
the aims of our education. We must bring the school to
him so that he, the muzhik, will understand and see that the
school gives good training for a knowledgeable husband­
man. But if a young lad reads and writes badly, no com­
plex methods will save the school.
The school must pursue the aim of, on the one hand,
effective literacy, which will be immediately evident, which
will be taught rapidly, simply and well in the school, and
after that the school must give essential knowledge of agri­
culture and by so doing be itself a help to agriculture. For
example, even in bourgeois Switzerland, as my neighbour
there who was a gardener told me, his young son used to
come home from school and give him valuable advice on
cultivation. Here, whore IIn* level of peasant farming is low,
one can provide a vast amount of advice. And agricultural
science can extend its care for our farming economy through
 THE TASKS OF EDUCATION 183

1lie* school, can help it through the children, teaching how

to treat a sick cow or providing information on how vege­
table crops should be sown. Every school can set an exam­
ple, so that the eggs will be teaching the hen.
When the peasant sees that through the school he re­
ceives useful knowledge on farming, then he will respect the
school.
One must him the school not only into an instrument for
raising the level of consciousness in agricultural science
among the rising generation of peasants, but also into an
instrument for raising the general level of consciousness of
all, adult peasants too. America, with its vast network of
farmers, is doing this already. At the last agricultural con­
ference we brought this matter up most seriously.
What is needed is that the agricultural colleges, the pla­
c e s o f higher education, should each take a certain geograph­
ical area under their care, that they should bring together
teachers and pupils from the secondary schools, out of these
produce instructors, and the latter will then travel round
the schools and give instruction. Every secondary-level
place of agricultural education should have its own area to
look after. The basic unit must be the village teacher. He
needs to know about bee-keeping, say, and horticulture, this
or that branch of farming, so that from day to day and from
month to month he can develop this or that aspect of the
peasant economy, through creating special children’s clubs
and organisations.
America teaches its farmers through their children, though
those farmers have developed economies far beyond the
reach of our peasant. We must teach our peasants, whose
husbandry is on a very low level, and in the very near fu­
ture we must make this a reality in at least a few areas.
This is school re-organisation for you.
Let no one think T am against the State Teachers’ Coun­
cil curriculum or the complex method. On the contrary, T
am wholly in favour of both. They are a step towards the
realisation of a true labour school, towards the creation of
a genuine Communist school, and quite a big step too. Bui
one must think out methods in such a way, and give the
teacher instructions of such a kind that he should not over­
reach himself. And this does happen. The teacher is puzz­
ling his head over the Council’s curriculum, and in the
184 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

meantime the children are growing up illiterate. This can­

not be allowed. We must link together in harmony our
methodological directive5? and the possibilities of real work.
We are often asked in what way it is possible to acquire
technical skills: “We are groping our way through the for­
est of complex methods, and lagging behind in gaining
technical skills and knowledge.” This should not be. A gen­
eral barometer here must be the following: if the peasant
respects the school, it is a good one. Rut this has to he at­
tained not by making concessions and going along with re­
ligion, or by relaxing standards on discipline, but by acting
so that the peasant says, “They teach the children what’s
what in school, they teach them what they need to know.”
That is what shows that the complex method and the Coun-
?!ls curriculu*n are correct, for they are calculated to bring
life into the school and make it as close to life as possible.
Now something must be said about the material situation
of the teaching body, for it goes without saving that, how­
ever dedicated it mav be (and it is very dedicated), none
the less material conditions do exist. As has been said here,
they are the floor on which we stand. Tf you fall through
that, everything is upside-down; a person cannot work when
he or she has not got material security.
What, are the tasks that face us in this connection? Now,
during this year, by means of an assignation of 7 million
and a supplementary assignation of 5 (with the promise of
something to be added to these from local resources), wo
have raised the average obligatory salary of a teacher up to
28 roubles (per month). Very often it is'said. “Tn many pro­
vinces this has been exceeded already. Why are you making
us a present of your 28 roubles when we have much more
than that?” This is wrong, for the money is going to the
very poorest provinces. If 12 million is being given, some­
one is going to be the better for it. It is after all impossible
that, once an additional sum has been received, salaries
should not go up, that these extra 12 millions should not
improve anything. This does not happen. But are these
12 million on the way, and will they really go to you? Will
the local authorities not use them for other purposes, will
this money not be diverted in some disguised form to other
purposes, even in some form offensive to the teaching bo­
dy? We say, “We hereby give 12 million over to the loca-
 THE TASKS OF EDUCATION 185

lities. You—they—must add three and a half million of

your own funds to this, and so increase salaries to an aver­
age of 28 roubles.” And what did we get in response to
this? A reduction in the number of schools.
Just recently we got from Tsaritsyn province (if there are
teachers from Tsaritsyn here, they know about this) an ul­
timatum as follows: “Rustle up an additional assignation
and subsidy for us. or else we reduce the number of
schools.” although such action has been forbidden many
times over. And Tsaritsyn province is not alone in this re­
spect. Tn fact, in those nlaces where directives from central
government are received concerning increases in the amount
paid to teachers, they are cutting down the number of
schools in our already scanty network.
Or another trick: they hire teachers for 7 months: the re­
maining 5 months are non-working time, holidays, live as
best you can. This produces an interesting situation: you
used to get lb roubles, now you can have 28. hut multi­
plied bv seven instead of bv twelve. This is clearlv offensive,
and clearly fraudulent. It is deceiving not only the teacher
but the central government, which did not want this.
Or you have the overloading, the colossal overloading of
one teacher, who is compelled to work with a hundred or
so children, and this can in no way be done. You get an
over_}]-i(;pgagingp volume of work when the teacher cannot
cope, and all the salary increase goes down the drain and
yields precisely no return. Two teachers are needed here.
It is clear as the day, hut. this conclusion is not draw n-
flounder on as best, you can, and for next year you 11 he
getting another 25 pupils. Tn this way it can he made to
look as though the needs of the peasantry are being met
without having to extend the school network. Tt is clear that
if we cannot build new schools, we must, at least increase
the number of teachers, and without, this the reform will
yield no results.
This is why there were recently set up by law control
commissions with the participation of Provincial Education
Offices, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection 11 authorities
and so on, empowered to check on the actual implementa­
tion of the law. This will he their responsibility, and we
in the Commissariat, for Education ask you to lot us know,
through Tsekpros and directly, of any instances which flout.
186 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

the intention of the legislator, which is that the teacher

should receive 28 real roubles, multiplied hv twelve, for normal
teaching duties. Tf the commissions do not keep an eye on this,
we shall bring them up to scratch. The law is not promnlgaled
in order that people shall find ways round it. hut in order
that the cultural front shall be brought up to a higher level.
Alongside these material conditions, which are going to
be improved, there is also the law on pensions. 12
Then, it is vital that very serious attention should be paid
to tbe status of the teacher. A lot has been said about this
here, and T have a whole mass of material. I hope, I am
even sure, that in this mass of material there is a great deal
of teachers’ nerves (they were cross and are exaggerating),
and that if one listens to the other side, much will fall to
the ground and seem less bad. Tf it was all true, then cer­
tain^ it would he impossible not to he shocked to the depths
of one’s soul. But if onlv part of it is true, still this is some­
thin? that must he firmly dealt with once and for all.
What, is to he done in thi^ matter? T think that this cong­
ress is a powerful remedv in itself. TTere wo have represen­
tatives of the government and of the Party who have just
been talking loudly about tbe need to raise the dignity of
the teacher, to recognise him as having equal rights with
the proletarian worker in industry. Tt has been said here
that, the teacher is a most valuable worker in society, that
through him the alliance with the peasantry is operated in
real terms. Tt has been said here that we are going to put
up severe opposition to any representatives of government.
Party or Young Communist League who fail to recognise
this and to live up to it. A great deal has been said here
about putting a stop to disgraceful manifestations arising
from lack of understanding of the teacher’s importance.
But action must be continued. Here the role of Tsekpros
is immense, and in some cases Tsekpros has been silent: it
seemed not to be aware of its own strength, and that
strength is great, Tt is not true that, our country is without
justice, that a chance-come Jnck-in-office can grind a teach­
er’s face in the dust. Tt. is not true that the dignitv of a
person engaged in raising a new generation of human beings
can he attacked, and no means he found to deal with the Jack­
in-office responsible for the attack. Such cases must he
brought to the attention of the Commissariat for Education,
 THE TASKS OP EDUCATION 187

mid we shall organise and have in readiness a special sec­

tion in our control apparatus, which will respond quickly
to such infringements of the law. And in any case where
the arm of the Commissariat is not long enough, the arm
of the Central Executive Committee and the Party, to
whom we shall turn, will certainly reach sufficiently far.
But, comrades, we are still facing a situation (even
though we are on the eve of a significant improvement in
all aspects of education) in which primary education draws
in only 50 per cent of children. And the others?
We talk about doing away with illiteracy, but half of
our population is again growing up illiterate. Clearly, help
must he given here. Tt will be still some time before we
reach the longed-for day when we shall have education ob­
ligatory for all and accessible to all. But to allow the num­
ber of illiterate youngsters to continue growing is also
something we cannot have.
That is why I have a deep feeling in favour of the idea
first put forward by N. K. Krupskaya. Without fearing that
someone may see in it a lowering of our educational ideals,
we consider it vital that we should at once set about creat­
ing an auxiliary system of schools, may be one-year schools
only, for older children who are not finding their way into
the' normal schools. This year we have received an alloca­
tion for the first time, of half a million, for the first expe­
riments in setting up such schools. Of course with half a
million we cannot move very far forward. We believe that
this should produce immediately an inflow of funds from
local resources, which are increasing all the time. Besides,
Ibis year it will be only a first experiment.. It is an expe­
riment of importance.
But, when we were getting this legislation put through,13
we met with bewildered questions, even from some mem­
bers of government. Why, they asked, are you “doing away
with illiteracy”, why arc you asking for more money, when
yon have only just received 1,030,000 extra? You are doing
work that, makes no sense. Why should you be teaching
adults? Pay attention to your schools, bring all children into
the schools, then there will be no need to wipe out illite-
racv, it will be done away with in school.
This is clearly a misunderstanding. And often comrades
speaking from positions within our field of work show the
188 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

same lack of understanding. It is absolutely clear that we

cannot wait. We cannot let adults who are making history,
on whom our tomorrow depends, remain illiterate. This is
not a matter that can wait until today’s children grow up.
It is a job that must be done now.
In the business of wiping out illiteracy we have many
achievements to show, since we provide teaching for the
army, for the organised workers, for those living in towns,
for the Young Communist League, for youngsters awaiting
call-up, etc. But when we move on to eradicating illiteracy
in the countryside, for those of quite high age-groups, ac­
cording to the provisions we have laid down, then we meet
with a solid resistance: the peasant has no time, the peasant
has no interest.
We^have become convinced that the old method of getting
rid of illiteracy, whereby the “enlightener” stayed where
he wa? and the peasants had to come to him, is no good.
We are now going over to work with illiterates in small
groups, or even in some cases individuallv. We ourselves
now go to the peasant, ABC hook in hand, if he will not
come to us. And besides this, immense attention must be
given to the barely literate. They must bo given literature,
given things to read, made to understand that reading is an
essential economic activity, that he cannot live without
it. And to do this we have to provide appropriate litera­
ture.
These are immense problems. Essentially, of course, the
whole of the countryside is barely literate. It may know its
letters well enough so far as concerns reading and writing
in some particular instances, but politically and culturally
it is barely literate. And we have to raise it up, not only
in the person of its children, but of its adults as well. Tn
this connection our work must be done in synthesis, i.e.
tied together in one knot. And the central knot in the work
we make the village reading-room.14 In the village the read­
ing-room should be a place where the peasant can get in­
formation, it should be a place where laws, decrees and
newspapers are read out publicly, it should be a place where
the pulse of local life is followed, where a wall-newspaper
is kept., where hooks can he borrowed and read, it should
be a source of advice and a place of meetings. From time
to time there should without fail be lectures on all the most
 THE TASKS OF EDUCATION dst)

important cultural matters: on health, on matters oi farm­

ing, etc.
In this connection the person in charge cf the reading-
room must know a lot, must he able to talk with peasants,
and to draw together local forces—health workers, the Min­
istry of Agriculture’s representatives, the local Peasant
Committees, the workers of the local Soviet, all those work­
ing in the schools, the Party branch, the Young Commun­
ist League—all these must be drawn together at the read­
ing-room.
The village reading-room must become a centre which
draws to itself all that brings light to the village, and in
its turn be itself a source shedding light on everything.
Comrades, there will be a separate report on the Young
Communist League, hut 1 too cannot pass this notable phe­
nomenon by without remark. 1 have to say that in the held
of popular education as a whole, and in that of village edu­
cation in particular, the Commissariat for Education owes
much to the League. The Young Communist League not on­
ly shows a vast amount of youthful ardour, a liveliness
greater than we can muster, but it also shows a great prac­
ticality, an ability to grasp and note a task at once, and
do so soberly and realistically, and then push it through.
From this point of view we are not only grateful to the
League, we have formed links with it throughout all oui’
work, and would wish this to be done by all our bodies right
down to the lowest educational establishments as it has
been done in the Commissariat itself.
Of course one cannot deny that there are deviations and
shortcomings in the work of the League matters in which
their youth tells against them, and which have been point­
ed to even by the Secretary of the League s Central Com­
mittee. But we are still convinced that after this congress
the work of the League will settle into an even better
planned and more normal course. In the matter of “paying at­
tention to the countryside” the Young Communist League
has undoubtedly played a considerable part. It is helping
us to set up a network of agricultural groups and schools
for peasant youth, the purpose of these being to take the
place of the somewhat cumbrous “second-stage schools” or
seven-year schools existing in country areas—helping us
to replace them with schools exceedingly well suited to
190 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

country conditions, schools which turn out a rural intellec­

tual or intellectual peasant, who can work in the local or­
gans of Soviet government, in the cooperative movement
etc.—a truly educated husbandman. This is an immense
task.
The four-year school, let alone the incomplete four-year
school, can never produce anything of the kind. We need
to work towards an abundant provision of peasant schools.
Some people have expressed objections, asking us, “Why
peasant schools, specifically? Do you want to coniine the
peasantry to the bounds of their own class—why should a
peasant not study in the universal school?” Because we have
no universal school, and indeed cannot have it. The real,
complete, Marxist school, such as Marx foresaw it, can on-
ly be realised in practice in an educational establishment
which stands alongside the industrial establishment and
shares in the latter’s life. That is why our Mill and Works
Apprentice Schools (“fabzavuchi”) are important, not only
because they are producing a new generation of workers to
take over from those of today, hut also because this new
generation must be highly trained technically and conscious
of their role in Communist terms; it is they that provide a
model of how to raise up all our schools to be truly Marx­
ist schools. Only the Apprentice Schools are placed in the
fortunate circumstances under which a Marxist school can
be made a reality. That is why we have brought into being,
for the proletariat, the seven-year school with industrial
work as an integral part of its programme, and the Appren­
tice Schools.
Only a small percentage of the population, even at best,
will go through institutions of higher education. The ma­
jority will be left with completion of this nine-year school­
ing as their only qualification. Where will they go?
It would appear, from observation of real life, that there
is nowhere for them to go, they are not equipped for life.
In this connection we are carrying through an emergency
reform, and a profound one, which transforms the two final
classes of the second-stage school into a vocational-type
school. Several options are being provided. We are directing
the schools towards training propaganda workers, personnel
for the cooperative movement, teachers for the “eradicating
illiteracy1’ campaign, and staff for reading-rooms and club-
 THE TASKS OE EDUCATION ltM

houses. We need people for all these jobs, and to train

them does not require lecturers with higher education.
Why should a peasant follow this direction? This hind
of school we are creating for the young people of the towns
who have nowhere to go.
The country school is a school that provides people for
work in the countryside. Through it the country areas will
acquire cultural workers who will stay in the country. Those
who complete the country school can also go on to higher
education or to Apprentice Schools just as do those com­
pleting second-stage school; it will be the most able children
who do this, the ones who show a bent or talent for this
or that subject. As these schools cost a lot of money and it
is not possible to provide them on a wide scale within a
short time, it is here that agricultural study groups come
in, where young people can meet, and discussions on ques­
tions of social interest can be held under the guidance of
the Young Communist League and with the participation
of whatever cultural forces the League can make available
for this work. To the best of my knowledge, these agricul­
tural groups are well developed and offer a good form of or­
ganisation reaching beyond the peasant youth belonging to
the League.
One word more—on pre-school education. This began un­
der the influence of revolutionary enthusiasm, but regret­
tably, later it boiled down to practically nothing. 1 am not
going to speak of the general significance of pre-school edu­
cation. It is clear to one and all that it is easier to mould
a child’s soul before the age of seven, and that a proper
approach to education must start there. It is clear that pre­
school provision, starting with the day nursery and going
on to nursery school, makes things easier for the mother.
Working towards this is the main road to enabling women
to develop themselves, and to enabling them, also, to take
part in the life of society. 15
Here the countryside is a case for special consideration,
since here we can have the closest of links with the peasant
woman—the most disadvantaged half, but still about a half
of all our rural population. We can make contact with the
peasant woman through proper care for her children,
through proper organisation of the health aspect of child
care. We can make a start here in the most elementary
192 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

way —willi the playgrounds, helping the peasant woman and

making her position easier.
We know from the reports of the students who last year
were sent out to a whole series oi places throughout the
country, what good results their work yielded not only for
Ihe children they were looking after, but how useful their
work was in the way of establishing a definite link-up with
the peasantry.
In the very near future we shall try and lind the resour­
ces and the people needed to make a start on developing
pre-school work. And to make that start in the countryside,
where it is most poorly represented now, but where it is no
less necessary than in industrial districts, and much more
necessary than in inner urban districts, which is where if
has been preserved to some extent.
1 want to say a few more words yet, concerning the so­
cial role of the teaching profession, inasmuch as this is tied
up with the tasks of enlightenment to which 1 have particu­
larly drawn your attention.
This is what I would like to say to you: the teacher is a
person who looks after the correct growth and development
ol a new organism, indeed of a whole entity made up of
such organisms. The teacher, collectively—the body of
teachers—is looking alter the proper growth of a new gen­
eration. And we say this: not only may that new gene­
ration grow wrongly and all awry, through illiteracy, dark­
ness and ignorance, grow up deformed physically and de­
formed in its consciousness, but here in this country the
adult people of the countryside, though wise in peasant
wisdom and bitter experience, remain children in many re­
spects.
In social terms the peasants represent a kind of child­
ren—they have to grow and develop, and so far as social
consciousness is concerned they have to grow under the in­
fluence of their more developed, more organised brother—
the worker. But the worker is not in touch with the peas­
ant everywhere. The influence, the effect of the worker on
the peasant is often a pretty arguable, pretty remote thing.
There is nothing to suggest that the peasants, left to their
own devices, will grow and develop correctly. They loo need
teachers. Otherwise they may become distorted and go the
wrong way. Why so?
 THE TASKS OF EDUCATION 193

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on many occasions has told us and

taught us: the peasant is a dualistic being. As a labourer
in the fields, rewarded very meagrely for his labour, he is
the brother of the worker, he is the object of exploitation,
he is a labouring man. But as the seller of the product of
his labour on the market, he is a trader. One side of his na­
ture draws him in the direction of the proletariat, the other
pulls him towards the bourgeoisie. The more a peasant
works and the less he trades, the nearer he is to the poor-
peasant end of the spectrum, the more natural it is to him
to be our ally. The more a peasant is transformed into a vil­
lage trader, the more there is in him of the kulak, 16 the
more of an interest he has in aims which may not coincide
with the aims that the proletariat sets itself. At the same
time the kulaks are the more developed, more influential
section of the peasantry, they lure it into their nets, and
by various ingenious arguments and promises they draw
the peasantry as a whole nearer to—of course the petty-
bourgeois line of development, the false road that can be
disguised for the occasion by various fine phrases .. .
This means that the peasant has to choose between two
forces, between the revolutionary proletariat and the bour­
geoisie. To choose the bourgeoisie means, for the peasant,
to put himself and bis children into bondage for decades
more. Communism, on the contrary, brought to the country­
side by the worker through the schools, through the news­
papers, through the village reading-rooms, through the co­
operatives, through factories acting as “patrons ’ this Com­
munism is in essence a profoundly peasant movement, for
at no point along its road does it do violence to the peas­
ants, in no way does it run counter to the interests of the
middle and the poor peasant.
It is Communism that is leading to that higher form of
economy under which there will be no poor people, not only
in towns but in the country too, and under which the indi­
vidual peasant economy will peacefully and naturally, ac­
cording to plan, broaden out into the social economy, en­
abling the peasant to live a life incomparably more worthy
of a human being than the life he now leads.
And this is why until recently the teacher stood at the
cross-roads, and these two forces fought to have him. Petty-
bourgeois ideology made it one of its trump cards that “the
13-01120
194 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

people’s teachers are with us”, and that those teachers

were in their hearts, essentially, SRs. 17 The petty-bougreois
ideologists said that the peasantry was the elemental force
which would devour us and wipe the Soviet cities off the
face of the earth. That danger is of course now past. It is
clear that on this point the proletariat has been victorious,
that the proletariat has captivated—in the best sense—the
teacher, that the teacher has realised the falsehood of the
phoney rural ideologists and has grasped that he as a car­
rier of enlightenment needs to bring not enlightenment in
general, but enlightenment organised in the manner that
alone can make it true enlightenment—the enlightenment
of Communism.
It is precisely in this sense that the teacher forms a fac­
tor of immense importance in the link-up with the peasan-
But he is not only a factor in the link-up with the peas­
antry. There is yet another gigantic force with which we
cannot make contact without the teacher, with which only
the teacher links us, the Communist Party, and without
which he, the teacher, is a cipher.
What force is this? It is the coming generation. Dead in­
deed would be our cause, if our children did not follow in
our footsteps. And they must follow in our steps as people
with better education than we ourselves had. And their
education comes from the teacher and educator who stands
by the side of the young worker, the young peasant, who
must carry on the work we have begun.
The biological river of life flows on, some pass away,
others enter upon a new life, and the new entrants are in­
fected by the dirt in the water of the river. Children are
infected with all the ills, so to speak, of past generations,
and the schools in the West are infected. But we are orga­
nising inoculations against infection.
On the other hand, this ancient, millennial river of cul­
ture has produced enormous results. These results need to
be injected, gently and rationally, into the rising genera­
tion. What did the bourgeoisie use to do? It hid the truth.
It did not make available the best sides of culture to chil­
dren, or certainly not to the children of the classes it ex­
ploited.
The teacher—all our educational apparatus—stands there
 THE TASKS OF EDUCATION 195

like a grandiose filter through which the new life has to

pass. He must cleanse the bourgeois and feudal grime from
what is called public education, and enrich it with all the
good there has been, all the happy discoveries made during
centuries upon centuries, enrich it with the latest discove­
ries of science, and especially with the latest discoveries of
our Communist science of society. In that way he will in­
deed ho able to cause a giant turn of events, an immense
revolution. That revolution is, that people will become bet­
ter. From out this workshop will come human beings of a
new, pure and noble model.
We arc still “maimed and hump-backed”, and dirty, and
vicious, and ignorant. The old system made us so. But we
have made colossal efforts to ensure—being conscious of our
own deformity—that future humanity shall have a healthy
life.
Who is to do this work, or most of it? The teacher. Here
of course one may ask oneself: is the teacher himself ready
for this great mission? And how can one teach another with­
out having himself been taught? And does the teacher ap­
proach even remotely such a state of perfection, and will
he be able to accomplish so lofty a task?
Of course, comrades, the teacher must learn himself, but
he must learn while he teaches. Insofar as he devotes him­
self wholly, in deed and in thought, to the colossal task of
re-educating that part of humanity which now lives inspired
by our red banner, he will in the course of the work it­
self become brighter and purer with each passing day, and
morally more of a Communist, and will approach more
nearly to the type of human being that he, perhaps, will
never realise in himself, but which he will realise in his
pupils.
Such is the vocation of a teacher in our time, comrades.
And that is why many, many people may envy you the
richness and interest of the work that lies before you.
We all know that things are hard for you, but for whom
are they not hard these days? Yet at the same time they
are joyful, for man lives not only by those things that cause
him weariness and suffering. We know how all of life
is transformed by the sense of duty done, and a duty that
is something vast and of import to the history of the
whole world. In this sense, comrades, you can congratulate
13 *
196 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

yourselves that you are teachers, and teachers of these very

times, these bitter but glorious years of change.
You are the outriders of the new world, those engaged
in immediate struggle for the new man, laying hold upon
him in his tender years and making him better. Of course
this is a work that takes time. Those of you who are now
young will perhaps be grayhaired before it is done. Not all
at once, not at the wave of a magic wand, not by the new
methodology shall we carry this work through, but carry
it through we must!
So, the teacher is, as our leaders have said, a firm link
for us with the peasantry, and thus ensures our present.
The teacher is a firm link with the generation to come, and
so ensures that the future shall be ours.
Comrades, besides the two thousand teachers sitting here
there are hundreds of thousands of workers for enlighten­
ment throughout the whole of our Union, listening to what
is being done here. Among this whole mass of teachers
there are of course not a few who are still bent in the back,
who feel themselves injured, who are undecided, who are
frightened. May the voice not only of all our Party and of
our government, but of your Congress too, ring out through
all the land, saying: “Teacher, stand tall! Stand tall, teacher,
and in the awareness of your own dignity take up the un­
commonly difficult, but uncommonly glorious place that be­
longs to you in the building of a new culture!”
 THE ART OF THE WORD IN SCHOOL
An American educationist, with whom I had occasion to
speak as long ago as 1919, told me: “Not everyone has yet
realised that the pencil is an essential tool for one and all,
a means of communication. Why,” ho said, “when you’re
explaining to someone else what you’ve seen, you straight­
away jot down a sketch or a plan in your notebook to show
the other person. However clear your speech or written
notes may be, the only thing that is really clear, visually
clear, is a drawing or a plan. A person who isn’t capable
of using a pencil to draw with is a half-dumb, half-literate
person.”
All this was well said. This American educationist also
gave an excellent exposition of the idea that a lesson given
by a teacher of any subject should consist largely, up to
50 per cent of it, of explanation in chalk on the blackboard.
All this is true. But language is even more important than
the pencil.
Has everything been done to produce mastery of that tool,
meaning language both spoken and written? It evidently
has not. If the state of things with regard to really efficient
command of that “instrument” was a sad one in the pre­
war school, so far we ourselves have not only failed
to make any advance, we have gone backwards some­
what.
The tasks in teaching language have many facets, but
one may divide them into three main aspects: 1) elemen­
tary command of language, i.e. the acquisition of a certain
vocabulary, the ability to construct a sentence correctly
when speaking and when writing, to spell correctly, etc.;
2) the ability to use language to describe accurately exter­
nal things or events or to express a logical train of thought.
This is the side of language which has to be developed to
perfection in any man of science or learning—the ability
to formulate economically and at the same time with per-
198 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

feet clarity the content of the thought that is to be conveyed

to his hearers or readers. Since everyone needs lo be to
some extent “learned”, that is able lo analyse facts, draw
conclusions and convey the results of his mental work to
others, the aim of the school must be to produce the
nearest possible approach to complete mastery of lan­
guage as a precise instrument for describing phenomena and
ideas.
The third aspect concerns literature —the artistic use
of language.
A great disaster—a cultural reduction to beggary —
would await a man who made his life completely, consis­
tently ‘individual \ We do not, of course, take Henri Berg­
son s point of view, that in fact intellectual thought and
prose^ language are something in the nature of a conventio­
nal lie, a convention which people accept, and that only
intuition, artistic perception and artistic language, filled
with music, can to some extent reflect the true external
and internal world. This is not the point, to counterpose
intellect on the one hand and emotional life on the other.
They should not be counterposed, but united, and that in
such a way that they do not hinder one another, in real
human life. The clearest of intellects can and should be
joined with a warm and responsive heart. But in the field
of acquiring linguistic techniques the tasks must willy-nilly
be separately delimited.
Didactic interpolations appear strange and wearisome in
a poem, and so does precise exposition of facts in a novel.
True, in cases where statistics or the statement of facts on
certain mass phenomena are in themselves moving, we find
shifts to scientific, publicistic prose, within literary works,
which do not jar upon us. Many pages in Gleb Uspensky’s
works,2 for instance, are in themselves almost too dry for
artistry, but being as they are set in relief by an artistic
approach to the subject and shot through here and there by
the lightning, as it were, of a brilliant image or emotional
expression, and are perceived even today—let alone in their
own time, when all that was a live issue—as truly artistic
work. The same may be said of the interpolations on socio­
logy, statistics and public health in the novels of Pierre
Hamp,3 which deal with various forms of labour and in­
dustry, and of the passages in “straight” and precisely ana-
 THE ART OF THE WORD I.V SCHOOL 199

lytical prose which abound in the lively, ardent and artis­

tic works of Dmitri Furmanov. '*
But all these are the exceptions. It is another exception
that a scientist, not only in a work of popularisation but
in strictly scientific writing as well, may from time to time
give way to the need of live emotional contact with his
readers, and use the language of the literary artist.
By and large though, these are two separate and essen­
tially different uses of human language. In the one case the
aim is to eliminate the personal, to slate the facts, which
are laid out before you as they would be by anyone who
had the necessary vision, observation, knowledge and abi­
lity to express himself. This is objective language. And
every effort must be made to train children and young peo­
ple in the skill of objective description, for this also teach­
es objectivity in thought. Objectivity is a great power in
a human being. The loss of objectivity, of calm, of impar­
tiality in observation and of total accuracy in expression
means leaving the human being without defence against
the environment.
In the second case, on the contrary, we have the aim of
speaking of the external world after it has passed through
tlie inner world, that is of giving it vividness, tempera­
ment, the feel of the passing moment, all the things that
make it truly individual. An artistic work is always orig­
inal; it is a subjective reflection of reality or of the inner
phenomena of human consciousness. Of course when this
originality slips into deliberate effort to be original, or
when we find ourselves faced with someone so original that
his feelings are peculiar to him alone, then the link between
narrator or writer and his audience is broken.
This is the basis of the group or class nature of litera­
ture. The subject chosen by a given narrator or writer may
have much iri it that is familiar to particular groups—the
landowning class, the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, etc.
—but have nothing in common with workers or peasants.
A writer becomes a group spokesman because he in his
subjectivity gives responses to external facts—lively, ex­
pressive responses,—which are on the whole those proper
to a particular category of human beings. Lev Tolstoy con­
sidered that the truly great writer is the one who approach­
es most nearly to “common humanity”, i.e. that the im-
200 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

mense originality of tlie genius lies in his ability to give

us, with a power beyond the reach of others, artistic for­
mulae won by the sweat and blood of human feeling, for
our relationships with the great phenomena of nature, of
social life, of private life, and so on,—formulae which arc
valid, though hidden, for all people, while it is only after
that formulation of genius has been given that they become
conscious of their hitherto vague feelings.5 But in a so­
ciety sharply’’ divided into classes such geniuses for all hu­
manity are an improbable occurrence, and then only when
they emerge from a comparatively undefined group, for
instance the petty bourgeoisie, and when they deal with
the most universal of matters.
hor our lime, it is becoming obvious that the task is to
acquire the skill of expressing in art the external world
and inner experience in language which must be crystal
clear, in language which can be most easily approached by
t e whole vast variety of the worker and peasant masses
now irrupting into social and cultural life. Themes and
images must be taken from all the processes, of close con­
cern to the masses, of the building of the new life, and
this includes both the creation of great things and the
moulding of the new man. The whole grandiose revolution­
ary process taking place around us is far from revolving
only within the restricted framework of questions intellec­
tually posed and intellectually solved. Knowledge and tech-
nologieal skill do not suffice here; a very great effort of
will is called for, a profound understanding of one’s fel-
low-men, the ability to bring heterogeneous beings into
harmony, the ability to work with others, and the ability
to ie\ise in view of the moulding of the new man—at our
relationships to all the basic, almost unchanging phenomena
such as love, death, etc.
Can the school make an approach, to some degree, to
this task? Of course it can. But is it easy to define the way
the school should lake in this? This of course is very dif­
ficult.
The great writers who came from the nobility and from
the third-estate intelligentsia made an uncommonly large
contribution to perfecting our language. Without siudying
the models offered by these classics (from the point of
view of language as a tool, as the material with which one
 THE ART OP THE WORD IN SCHOOL 201

will have to operate) one cannot envisage even the most

elementary progress being made in the schools towards
gaining command of language as an instrument of creati­
vity and as a means of influencing people through art. But
at the same lime the classics are limited, of course, by
their time, and by the groups whose ideology they expressed.
I n the days of Pushkin6 and Gogol7 we had a quite
different, tempo of life. And since those days our vocabulary
too has been extended, and the rhythm of our tasks and
our actions has changed. It is impossible for our language
not to have undergone very material changes in consequence.
Yet where among our new writers is there anything
in this respect which has really “jelled”, is really of value;
where are the results of successful searchings? The over-
mannered kind of style which is apt to appear in any age,
and the individualistic mopping and mowing which under
the guise of “new trends” is characteristic of the decline
of European bourgeois culture—these have infected us too
with their latest “-isms”.
A classic may appear a little out of date not only in sub­
ject-matter, in what he offers, but also in how he offers it.
None the less, we have here something tried and tested,
something that has stood its ground, a high-quality article.
For this reason we cannot do other than start with the
classics, as the foundation, as the basic series of models
for study and imitation. But we would make a huge mis­
take if we cut ourselves off from contemporary literature.
Even apart from the fact that its themes and its mental
and emotional lines of development are for us live and close,
it. must in its forms also, undoubtedly, reflect with this
or that degree of accuracy the actual changes of taste and
mode of expression proper to a life that has moved on a
long way.
Children need first of all to be taught to appreciate not
only the content but the form of literary works (as soon
as they reach an age at which such an approach becomes
possible); their attention must be drawn to the musicality,
vividness, expressiveness of this or that phrase, to the plas­
ticity or dynamism of this or that figure of speech, and
explanation made of how this is achieved,—this comes
within the purview of study of the classics as part of
school lessons. At the same time, as children are made
20 2 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

increasingly acquainted with the classics, more and more

attention should be given to separating out what in them
is of their own times (and in doing so, indicating what
special conditions of those times were responsible, to tlie
extent to which the given age-group can appreciate these),
and what is of long-term value, still profound and signifi­
cant for our own day, again indicating why this or that
artist and thinker was able to feel his way to a formula­
tion which has remained valid perhaps for thousands ol
years.
Great care is called for in reading modern authors. Great
lact is needed in order to differentiate between that in their
works which is a good echo of the classics, that which is
really a brilliant modern advance in point of form, and
that which is unsuccessful conjuring, ornamental verbal
sleigh-bells that in fact distort rather than adorn the basic
tenor of the work.
The same needs to be said so far as content is concerned.
Ihe new literature is very patchy. Here one finds both
the over-strained effort to express something that the author
does not really feel (sometimes descending to sheer, hack­
work falsity), and the actual failure to encompass the im­
mense new content attempted, and, of course, the first
words of full-carat gold on the facts of post-revolutionary
life and consciousness.
In school-children’s own attempts to write one must start
by drawing them on to direct, spontaneous and therefore
•always artistic narration of events which they themselves
have^ lived through. This direct realism of what one may
call memoire7 writing should in my view be the main pil­
lar in school pupils’ attempts to use language as an instru­
ment of art. It is a very good thing if these attempts are
made not only in writing, but orally as well. The artistic
relation of what has been actually lived through can be
very powerful. Those who have ability in this direction
should be given encouragement; those who have little abil­
ity should be helped to acquire at least a certain compe­
tence.
But alongside this, let us admit fantasy too. Our “new77
children today have been to a considerable degree detached
from religious superstitions. Their imaginations are not
clogged with all manner of ancient nonsense. They are not
 THE ART OF THE WORD IN SCHOOL 203

likely to launch out into absurd or morbid imaginings.

None the less, to dream dreams is proper to childhood and
early adolescence (and to later adolescence—but in a some­
what different form). Dreams, starting with children's
fibbing and make-believe and ending with fervent novels
written by young people, outpourings of longing for the as
yet unknown life at the threshold of which the young per­
son stands—all these are as it were battle manoeuvres in
the mind, a game, an exercise, leading up to the fulness
of activity of the mature person. Of course if one goes loo
far on this line, it is possible to impel some individuals in­
to becoming intoxicated with dreams as such, into such
"solitary delights" of fantastic imaginings that the latter
will later become nothing but a barrier between that indi­
vidual and real life. But it should be remembered that
these tendencies to build dream-worlds become hyper­
trophied—and often produce artistically quite amazing fruit
—only in times that do not summon people to action, do
not open up w'ide avenues for real creativity to the in­
dividual.
Our times are not such; our day is practical, militant,
technological. We even hear voices from among our young
people to the effect that we do not need passion, pathos, or
enthusiasm, that we do not need far-reaching and at the
same time delicate sympathy with our fellow-man, that we
do not need ardent personal friendship or fine-tuned love
(yet both Lenin and Engels, incidentally, called for love
to be more finely tuned). These voices are harmful, this
is a damaging deviation, this is dessication of man’s con­
sciousness, aulomatisalion of man, bringing him closer to
the machine, this is Fordism, not Marxism, it is the ideal
of the USA, not of the USSR.
That is why elements of fantasy, of dreaming, into which
young organism pours its needs, its ideas of what it would
want to be and what it ought to be, provide an excellent
opportunity for educating the finest possible system of re­
flexes in a human being. One must always remember that
not only those reflexes which end in action are decisive and
important; one must remember that without knowledge of
those reflexes, not productive of external realisation and
called by the names of thought, feeling and desire (or in
their generality by the old term “psychology”), one cannot
204 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

know a human being. And unless that inner or outwardly

unexpressed world is to be brought into some kind of or­
der, that human being cannot be educated. That is why
we consider that children’s imaginative work, both in draw­
ing and in oral and written story, is an important element
in education, which must increase and develop correctly as
the child grows older and passes through adolescence.
One last point. A society’s richness in respect of culture
is determined by unity in multiplicity. That society is poor
in which all people resemble one another like bricks in a
wall, and equally poor is that in which they are all sep­
arate, facing all ways like a heap of spillikins. That so­
ciety is rich, within which every individual has traits en­
tirely its own and gives other individuals what it alone can
offer, under conditions of infinitely varied and very close
inteiaction between individuals. Socialism is a totality of
uncommonly variegated, complex, freely united, unrepeat­
able individuals, united in the last resort into one human-
maximally variegated, maximally harmonious,
lully self-knowing and happy whole.
Ihus the school must not repress individuality, but nei­
ther must it allow parts to be cut off from the whole. Its
aim is the creation of a social individuality, of what one
might call socially educated originality. And the art of the
word, more than any other aspect of school life, can be
a means towards this education of individuality linked in
harmony with the other individualities that surround it.
I am very well aware that the pessimists and the scep­
tics will say: What is the use of all these words—maybe
correct, certainly ardent—about the poverty of our school?*7
But the pessimists and the sceptics are wrong.
Firstly, we already have no small number of schools in
which what I am speaking of could be realised in practice
even now. And secondly, we are moving ahead rapidly. If
on the school front we did perhaps find ourselves for a time
in a backwater, out of the current of our great river,
now its rushing flow has broken down the barriers block­
ing our way and will in the very near future sweep the
whole sphere of people’s education into its mighty forward
current. We must be prepared for this.
Up to now we have often been developing our education­
al ideas on too poor and scanty a practical basis, up to
 THE ART OP THE WORD IN SCHOOL 205

now wo have been obliged to carry our good intentions out

on the most modest of scales and to a beggarly realisation.
There is no doubt whatever, though, that soon our school
system, colossal in its size and extent, will suddenly emerge
from its somewhat torpid state and begin to grow, teach­
ers and pupils alike, with magical rapidity. And then
watch out or it will be our educational thinking that may
lag behind, tailing along alter a life that has overtaken it.
I would ask my readers to pay heed to that last remark,
especially as regards aesthetic education in school.
SOCIOLOGICAL PREMISES OF SOVIET EDUCATIONAL
THEORY
1. Sociology and Its Significance
for Educational Theory
Sociology as the theory of social life is related to ques­
tions of education as to an object to be studied.
Education of the people—its aims, its forms, its extent—
of course depends upon the social system, upon general so­
cial processes, and Marxist sociology can demonstrate how
public education corresponds fully to the social whole with­
in which it develops and which it serves.
But for us, Marxists, sociology is not only an objective,,
inductive science, shedding light on a given body of ma­
terial by means of unifying principles. For us, Marxists,
theoretical sociology is an essential tool, it is the supporting
foundation from which our practical sociology arises. For
in this field more than in any other, Marx’s words to the
effect that others have interpreted the world in various
ways but that we have come to change it,1 are full of
meaning.
From this point of view we must at all times not only
assess the state of education, not only trace it back to its
natural roots, but also show the deep divide that exists
between those forms of education which have been dictated
by the interests and the will of ruling classes, and the edu­
cation which would be in the interests of the oppressed
masses.
We can set ourselves an even more far-reaching task.
We can demonstrate, taking as our point of departure the-
general programme of the proletariat (Socialism, Commun­
ism), our general ideas and the advantages—which are in
all respects beyond all comparison—of the system towards
which the proletariat is striving, and lastly, the full accord
of our educational principles with a correct advance to­
wards those objects—we can demonstrate that the new edu­
cational theory elaborated by the proletariat should be seen
as the victorious opposite of the old theory not only because
it is in the interests of the proletariat but because it is in.
 SOVIET EDUCATIONAL THEORY: SOCIOLOGICAL PREMISES 207

llio interests of the development of humanity as a whole.

On this exceptionally important coincidence—important
especially from the educational point of view, especially for
the teacher—of class aims with common human aims, qui­
te clear statements have been made by Marx, by Lassalle,
and by others among our great teachers.
On all occasions a revolutionary Marxist approaching the
problems posed by bourgeois educational theory must not
only provide their explanation in nature but also offer a
critique and an alternative educational theory flowing from
the principles of socialism. This becomes an absolutely es­
sential task for Communists after attaining power. The so­
ciologist in power is of course a statesman; lie is—of cour­
se—a destroyer of the old and builder of the new; he is—
of course—a fighter aud a creator.
From this standpoint it is clear that our educational so­
ciology assumes a profoundly practical character, that it
must move rapidly from statement of general principles to
their realisation in practice, and must take account in
doing so of all the difficulties along the way; must rememb­
er that it is not possible to achieve complete transforma­
tion of the educational system at a stroke, must map out
the most acceptable traditional forms and take^ care, too,
that the various educational and scientific institutions
should not get stuck fast in these transitional forms but
should progress in step with the general expansion of so­
cialist development.

2. The Unified School as a Reflection

of the Principles of Soviet Democracy
Looking at public education as it has taken shape in the
countries of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, we note first
of all the division, on principle, of the school into several
levels, and the more or less complete removal of ladders
whereby there might be upward movement from the lower
to the higher levels. This is not only anti-socialist, it is an-
ti-dcmocratic.
From the standpoint of proclaimed equal political rights
the countries of bourgeois democracy—“democracy” in
quotes, of course—should be obliged to provide equal right
208 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

to equal education for at least all children of equal ability.

But bourgeois democracy is continually eroded owing to the
complete contradiction, so vividly noted by Marx, between
supposed political equality and actual economic inequali­
ty .2 The school system of the countries of Western Europe
and of America is marked much more deeply, even so far
as actual school structure is concerned, by economic in­
equality than by juridical and political equality.
Proclamation of the principle of the unified school is from
this point of view not only a natural principle of socialism
being put into practice, but also a crowning act ol demo­
cratic reform. 1 he unified school, equal educational oppor­
tunity, is in essence also a last link in Ilie bourgeois revo­
lution as well as a first link in the socialist revolution, like
or instance nationalisation of the land or equality of the
sexes in political rights.
c?u1rse we may told that this unification has been
realised here only in principle. Lenin was fond of saying,
- 1 a ra^her wicked smile, that realising or accepting
something m principle” meant one was a very long way
irom realising or accepting it in practice. And so it is.
Equality is one of the basic principles of Communism. Ac­
cording to the definition of Socialism given by Lenin, it
represents the almost complete realisation of equality (equal
remuneration for equal work).3 But we, who are on the
way towards this Socialism with its high but varying re­
muneration of labour—a sort of allowance received from
society in the form of consumer goods against the contribu­
tion made to society in work, or labour—we are still far
from anything like the outward expression of true economic
equality. Of course we have no millionaires, we have no
exploiteis on a large scale, but dilferences in property, and
even more in ways of life, are still great. One ol' the prin­
cipal barriers dividing people one from another is the dif­
ference between town and country. It will still of course
be a long time before the countryside ceases to lag behind
the town, and especially in point of enjoyment of cultural
advantages.
All this leads to the situation that while there is accept­
ance in principle of the unified school and equal education­
al opportunity, (at least for children of equal ability), in
actual fact the town child enjoys greater advantages than
 SOVIET EDUCATIONAL THEORY: SOCIOLOGICAL PREMISES 209

the country child. It is much easier for the former to com­

plete four-year schooling, or seven-year, or nine-year, than
it is for someone living in the countryside. We know too
that in both town and country we still cannot, in spite of
all our efforts, even out educational opportunities as be­
tween the poor and groups that are better off. In practice,
poor people’s children in the country cannot even manage
four classes in our elementary school, in practice it is rare
for poor people to be able to see their children through a
full course at second-stage school, and so on. But if we
turn our attention to the fact that in our institutions of
higher education workers and peasants, and their children,
do make three-quarters of the total number of students, if
we compare the class representation in our technical col­
leges and second-stage schools with the situation as it used
to be, then we shall see that in spite of the poverty of our
country and the economic inequality this gives rise to, we
have none the less made a massive advance in the direction
of accessibility of schooling at all levels to all people.
The norms of the universal school, with equal rights for
children of equal abilities to all levels of education, must
remain the definitive norms for our programme of develop­
ment. Countries which economically are fully capable of
realising such a school, but fail to do so out of hypocrisy,
are unworthy to bo called even democratic. Some demo­
crats, the more advanced or the more cunning ones, under­
stand this, and Herriot34 has twice now introduced a
draft bill on a unified school into the legislative Chamber.
In a conversation with me, Herriot actually indicated that
he considered such a reform to be a natural part of the sys­
tem of democracy. But the bourgeoisie refuses to entertain
the very idea of such a reform, for it would take away one
of its privileges—the privilege of having a full education.

3. The Labour Schools as Understood by Marxists

Equally within the field of democratic social life, carried
through to its logical conclusions, is that which we call the
labour school. True, the principle of the labour school is,
sociologically speaking, more closely bound up with prole­
tariat in particular than is that of the unified school.
1 4 -0 1 1 2 0
210 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

In his famous, foundation-laying exposition to the First

Internationale of the principle of the labour school, Karl
Marx was not even speaking, as can he seen from the con­
text, of this school being brought into existence after the
triumph of the working class. He considered it as something
fully realisable within capitalist society, like the eight-hour
working day, equal pay for equal work for men and wo­
men, and other such demands. 5
Marx s idea, as we all know, is in brief that properly or­
ganised apprenticeship to industrial work, at places of pro­
duction, is the ideal form of education of the people.
It is immediately apparent that this form of education
relies absolutely upon the factory or industrial establish­
ment.^ If it is at all possible to transfer the principles of the
Marxist labour school to an agrarian school, this can only
be if the agiarian school is within a setting of mechanised
agriculture, i.e. a school living within an atmosphere of
industrialised agriculture. Marx's labour school is a deep­
ly industrial school. In step with the industrialisation of
our country opportunities will naturally appear more wide­
ly for bringing into being labour schools of the type en­
visaged by Marx.
But that aside, we have before us industrialised coun­
tries, we have before us America, which in respect of car­
rying bourgeois-democratic forms through to their conclu­
sion has advanced quite a way, and yet one must not balk
at saying that industrial education of the people in that
country can only be realised in the first resort by the pro­
letariat. Some very great efforts, quite beyond the under­
standing of a bourgeois government, are required in order to
proletarianise, so to speak, the education of all children,
even those not belonging to the working class. In this sense
Marx’s form of labour school is not only a logically final
form of democratic industrial school, but specifically a pro­
foundly proletarian industrial school. It is significant that
Marx speaks of a member of the proletariat, educated on
the basis of industrial apprenticeship understood and organ­
ised as he meant, being able very soon to outstrip the
children of the bourgeoisie educated in their h/cees and
colleges.6
We in our country, comparatively little industrialised,
with our extremely backward agriculture, can bring Marx’s
 SOVIET EDUCATIONAL THEORY: SOCIOLOGICAL PREMISES 21i

school inlo being only, in essence, in the Works Appren­

tice Schools (fabzavuchi) , and there only to the extent to
which shortage of funds and resources does not compel us
to curtail general and political education, and physical
training too severely. Marx considered those things to be of
very great importance. The tendencies noticable today
among some of the people involved in industry, to view
the Works Apprentice Schools solely from the point of the
current needs of this or that industrial establishment, have
thrown even our vanguard contingent of schools back to
the level of American-type apprentice training.
It is obvious that for other schools, those for urban chil­
dren not of proletarian origin, and country schools—whether
elementary schools or the Schools for Peasant Youth we
are obliged to bring in substitutes for industrial work, i.e.
either work based on a craft or peasant economy, or excur­
sions to an area of major industry and industrialised agri­
culture, or textbooks and curricula appropriately written,
based on living reality and aiming to fill in as far as pos­
sible, through verbal explanation and visual aids, the enor­
mous gap which arises from the fact of labour itself being,
here, on a low average level of skill. The school cannot be
organised on the high level required, as a specifically la­
bour school, if labour itself is not on a sufficiently high
level in the country as a whole.
It is clear from the above that, from the sociological as­
pect, we are entitled to call our school a unified and a
labour school, and are bound to strive towards that state
for it, in exactly the measure and to exactly the extent to
which we are entitled to call our economy a socialist economy
and must strive to advance it towards a fully socialist type.
4. Participation of the School
in the Life of Society
Of exceptional importance is the idea of the school ta­
king part in social life and socially useful labour—an idea
strongly stressed by Lenin, and one closely connected writh
the school being qualified as a labour school.
There is of course no essential reason why even in bour­
geois-democratic countries children should have to be con­
fined to scholastic learning in school itself. But the well-
14 *
212 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

known educationist John Dewey, who happens to be a sup­

porter of the labour school, in particular the school involved
in the life of society, declares in his book Schools of
Tomorrow that even in America he knows of only eiglil or
nine schools which could be called satisfactory in this re­
spect. 7
We, with our far-reaching desire to draw young people
in as early as possible to participation in the intense and
seething life of our society, we attribute immense signifi­
cance to the link-up of school and its surrounding environ­
ment. I shall not dwell on this now, but only note that
this is not a matter of simply “taking part”, of the school
as it were being trailed along on a tow-rope behind life
outside the school, and never breaking away from it. No,
we consider that given our low level of health education
and economic knowledge, and political knowledge too to
some extent, in the villages, the backward towns and
among the backward sections of the population in the large
towns, the school can from the first take up a position
which stimulates social activities and contributes to it.
For this we have no need to turn to America, where the
schools are already working along these lines so far as ag­
riculture is concerned, as Professor Tulaikov, 8 who visited
America a few years ago, has written. We need only look
at the work of our money-starved Schools for Peasant
Youth. These schools, pitifully poor in material resources,
have brought into being among the youth and older children
an uncommonly powerful thirst for action directed to­
wards making husbandry prosper around them. And these
Schools for Peasant Youth, despite their material poverty,
are all along the line succeeding in winning for them­
selves the status of centres of agrarian education in their
areas. It is worth directing your attention to the First Ex­
perimental Station9 under the Commissarit for Education,
in Kaluga province (see Vol. II of the Educational Encyc­
lopaedia) and to the successful efforts by the school there
to help health and hygiene through various partial reforms
of agricultural practice in the surrounding villages, and to
contribute towards the growth of political awareness
there.
Lenin’s slogan that children and young people should,
while still studying, take part in the general creative work
 SOVIET EDUCATIONAL THEORY: SOCIOLOGICAL PREMISES 213

of society, be it in the simplest and smallest of ways re­

mains our great device.10 The bourgeoisie, which could put
it into practice, passes by on the other side, because it fears
the development of the social spirit among the children of
the lower orders, since along with it the spirit of criticism
—of the rule of the bourgeoisie—also develops.

5. Sociological Bases
for the Content of Labour School Education
Passing on to the matter of the inner content of school
learning, we must note, again from the sociological stand­
point, the following phenomenon. Of course the bourgeoi­
sie, the class in the position of hegemony within a society
highly developed in point of things economic, had to solve
both in scientific theory and in practice a great number of
extremely big problems in science and technology, and this
is the cause defining the immense success of capitalism.
It would be mere stupidity on our part were we to for­
get the colossal scientific and technological discoveries
made by the bourgeoisie or under its leadership, which now
represent such immense might in the hands of the bour­
geoisie of America (and of other countries to a lesser de­
gree). Of course we must learn from the bourgeois coun­
tries, from the West, because in point of technology and
of the whole vast mass of knowledge associated with it, we
are at a much lower stage.
But the bourgeoisie remains on the level of objectively
honest and triumphantly successful science only so long as
the triumph of the scientific point of view does not come
into conflict with the interests of the bourgeoisie. That is
why, as soon as science—based on correct observation of
facts and broad generalising deductions from these—entered
into sociology, the bourgeoisie recoiled from such a real,
scientific sociology. The real, scientific sociology—Marxism
—demonstrated that capitalism is a passing phenomenon,
it foretold the death of capitalism, it indicated the inevita­
bility of the triumph of the proletariat, and the uncommon­
ly fertile consequences that would follow that triumph. The
bourgeoisie could not recognise a science such as that, it
rejected Marxism, it whistled up and set upon Marxism a
214 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

whole pack of venal or semi-venal professors, who were

supposed to prove that truth was a lie and lies—truth. More
than that: from fear of the new sociology, which at once
became a proletarian science, since tomorrow belongs lo
proletariat, the bourgeoisie hastily started to revise many
chapters in biology, in the theory of knowledge, in the pre­
mises and conclusions of general philosophy, and every­
where began to introduce falsifications which to a large
extent poison and distort the aspect of these major sections
of science.
If the progressive bourgeoisie balks at poisoning the
minds of children directly by inculcating religious super­
stitions in school (and even on this one can note a deep
reaction setting in), it still remains a past-master at in­
venting semi-religious, idealist, metaphysical poison for
the same purpose.
Clearly, in the school of developing socialism we must
not only cleanse knowledge of all non-materialist impuri­
ties, but as a good half of the science taught must bring in
the true science of man and society, Marxism. The school,
indeed the whole system of popular education, has as its
aim not only the inculcation of appropriate knowledge, but
the education or bringing out” of the human being also.6

6. Social Environment and the Socialist School

Th^se who say that the rising generation is educated by
life itself, by the whole social system, are quite right. This
is sociologically correct. But there, we have already said
that Marxist sociology does not admit direct, passive as­
sertion-asocial life is thus and thus, therefore its result
will show up in the nature of the rising generation so and
so”.
The revolutionary Marxist does carry out analysis of his
environment, with the greatest possible care and objectivity,
but he does so in order to act upon that environment as
powerfully as possible.
In this initial period of the economic and cultural strug­
gle for socialism, life is very patchy. Alongside progressive
elements it includes within itself many elements that are
dubious or even bad. As a rule it is far from leading a
 SOVIET EDUCATIONAL THEORY: SOCIOLOGICAL PREMISES 215

child educatively in a direct line towards becoming the type

of Socialist we should like, a fighter for Socialism. No,
life jerks the child about, as one might say, it throws him
to the right and to the left, even backwards, sometimes.
This makes the effect of life chaotic. It reflects the short­
comings of the past that are to be observed in family life,
which is sometimes half of it structured according to the
Rules for the Regulation of the Household of olden days,
or sometimes half wrecked and swept away by the whirl­
wind of the Revolution, and many other things too are re­
flected in “life itself”.
Regrettably, the school itself with its teachers who may
sometimes happen to be of the old type, with its poverty,
with its not yet fully elaborated teaching methods, etc.,
often is little better than the life outside it for truly edu­
cational purposes. But this should not be so. The school, as
an educative institution of the state, must become filled
with the new spirit sooner than is the case with the life
of society in general, it must rise above the petty things
of daily living, from it must come the truly educative
forces. The school must correct the distortions forced upon
the child by life.
7. The Children’s Movement and the School
Since in our country, petty-bourgeois, so far as the ma­
jor part of the population is concerned, the school still
bears the traces of the abject poverty only recently left be­
hind us, it has been very slow to move in the direction of
becoming an instrument of socialist education, and life
brought forward another means of educational influence.
The Party, having created young cadres for itself within
the Young Communist League (Komsomol), has now
reached out lower down the age-scale. It has extended its
roots into the hearts of children, it has brought into being
a vanguard organisation for children—the movement of
Oktyabryata and the Young Pioneers.11 None can doubt
that, even granting all the incompleteness of this as an in­
strument of education so far, it is a very powerful lever.
jSfor can anyone doubt that the higher the type of school
■we achieve, the more natural it will be for that school to
have profound effect, being as it is a state institution di-
216 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

rected towards the all-round education of the general mass

of children, or that the influence of the children’s van­
guard that has set itself, under the leadership of the Young
Communist League, to perform the same task, will also be
profound.
8. The Teacher and His Task
Lastly, it is quite clear now that the teaching profession
as a body has to a significant extent made a shift away
from o d traditions; becoming by degrees more and more
caug it up by the enthusiasm of the October Revolution, it
hiaS,i^ fgUn l? do great tlliQgs in “re-training for new
skills as they say. None the less, particular emphasis
must be given , m noting such a striking revolution within
ifh°o1’ t0 the process of creating a new teaching body,
and hence to the importance of correct work in teacher-train-
ng establishments, at both secondary and higher-educa­
tion level. I shall not touch, in this article, upon such tasks
as the immense need for us to evolve a new intelligentsia
ot workers and peasants. This must be educated in such a
way es to be at least the equal, in actual knowledge, of
the West European intelligentsia—that caste of faithful re­
tainers ot the ruling bourgeoisie—and yet to feel itself still
part of the mass of workers and peasants.12 This is indeed
one of the extremely vital tasks of our construction work,
as was stressed by our great teacher Lenin.
The Marxist teacher is a figure very typical for the Marx­
ist sociologist in general. The Marxist teacher cannot stir
unless he is sociologically educated, without taking socio­
logical considerations into account, lie needs these things
as much as he needs to know about teaching methods, etc.
But at the same time the Marxist teacher must never be
passive in face of circumstance, explaining away various
shortcomings in the world around him—including those of
the school and of his own work—as being due to such and
such causes. He must not be a “tailist”, trailing along be­
hind and saying “So what can you do . . . how can you
hel p. . No, the Marxist teacher is an educator, i.e. some­
one who is forming the future, and must be a factor in that
future to a very great extent, not just a product of the past
and the present. Let him, or her, remember that.
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN *

Up to now, successfully or unsuccessfully—and to a con­

siderable extent unsuccessfully, because our means in na
way correspond to our plans and our wishes—we who work
on the educational front have concerned ourselves with the
organisation of instruction. It may perfectly well be object­
ed against us that the matter of instruction, in the mass
first-stage schools and in the higher-level schools—the
Workers’ Faculties, technical colleges and universities and
schools of higher learning—leaves much to be desired. But
we can answer as follows: of course, to the extent that our
country is still poor, that the resources set aside for the
people’s education are small, to that extent the results also,,
naturally, are far from satisfactory. But insofar as a cor­
rectly constructed plan, a correctly indicated direction can
have a general effect upon the matter of instruction, given-
a certain paucity of resources, to that extent these factors
have had their effect, and we do not for one second retreat
from the general positions which have provided the foun­
dation for our work. We consider that we have laid down
quite correctly the basic directive lines on instruction, that
we have a correct approach to this question, and that we
know what we need to do in the field of instruction. And
if a new wave of resources, both financial and human, comes-
our way, our mill will start working as it should.
Since the time when we recognised the impossibility of
realising in our country a correctly organised, polytechnic-
al labour school ‘—and this proved impossible owing to
the weak development of industry in the country—we have
done a great deal of work on the question of how to trans­
fer our original plan to more modest rails, how to cut it
down but. still create a school as close as possible to the
type sketched out. by Marx, a school which might at least
*Abridged.—Ed.
218 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

pass muster as a school of the transitional period. As a re­

sult of the work done on these questions, we have introduced
•our own comprehensive method,2 a method which has
now been introduced in the Austrian schools, is being intro­
duced in some German schools, and is being evolved in
America, where the initiatory pressure to study it in prac­
tice came from John Dewey himself. 3 At the present time
-a big commission, of 30 most eminent American educa­
tionists, is on its way here in order to gain acquaintance
'with our system of instruction. All this is indicative of the
fact that, so far as theoretical position at least is con­
cerned, the State Schools Council’s curricula have aroused
-enormous interest in the progressive teaching world, have
won a leading place there.
A modest exhibition on education which we sent to Den-
anark is now being asked for by one country after another,
it is having in Europe a greater success than we could have
'expected.4 It appears that our model schools, the comp­
rehensive method and the use made of the basic proposi­
tions of the SSC curricula, have attained such a level that,
given the crisis in education in the West, they represent a
factor that cannot be denied consideration.
Teachers know, of course, what an immense crisis the
-'Schools of Western Europe are going through at present.
In all the countries of Western Europe all the questions of
-the system, methods and content of education are being
posed in an entirely new way. What one may call a state of
mutation on a world scale has set in in the educational
worlds of Europe and America. And here the words we
have uttered play a prominent part, even in countries where
Social Democrats play a leading part, and not just on
methodology, but even on the content of what is taught.
In Austria, Vienna in particular, the schools are as you
know under Social-Democratic influence, and much that is
.accepted here in the teaching field has found its reflection
there.
But so far as education in the broad sense is concerned,
.things are not good with us.
Over the last two or three years, at any and all meetings
of workers that I have attended, working-class parents—
both fathers and mothers, but especially the latter—have
icome forward with grave accusations against our schools.
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 219

They say the schools neglect their role as educators rather

than mere instructors, they say their children are growing
up hooligans, that they are undisciplined and impossible to
cope with: the workers say the children are not at all what
we would wish our future citizens to be. The schools, they
say, do not know how to keep them in hand, and in place
of strict discipline and collective spirit the children are
developing an individualistic and half-hooligan tendency.
Alongside this, the Young Communist League recently
laid before the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for
Education a very meaningful, deeply thought-out memoran­
dum, which draws attention to a whole series of negative
phenomena in our schools, chiefly in the higher-level
schools,—to a growth of sexually permissive attitudes, to
the existence of secret organisations, usually starting out
from childish play-acting at conspiracy, but later leading
on to disgraceful activities of various kinds, and sometimes
to counter-revolutionary activity. This memorandum com­
pels one to some very hard thinking. It would seem that
our school pupils are as yet lacking, to a certain extent, care
and attention so far as their moral education by the state
is concerned, that their private lives, their intellectual
and moral growth, are not being brought into any sort of
order by the schools, and that young people are seeking
ways of organising themselves outside of the schools, often
falling in the process into involvements fraught with ex­
treme unpleasantnesses, or even quite ruinous to them­
selves.
Besides these symptoms, I have been astounded by the
utterances of some teachers. Here in Moscow we have had
a whole number of cases where teachers, faced with dis­
ciplinary problems, have come out in favour of so-called
“stern measures”, producing the devil knows what by way
of argument. In one journal for teachers I read an article
which speaks of the terrible state of discipline in schools
both in Western Europe and here in the Soviet Union, an
article whose content one can only characterise as the rom­
ance of the rod: we find a portrait drawn there of an ap­
parently approved type of Soviet pedagogue who sends his
pupil into the woods to cut the birch with which he is la­
ter to be flogged. To read such stuff in one of our own, So­
viet journals is enough to burn one up with shame. If such
220 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

declarations are possible in the central organ of the trade

union of education workers, then even worse can be ex­
pected in places left much to their own devices, and far
from our eyes. We have of course already taken some
steps to make it clear how inadmissible such utterances
are.
All this undoubtedly bears witness to the fact that we
have fallen behind, excessively and absurdly far behind, io
the matter of moral education, while concentrating all our
attention on instruction. True, we could not have done
otherwise, since there was no possibility of carrying
through the reform of instructional education and at the
same time issuing directives on moral education that would
measure up to the demands of our revolution.
All these disturbing facts have compelled us to raise our
voice now about a turning-point of sorts in our work,
which would bring matters of moral education into the fore­
front. That is one aspect of things.
Another aspect concerns the economy.
\o u are aware that since proclamation of the slogan of
industrialisation and of the other slogan which at the 15th
Congress was its complement—of furthering by all possible
means the growth of collective husbandry in the country­
side since then we have entered upon a period of serious,
uncommonly concentrated work to improve our energv sup­
plies.
We have immense reserves of raw materials, and the most
progressive, most creative form of government. But from
the tsarist government, which was incapable of directing
those resources, devoid of skill and rapacious—wre have ta­
ken over a country that has been through an imperialist
war and a civU war, and that is in a state of extreme ruin
and disintegration on a vast scale. Our task consists in
yoking together the creative energy of the proletariat and
its party and government with those great resources of raw
materials, in such a wray as to produce our rapid movement
ahead.
As you know, enormous funds have been set aside for
this purpose. We have been able to throw many thousands
of millions into the business of capital construction. And
today, when wre have a great upward movement in the eco­
nomy, the thing that the Commissariat for Education, whose
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 221

special business it is to look after the people’s upward

cultural movement, the thing that it has constantly been
talking about has now become clear to those in charge of
eoonomic matters; that is, that the sums expended on cap­
ital construction, on mechanising the country, can truly
lead to beneficial results only if there is simultaneous cul­
tural rise among the masses, that is a rise in the know­
ledge and skills of people. Without this simultaneous rise
in level of human qualification, no machines and no ca­
pital construction can yield anything whatsoever.
The genius of Lenin foresaw this long ago, he long ago
said that a higher level of culture among the population,
added to Soviet power, would give us all that was needed
for socialist construction. And to that he immediately added,
“but that higher level of culture won't descend from
heaven upon us, it has to he bought, and our country is
poor—that means that our budgetting must be done in
such a way that the economy shall make available, as it
grows and becomes better ordered, ever-increasing sums
for the purpose of training the kind of people required”. 5
If any of you has read, in the fourth issue of On the
Road to the New School, the aricle by Valentina Kordes
entitled “What Youngsters Want from School Today, and
What Kind of School They Would Wish to See in the Fu­
ture”—you may have found an interesting passage there. A
hoy is imagining the school of the future. He says that in
the future schools will be mechanised. Instead of a teacher
there will be a programmed electrical machine; a machine
for keeping order and educating the young will walk the
classrooms and instil discipline mechanically. In the la­
boratories the pupils are working diligently. The duty ma­
chine goes round them.” After this naive picture of the
mechanisation of school the author of this plan adds, “But
I should not like to live then, because then there will not
be people, just machines.”
Of course that is not our ideal. It may perhaps to some
extent be the ideal of the further development of capital­
ism, which is putting the emphasis more and more on obe­
dient mechanisms, and attempting by their aid to discip­
line and in a certain way regulate their resistant, unquiet,
rebellious material, composed of human beings—the prole­
tariat.
222 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

The sense of socialism lies not in subjugating man to

machine, but in making machines serve man. One of the
basic theses of Marx and Engels is that the gigantic in­
struments of production, which people themselves invented
while capitalist relations of production prevailed, act upon
us with elemental force and cause all the bitterness and
ruin of our life. Socialism, though, is the final subjection
of the machines to man—the restoration of man to first
place.
And if this is so, then we must in posing the question of
creating a new, improved kind of people for our economy*
be thinking too, of course, of all-round cultural devel­
opment.
It is important to us that the sons of today’s workers
should be not only good production workers, able to work
well with machines. For us it is important, it goes without
saying, that over the period for which the dictatorship of
the proletariat continues they should be real leaders in the
reconstruction of life of the nations of our Union on social­
ist principles. For this we need broad political education*
and a high level of general and specialised education, and
it is to this that we must turn our attention.
These demands, made upon us and upon the whole po­
pulation of the Union by the task of developing our econo­
my, plus our understanding of how uneven and insufficient
our work has been on the side of moral education, set be­
fore us the exceptionally urgent question of how to bring*
forth the new man—new, because for us true education
means just that, the education of a new kind of human
being, since the old variety, educated in a chaotic and un­
cultured capitalist society, is unsatisfactory.
What accusations have we to bring against the old kind
of human being?
We say: society was anti-human, primarily because it was
roughly speaking, divided—and indeed still is—into two
groups. From ancient times right up to the present day peo­
ple have been divided, in various ways and under various
names, into masters and slaves.
What kind of psychology is induced, in this situation, in
the so-called masters, whether they be hereditary lords, es­
tablished power, or men striving for democracy—the democ­
racy which in Napoleon’s words is “careers open to talent”?
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAX 223:

VVhat is the psychology of these predators fighting for sup­

remacy.
The psychology induced in men who rule is that of pre­
datory individualism. The representative of an oppressing-
class sees the problem only in terms of “I, my interests, my
power, my success’’—and by so doing he breaks apart his-
linlcs with other people. He educates himself, his son, his
subordinates, in the spirit of this contempt for the mass of
people. Nietzsche, who augured the psychology of imperial­
ism, of the financial oligarchy that rules today in Western
Europe and in America—Nietzsche6 understood this very
well. He said one must distance oneself, one must foster in.
oneself the ability to be harsh and even cruel to people not
of one’s own class, to treat them as muck, as the lower or­
ders, as raw material to be worked on. This kind of attitude-
lo the greater part of humanity is a crippling hindrance to-
culture, giving the latter traits of incredible narrow-mind­
edness, self-sufficiency, introversion.
But over and above that, the minority of rulers, of mas­
ters, finds itself in a state of constant fear. There has prob­
ably never been a time in the history of the world when
that minority could rule with a quiet mind. There have been-
times when the panic fear of their own subjects subsided,
when those subjects followed more or less willingly in the
train of a class which was in full bloom, at the height of
its powers, there have been times when ruling classes were
in decline, and when that panic fear became the dominant
factor.
At the present time anyone whose hearing is in anything
like good order can easily catch that note of fear, sound­
ing continually in the consciousness of the masters of the
situation in America and in Europe. They are all in the-
grip of an incredible fear. In Berlin and in Paris I have had'
occasion to meet some representatives of the big bourgeoi­
sie. And—quite amazing, this!—even in front of me, a Com­
munist, they did not attempt to conceal that they were hav­
ing their children educated in such a way that they should
be capable of earning their bread supposing the collapse of
the bourgeois order came upon them. Rich men with mil­
lions say, “Who knows what may happen? I am having my
daughter learn foreign languages, shorthand and ty p in g -
then she can always earn a living.” They say, “Millions are-
224 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

like smoke these days—millions today, nothing tomorrow.

Who can guarantee me the future, who can promise me that
the order of today will endure?”
One can imagine what panic must prevail in bourgeois
'circles in Berlin, where 650,000 adult population voted for
the Communists. 7 That, in other words, means that Berlin
is a Communist city. They must be feeling pretty rotten, all
those bourgeois Berliners.
The consciousness, the type, the character, the personal­
ity, of these “masters'’ are all uncommonly distorted. These
are maimed, psychically dented people, as far as heaven
is from earth from the real image of man—calm, authorita­
tive, energetic, proclaiming his right of mastery over na­
ture not on his own individual behalf or on that of a small
group, but in the name of all h u ma ni t y .
And on the other side, in the camp of the slaves—I am
-not of course describing as “slaves” those people from the
•oppressed classes who have grown up to socialist conscious-
ness, I am speaking of the average conformist, including the
intellectual, and in part of some strata of the workers and
peasants—and here too we have the human being terribly
maimed. This is, firstly, a human who has been depersonal­
ised to an uncommon extent. Here individualism is expressed
in petty avarice, in the urge to grab for oneself as much
-as possible of the means to existence, and in a hostile atti­
tude to any competitor, to one’s neighbours of any kind. In­
dividualism of this kind produces in this milieu a herd in­
stinct of colossal proportions—a worship of the existing or­
der, an uncritical acceptance of all manner of fashions and
prejudices.
This depersonalisation of the crowd leaps to the eye ex­
traordinarily clearly in Europe, much more so than here.
Whereas here, for instance, even after the revolution one
.may still observe something of a herd instinct of this sort,
it is still to a much lesser degree. But there you have peo­
ple standardised to a particular pattern, improbably alike one
to another and thirsting to be like one another; they fear
the very thought of being unlike others in any respect,
that would be not comrrte il faut, not anstandig, one cannot
-allow such things. Social Democracy does not display any
features to distinguish its representatives very markedly
from this petty-bourgeois bog.
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 22S

If you look more closely at tills old type, still predomi­

nant in the bourgeois world, you will sec the incredible
narrowness native to it. llis link with great issues is the
newspaper, which he takes every day, reads indifferently
and throws out. During the brief hour in which he reads
his newspaper he is in contact with the rest of the world,
and then he retreats again into his shell, into his Good
Suit, which is as obligatory a covering for him as a shell is
to a snail, and there he lives, among his narrow everyday
interests. Such, speaking in general, is this old type of hu­
man being.
I should add the following point. Living in this old
world is a bitter thing for a human. Of course in our time
of transition life can be bitter here too. But we are on the
road, and our sufferings are the pains of creation, but there
the sufferings are ordained forever, and there is no sign of
anything better coming. On the contrary, over all looms the
inscription “So it was, so it shall be”, and in consequence
lasciate ogni speranza, abandon all hope. 8
We have to make sense of the world. The world is indeed
great, beautiful and full of variety, but it has no general
sense of its own, and there is no one available to impart
this sense, to impart rationality and justice to existence, ex­
cept you and me.
The proletarian, of course, is a transitional type between
the old and the new. The proletarian is the only human
being, and his collective self is the only social force, capa­
ble of organising the progressive forces of humanity to break
that world of masters and slaves. A proletarian, it is well-
known, means nothing single-handed; he becomes a force,
and a force of world dimensions, only in the mass. It is
so at the point of production, it is so in trade union strug­
gle, it is so in political struggle also.
The proletariat acts as a mass, mass presence is essential
to it, and capitalism itself, with its organised mass pro­
duction, educates it along these lines. A locomotive built in
a works is not made by Ivan or by Sidor—it is made by a
group in association and rationally organised. Thus the ba­
sic traits of the human of the future are laid down in the
proletariat.
The proletariat, a class which has suffered exploitation
and has no urge to exploit others, represents an active prin-
15-01120
226 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

ciple capable of carrying through the reorganisation of so­

ciety in an organised, planned, and collective way. And in
doing this the proletariat does not feel itself to be a citizen
of any one country in particular; it has assimilated the idea
that it can win only in struggle on a world scale, it has
acquired an internationalist spirit.
ihese are the traits which make the proletariat capable
of leading humanity into the world of the future.
But the proletarian, none the less, is a transitional type.
If you look at him more closely, you will see that not all
of the proletariat take part in the movement of the prole­
tarian vanguard, that there is a part of the proletariat which
lags behind, which comes close to and overlaps with the
petty bourgeoisie, that so far as family life is concerned, and
a whole number of other particular features too, almost every
proletarian bears dark stains on his character and person-
ality, stains that make him kin to the old world. Conse­
quently he, in working upon others, must also carry through
a great work upon himself.
Marx said that the period of social revolution would be a
prolonged one—of several decades, and that the proletariat
would, in changing the whole world, change itself too. Wc
must keep this thesis firmly in mind, in approaching the
question of education as the improvement of man.
We know that revolutions result from definite social cir­
cumstances, that human society develops according to cer­
tain laws. But the realisation of socialism is, as Engels put
it, a leap out of the realm of necessity, where elemental
laws rule man, into the realm of freedom, 9 i.e. the realm
of man’s self-determination—not individual, but collective;
this will come about not by an announcement being made,
on such-and-such a day and at such-and-such a time, that
“Right, lads, it’s socialism now!”—and straightaway ele­
mental laws will stand repealed, and man will begin to rule
himself. No, this process lasts for decades, and means the
organisation of human wills. The chief reason why man is
in dependence upon elemental forces is that the multitude
of human wills is exerted contradictorily, that human socie­
ty is something like matter in a gaseous state—each man-
molecule surging to this side and that, bumping into all
its neighbours, rushing to and fro in disorder. To organise
these molecules, to give them a single direction, to give
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 227

them purpose and order—lliat is wlial is needed. And when

Iilima 11 wills are organised into a unity, when they act like
a coordinated bundle oi’ energy, then there will perhaps
he nothing that can resist them, not even the elemental
laws of nature. We already know the extent to which man,
himself far weaker than these natural forces, is able to ope­
rate them like a railwayman switching the points, turning
them by a sometimes quite minimal expenditure of his own
energy, and giving an entirely different direction and char­
acter to llu'ir development. We cannot foresee a limit to
Ihe effect of man on nature, the point when they cease to
light against one another and emerge as a single organised
force. What we will then have will be a rapidly progressing
and increasing power of unbelievable significance.
Our Soviet organisation, our Party organisation, our slate
with its culture and its endeavour to build socialism, re­
present a certain stage upon that road. It is, of course, one
of the earliest stages, we still have here a groat deal of that
internal struggle and internal chaos, we are still far from
being a truly correctly organised collective. But we must
strive towards such organisation, and we do have certain
ability of organised, conscious action upon the elemental for­
ces of society.
Inasmuch as we are talking about the creation of a new
man, it is absolutely clear that from the point of view of
conscious influence upon the educative process it is our
schools that stand before us as one of the main tasks. Vla­
dimir Ilyich Lenin used to say that it was in just that are­
na, the schools, that we should transform the old world.
Many people took the attitude that these were merely words
of courtesy addressed to the First Congress of Workers in
Education. 10 Nothing of the kind. The final victory will in­
deed belong to the schools, and the first real sketch-plan of
a socialist society will be the socialist school. That is why
quite special attention must be paid to the schools.
Our schools are poor; they have at their disposal the old
body of teaching staff, the best section of which is striving
lo transform itself into something new, but on the one hand
it is no easy matter to change oneself, and on the other, it
is only the best section that is trying to do so, while the
olher, the worse section, and quite a considerable one, is
not even trying. We are working lo produce a new type of
228 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

teacher but in a poverty-stricken way, laying mil copper

coi ns only. Under such conditions one cannol hi* surprised
at the enormous shortcomings still inherent in our schools.
To the question, “Are our stale schools structured in such
a way as to ensure education of the rising general ion in the
spirit of socialism?”, we can reply that we have certain pre­
conditions for doing this, certain achievements to our credit,
certain partial successes. One should not think that it is
possible to build up the schools in a new way immediately,
in a society which is in many respects still the old society,
lo do so requires a big struggle, it requires creation of a
new teaching body, and it requires the allocation of re­
sources in very large quantities.
Hie stream of humanity flows on, a murky and muddied,
stinking stream, but a mighty one for all that. It flows on
through the generations, and new generations take in the
experience of the old, they stand on the shoulders of the
old, they take over everything of value that has been accu­
mulated by many thousands of generations, but at the sa­
me time they take over prejudices, and sicknesses, and vices
all the dirt, all the murk and stink. Somewhere a filter
needs to be set up, a net, which will let through all that is
valuable, the whole mighty stream with all its skills and
achievements, but which will not let through the dirt and
the stink. Only the schools can be such a filter.
The teacher is the person who must pass on to the rising
generation all the achievements accumulated through the
ages, and not pass on the prejudices, vices and ills. That is
the measure of the teacher’s importance. So give him great
lesouices, realise that it is by his hands we must cherish
the healthy shoots for whose sake we struggle, for whose
sake we exist, and without which life and struggle would
not be worth while. This is the most important thing there
is in all our struggle.
This realisation is not here yet. It must come. Only then
will it be possible to form the new man.
I do not intend to say that the schools are the only, ab­
solute and dominant means of forming the new man. I un­
derstand very well that the children’s and youth organisa­
tions are a factor of no less importance.
I shall not speak about the Komsomol [Young Communist
League]; it can speak for itself. In the recent period I have
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 229

formed the impression that the members of the Komsomol

have at least moved up closer to the Party level, that they,
Ilie new generation, have drawn level with us, to say the
lcnsl, and are perhaps even beginning to move ahead of us.
We have there tremendous numbers of talented people, a
remarkable combination of strikingly sober realism—the
realism of adult people—with great reserves of youthfulness
and great practical idealism. A fine generation!
The members of the League know their own shortcomings
very well, and look to them very well. But the Pioneer
movement--that is another matter: the Young Communist
League has enough ability to look after its own matters, but
111ay not have enough left over to cope with the Pioneers
too, and the Pioneers, of course, cannot manage by them­
selves. This organisation for children has recently been in a
clearly enfeebled state, we are not finding the way to give it
an inner content which would not be too tiring for the
children (and we do tire them too much), which would
really be of lively interest to them and draw them on into
the atmosphere, the crucible, where a human being is truly
re-cast into a new mould. It is an immense task. The forces
of the People’s Commissariat for Education and the forces
of our teachers should be drawn into it to a much greater
extent. We need to pay immense care to our children’s or­
ganisation, for the schools, given their poverty and the out-
of-date attitudes of a large portion of the teachers, cannot
without the help of a progressive children’s organisation ful­
fil their task —to provide an education for a new generation.
What sort of a word is this “education”? * In all lan­
guages—Bildnng in German, education in English, etc., it is
linked with the idea of the child being led on to a goal,
and being formed in accordance with given ideals. In the
process of education the child is the raw material, the sub­
stance which must be given a certain form, which must be
shaped. You understand perfectly well that humans have no
predetermined universal form to work to —each class forms
its child according to its own class ideals. And that is why
Ihe concept of education is a profoundly class-determined
concept: the education of a knight, the education of a bour-

*As noted in an earlier article, the Russian word for education

is obrazov ani yc , which literally means “formation”.
230 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

geois, the education of a proletarian, are quilt' different

things.
The concept of education embraces two elements—instruc­
tion and moral training.
When I read a lecture in Berlin on the fundamentals of
our educational system (the chair was taken on this occa­
sion by Lobe, the President of the Reichstag, 11 1 said that
our schools had overcome the individual and social contra­
dictions, whereas Western schools inevitably fall into one
abyss or the other of these two. You say that the school
should sharpen a human being’s teeth and claws, so that he
can make a career for himself, that the school should give
him everything he needs for the making of a career (this
is the standpoint taken by the liberal school), or you de­
clare, along with Foerstcr, that a human being ought to be
educated with the aim of his serving bis country, that lie
should be prepared always to sacrifice himself for its sake,
and therefore what should be developed in him is not the
ability to make a personal career, but the instinct of su­
bordination.
Wc do not need “patriotism” of that sort; we say, “Look,
this is the state in which humanity finds itself, this is why,
in spite of the progress of science and technology, it suffers
unhappiness, and this is what needs doing in order to make
it happy.” And we say straight out to the pupil in our charge
that if he wants to feel himself worthy, to feel himself
a real man, to attain happiness, then a great change is need­
ed, and to achieve that discipline is needed, agreement is
needed, and for that organisation is needed, and organisa­
tion on a world scale. And would you believe it. as I said
this my words were drowned in a storm of applause, yet
among my audience there was not a single Communist, and
probably even very few Social Democrats. This was clear
evidence of the depth and correctness of our ideas: it would
seem that our argumentation cannot be countered, for it is
logic, and there is nothing you can do against that.
In the matter regarding the stress to be laid on the con­
crete or the generalised and universal, only we with our dia­
lectical materialism have the right approach.
We are realists, we demand real, concrete work. Jn any
given field Of trade one must be a specialist, one must be
a m aster of that trade. We bale empty word-mongers, we
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 231

hate people who look at things superficially, we need real

workers and we demand real work, we demand careful con­
sideration of the real circumstances of every task set.
Bui with us even the very least of tasks fits into goals
of colossal significance. You could say that sweeping a fac­
tory yard, picking up an old brick or a piece of glass that is
lying around, is the most modest of work. With us it as­
sumes a world-wide importance, with us it partakes of the na­
ture of our economic advance, which is the key to world rev­
olution. When a worker here stands at his lathe and in­
creases his productivity, he is taking part in the great battle
of darkness and light, be is laying his small weight in the
scales to change the balance in favour of the victory of
light. Only when work is illumined by this universal idea,
only (lien have we the right to demand enthusiastic, con­
centrated work when that universal idea is present in a
man’s brain, when like a sun it throws its beam of light
on ihe concrete task before the worker, and on his calloused
hands at work.
That is why dialectical materialism with its victory over
particular contradictions is indeed the principle which in
education, as in all else, gives us immense opportunities and
lines of guidance.
One of the first problems in the education of the new man
■s that of physical training. Here a huge change is needed.
In spile of my profound conviction of the first-rank impor­
tance of physical training, in spite of the fact that in this mat­
ter much would seem to depend upon People’s Commissariat
for Education, wo have enormous work to do here, and will
probably not succeed unless we have the support of the
Party, the Young Communist League, and public opinion.
At ihe present time physical training in the schools, in the
very field of bringing up the young generation, is
scandalously neglected. It is a sort of ghost of the old gym­
nastics, sometimes even of army gymnastics, which the
school graciously allows to have a tiny space in the time­
table. Instead of it being the foundation for everything else,
instead of the Communist teacher saying, “First of all
let us see that our children are healthy, that they are strong
and graceful, that they should have sun and air enough to
ensure that they develop lo excellence,” inslend of that
we say, “IIow on earth can we find two hours a week in the
232 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

time-table for that confounded gym?”, and we get an old

sergeant in to teach our children drill. We must completely
change our approach to this matter.
We must deliberately give our gymnastics a rhythmic,
collective character. The collective movements which in So­
kol * practice grew out of a national principle and partly
too from aesthetic feeling (the beauty of many people mov­
ing in concert) must be adopted by us. These thousands
of people who all together perform with the greatest preci­
sion complex and concerted movements—this is an excellent
school, a materialist school of collectivism.
Collective games, collective sport with a certain competi­
tive element, but always within the bounds of comradeship,
without wild excesses and ridiculously high prizes, these
must form the basis not only of our labour and social cul­
ture, but of our military culture as well. We curse war, we
hate guns, we do not want to have an army, but while we
are threatened we must be prepared to fight back. So the
military element in our gymnastics must be given its place,
and must be introduced, in appropriate forms, even for quite
young age-groups.
That is how physical training should he structured, and
on this system our theoreticians of physical training have
worked out an excellent general curriculum. In practice it
is in many cases not observed, but it must be carried
through, as being an important condition for the production
of the new man.
No less important is the discipline of labour. By this 1
mean not only labour in school as a set of lessons and as
the conquest of skills in themselves difficult to acquire.
That is important, but that is not the main point. I am
speaking now of actual physical labour.
Physical labour has only a very small place in the schools.
We worked out the principles of the universal polylech-
nical labour school, but from that first plan almost nothing
remains. In our State Schools Council plan of work we have
retained only the basic principle of the school envisaged
by Marx. But in our current practical elaboration of curri­
cula the school workshop has been quite forgollen and aban­
doned. There are workshops in some schools of Ihr higher

* The Czech national gymnastic organisation.—Tr.

 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 233

grade, but they usually play a secondary role. Thus the la­
bour approach, the discipline of labour, have been aban­
doned. yet il is obvious that they would immensely increase
tlic interest towards school. It would be very important for
tlie children in every peasant school to lparn not only read­
ing and writing, but also some skill needed in country life
carpentry, saddlery, metalwork. The peasantry needs a
colossal quantity of things, yet the craftsmen are dying out
and no one is growing up to take their place. It is only very
recently that permission has been given for the taking of
apprentices. For this reason we have a huge crisis in regard
to country crafts. Furthermore, the teaching of any labour
skill g iv es a polytechnical character to the school, the op­
portunity to a well-skilled teacher of demonstrating many
natural phenomena and deducing from these a whole series
of laws—and this is the labour principle correctly applied.
All this we said at that happy yet also unhappy time when
we were flying high, like Icarus, on the wings of our rev­
olutionary enthusiasm. Those waxen wings melted, and we
gradually descended to this sinful earth. But we should re­
member that we did so only in order to rise again, we have
for a time lowered our demands upon the schools only in
order to gain a more effective rise later.
Another vast department of education is aesthetic educa­
tion. In this department we are doing practically nothing.
When in the Commissariat for Education the principles foi
the Soviet school were first worked out, we attributed enor­
mous importance to aesthetic education. Later, owing to lack
of resources, nothing remained of aesthetic education ex­
cept, in some places, singing lessons, a little theatre work
or a little bit of drawing, and some realistically inclined
colleagues of mine even said that all that craze for aesthet­
ic education only came about because the people’s Commis­
sar was an eccentric—he had a weakness for art and want­
ed to have art in schools, but in actual fact that was a thing
of tenth-rate importance only, as everyone knew—when we
grew rich, then it would be time to think about art.
This kind of attitude resulted from vast ignorance. Aes­
thetic education is a factor of immense importance in edu­
cation as a whole, not only because it is a nice thing to de­
velop Ihis or that artistic ability in a pupil, to have him
singing, playing the fiddle or doing good drawings, and not
234 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

only, as bourgeois educationists often say, to educate in

the child the ability to appreciate nature and works of art,
which is important because it contributes to bis personal
happiness.
That is not the main point. The main point is that there
are almost no other ways of educating the human emotions,
and consequently, the human will. Of course one should link
up school with the life of society, one should use work­
places, points of production, and participation in social life, to
broaden the horizons of the pupil and foster his sympathies
with other people. But take good note that festivals, almost
from beginning to end, consist of artistic elements. Real
life as it exists is so chaotic and contradictory that it is al­
most impossible to use it as an aid to education: it has to
be organised. And that organisation is mainly accomplished
through the arts—music, literature, theatre, cinema, the
pictorial arts. To the extent that works of art are either pro­
duced or appreciated by children collectively, they leave an
ineffaceable mark upon the children’s consciousness. That
is the whole point—the genius of Tolstoy was fully expressed
in the definition he gave, that art is first and foremost
such an organisation of words, sounds, lines, colours, etc. as
is capable of transmitting the mood, feeling, experience of
their author to an audience of listeners, viewers or readers,
etc. 12 The effect is produced by force of example, this is
the main stimulus to imitation, and if a teacher is in no
way an artist, then he is in no way a teacher. Aesthetic
power means, first and foremost, the organisation of expres­
sive resources in such a way that they act directly upon the
feelings of men, and change those feelings. And art is the
highest expression of this kind of agitational work, this way
of affecting emotionally those around you. That is why art
is of such immense importance—it summons up, fosters and
organises the sympathies of the individual for what is
around him: it makes us understand, love, hate, feel a lively
reaction to the existence of other people, of animals, of
things, to the past and to the future: and if we can make
use of the old art for this purpose, taking from it those ele­
ments which are appropriate to our purpose, how much more
ought we to want to develop our own art, which will ex­
press our ideas, our principles, our views, and which will
be of gigantic significance educationally.
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 235

It is essential for us to introduce into our educational pro­

cesses not only the elements of physical education and
aesthetic education, but also elements of discipline. Man’s
will gn>ws by overcoming difficulties. We cannot get chil­
dren lo develop by offering them only pleasures. In the fu­
ture they will have to surmount obstacles, often with some
effort and some suffering. For this discipline is needed, the
human being must be able to keep himself in hand, lo sub­
mit himself to what is unpleasant for the sake of a goal
which he considers good. The highest form of discipline is
self-discipline. When a man’s character is firm enough, he
makes himself go through hardships in order to reach his
goal. But if a man has not enough will-power to do this,
if he proves to have insufficient self-discipline (and this
applies to adults as well as to children), then he must be
helped.
The child has two sources of help: the group of his peers,
the collective, and the teacher. The teacher is not desirable
as a direct moral educator: it will be best of all if he works
through the development in the child of the ability for self-
discipline, or, if he has sufficient authority, if he becomes
as it were the presiding genius of the children’s collective
and evokes from it the conscious discipline that serves the
achievement of the educational goal. The source of disci­
pline should be the collective. It is always better than the in­
dividual. Within a collective it is always possible to find
those groupings which can provide the foundation for a cer­
tain discipline. This is the line that should be followed,
lie?re the sense of honour must be developed.
1 am not at all afraid of using this expression. Robespier­
re, a bourgeois revolutionary, said: “The nobility had hon­
our, we have honesty.” We, the proletarians, have honour
once more. It must be a dialectical process.
The bourgeois shopkeeper who would not cheat his custom­
er ol‘ so much as an inch when the latter was buying cloth
fully deserves the name of an honest citizen.
The honour of a nobleman was of a different kind entire­
ly. Since the nobility had major tasks of aggression to dis­
charge and was a military caste, a class of conquerors, it
was necessary for them that a man should be able to disci­
pline himself, to subordinate his personality to the interests
of that given class in order to make it stronger.
236 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

Wc are tackling vast historic problems, and the individual

must be prepared to sacrifice himself to the common
goals; it is not enough to lie prepared to die for (hem—we
demand more, wc demand that men should live for them,
and live every hour of their lives for them. Lenin said,
“Make your behaviour correspond to the basic moral stand­
ards of the proletariat.” And by these basic moral standards,
that is good which leads to the victory of the proletariat and
its ideals, and that is bad which harms that cause.
It is along those lines that we must develop the sense of
honour.
The sense of^honour needs to be developed from a child’s
earliest years. 1lie body performing the educative function
in this respect must be the collective, and if a boy or a girl
has told a shameful lie, or has hindered collective work, or
used force against the weaker, or shown anli-semitism, then
he or she must feel shame before all their comrades for
their action, as unworthy of a member of that collective.
Ihe small human must feel the blush of shame at having
to admit his or her fault before the group.
That is what sense of honour means for us. If is an enor­
mous force for discipline within the collective. If a teacher
can achieve discipline of that kind, then by so doing he will
achieve a great deal.
Baden-Powell, the organiser of the Boy Scouts, succeeded
admirably in developing the sense of a Scout’s honour in
them.13 All the more, then, must we develop this sense in
our Pioneer movement. I remember once talking to some
little Pioneers and asking them; “Well, is there anyone here
who smokes?”. And they answered: “A Pioneer would be
ashamed to smoke.” And it was said so definitely, rapped
out in such a way that you felt it meant something, that
anyone smoking really would be ashamed. And shame is
a power that has been built up among men over the ages,
shame is the result of the demands laid down by society not
being met, and it is capable of keeping a tight rein upon
savage instinct, intractable as a wild animal. That is why
I think we have no reason to be afraid of the word “hon­
our”, and that we need to develop this sense of corporate,
class honour not only among adults but in the child too.
In working to bring forth the new man we must lake earn­
est, heed of one disgrace that still occurs in our daily life
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 237

—wo still find women downtrodden. In no way shall wo bo

able to move ahead unless, firstly, wo give women the op­
portunity to develop themselves freely and, secondly, the
family ceases to be a means of exploitation.14 Really, it is
sometimes hard to find words to express one’s contempt and
indignation over the way some Communists and members
of the Young Communist League speak on sexual questions
and on attitudes to women. In this context there still lurks
within many of us an exploiter of such primitive savagery
that you could set such a Communist side by side with any
bourgeois. Lenin was aware of this, Lenin branded it for
what it is, and we now must brand it for what it is—cri­
minal.
This makes its appearance sometimes under the guise of
so-called free relations between the sexes. Men are inclined
to touch up the attractions of such “free” relationships—
they don’t give a damn now for family life, because the fa­
mily is a bourgeois institution, see?—therefore you’ve got
to have complete freedom. The “glass of water” theory ap­
pears, i.c. the reduction of a mutual relationship to nothing
hut the satisfaction of a physiological need. But the chil­
dren—it is the woman who has them, not the man, so that
the man suffers nothing, while the woman suffers hugely.
That refers to relationships outside the family. On rela­
tionships within the family, Vladimir Ilyich with his im­
mense clarity of vision used to stress this: we have given
women equal rights, but we have not rescued them from
domestic work. Of course a man can help his wife, and here
a comradely attitude can achieve a good deal. But for a ra­
dical solution of the problem we must have a reconstruction
of our way of living. For this reason great attention needs
to be paid to the provision of new housing, of facilities for
communal catering and for getting laundry done outside
the home, and to getting rid of the nursery within the fa­
mily, which takes up such vast quantities of physical ener­
gy- i . ,
Housework, which Lenin defined as the worst organised
and the most slavish form of labour, and the most uneco­
nomic in terms of energy expended, must be condemned to
die the death; gradually, first in the towns and then in the
countryside, housework must be brought to naught. This is
a premise, a precondition for the building of socialism. With-
238 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

out this we shall not be able lo draw vast numbers of wo­

men into the building of socialism, and we shall not Iruly
realise equal rights for women.
We must transform our individualistic daily living into
a social one. The development of the new man depends
greatly on social organisation apart from factories and work­
places, and apart from life-support services. So that here
the clubs should acquire immense importance for us. I will
not elaborate on this point particularly, everyone now un­
derstands the importance of this aspect. We have gone a
long way already in this respect, nowhere in the world has
the development of democratic clubs gone forward on such
an impressive scale as here, although we could still wish
it to be much better.
At the same time, all our new housing construction, the
whole direction of our cultural line must be such that we
do not forget the individual man behind the social man. We
must recognise the right of each individual person to a room
of his or her own, which can be furnished according to per­
sonal requirements, where privacy can be had; also the rigid
to have an individual family even in a socialist society
where the family may not be essential; then children can
be educated by society, but none the less if a couple wishes
to lead a private life of their own, every opportunity should
be given them to do so. One should not depict socialism as
socialisation of the person to such an extent that it amounts
lo a kind of exterritoriality with the person completely ex-
leinalised, all in full view, unable to be by himself, to live
his own inner life and foster his own individuality.This is
wrong. In Fiilop-Miller s book on the Bolsheviks (a huge,
beautifully illustrated volume) it is said that Leninist Bol­
sheviks deny the right to individual development, to origi­
nality and to personal life, and that only Lunacharsky holds
other views, but that he published his booklet about this in
Berlin under the initials N. N., because he was afraid lo
put his own name to it.
Of course 1 did not publish any booklet under the initials
N.N., but I have always openly, in speeches and in print,
expressed the idea that socialism presupposes great develop­
ment of the individual, rather than grinding him down and
sweeping him away. Dozens of our other comrades have
said the same. We have always taken the view that the in-
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 239

dividual roaches his fullest flowering under socialism, and

when at the beginning of this lecture 1 protested against the
herd aspect of the mass of the public in Western Europe,
I had in mind that the structure characteristic of socialist
society was “granular”. Here extremely original individuali­
ties can develop, capable each of contributing something
new to the general concert, as each voice in an orchestra
takes its own line and all in concert sound together in sym­
phony.
Some people ask the question, “Are we not going back­
wards? Do we not see symptoms of decay, of weariness?”
The papers carry reports of a rape in a Moscow hostel, we
know of all kinds of disorders and scandals among young
people, even those within the Young Communist League.
It is beyond doubt that in our higher-level schools too there
are some revolting trouble-spots which prove that demagne­
tisation is starting, that we are regressing.
Of course there are sucli processes going on among us,
but I maintain that they are not the dominant ones, it is
not they that set the tone and determine our overall pro­
gress. But these things arc there. Why? Because we live in a
transitional period.
We struggle with natural forces, with our poverty, for the
means to exist and to advance. We are locked in a tense
struggle with the class enemy—with bourgeois elements that
try to exert influence upon us insidiously; with the remnants
or the hangers-on of the big bourgeoisie, that try actively
to damage us; we struggle witli philistinism, with lack of
culture, witli philistine anti-cultural attitudes; and in par­
ticular \ve struggle with backwardness in the countryside.
Tliis lack of culture is like a cancer that stretches out its
threads and excrescences into the depths of our Party or­
ganism, to our very heart. With all of this we carry on a
cruel and unremitting struggle. In the lirst period of revo­
lutionary struggle the enemy was before us, we fought him,
we received wounds, many fell dead, but at that time all was
there to see, all was clear. Now it is not so. History has
taken another turn, and demands of us not destruction only,
but creation. It has made these demands of our young peo­
ple too. Do we know how to create? No, we must still stu­
dy, long and hard. Yet we cannot offer the chance to study
to all. From the primary schools we send on to higher
240 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

schools aud lo Workers’ Faculties a lilllo over half the U>-

lal number, and, owing lo our poverty, we leave a huge sec­
tion of pupils without any further leaching—and it is these
people with uncompleted education who to a significant ex­
tent find themselves unemployed. Those who are still slu-
dying do so under dismal conditions—with no textbooks, in
poorly equipped premises, badly prepared for the courses
they follow, and receiving a derisory grant to live on, if any
at all. We should not forget how hard this colossal con­
centration of elfort can be: lo study and at the same time
lo respond to social obligations, since one must not lose
contact with one s class, otherwise at the end of the process
all we shall have will he a disorientated, declassed “technic­
al expert who lias no links with the masses of workers
and peasants. All this creates additional difficulties for stu­
dents of all categories. And once a young person has at last
got a job—is it always the job they want to do, may it not
be thoroughly boring to the person doing it? Very often
their fate may be some clerical job in an office, some purely
technical routine task, the same day after day.
This sort of dissatisfaction with work, and boredom,
pushes the youngster towards Bohemianism, to drink and de­
bauchery, spiced with the thought that after all we are
people of a higher order, we cannot go on in that old petty-
bourgeois milieu, we are looking for a way out to the higher
freedom and liberation from morality—and maxims of this
sort are the “new testament” of the Bohemian. And in cases
where they cannot rise to Bohemianism, since their edu­
cation is insufficient even for that—then the progression is
to plain hooliganism, vandalism, drunkenness and all sorts
of idiocy, straight and undisguised; here the sot gets besot­
ted merely because he is bored, he can’t face things, because
he does not feel himself a part of this society which is
moving ahead, he feels himself thrown overboard and left
behind.
This means, comrades, that morally and culturally we are
losing no small number of people wounded or killed in each
of our battles. One cannot go to a general before a battle
and say, “Win this fight without anyone being killed or
wounded.” The same is here: we cannot go forward without
losing those who have morally fallen behind.
Comradeship is a great key that opens many closed bo-
 EDUCATION OF THE NEW MAN 241

xes. To give timely support to a man who has lost balance,

lo set him straight, tell him off, put him up to be “sorted
out” by his mates, pull him by main force out of the bog
inlo which he is sinking—that is what is needed. We need to
show care for one another. That section of the whole which
is healthy and morally strong is responsible for the section
which is sinking, and often sinking because they are in
worse conditions.
Proclaiming the slogan “now the revolution in culture”
means speeding up in the extreme the tempo of our move­
ment forwards lo bringing forth the new man. It also means
a careful re-evaluation of the principles and methods wo
have been following up to now.
Someone who has been sitting so that a leg has gone to
sleep does not feel that leg, but when he stands up he will
feel pins and needles in it, because the blood has begun to
circulate again. It is not an altogether pleasant feeling, but
it does not mean that anything is wrong, it shows it is set­
ting itself right. In the same way the criticism which has
started lo rise its voice in the field of cultural work shows
that our Soviet, workers’ blood is beginning to pulse here
again, and that this to some extent benumbed sector of our
work of construction is now getting keyed in to the general
system of our mighty Soviet life.
 THE EDUCATIONAL TASKS
OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL *
The Socialist Revolution
and the Tasks of Education
We are in the midst ot‘ a ladical transformation of socie­
ty. This transformation of society—the socialist revolution,
the “establishment of justice on the earth” —lias occupied
the thoughts of men over a long period. And alongside our
Marxist-Leninist thinking on the socialist revolution there
has been a whole series of other trends which have also stat­
ed the facts of how unsatisfactorily society—in particular
bourgeois society—was ordered, and of what an unethical,
unacsthctic and imperfect being man was. I will not now
go into the very interesting question of how a conception
of what man ought to be, is established. 1 shall merely note
that other social reformers (great and small, individuals
and mass movements) have often supposed that the reforma­
tion of life can and should be brought about through the
re-education of man, as child and as adult, through a parti­
cular teaching; a perfected man, in their opinion, is the
condition for the further growth and improvement of social
life.
We completely reject this viewpoint of the liberals and
the Utopians. We have said that within a society such as
that in which we exist, the transformation of humanity by
means of teaching or preaching is impossible of attainment,
even if it were to be allowed by the ruling classes. Our blue­
print is different: the proletariat as a class, the class left
disinherited by capitalism, the class that can easily reach
a grasp of the idea of union of all proletarians of the world
for the purpose of rationalising the whole life and the daily
existence of mankind—that class, while being itself in no
way perfect, is none the less the only possible revolutionary
force that can take power into its hands and compel all
other forces upon the scene to submit to its will and dict­
ates, and then proceed to the re-organisation of life. Marx

* Abridged.—
 EDUCATIONAL TASKS OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL 243

pul it like lliis: the social revolution o! the proletariat will

lake up a long period of time; lor some decades the prole­
tariat will have not only to change its environment, but to
change itself; and by the end of the process, approaching
the establishment of a socialist order, it will come to bo a
type of human being much more suited to ordering life pro­
perly than that type now in existence.
With regard to the educational process considerably re­
ducing the time needed for the transition from a socialist
lo a communist formation, one can lind most interesting and
useful pointers in what Lenin said. Vladimir Ilyich used lo
stress that it would be a delusion, a fatal error, for Commu­
nists and the proletariat to think that the business of social­
ism is only to change formal human relationships, the laws,
or to change only material relationships, starting with ma­
chines and passing on to housing conditions and affairs of
daily life, but ignoring the matter of man himself. Vladimir
Ilyich stressed that the work of construction which does not
in itself lead to a change in man himself, is essentially lack­
ing all aim and sense; that even from the point of view of
actual successes, political and economic, lo be achieved by
the proletariat, the latter must straight away, immediately
after taking power into its own hands, concern itself with
the cultural revolution. For both the consolidation of polit­
ical consciousness and, in particular, the extent of the pro­
letariat’s influence upon the peasantry and upon the work­
ing intelligentsia, depend on the level of political education
and culture reached by the working masses. 1
The political education of the new generations which
must take over from ours—that is not everything; economic
tasks too demand, no less insistently, attention to the human
factor. The re-education of adults and education of young
people and children are the pre-condition for further econom­
ic and political successes, not to mention that it is they
that bring about the transformation of human life which
gives true meaning lo the whole movement of the proletariat.
In this sense, the educational process occupies one of the
central positions.
Vladimir Ilyich was right when ho said that our gene­
ration would be obliged to concern itself with transforming
the life of man, while ourselves standing waist-deep in the
dii l of old prejudices and life’s uglinesses.2 We are maimed
10*
244 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

humans, we are not yet socialists; rather we see the trend

that way, yet can with difficulty manage to bring our be­
haviour into accord with what we want.
People who have spent the greater part of their lives,
or even their youth only, under the old order, have great
difficulty in liberating themselves from all manner of ego­
ism and other charming features of individualistic petty-bour­
geois life.
Individual brilliant examples of what a man can be, such
as for instance Vladimir Jlyich Lenin was, amaze us with
their consistent integrity and harmony, something far re­
moved from the average type even among Communists, even
among proletarians. The thing to achieve is that the new
generation, brought up in the surroundings of a life still
not in full and proper order, should be educated as fast as
possible into people with characters and habits of action,
and general physical make-up, that measure up to the dc-
se^ by the socialist order of life as we conceive of it.
The process of education is still beset with difficulties, in
spite of the revolution. We cannot guarantee that the next
generation, that nearest of all to us, will he able to tear it­
self free from the old circumstances of life, since in our
ti ansitional period those circumstances are a stormy and
still somewhat polluted sea, surrounding some islands or is­
lets on which the socialist order of things is already becom­
ing established. The difficulties of education are huge.
Of what nature, in the history of humanity or of human
civilisation in general, is the process of education, what is
its sense, and how is that sense being changed in our hands?
Man is distinguished from all the other animals by the
role which in his case is played by socially acquired and
socially transmitted experience. Over a period of five thou­
sand years man, like any other animal, anatomically and
physiologically has not changed. If one were to take a child
born in, say, London in this year, and to educate him in
complete isolation from the surrounding civilisation, one
would produce an imperfect animal, less fitted for life than
other animals, because animals enjoy a rich inheritance of
instincts, which cannot be said of man. And if one compares
a man in the prime of life five thousand years ago and
one of the same age today, or a savage and a contemporary
Englishman, then the difference is enormous.
 EDUCATIONAL TASKS OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL 245

This difference lies in knowledge, in power over nature,

things acquired in the process of education, starting with
tiie acquisition of language, the results of past civilisation,
etc.
H u m a n society holds at its disposal a huge capital, accu­
mulated over the ages—a capital which constantly increases.
And eacli new generation lias the advantages of the still
higher stage info which it comes, receiving in this way an
immense heritage, not through heredity but through acqui­
sition, which with the animals plays a quite insignificant
part, but for man is everything. This creates an extremely
fascinating and retentive bond between the generations. It
is something like a stream of history fed by ever more and
more fresh individuals, but which is itself a unity, for these
individuals —through schools, libraries and the whole orga­
nisation of economic life, culture, etc., take in the old and
themselves create more.
But the new arrivals in human society, the clean, fresh,
recently born human material that replaces the old withered
leaves, in making its own the colossal gains of the past
also makes its own the diseases of the past. If a man is
horn in a crooked, crippled society, that society in subject­
ing liiiii lo its regime cripples him*, all the prejudices,
all the ugliness, all Ihe shortcomings of the past are taken
over by him. Bach new generation not only has the advan­
tages of the accumulated riches of the past, it also becomes
infected with its diseases (I mean social diseases, not phy­
siological ones). Our task is to set up a mighty filter in the
living stream of humanity, or a prism of one sees that
stream as one of light to enable the new stock of humans to
arm iIsol f with all that is positive from the creations of
civilisation, bul which would not let through social de­
formities, prejudices, sicknesses of all sorts, and which
woul d send Ihe human stream on its way purified.
Our schools have a dual task: on the one hand, to pass
on all Ihe knowledge won in the past, of course accenting
ihe new culture, the new science, and first of all that which
belongs lo the proletariat, Marxism, proletarian organisa-
lion and our own communist, ideas; on the other hand, to
prevent the old ideas from reaching the child, lo leave no
chance of its being infected with all that we struggle against
in the old society.
246 ANATOLI LITN ACIIA HSICY

Wc need lo lake in the whole history ol‘ pedagogy and its

present stale in the world at large. Hut we know very well
that its propositions, as a rule, have aims opposite to those
which we set ourselves; at best we find there the apolitical
school, the school of the “free child”,3 which in no way
whatsoever relates Lo our school with its sharply delined
class character in both moral and instructional education.
We have had lo build up this edifice with our own hands,
from top to bottom, and while suffering an extreme deficien­
cy material means. The pointers that have been given us
by our leaders can be brought together into one very small
booklet, and these we make use of, as of a compass. But a
compass alone is not enough, in raising up such a grandiose
edifice.
We still have insufficient means, not only for taking over
the full education of all children, we have not even the
means needed lo build our schools to anything like a de­
cent standard. Even our primary schools do not lake in all
children as yet, and the second-stage schools deal with an
insignificant percentage only. Wc are now spending on each
pupil, for his entire school life, approximately 50 per cent
of what was spent, in damnable tsarist Russia; we pay our
teachers in primary schools 75 per cent, and in second-stage
schools fifty per cent, of their insignificant pre-war earnings.
That makes it clear what immense difficulties, what terri­
ble handicaps, are lacing us. No one is to blame for this for
the scanty means at the state’s disposal could not be allo­
cated in any other way.

The Aims of Education

in the Period of the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat
Instruction is inextricably bound up with moral educa­
tion. Indeed the tasks of both are subsumed in the single
word “education”. Our word for it, “obrazovaniye”, and the
German “Bildiing ”, convey the sense of the process very
accurately. The child is seen as something that has not yet
assumed a finished form or image, a semi-finished product
as it were or a sort of raw material, and it lias lo be given
its final form. If we want to give form to a material, we
 EDUCATIONAL TASKS OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL 247

need lo slarl will) Marx's formulation slating that the work

of a man, oven of an ordinary artisan, is distinguished from
Ilie work of Ihe wisest of beavers and the most ingenious
of bees, by the fact that a man has, in working, a prelimin­
ary c o n s c i o u s n e s s of Ihe aim of the work.4
The leaching process loo is a labour process, and one
must there foie know what one is seeking, what one wishes
lo make out of this material. If a goldsmith spoils some
gold il can be re-cast. If precious slones are spoilt, they
must be thrown out as scrap. But even the largest of dia­
monds can have no greater value, in our eyes, than a new­
born human being. Spoiling a human being is either a great
crime, or a case of terrible damage done unwittingly. This
most valuable of all malerials must be worked with utter
precision, with prior knowledge of what has lo emerge from
the process.
What sort of human being do we want to create?
The great idealists in the held of education, who were
in some degree our forerunners and lo whom we are close
so far as the linal ideal lo be achieved is concerned, set the
task in the following terms: a harmonious human being
must be created, i.e on the one hand his needs must be de­
veloped (and satisfied), and on the other, all his abilities
must be developed. And in doing this the aim must be to
see that Ihese needs and abilities are organised in such a
way that one aspect does not hinder the other, that the end
resull should be an inlegrated organism, just as in building
a machine we lake care that one part should not interfere
with another, that its overall efficiency should be as great
as possible.
It has commonly been held that specialisation conflicts
with this aim. 1 reject this, for if specialisation engrosses
a man to such an extent that if destroys his humanity, then
it becomes a disease, an absurdity. But if specialisation
makes manifest and assists the particular role that the given
individual plays in society, then if does not conflict with
the ideal of the harmonious personality. A human being
must receive a general education, he or she must become
someone lo whom nothing human is alien, but to Ibis must
he added a field of special knowledge, or several, according
to the abilities present, and there is no contradiction or con­
flict here.
248 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

But there is conflict between the harmonious human being

and this age of ours. Today we are educating for a transi­
tional stage, for struggle, for very intense struggle, which
does not provide a harmonious environment. We could reply
to the ideals of the great educators as follows (and Fichte5
understood this): It is no use concentrating your thought
on creating a harmonious human being, for that being will
be living in an inharmonious society. Here there will be a
collision, and its result will be either that the human has
to abandon society and be a hermit (for every thing in this
society is going to shock him, and will prevent him realis-
ing his potential), or else he will be something like a Don
Quixote, hurting himself against the sharp corners of life
in society, and puzzled by problems for which he has lo
show qualities inconsistent with harmony.
We, of course, are not setting ourselves the task of cre­
ating hermits, not even highly-educated ones. Looking at it
from the other side, a harmonious human being could not
go to war. Can we at the present time prepare human
beings in such a way that they will hate war in general,
will have a Tolstoyan pacifist attitude? When we encoun­
ter liberal educationists, we time and again hear from them,
“You want to educate children in the spirit of class hatred:
one must not tell children of cruel things, one must
not make children hate people; let life do that when it
must, but for the time being children should be shielded
from all that.”
A harmonious man in a harmonious society will have
no need of bloodshed or of cruelties. But if we, losing
track of time and date, fail to bring up a child as a fight­
er and a distinct personality, then that will hinder us from
creating a great deal, it will hinder our creating the har­
monious society. Our class enemies and thousands of other
obstacles have to be overcome through a highly intensive
effort and struggle, and we need a man of the highly in­
tensified motivation, of highly intensified critical faculties,
capable of immense expenditure of effort and of a high
degree of self-sacrifice. We bear the aims of harmony in
mind for the future, but the process of struggle requires
men of another kind. One must distinguish between so­
cialism in the process of struggle and socialism already
victorious. Socialism already victorious—that is a classless
 K D lir.A T IO N A L T A S K S OF T H E SO VIET SCHOOL 249

society,0 but socialism in the process of struggle is oppres­

sed humanity tearing its living bonds that are the living
bodies and the living consciousness of its class enemies.
We want to educate the man who will be a collectivist
of our time, who will live by the life of society much more
than by his own personal interests. The new citizen must,
live in sympathy with the sense of political and economic
relationships during socialist construction, must live in
them, value them, see in them the aim and the content of
his life. His activities arising from this, whatever direc­
tion these may take—whether in the sphere of organisation,
or in that of purely physical labour, etc.—must be always
shot through with this fire, must be undertaken in concord
with the collective as a whole. A man must think in terms
of “wo”, must become a living, useful and relevant organ,
part of that “we”. All personal interests must be put away
far into the background. But this does not mean that we
want to destroy natural human cares, cares for the satis­
faction of one's own needs, the personal instinct. We say
only that this must give way before the demands of col­
lective life.
At the same time we are far from wishing to turn men
into a herd, to submerge individuality, to expunge origi­
nality. Not in the least! Our requirement is that on a col­
lective foundation a man’s personal characteristics should
liave full development. This is the guarantee of far-reach­
ing division of labour within society. Only a society which
is full of variety in its constituent separate human perso­
nalities, which consists of clearly expressed individualities,
is a truly cultured, rich society. A herd-bound personali­
ty easily gives way to Bonapartism, to leader-worship of
all kinds. A herd-bound man cannot have a critical attitude
to all that life faces him with. We must give full scope to
the individual characteristics, the talents, the purposeful
skills, that a man has chosen for himself and that society
has marked out for him. What then must we do? Educate
a man truly appropriate to our great epoch of transition.

On Physical Education
Dialectical materialism, by which we are guided, obliges
us to build our educational practice on the basis of precise
250 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

educational knowledge. From (hose who slndy child devel­

opment we must obtain absolutely clear indications on Ilit*
nature of the infant organism, iIs development, Ihe natural
tendencies of that development. We need a precise know­
ledge of the child as an organism, from the poinl of view
of anatomy, physiology and social biology, then it will be
clear what mental raw material an eight-year-old c o m e s
into school with, and from what source that material is
drawn. All this is the task of child development studies,
both biological and social.
It is quite clear that in dealing with the child as an
organism, the aspect of its anatomical and physiological
development must be well to the Tore. The physical forma­
tion of the child is the basis for all the rest. Without prop­
er health care during the child’s development, without
properly organised physical culture and sport, we shall
never obtain a healthy generation. In leaving these mat­
ters to “life itself’, which is in a state of dreadful disar-
ray, in paying little heed to health care during the years
of childhood, we are committing a great crime.
We need to realise all the importance of these mailers.
One cannot even begin to think of correct sexual develop­
ment for a child if it is brought up without fresh air and
lives in dirt, and is thus an organism that has been blocked
in its development and given an unhealthy direction.
One cannot think of bringing up a generation of good work-
ing abilities, if those belonging to it arc going to have*
llabby muscles, underdeveloped bones and bad hearts. Mean­
while, ii we take a look now at this side of things, we
shall see a horrifying situation. I cannot say that we have
paid sufficient attention to this, that its importance has
really come home to us. In the actual school limetable,
what is called physical culture occupies a quite insignifi­
cant place. We have as yet done practically nothing to­
wards training teachers of physical culture, towards ensur­
ing a sufficient number of thorough masters of their crafl
in this field. Yet without corrective gymnastics, wilhoul
ordinary gymnastics that correctly develop the pupil’s body,
and without a considerable inclusion of sports —of Ihe
kind we have defined as appropriately Soviet—we shall
undoubtedly falsify the total picture of the school, and wo
shall get negative results,
 EDUCATIONAFi TASKS OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL 251

A l o n g w i lh phy s i c al culLiirc wo i m is l not forgot I lie ini-

porianco ol' “ co mba t " sports, beari ng in mi nd their cur ­
rent forms, w h i c h m a k e a man into a real fighter, c o l l e c t ­
ed and c a pa bl e of co nc ent ra t ed and effective effort in a c ­
tion, of s h o w i n g i n g e n u i t y and e n e r g y in cont est . In forei gn
c ount ri es all this is g i v e n an i nd iv i d ua l i s ti c slant; there
I he object of I he e xe r ci s e is that a m a n s ho ul d be able
to use his teeth and c l a w s to m a k e his o w n w ay , hi s o w n
career. In our. So v ie t, sport w e start from qui te different
pr inc ipl e s and s hal l g e l. natural l y, dilferent results. W e also
have m il it ar y servi ce, mi l i t ary training, hut their c ha r ­
acter is qui t e different from that t hey hear abroad: there
t he y s e rv e o ppr es s i on, here — the light lor l r ee do m. Our
g u n is a s i n f u l w e a p o n l i ke a n y other, and unde r s o c i a l ­
ism w e s ha ll do a w a y wi th it, hut at the pr es e nt ti me it
has a d if fe re nt s o c ia l s igni f icance.

On Labour Education

The next question is one of exceptional importance that

or labour in school, and the educational significance of
this. In Ihe labour school we have always approached this
matter in two ways.
We have considered that the actual process of lnstiuc-
lion should he carried out by labour methods, i.e. we have
held that it should not be a one-sided activity, the pupil
only acquiring knowledge from hooks or from the teach­
er’s words. There must be some active part taken by the
child in this process of assimilating knowledge, some part
which brings more or less all of his organism into play
in the course of an interesting process where he has to
overcome certain difficulties both theoretical and physical,
meanwhile gaining knowledge and practising if within
himself. Thanks to the system of work in school which is
becoming .established here, instruction itself includes the
elemenl of labour, i.e. if is achieved in joint work, by col­
lecting material, through independent collation of facts of
all kinds, collective consideralion of reporls, all sorts of
discussions, etc.
Any process of instruction should he accompanied by sa­
tisfaction, by enjoyment, but to draw the conclusion that
 252 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

school work ought to be made something in the nature of

voluntary activity—this would be a false conclusion on
the whole, except possibly as regards those forms of instruc­
tion employed for very young children. It is essential lo
train the child to overcome obstacles, even at the cost of
some weariness. In life one often has to weary oneself in
order to achieve any sort of effectiveness in One’s work.
We must teach the child to use his powers to the best
effect, i.e. teach him not just to toil, but to find within
himself the resources to motivate himself to work: bring
him to the idea that working can itself yield an enjoyment
of a new order, the pleasure of the goal achieved- We must
teach him how to approach work in a sensible, organised
manner, to overcome difficulties, and to collectivise work.
Practice in setting goals, in the skill of rationally ex­
pending the energy in a given direction—this is of im­
mense importance as exemplifying the method to be fol­
lowed in acquiring any kind of knowledge. In the old-style
school they often used to say that school existed not so
much for transmitting knowledge as for giving pupils cer­
tain formal skills. This was the argument used to justify
the study of the dead languages: they (the languages)
brought to the forefront the method to lie followed in mas­
tering the formal aspects of the material —a richer and more
varied method than that offered by formal logic, inasmuch
as here one has a vast store of exceptions and paradoxes.
Those who considered this matter rather more deeply
declared that these studies were important because they
trained a man to perform any task that was set him with­
out worrying about its essential nature. Precisely this
point was included in a petition that was presented to Wil­
helm II, in which it was said that he would then have
very good subjects, very good officials, who would be like
efficient milling machines that would grind anything from
coffee to gravel: they would be men who could carry out
orders with extraordinary precision, and everything on the
formal side would be absolutely exact.7
All legal education and also one form of training we
have never had, known as the “cameral” school,8 was of
this sort. With the bureaucratic oxeciilive skills acquired
therein people went on for the rest of their lives; they only
drew up papers—and became quite outstanding officials
 KIUT. ATIONAL TASKS OF TITF SOVIET SCHOOL 253

or bureaucrats. Al one time they tried to do the same sort

of thing with us, enclosing us in high-school uniforms and
subjecting us to barrack-room discipline. We fell the heavy
hand of external discipline and formal application of
our abilities, to order from above, following ideas alien
In us.
We need something different. In our educational system
we provide profoundly real content, not the formal aspect
of the matter, not just mastery ol the forms of rational
mental work, but rational physical work, which is now, in
its highest forms, work with machines, work in the indus­
trial establishment. We have always taken the view (and
this has distinguished us from the leading American scho­
ols) that the labour school must give the child and teenag­
er poly technical knowledge, i.e. a grasp, acquired from se­
veral examples, of the basic principles, the basic processes
ol contemporary, highly sophisticated, scientifically oiga-
nisod labour. So lar we have tailed to achieve this in the
mass schools, but this does not mean that the idea is in­
correct; the failure is to be explained by the under-develop­
ment of our industry, the low level of our agriculture;
given these, it is not possible for our schools to reach the
safe shores of properly, industrially organised laboui.
There was only one way out—to organise good woik-
shops, within the school or centrally for several schools. At
rural schools to establish orchards, vegetable gardens,
simple forms of keeping livestock, things that would make
a certain level of achievement possible, on the scale of an
enlarged and improved farm economy. We have not suc­
ceeded in doing this to the extent required. But in many
well-run schools one can find some labour processes well
exemplified. The leading examples here are the Factory
Apprentice Schools and the Industrial Seven-Year Schools.
They give us what as yet we cannot have in the mass of
urban and rural schools.
The importance of labour in education is enormous. It
hardly needs saying that the whole of what is designated
as “mental work” is a poor substitute in respect of pro­
ducing what we think of as a whole man. The continual
tendency of our intellectuals, even on the technical side,
to deviate into idealism, in forms such as Machism,9 is
due to a large extent to the fact that these people do not
254 ANATOLT LUNACHARSKY

have contact with material things. True, they hold pen or

pencil in their hands when they write, sil on chairs al Ihe
table in their homes, but basically they only look on or,
at best, observe in the laboratory. They do nol come to
grips with nature at close quarters, they do not c o n q u e r
it by physical strength, and for this reason I hey do nol
sense its living, dynamic reality. Here we have Lhe rool s of
the idea that the world consists of our sensations —solip­
sism, 10 etc. something that can in no way be brought
into line with either socialist struggle or socialist practice.
We need man the materialist, and you will learn a lol
moie materialism standing at a lathe than you will through
leading the works of a materialist philosopher, because1 iu
the second case you have only ideas, constructions, words,
but will not find the experience that makes a m e m b e r of
the proletariat a true materialist—such a materialist lhat
even if he happens, through cultural backwardness, to be
leligious, all that drops away from him in the twinkling
ol an eye as soon as he comes into contact with his work­
ing comrades who have a more correct view of things. The
whole point here is not only acquisition of craft skills, not
only better control of our muscles—the point is becoming
acquainted with the available tools. And these available
tools are now' of vast importance.
Marx and Engels considered that the available tools,
all our array of machines, had subjected human society to
themselves, and that the task of socialism was to ensure
that these means of production which compelled humanity
to split up into classes, which put power inlo the hands
of the bourgeoisie, should he conquered and submitted lo
man.
Of course we still have a great deal of the old Oblomov*
leit here. We still need to tear this trend out by the roots,
to re-order our rhythms, our tempo. Only urbanisation, only
the machine can give us the new tempo, can reconstruct man.
The rural tempo, the hard, slow labour of the countryside,
the country habit of a long, pointless abandonment of work
in the winter months, all create an exceptionally slow flow

:r'The main character of a lOLli-ccntury novel by Goncharov, a

serf-owning landlord so lazy he could not even get dressed without
outside help.—Tr.
 Knur.ATFON \L TASKS OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL 255

of life, and Ihis has left ils imprint even on the (own, and
mi each one of us. In all of us there is a lillle of lihe*
yokel sitting on a cart with one leg dangling, while the
draught ox progresses a mile in goodness knows how long.
And from these vast distances of our Tar-flung steppes,
Irom this hibernation in wilder, we have to change gear
into the tempo of Mr. Ford, when a man has no time lo
sit down, when the machine will have his linger off il he
slackens his attention a minute.
Factory production drives out any residue of the peas­
ant (.cmpo from our worker. The amount of labour demand­
ed of him has to he given with uncommon concentration.
Labour of this kind will enable us to heat the Western
European and to re-educate ourselves in the industrial
spirit, will give us the possibility of creating a man who
hi tempo and precision will he of a new kind, a kind that
cannot he created without the help of the machine.
One might indicate many other aspects of the influence
()f labour on education, hut 1 shall stop here.

On the Connection Between Instruction and Education

Education as a whole is made up of instruction and mo-
La] education, and the two arc intertwined, hor instruction
we take the old culture, i.e. all that has been created by
the human race up to now; wo also take that which bom-
geois culture has rejected—Marxism and all that flows
from it, which is the beginning of the new world. Marx­
ism follows on from the whole development of science, bul
was rejected by the bourgeoisie as being contrary to its
interests. In Marxism human thought outgrew the frame­
work of the bourgeois world just as industry has outgrown
it. In this contradiction lies, in Engels’ conception, the
germ of the socialist movement and the guarantee of its
success. 11
In the held of the natural sciences Marxism prints it­
self deep. It re-works natural science, frees if from those
adulterations which bourgeois thought has brought, and
continues to bring into it. Bourgeois thought senses quite
clearly, and in some cases understands quite accurately,
that correctly presented natural science, with all its con-
256 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

stituiMil branches, leads inevitably to Marxism. Thai is why

bourgeois thinking attacks Darwinism, attacks technical
biology, for il thinks that otherwise it cannot save its own
order of things. In particular, it lalsilies the premises of
natural science, going deep down to the very roots ol
man’s view of the world and there injecting its poisons.
The bourgeoisie fears that within natural science the Flow­
er of Marxism and Communism may come to bloom.
Wo must leach natural science in such a way that there
is no room for any mysticism whatever in it, not even
of the most refined sort, so that it represents consistent
materialism.
lhe content ol the natural sciences opens up a whole
complex of educational work, such as: giving the scicn-
^*1C .cont,enl' °f Marxism in a Form accessible to children,
oliering as it were a children’s edition of the foundations
of Marxism; giving children a certain concept of man with­
in nature, of the historical development of human society,
of the injustice that reigns in human society, of the rnean-
mg of the proletarian revolution, of the meaning of the
October Revolution, of the situation created in this coun­
try in relation to other powers, of the tasks that flow from
our revolution, and so on—i.e. roughly that whole com plex
ol problems which we have to teach cyclically, starting
with simpler forms and gradually passing on to more com­
plete ones, following the methods now recommended.
lhe content of social science also represents a great edu­
cational force.
It remains beyond dispute, however, that one can know
a very great deal and not be changed by that knowledge
in the least, lhe task of moral education is to create a
mood, or in Pavlovian 12 terms to create a certain system
of constant and conditioned reflexes, which will ensure that
the human being will function in life in a given way. Wo
have no physical means of doing this, but we know how
powerfully a human being’s reflexes are changed when act­
ed upon by what is known as emotion. When a human
being is moved, when he feels joy, or sadness, or contempt,
when he laughs aloud—this means profound processes are
at work within the nervous system. These processes may
be only superficial, but they can also be extremely pro­
found. When people say, “It made an unforgettable im-
 EKIT.ATIOXAI. TASKS OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL 257

pressioii on me”, “It left its mark on the whole of my

life", and so on, this denotes moments of deep emotion
which indeed re-order the nervous system, in these or those
of its parts, creating new reflexes, inducing new reac­
tions to these or those phenomena —the human being is
re-born, assumes a new image.
Without stirring up or stimulating the nervous system
one cannot carry out agitation of even the simplest kind —
collect a crowd together, for instance, and get them to put
ii lire out. Still le SS is it possible to produce an education­
al effect. By the emotional colouration given to the teach­
ing material, by evoking emotional reactions, and through
the emotions evoking changes in the consciousness of the
pupils, one can give a morally educational charge to any
process of perception of this or that external action.
The social science can be taught calmly, without the
teacher being moved or moving anyone else. Such a science
will he a bore, it will flow away like water through
a funnel—however much you pour in, it all runs out the
other end. Yet there is no more lively, more emotional
subject than the social science. It is compact of pictures,
of the struggle of man with nature, of people against one
another, of the conflict between our great aims today and
the darkness that has to be conquered. The smallest child
can ho lold the history of culture like a glorious fairy sto-
ry, and there is no better story, no one could invent it!
What is needed is, firstly, that the material should be
brought together in a lively manner, in such a way that it
(the class struggle, for instance) is something creative, not
just hare facts, not just a sequence, but a dynamic pro­
cess. One needs a certain ability to present material. Not
theatrical effects, of course, but intimacy of tone, simpli­
city of language, sincerity and feeling on the part of the
teacher. Various resources can be brought in to assist:
well-thought-out excursions, illustration by means of works
of art (literary and pictorial), and actual introduction to
this or that aspect of real life.
We can study the past and bring it to life again through
excursions to museums, the study of collections, while the
present one can treat by getting into life itself, gaining
a closer acquaintance with it. This brings us to the ques­
tion of artistic education.
1 7 - 0 1 120
253 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

There are ideas current that the aim of artistic educa­

tion is to train artists, to discover those with special tal­
ents, or to develop in every child this or that degree of art­
istic ability. Aestheticism as a goal must be rejected. If
we attain something in this respect along the way, well
and good. Professional art education should take place in
art schools.
But there is another idea, which puts forward the fol­
lowing viewpoint: artistic education has the aim of train­
ing children from their earliest years to appreciate works
of art properly, to appreciate the creative work of the art­
ist, art itself, and the life of nature; that it has the aim
of teaching aesthetic enjoyment both of those products of
human talent intended to evoke such enjoyment, and of
nature, and of those phenomena in human life which are
marked by light and grace. This is good, but even this is
not the main point for our days. This too is something by
the way.
The basic intent of artistic education must be to find such
means of acting upon the feelings of children as will most
powerfully and lastingly educate them in the spirit of com­
munist instincts, communist traits, communist reflexes. The
basic role of art is the re-education of man. Insofar as
literature, painting, music will contribute to the re-educa­
tion of man, to that extent they are useful in their ideolog­
ical aspect. The social science must be lively, agitational,
stimulating and thereby educational. Art must be b r o u g h t
into this. One cannot do without it, for literature gives the
world of the old and of the new. What distinguishes a
writer from a publicist is that the former excites us, that
(lie images he creates can lay hold on us, shake us. So we
must bring literature into play, of course literature of a
kind suitable to the age-group we are dealing with. Tn
just the same way the teacher must be able to draw out
from the pictures in any gallery, whether it is the Tretya­
kov 13 or any provincial museum, elements which educate
the child’s emotions. This is the aim of children’s theatre
also, and of taking children to the theatre.
The same aim should be pursued in children’s indepen­
dent creative work in art. Children’s creative work should
be a collective activity. Taking part in festivals, in organis­
ing festivals—this is participation in social life, but of a
 EDUCATIONAL TASKS OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL 259

totally organised kind. A festival is an artistic organisation

of social lift1, in which everything is concentrated, every­
thing is compressed, everything has taken on an effective,
exciting form. In order to experience this people come to­
gether, they create the festival together, they enjoy it to­
gether. A school festival, held within the school, is a part
of a wider life. Through the festival life comes into the
school, finds an echo in the school.
On these lines other types of children's artistic work
also proceed. Making up albums, drawings or paintings
that reflect these or those events, this or that side of life;
holding an exhibition of different pieces of work that
reflect^in artistic form, from various sides, the life outside
school; producing a theatrical show devoted to some par­
ticular event and setting the children the task of creating
a play, a ceremonial or display for other children, for par­
ents, for those around them—all these devices touch op
the social science on the one hand, and on actual partici­
pation in the life of society on the other, on the children’s
response to current politics, and they remain long in the
memory. Even in the old school, unsuitable for us, it was
school plays that left more trace, and a brighter trace, than
whole years of teaching, because in such plays the human
being is an operative, creative, active agent. All these
forms of artistic education must occupy a significant place
in our schools.
Artistic education must be accepted as one of the meth­
ods of social education, and brought up to a proper level.
We need to review once again our general principles, and
bring all our education closer, than has been the case up
to now, to socio-political education, and correlate every­
thing in this sphere with this central crank-shaft. Then we
shall be able to raise the purely aesthetic side of education
too, for we shall be giving it a definite content, filling it
with what is politically valuable.
Every festival organised in school becomes part of gen­
eral social life, and has immense educational significance.
The same significance attaches to methods of educatio­
nally organised intervention in the life of society, in the
form of socially useful labour. Direct participation by
children in labour—itself an organising force—that improves
sanitary conditions, or the daily environmhent, or that
17 *
260 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

helps to combat ignorance —all this is taking shape, is al­

ready being done.
It is essential to organise children to react very flexibly
to events in society. It is important not only that children
in a given small town should take part in looking after Ihe
upkeep of a park or garden, or undertake lo teach a cer­
tain number of illiterate children or adults —il is important
that they should respond to events in China, too, and to
political slogans put out by the Parly. One must be able
to take the newspaper that we have for our information
every day, and to translate it, if one can pul if like that,
into language that children can understand. Something of
the kind is already done, in the Pioneer newspapers. Pas­
sing on to children the information contained in the popu­
lar press should be a constant function of the school. One
must see that the emotions arc engaged in the process.
Lhudren must mark great events by meetings, festivals
etc. Children must mark events using the same forms
by which adults react to those events.

On Combatting Reactionary Influences on the Schools

Public attention today focusses closely on the schools.

Special schools sections have been created by local So­
viets. Attention is paid to the schools not only by those dc-
puted to do so; local Soviets, trade unions, and other so­
cial bodies are paying attention too. The working popula-
tion in a school's area takes part in the life of (lie school.
The Young Communist League stimulates the school. The
Commissariat for Education can stale with pride that it
always pays the closest heed to the voice of the Young
Communist League.
At present public attention is concerned about the schools:
is reaction not lurking there? is there not deliberate
sabotage? is there not extreme resistance to change, and
inability to change, among old teachers? or are there not
very unskilled new teachers, who want to do the right
thing but are unable? or are there not Communists who are
not measuring up to their responsibilities? Public opinion
puls us under a certain critical review, and asks the teach-
 1:111 NATIONAL TASKS OK THE SOVIET SCHOOL 201

er: arc you devoting all your powers to your work, and
are they as rationally directed as they should he? If a man
has applied all his [lowers, and done so in a rational man­
ner, llifii no blame can be attached to him.
But this is not all there is to it.
We have teachers with good, honourable, philanthropic
hearts, with settled, skilful methods in their specialist
work among a given body of children. In school work such
a teacher does his job conscientiously, lie says, “ 1 am giv­
ing you all my powers; 1 think 1 am doing a useful job:
1 teach children to read and write, 1 develop their aesthet­
ic capabilities, I talk to them about what is good and what
is evil, I do not tell them that one should say one’s pray­
ers, I do not teach them the fear of God, although 1 do not
assure anyone, either, that that would be wrong. Political­
ly I have no quarrel with you, if only because I have no
political views. And if I am not doing enough in the way
of political education, then tell me what I am to do. I am
prepared to work to your directives, so long as you do not
offend my opinions as a teacher. But if you say that I must
foster class hatred in children, that I must tell them that
the bourgeoisie should be extirpated in every way —then
I am sorry, but I have not a hard and horny heart, and
to give children hard and horny hearts is wrong. I can
tell children only that one should love all men, that so­
cialism is the reign of love and peace and so they should
love socialism. Within these limits I am in agreement with
you.”
Such a teacher must be adjudged unsuitable jor the giv­
en period, the present, when we have to attack with greater
energy, Lake more energetic steps to win over the children.
Our work is often complicated by political factors of all
sorts: here or there our enemies are stirring, they are stir­
ring even in the schools, and we have to fight those ene­
mies. And to those who cannot fight we have to say “For
times of peace you will pass as a teacher, but at the pres­
ent time you cannot be allowed near children.”
But such a line may also become extremely dangerous:
if we set our demands as high as the full one hundred
per cent, we may leave our front quite bare of defenders.
These teachers of varying shades of opinion—-they are often
experienced, excellent practical workers, good masters
262 ANATOLI LUNACHARSKY

of teaching method and good .educators, but their work

needs correcting factors to right the balance. Communist
public opinion has attained some maturity now. We must
use our skill to join one thing to the other.
The schools experience other influences too; the deep-
rooted, stagnant environment of the petty bourgeoisie
sends its children too into our schools. These children bring
into school with them all manner of forms of antisemitism,
religious attitudes, all sorts of political gossip, all kind
of dirty insinuations. Among them we can observe self-
seeking, careerist motivations of all sorts, especially in the
senior forms. We see organisations of every conceivable
kind arising, in which they group together. Of course young
men at a certain period of their lives have a great tendency
to secretiveness, a yen for “closed” organisations, for plot­
ting together, playing at conspiracies, playing at being im­
portant. Organisations of this kind, according to American
em CT^°n^S^S’ inevitabIy appear among children 14-15 years
old. They mark the awakening of social instincts, of their
own peculiar kind, which we must satisfy by filling them
with a content that belongs to our order of society. Such
organisations disintegrate and arise afresh; sometimes it
turns out that they are entirely erotic cum pornographic in
nature, sometimes they may be counter-revolutionary as
well. The influence of the philistine home background
makes itself felt, with all its malice, all its petty-bourgeois
way of life.
If we do not make our owrn wray into that world, into the
family, it will smother us. But we can exert influence on
it through the children themselves (particularly in the ru­
ral schools), and we must influence it by taking care to
maintain communication with parents. It is a very big and
a very complex task, but I see no other way fonvard, no
other means of hastening the process of making peoplo
other than they once were.
We are creating an experimental field, in which we can
learn methods of educating, using chosen material and the
help of teachers of another order. This is the Pioneer move­
ment. We are convinced that the children who are pre­
disposed to communism and who are eager to join the
Pioneer movement will give us the opportunity to make
them the nucleus, the germ that will act upon other people
 EDUCATIONAL TASKS OF THE SOVIET SCHOOL 2G3

near to them, and on the e nv i r onme nt sui Toundi ng the

school.
The question arises, what should be mutual relationship
of tlm world of school and the world of the Pioneers? What
is needed is that teacher and Pioneer leader should have
complete trust in one another; we must establish a meth­
od of attentive cooperation, and in this contact with the
young people of the Young Communist League it is the
teacher who must learn. The Young Communist League is
not an atmosphere existing in isolation, its heat is felt by
others, and often burns away all manner of impurities.
From the ranks of the League’s members will come, too,
the teachers who will carry on our work.
 SUPPLEMENT
A. V. Lunacharsky: A Brief Biographical Note
A natoli V asilievich Lunacharsky was born on 11 Novem ber,
1875, into the fam ily of a liberally inclined civil servant. W hile
still a pupil at the Kiev Gymnazia (High School) Lunacharsky
entered the revolutionary m ovem ent and carried on propaganda
work at m ills and factories, in workers’ circles (study groups). In
1895 he joined the Social-Democratic Labour Party of R ussia
(RSDLP), linking his life thenceforward w ith the party of the
Russian proletariat, with the struggle for socialism , w ith the cause
for which V. 1. Lenin fought.
By reason of his political “u nreliab ility” Lunacharsky w as not
admitted to Moscow University. He was obliged to continue Ins
education abroad, in Switzerland, at the U niversity of Zurich,
where in 1895-97 he studied philosophy and natural science, in
1897 Lunacharsky returned to Russia. Having been elected a m em ­
ber of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP, he look up active
revolutionary work. In 1899 this work w as interrupted by arrest,
imprisonment, and later exile. But w hile in exile Lunacharsky did
not give up his revolutionary and propaganda work, his collabora­
tion on the production of revolutionary publications.
At the^ invitation of V. I. Lenin, who follow ed the young revo­
lutionary s propaganda and publicist work with close attention, Lu­
nacharsky in 1904 left Russia and joined the editorial staff of Iho
Bolshevik papers Vperyod (Forward) and Proletary The Proleta-
rian), which were published in Geneva, and from this period dates
the fruitful collaboration of Lunacharsky and Lenin, who had a
high opinion of Lunacharsky and called him “a man of uncom ­
mon natural gifts (M. Gorky, “V. I. Lenin”, Collected Works in
30 volum es, Vol. 17, p. 21). In April 1905, V. 1. Lenin com m ission ed
Lunacharsky to make an opening report at the Third Congress of
the RSDLP, on one of the most im portant questions to be dis­
cussed—that of armed uprising.
The developm ent of revolutionary events in Russia, w hich in
1905 brought about the start of the first Russian R evolution, m a d e
it possible for Lunacharsky to return to his native country. He or­
ganises revolutionary work in St. Petersburg, takes an active part
in the publication of the Bolshevik newspaper N ovay a Zhizn (New
Life), in which he appears as a brilliant protagonist of L enin’s
ideas, a passionate fighter for the revolutionary transform ation of
society. Before long Lunacharsky was again arrested, but he su c­
ceeded in escaping, and once again w ent abroad. He took part, as
a representative of the Bolsheviks, in the Stuttgart (1907) and
Copenhagen (1910) Congresses of the Second International.
 A. V I. l ' XACI I AKSKY: A HUIKT Hlor.KAPlIY 295-

The defeat of the first Russian Revolution of 1905-07 led Lu­

nacharsky to som e m istaken theoretical conclusions. Later, Luna­
charsky wrote that Lenin's harsh and uncom prom ising criticism
helped him to realise the incorrectness of his own stand and the
unassailable rightness of V. I. Lenin, who was able, during the
grim years of reaction that set in after the defeat of the first Rus­
sian R evolution, to foresee the line of further developm ent of re­
volutionary events, and to draw the Party more firmly together
and direct it to the preparation of new class battles.
In April 1917, after the February Revolution that toppled tsa-
risin. Lunacharsky returned to R ussia and under \ . I. Lenin s quid-
ance took up revolutionary activities in Petrograd; one aspect of
those activities was bringing the in telligen tsia over to the sid e
of the R evolution.
Following the victory of the Great October Socialist R evolution
in Petrograd, there w as created the first Soviet Government, head­
ed by V. I. Lenin. At Lenin's suggestion, Lunacharsky became a
mem her of that governm ent. He headed the P eople’s Commissariat
for Education, and continued in that post for twelve years. In Sep­
tem ber 1929 Lunacharsky was appointed Chairman of the Academ­
ic Com m ittee attached to the Central Executive Committee of the
USSR, and in 1933 he was appointed Envoy Plenipotentiary of the
USSR to Spain. On the w ay to Spain he was taken seriously ill,
and on 29 Decem ber he died, at Menton in the south of France.
Lunacharsky lies buried in Moscow, by the Kremlin w all in Red
Square. „ . , . .
A man of encyclopaedic know ledge, with eleven languages a
his com m and, a talented scholar, an em inent theoretican in the
fields of art and literature, a critic of originality, a writer and
playw right, a p ublicist and an orator—Lunacharsky made an im ­
m ense contribution to the creation of a socialist culture. His name
is in extricab ly hound up with an entire period in the develop­
m ent of a socialist culture, of a socialist in telligentsia, of Soviet
literature and art, of M arxist aesthetics and art criticism , of edu­
cational theory and of the actual education of the people.
Lunacharsky played a m ost im portant part in propaganda for
socialist culture outside the country. The foreign press used to call
him liie m ost cultured and w ell-educated M inister of Education
in any European country. He was a personal friend of Romain
Rolland, Henri B arln isse/ Bernard Shaw, Berthold Brecht who all
had a high opinion of the Soviet People's Commissar with Ins great
gifts. In Romain R olland’s words, Anatoli Lunacharsky’ was ‘ a u ni­
versally respected am bassador of Soviet thought and art outside
his cou n try”.
L unacharsky’s pen was responsible for an enorm ous number of
works: on m atters of literature, m usic, theatre, painting, architec­
ture, ethics, aesth etics, the history of philosophic and revolutionary
(bought, international politics, anti-religious propaganda, education­
al theory, educational practice, etc. Lunacharsky also made his
own contribution to im agin ative w ritin g— he w as the author of
m any plays: Barber to the Ki ng (1909), Faust and the City (1918),
Oliver Cr omwel l (1930). Thomas Campanella (1922), Don Quixote
Liberated (1922), Poison (1926), etc.
266 SUPPLEMENT

In this great and variegated legacy left by Lunacharsky, an

im portant place belongs to his works on matters of education, both
form al and moral. There are over three hundred such works. They
reflect practically every aspect of the formation of the Soviet edu­
cational system , all the tasks which the Revolution set before edu­
cational theory and practice. Many of these works are of more
than theoretical interest. A considerable proportion of them retain
their relevance even today, and help us think through afresh and
m ake decisions on a number of complex questions in the theory
and practice of education.
^lrs^ ^eoP^e s Commissar for Education, Lunacharsky stood
a t the first springhead of the Soviet school. At Lenin’s call he took
the lead in creating a new, socialist system of education. He was
to bring about the first realisation in practice of Marxist ideals of
CUl!/-TC- And ‘hjs Iwd to be done under the unbeliev-
i° f * le ^ r s l years follow ing the October
R ! r } UU° l \ T° ^lv? ,t0 1 le PeoPle as quickly as possible the great-
thatPth p bR SlT V 0f knowledge, in preparation for the g ia n ts role
r ,m J i.f ,.c ? Utl0n , has lai“ uP°n that People,”—in these words
c Z m t s a r 1 or™ T cation . * * ^ SeDSe 0t hU WOrk 38 Pe° ple’S
ra°£e and scale of that work was uncommonly wide. It
•. / m1}. every lacet of culture and education—from doing away
in i t0* (ler P®111.*031 education of the masses, from teach-
a .]ev.els to tj1® sciences, art, literature, and
♦u _ / ,?) this multifarious activity bore the clear imprint of
t n r i Infa* l l t ? °! Lunacharsky, that m ost h ighly cultured man
and m ost passionate fighter for Communist ideas.

Notes
4 . ^ k® Notes provided to the works here published are of
two kinds: the first being for the elucidation of historical
and educational aspects of the material, and the second being
on what may be called matters of fact.
The object of the historical and educational Notes is to
outline the historical setting of the period wrhen the given
work was written, to indicate their raison d'etre , the actual
circumstances which called forth those works, and lastly to
elucidate the basic ideas contained in them, and their sig­
nificance in the history of Soviet educational thought, their
role and place within the general sum of questions being
dealt with today by the Soviet school and by educational
science. Each historical-educational note is prefaced by a
brief bibliographical note on the date of appearance of the
given work.
The object of the factual Notes is rather narrower—to ac­
quaint the reader with facts, events, and circumstances men­
tioned by Lunacharsky, with the educationists, scholars and
public figures whose ideas he may in these works be sup­
porting or attacking.
 NOTES 267

11 would seem useful to make a short comment here on

the peculiarities of terminology used by Lunacharsky.
In the works here published, a number of terms used by
Lunacharsky are employed in a manner som ewhat different
from the interpretation they bear in contemporary Soviet
w riting on education. This applies particularly to the con­
cept of “education” itself, which Lunacharsky defined as the
“formation of’?, or “giving an image to”. the child. (Cf. the
articles “What is Education”. ‘‘The Tasks of Extra-Mural Edu­
cation in Soviet Russia . “Education of the New Man ,
“The Educational Tasks of the Soviet School”.) Education, in
Lunacharsky’s concept, is “made up of instruction and moral
education, the two being intertw ined”.
Such an interpretation of the word o b r a z o u a n i y e is not the
one which has come to be accepted in Soviet educational
usage. The contemporary term which approaches this con­
cept most nearly is “education in the w idest sen se”, i.e. edu­
cation as the totality of influences defining the process of
character formation, including formal “education 1 and in ­
struction. These term inological variations, however, in no
way dim inish the force of Lunacharsky’s basic concept, which
has become one of the foundations of Soviet ^educational
thought— the idea of the unity and interconnection of mo­
ral education” (in its narrow sense) and instruction, as the
most im portant factors in the formation of personality. Equal­
ly great is the importance that still attaches to Lunacharsky s
idea that “education is not a m atter of schools alone , that
the schools give only the key to true “education .

Speech at the First A ll-R ussia Congress on Education

S p e e c h d e l i v e r e d o n 2 6 A u g u s t , 1918

In tlie first years follow ing the Great October S o cia list
R evolution, congresses on people’s education played an im ­
portant part in determ ining the lin es of developm ent of the
new, socia list school, and in form ing the ideological and the­
oretical foundations of Soviet educational practice. Of parti­
cular im portance was the part these congresses played in
draw ing the general body of teachers over to the side of the
Soviet governm ent, in m obilising all the forces available
w ithin society to solve the problem s of radically reconstruc­
tin g the schools. In 1918, in the R ussian Soviet S ocialist
Federated R epublic 164 local congresses of teachers were held,
and 81 congresses of workers in education.
The conclusions from all this m ultifarious activities in
w orking out the principles of socialist organisation of edu­
cation for the people were sum m ed up by the First A ll-R us­
sia Congress on Education, in w hich over 700 people took
part. The Congress took place from 25th A ugu st to 4th Sep­
tember, 1918, in Moscow. V. I. Lenin spoke at it. Ilis speech
o u tlin e s the im portance of education for the m asses, and
first and forem ost the im portance of the schools, in build-
 268 S UP P LE MENT

in g a nuw, s o c i a l i s t s o c i e t y . (For
lew I of Lenin’s speech see
C om plete C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , VoJ. 28,
pp. 85-86.)
The Congress discussed the Draft Theses on the Uni lied
Labour School, which was approved hy the All-Russia Cent­
ral Executive Committee (VTsIK). Sim ultaneously with the
Theses were published the Basic Principles of the Uniiied
Labour School, also approved hy the Congress. (This docu­
m ent is also known as the Declaration on the Uniiied La­
bour School.) Both documents played a most important part
in the history of the Soviet school. They crowned the ideo-
logical, theoretical and organisational preparation of the ra-
transformations in the schools of Russia that were to
take place, and ushered in a new sta g e— that of the practi­
cal realisation of those transformations.
Underlining the great significance of the T h eses and the
ar?i ° D ' -1. £ oaS ress noted in its resolutions: “ In ardent
sym p ath y with the transforining a ctiv itie s of the C om m issa­
riat for P e o p le s Education, and p led gin g to the latter our
rr1,0Sf am 1™0 s.uPPor^ in the lo c a lities, the d e le g a te s to the
f i r s t A ll-R ussia C ongress on E ducation are fu lly aw are that
t i e su ccess of this work can be en v isa g ed o n ly on co n d i­
tion ot linal and com p lete trium ph hy the p rin cip les of the
social r e v o lu tio n . . . . Let n on e of us he d ism a y ed hy th e
tact t h a t w o m u s t accom p lish th is g re a t task in the g r ie v o u s
^ i^ ii *an iin e: p overty, so cia l d isin te g ra tio n an d a b se n c e
r , e sse n tia l m aterial co n d itio n s for the d e v e lo p m e n t
1 t h e sch ools. W e h ave as y e t no properly tra in ed r e se r v e s
i0 r teach in g, no books, no te a c h in g a id s, n o
sch o o l b u ild in g s, hut w h a t w e h ave w ith us, and n ot a g a in st
us, is the good g e n iu s of the s o c ia lis t re v o lu tio n , and, g iv e n
that w e s u ffic ie n tly p ut forth our s t r e n g t h , and w ith the h e lp
o that sa m e lab ou r m eth od w h ich w e are about to b rin g
i n o d a ily u se in our sc h o o ls, w e sh a ll, fo llo w in g the e x a m -
p /e o f a l l p io n e er s w ho h a v e b u ilt a n e w life w h e r e n o th in g
w as b efore, in the en d b u ild a m a je stic ed ifice, o v er th e d o o rs
or w h i c h s h a l l s t a n d the w ord s ‘T h e U n ified S o c ia lis t L a b o u r
S c h o o l . (R e so lu tio n o f the F irst A ll-R u ssia C o n g r e ss on E d u c a ­
tion , M oscow , 1918, pp. 1-2.)
I n s p e a k i n g at the Congress, Anatoli Lunacharsky summed
up the activities of the People s Commissariat for Education
over the ten months that had passed since October 1917;
he stressed that their working-out of the “socialist founda­
tions for the education of the new generation, and the re­
creation, in the new ‘labour’ spirit, of all the teaching and
scientific bodies in the country” had been proceeding under
conditions of extreme confusion. Only after comparative nor­
malisation of the situation on (he internal and external fronts
had been achieved, after sabotage on the part of some teach­
ers had been overcome, and an organisational apparatus for
the People's Commissariat for Education created —only Ihen
was it possible “to start thinking of serious ideological strug­
gle w/fh the old system of educalion*. The main idea. Ilie
 NOTES 269

burden of Lunacharsky's speech is struggle for the new, Ja-

bour school, for education for all the people.

1. The idea referred to belongs to Thomas Jefferson, President

o f the United States of America (1801-09). Lunacharsky had writ­
ten ahouI this in a brief note ‘‘From the Editors” which appeared,
not long before Ihe Congress, in the journal Y e s t n i k n a r o d n o g o
p r o s r e s h c h c n i i j n S o j t u z o K o m m u n S e r e r n o i O b l a s l i (Education Cou­
rier of the Northern Regional Union of Comm unes), 1919, No.
1, August, p. 21: “Thomas Jefferson . . . in 1786, i.e. three years be­
fore the start of the French Revolution, wrote to his great prede­
cessor as follow s— ‘I hold it to be axiom atic that our freedom can
be safe on ly in the hands of the people them selves, and then only
if tlie people have attained a certain level of education. That is w hy
the introduction of education on a common plan is the first charge
of the sta te’.”
2. The victory of the revolutionary uprising of workers and
soldiers on 27 February, 1917 w as the opening event in the bour­
geois-dem ocratic February Revolution in Russia. Tsarism w as over­
thrown. In the early days of March 1917 the bourgeois-dem ocratic
revolution had triumphed in most of the country’s cities and towns.
The February R evolution w as a most, im portant stage on the w ay
towards the Great October S ocialist Revolution.
As a result of the February R evolution a situation em erged in
w hich there w ere two centres of authority—the Provisional Govern­
m ent and the Soviets (or Councils) of W orkers’ and Peasants’ De­
puties. The m ain aim of the Provisional Government in March/Ap-
ril 1917 was, in L enin’s words, “thwarting the revolution, as cau­
tio u sly and q uietly as possible, and prom ising everything w ithout
fu lfillin g any of its prom ises”. (V. I. Lenin, “Lessons of the Re­
v o lu tion ”, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 25, p. 235.) H aving overthrown
tsarism , the February R evolution failed to solve the problems that
then faced it. The B olshevik Party under Lenin’s leadership then
developed action aim ed at escalatin g the bourgeois-democratic, re­
volution into a socialist revolution.
3. The first Soviet C onstitution was the Constitution of the Rus­
sian Federation approved by the Fifth All-R ussia Congress of So­
v iets in 1918. The C onstitution was the legislative affirmation of
S oviet power as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, also
confirm ing the abolition of cap italist and land-ow ning properly,
eq u ality of rights of all n ation alities w ithin Russia, etc. The Con­
stitution gave all w orking people in Russia the opportunity to par­
ticipate in running the stale, and deprived exploiters of voting
rights.
In 1924, The Second Congress of Soviets of the USSR approved
the first C onstitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
In N ovem ber 1936, a new C onstitution of the USSR w as approved
by the Eighth (Extraordinary) A ll-U nion Congress of Soviets.
T his C onstitution gave legal recognition of the profound changes
that had taken place since the tim e of the 1924 Constitution, and
reflected the fact that socialism had trium phed w ithin the USSR.
270 SUPPLEMENT

The Constitution of the USSR now in force—the Constitution

of a developed socialist society—was approved by a Special Ses­
sion of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 7 October, 1977. It
stresses that “developed socialist society is a natural, logical stage
on the road to com m unism ”, that “the Soviet state has become a
state of the whole people”. [ C o n s t i t u t i o n ( F u n d a m e n t a l L a w ) o f
t h e U n i o n o f S o v i e t S o c i a l i s t R e p u b l i c s , Moscow, pp. 13-14]. The
new Constitution, as was noted in a speech to the Special Session
of the Supreme Soviet by Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of
the Central Committee of the CPSU, Chairman of the Presidium
of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and Chairman of the Consti­
tutional Commission, “epitomises the whole sixty years’ develop­
m ent of the Soviet state. It is striking evidence* of the fact that
the ideas proclaimed by the October Revolution and Lenin’s pre-
cepts are being successfully put into practice”. [L. I. Brezhnev, O n
th e p r a f t C o n stitu tio n (F u n d a m e n ta l L a w ) of th e U n io n s of S o v ie t
S o c ia lis t R e p u b lic s a n d the R e s u lts of the N a tio n w id e D i s c u s s i o n
o f t h e D r a ft , Moscow, 1977, p. 7 .]

CommitteG on Education was set up after the Feb-

nf dV° lution as an advisory body to the Ministry of Education
X 0 P ^ 1810*13* Government. After the October Revolution, Lu-
F ^ arr ky rin lVs £rst declaration addressed to the public (“On
nEnd- r f°,l l !e Pce°Ple ' 29 0 ct°ker, 1917) put the offer of co­
operation with the Soviet authorities to this Committee. The Com-
^ « n itn !ie jKCted tSie o ffer.an1d dem onstratively ceased work. It w as
November decree 0 Council of People’s Commissars in
On 9 November 1917 a decree of the Central Executive Com­
mittee set up the State Commission on People’s Education, w hose
function was to be general guidance of education”. A decree o f
the Council of P eop les Commissars in June 1918, “On the Organi­
sation of the People’s Education in the Soviet Federated Socialist
Republic of Russia , laid down that the members of the State
Commission were to include leading workers from the Commissariat
for Education, representatives of central Soviet, trade union and
cooperative bodies, and representatives of regional education of­
fices. The Commission was to work under the leadership of the
P eople’s Commissar for Education.
5. In his address to the teaching profession of 15 November,
1917, Lunacharsky wrote “. . . For decades the best portion of the
Russian intelligentsia has served the people, and has been proud
of that service. It has held the cause of education, of arousing the
consciousness of the m asses of the people, to be of especial im ­
p ortan ce. . . . The teacher, the true te a c h e r ... m ust above all be
with the people in all it lives through, even when it wanders lost.
Go and help the people. It is full of strength, but surrounded by
disaster. Glory to those who in the dire hour of trial by fire are
found with the people, whatever the state in which it finds itself.
Dishonour to those who abandon the people . . . . The people calls
on you to work together w ith it—it w ill do its work, supported on ly
by its faithful fellow-workers and voluntary helpers. There is no
 NOTES 271

return to w hat used to be.” [ A n a t o l i L u n a c h a r s k y o n a r o d n o m o b -

r a z o v a n i i (on Education), Moscow, 1958, pp. 515-518, (in Russian).}

6. The A ll-R ussia Teachers 1 Union (Russian in itials VUS) w as

founded in June 1905. In 1909 it broke up. In 1917, after the Feb­
ruary Revolution, it was re-established, and branches of it cam e
into existence in practically all places.
In both the first and the second period of its activities the All-
Russia Teachers' Union w as p olitically under the influence of the
bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties. It took up a hostile attitude
to the October R evolution of 1917. In December 1917 the Council of
the T eachers’ Union attempted to organise a strike of teachers, but
its call was not successful. _ _ . . r
By the autum n of 1918 the counter-revolutionary leadership of
the Union had lost its influence, and m any of its local branches
had entered into close cooperation with the Soviet government. By
a decision of the All-R ussia Executive Committee, of 23 Decem­
ber, 1918, the A ll-R ussia Teachers’ Union w as disbanded.
7. In his article “How W e Occupied the M inistry of Education
(1927) Lunacharsky wrote: “To reconcile Soviet p ow er, and th e
officials of the M inistry of Education proved im possible. The of­
ficials decided on sabotage, and openly declared that they u ou ld
never give in ”. Lunacharsky recalled how, the first tim e that he
and others cam e to the M inistry “w e made our way th o u g h rooms
that were com pletely em pty”. The representatives of the P eo p le s
Com m issariat for Education were m et only by a fow p p
am ong the clerical stall. [ A n a t o l i L u n a c h a r s k y o n a r o d n o m o b r a z o -
v a n i i (on E ducation), pp. 366-67.]

8. W hen the Soviet Government moved from Petrograd to Mos­

cow in March 1918, Lunacharsky addressed to the Council of Peo-
p ie’s Commissars of the Russian Federation a memorandum in w hich
he stated: “I take it upon m yself to propose to m y comrade Com­
m issars that I personally should be its official representative in
P e t r o g r a d .... I am conscious of the responsibility I am taking
upon m yself, of how burdensome, dangerous and even, one m ay
say, disastrous is the position w hich I ask perm ission to take up,
but u nless I am m istaken, it is m y duty to do this. [V. L en in
a n d L u n a c h a r s k y , in L i t e r a r y H e r i t a g e , Vol. 80, Moscow, 19/1, pp. 08 -
59, (in R ussian).] t 4ni 0i
Lunacharsky rem ained in Petrograd until the beginning of ly iy ;
he visited Moscow at intervals, discharging the duties of both
P eople’s Commissar for Education of the Russian Federation and
P eople’s Commissar for Education of the Union of Communes, North­
ern Region. In May 1919, the Union of Communes o l the Northern
Region w as dissolved, governm ent of these areas being taken over
by the bodies of central authorities.

9. On 27 February, 1918, the State Comm ission for Education

issued a decision “On the Elective Nature of all Teaching Posts and
all Posts in the A dm inistration of Education”. This statute m ade
272 SUPPLEMENT

it obligatory for all local Soviets to hold elections, not later than
the end of July 1918, for all posts in or to do with schools. The
purpose of these elections was to democratise the education ser­
vice, to rem ove counter-revolutionary elem ents from the schools,
and to draw into school work persons enjoying the trust of the
local population.

10. The Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars “On Free­

dom of Conscience, and on Ecclesiastical and Religious Societies”
(published in many works under the title “On the Separation of
Church from Stale and Schools from Church”) was promulgated
on 20 January 1918. Under the influence of the clergy and of pco-
p e working through the All-Russia Teachers’ Union, in a number
of places, assem blies of peasants had passed resolutions asking for
the teaching of Scripture to be retained in the schools. But by the
e n d of the teaching year 1917/18 Scripture had everywhere ceased
to be taught as a school subject. °

n / k e first half of 1918 the follow ing became the accepted

• administration of education: central bodies—the State
Commission for Education and the People’s Commissariat for Edu­
cation; then, Departments of Education under the local Soviets,
plus elective Councils for People’s Education as advisory and con­
trolling bodies attached to each Department of Education.

.. PrO"revolutionary Russia the following system of educa-

♦ii^n m ^a ~rnmistration prevailed: the central administrative body was
“ Ty ? L ^ dUu at[(?n (set UP in 1802); local control was exer­
cised (since 1804) by the Guardians of School Districts; each Dis-
i'v covered several governm ental units (gubernias), in each of
which were set up, in 1874, Directorates of Peoples’ Schools, these
being in charge of elem entary schools. Immediate control of the
elem entary schools was in the hands of the Inspectorate of E le­
m entary Schools (the office of Inspector was introduced in 1867).
u nl^C1S i?- * ie State Commission for Education, 21 Decem ­
ber, 1917, the Directorates and Inspectorates of elem entary schools
were abolished. The School Districts were wound up during the
first half of 1918.

13. Some of the reforms listed proved to be only temporary. At

that period the abolition of exam inations, certificates and award
o f marks was necessary, since they could be utilised by reactiona­
ry sections of the teaching profession to hinder the children of
working parents gaining entrance to the schools.

14. On 6 August, 1918 Lunacharsky took part in a public de­

bate on the separation of church and state, at which his opponent
was Priest Boyarsky. Lunacharsky was an ardent propagandist of
atheism . He pointed out that religion was not only a deception
but chiefly a “self-deception” on the part of the m asses, and that
this was w hy it was essential to fight it first and forem ost with
ideological weapons.
 NOTES 273

Lunacharsky repeatedly noted that the struggle against religion

in the held of education could in no w ay contradict the basic the­
ses of the Constitution on freedom of faith. It m ust not, he said,
turn into any form of adm inistrative action or assum e the form
of crude pressure, but remain strictly a m atter of conviction.
On more than one occasion Lunacharsky quoted the words ut­
tered bv V. I. Lenin in a speech to the First Congress of W orking
W omen, on 19 November, 1918: “We m ust be extrem ely careful
in lighting religious prejudices; som e people cause a lot of harm
in this struggle by offending religious toolings. We m ust use prop­
aganda and education. By lending too sharp an edge to the strug­
gle we m ay only arouse popular resentm ent; such m ethods of strug­
gle tend to perpetuate the division of the people along religious
lines, w hereas our strength lies in unity. The deepest source of re­
ligious prejudice is poverty and ignorance; that is the evil we have
to com bat”. (V. I. Lenin, "Speech at the First All-Russia Congress
of W orking W om en”, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 28, p. 181.)

15. In 1869 Norway introduced a unified school system , which

included w hat were known as “interm ediate schools (for children
aged 9-15, a six-year course), and, follow ing on from these, High
Schools (G yinnazias), with a three-year course of study.
16. Lunacharsky is paraphrasing Marx, who said: “The philo­
sophers have only i n t e r p r e t e d the world in various ways; the point
is to c h a n g e it.” (K. Marx, F. Engels, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Progress
Publishers, Moscow, Vol. 5, p. 8 )
17. Lunacharsky speaks of this at greater length in the article
“On the Class Srlioof” (see pp. 82-109 of this volum e).
18. Lunacharsky is referring to Paul Natorp (1854-19-4), German
philosopher and educationist, a prom inent representative of the so-
called “social educationists”. Natorp, like all the protagonists of
“social education”, considered that the main task of educational
theorv was to elucidate what social conditions w eie most favoui-
able lo "cod education. The aim of education, according to Natorp,
was to stim ulate the hum an being to perfect itself morally, this
being essen tial to personal happiness; the best m eans to achieve
this being to develop people s active w ill and collective conscious­
ness.
19. The All-Union Conference of Workers in Higher Schools,
with over 400 delegates taking part—professors, students, staff of
the Education Departm ents of cities w hich had institutions of high­
er education—took place 8-14 July, 1918, in Moscow. The aim of
the Conference was, in Lunacharsky’s words, “to reach agreem ent
with those teaching in higher education on how to bring the high­
er schools into line w ith the requirem ents of the new R ussia”.
(See: T h e C o m m i s s a r i a t f o r P e o p l e ' s E d u c a t i o n . 1917— O c t o b e r 1920.
S h o r t R e p o r t . 1920, p. 51). The Conference elected a Commission to
work out a Statute on the R u s s i a n U n i v e r s i t i e s , a draft for w hich
was put forward by the Comm issariat for Education.
18-01120
274 SUPPLEMENT

20. In the summer of 1918 the young Soviet Republic found

itself encircled by lighting fronts. A tense struggle was in progress
on the Eastern front, in the Urals and Volga areas from which
the forces of reaction, internal and foreign, planned to strike at
loscow. At the sjuno time counter-revolutionary armies intended
bntf»rtnKiircr R^ ia% TsaJ, Nlf t ol“ 1 1 wh° was under arrest in Ye-
R0 H th Sverdlovsk). The temporary withdrawal of the
Red army on the Eastern front had been halted by the end of
summer 1918, and m autumn 1918 it went over to the attack.
21. The Conference of Workers in Teacher Training w hich con-
ments^ for* fratu re w h “8 t0 I/1® creation of new training establish-
a"'i -rll-M f - r W took:

pasSd°a“ dedsfon"^™ ".!917. ,he, Council of Pooplo's Commissars

for Education of all t e t r h f n J ' ^ B ^ h v 1 ° the PeoPle’s Commissariat
ical control” On n Tnno '.n? osfahlishments previously under cler-
Commissars was i s s S ”O nth~ Council of People’s
sariat of Education „r ? vi- i° trans^er to the People’s Commis-
eral education corn- f establ.lsl'™ents providing teaching and gen-
auspices”. ' Prcviously under any other departmental

1918,3’created™thef nenfrtUnCi} of. pe°PIe’s Commissars, of 16 August,

within the ap p ara tu s^ f^ h n V ^ S?1ience and Technology, coming
Head o fA isD e n a r^ P n t Counci! of People’s Commissars. The
membera 8 iteD^ ^ h v t t ^ p apP?-m tediby, the Council, and the
tion wiil, ft.’

On Social Education
S p e e c h d e liv e r e d on 3 N o v e m b e r , 1918, in P e tr o g r a d

. , A m ° n ? fhf. mai ° r educational problem s raised by the Oc-

tober R evolution, that of social education occupied one o f
the central places. In Russian educational thought questions
of social education had been m ost com p rehenfivelv treated
m the works of the revolutionary dem ocrats Nikolni Pher-
n y sh e v sk y (1828-1889) and N ikolai Dobrolyubov T s s l S l .
The accom plishm en t of w hat w as needed in social education
for the purpose of pavm g the w ay for a revolutionary reor­
gan isation of so c iety — this w as one of the leitm o tifs of th eir
excu rsion s into the ed u cational field.
L unacharsky advances a step further in dealin g w ith m at­
ters of social education. In the speech here pub lish ed h e
deals w ith tw o m ain aspects: “f o r w h o m is the child edu­
cated—-for h im self or for so c ie ty ”, and u w h o should ed u cate
ch ild ren — the parents or so c ie ty ”. Through exp osition of th e
ed u cational id eals and ed u cational practice of the a n cien t
 NOTES 275

world, and of the evolving aims and tasks of the bourgeois

school, Lunacharsky demonstrates how the concepts of social
education have developed and how they are distorted in a
society that is “based on inner contradictions’’, and in which
tin* schools are only “the ante-room of the barracks”. Civic
education in its full sense can only be envisaged, as Luna­
charsky puts it, “where we see citizens being trained by a
harmonious society able to create a harmonious individual­
ity . A “normal human society of that kind is possible only
under socialism, and “only under socialism docs educational
theory find its natural application”.
In considering the first and fundamental aspect of the-
problem, “/or w h o m is the child educated—for himself or for
society”,’ Lunacharsky stresses that socialist educational
thought* sees no possible choice of answer. Educating people
“for "society” is required by virtue of the very nature of the
socialist order, whose main principle lies in “the community
of all for tho good of all”. In the socialist school “maximal
individualism merges naturally with maximal unity”.
!n answering the second question, ‘ who should educate-
children—parents or society”, Lunacharsky here too stresses
that for the socialist system any appearance of choice here
is relative. The pressing need to shield children from the
influence of the old world's vices demands, in his opinion,
extensive development of socialised education. But in saying
this Lunacharsky in no way plays down the role of the fam­
ily. Lunacharky’s standpoint on the necessity of the clo­
sest possible concerted action of socialised education and
family education has been borne out by the whole practical
experience of Soviet education. . , . ,
The advantages of socialised education (and pre-school
institutions were here seen by Lunacharsky as one of the most
important factors) were in his view that it creates the most
favourable conditions for “speeding up the process of organis­
ing the child’s inner life along communist lines , that it saves
the child from the fatal influence of petty-bourgeois philistine
family life, and finally that it gives women freedom from serf­
dom in the home and brings them extensively into the build­
ing of socialism. . _ P t ..
Lunacharsky mapped out the practical ways of extending
the sphere of socialised education—ways which have been
followed in the subsequent development of the socialist sys­
tem of education and upbringing: the development of the
system of pre-school institutions, the establishment of chil­
dren’s homos for purposes of “social assistance and the set­
ting up of boarding schools as “educational laboratories'’;
the trend for schools to become “school plus club” or “all­
day schools”; the setting up of “experimental, integrated”
(or “all-in”) establishments for children and the utilisation
of their experience in the search for “the most satisfactory
types” of school. The ideas put forward by Lunacharsky in
tliis speech have been widely developed in Soviet education­
al praclice.
<8*
276 SUPPLEMENT

1 . M u s i c ( a l ) e d u c a t i o n (from the Greek ixoviT/i]—all the arts

ruled by the Muses, i.e. culture as opposed to technology)—in the
Greek educational system that found its finest flowering in Athens
in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., this included moral, aesthetic,
political, and in general cultural education.
2. G y m n a s i u m in ancient Greece, the stale educational insti­
tution.
3. The educational ideas of Plato (427-347 B.C.) are set out most
fully in ms S l a t e and L a w s , in which he depicts the educational
system of his ideal state. The social structure of this ideal state
presupposes the existence of three estates: a small caste of ruler-
philosophers (and it is their children for whom Plato’s educational
system is designed); the warriors who are to defend the state; and
\ ° lCrS f f'VlL1 J!° rif^lLs at all, who form the vast majority
P°pulatl0n.. The education of the children of the privileged
group is of a socialised nature. From their first days, the children
are handed over to special educational institutions, where their cdu-
cation and upbringing is entrusted to an “ideal teacher”, a man
wno is in Plato s words “the best of men in all respects”, chosen
Dy tbe rulers from among the “best citizens”. (See Plato, T h e R e ­
p u b l i c . D i a l o g u e s o f P l a t o , Yol. 3. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1875)
and L a w s (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1934)

H u m b o l d t , W i l h e l m (1707-1835) —German philosopher, philol­

ogist and statesman; he favoured the creation of a unified school
system, the removal of the schools from church control, and tlio
reform of grammar school” (gymnazia) secondary education. The
University of Berlin (now in the German Democratic Republic, and
called the Humboldt University) was founded thanks to his efforts.
Humboldt was one of the most eminent representatives of clas-
S1 7 Jlclll”am5in !u Germany in the early nineteenth century. The
goal of history, in his view, was the spiritual formation and de­
velopment of human individuality in all the fullness of its capabil­
ities. ITumboldt saw this ideal of “humanity” actually realised on­
ly m classical times.

5. F o e r s t e r , F r i e d r i c h W i l h e l m (1869-1956)—German theologian,
philosopher and educationist. He viewed the training of character,
will and feeling from the standpoint of Christianity.67
6. S m i t h , A d a m (1723-1790)—Scottish economist and philosopher,
prominent representative of the classical school of bourgeois polit­
ical economy. Marx described him as “the political economist par
excellence of the period of Manufacture”, (Karl Marx, C a p i t a l , Vol­
ume I, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p. 239L and Lenin as
“the great ideologist of the progressive bourgeoisie”, (V. I. Lenin,
“The Heritage We Renounce”, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 2, p. 506).
7. See note 18 to S p e e c h at the F i r s t A ll-R u ssia C ongress on E d u c a ­
tio n (first article, in this volume).
 NOTES 277

8. P esta lo zzi, Jo h a n n H e in ric h (1746-1827)—Swiss educationist

and democrat, one of the founding fathers of the theory of pri­
mary education, and author of numerous widely-known works on
education: L e o n a r d a n d G e r t r u d e , L e t t e r to a F r i e n d o n a S t a y In
S t u n z . H o w G e r t r u d e T e a c h e s H e r C h i l d r e n , S w a n S o n g , etc.
Pestalozzi held that education should aim at the harmonious
development of all the powers and abilities of human nature. This
requirement is the basis of all the theory and methodology he elab­
orated concerning primary teaching, which was to include mental,
moral, physical and labour education. The leading principle in Pes-
talozzi's theory of how to teach at the primary stage is his idea of
d e v e l o p i n g education: the development of the pupils’ thinking pow­
ers in the course of their learning, and of their powers of appre­
hension, and the development of the habit of active application of
mind. Pestalozzi was in favour of creating schools which vould
be accessible to the children of the common people and would an­
swer their requirements and interests.
9. C o n d o r c e t , M a r i e J e a n A n t o i n e N i c o l a s de (1743-1794) -French
philosopher of the Enlightenment, mathematician, sociologist-, ac­
tive figure in the French bourgeois revolution of 1789-94. As a
member of the Legislative Assembly’s Committee on Education,
Condorcet produced a plan for the organisation of education lor
the broad masses of people; this envisaged the creation of a uni is
school system, with free passage from one stage to the next wilinn
h, equaiit v of educational opportunity for men and \\oinen, sccu-
larisalion 'of Ihe schools, and free education for all. Condoreot
stood out for independence of the schools from politics, from tfie
slate. 11is plan was not accepted.
10. M o n t a i g n e , M i c h e l , de (1 5 3 3 - 1 5 0 2 )—French philosopher and
writer. In his principal work, the E s s a y s (1580), he took an anti-
religious stand, demonstrating that religion was an invention in-
tended to he a bridle, keeping the people in check. Montaigne crit­
icised the “estates'’ or caste system and the whole world outlook
of the Middle Ages. Defending the principle of the ‘natural equal­
ity" <>f people, of the rights of the individual, lie called on people
to “jud"c of everything bv reason and not by common opinion ,
to throw off the yoke of accepted authorities and to act like men
who weigh everything up and evaluate it in the light of reason,
taking nothing on trust, (Montaigne, E s s a i s , Paris, 1962)
11. L e p e l e t i e r d e S a i n t - F a r g e a u , L o u i s M i c h e l (1/60-1/93) active
participant in the French bourgeois revolution, and author of P l a n
d* e d u c a t i o n p u b l i q u e (1793), the most democratic scheme of educa­
tion of its time. The basic aim of this plan was the introduction
of universal free education, the creation at state expense ol “houses
of national education” (with boarding accommodation), in which
all children between the ages of 5 and 11-12 were to be educated.
Lepeletier considered that to organise education on these lines
would help to overcome social inequality and improve social mor­
als. Lepelelier s plan was approved by Robespierre, but was not
passed by the Convention.
278 SUPPLEMENT

1 2 . S c h i l l e r , F r i e d r i c h (1759-1805)— German poet, philosopher and

h istorian , author of the world-fam ous plays T h e R o b b e r s , M a r i a S t u ­
a r t , I n t r i g u e a n d L o v e , W i l h e l m T e l l , etc. Lunacharsky is here re­
ferrin g to the id eas S chiller expressed in his philosophical aesth et­
ic work O n t h e A e s t h e t i c E d u c a t i o n o f M a n (1795).

13. B e b e l y A u g u s t (1840-1913)— active worker in the German and

in tern ation al labour m ovem ent, one of the founders and leaders of
S ocial D em ocracy in Germany, and of the Second International. Be-
b el w as an in spirin g force in the fight to liberate w om en front the
fetters of bourgeois society; his speeches in the R eichstag on w om ­
en s rights received w ide publicity. The idea w hich L unacharsky
m en tio n s here w as put forward by B ebel in his W o m a n a n d S o -

14. P a l e s t r a an ex clu sive gym n astic school in an cien t G reece,

from'thp mn«f h S hd i 12' 19~ Ffom llle age of 16 or 18 young m en
fiom the most high-born families attended the g y m n a s i a .

What Is Education?
S p e e c h d e livered at o p e n in g o f co u rses fo r in s tru c to rs
m e x tr a -m u r a l e d u c a tio n , on 20 D e c e m b e r , 1919

Lunacharsky's speech deals with one of the most impor­

tant socio-educational tasks facing the young Soviet state—
that of organising extra-mural or non-school education. Lu­
nacharsky treats this problem with his usual breadth of vi­
sion, taking it in all its aspects: political, social, organisa­
tional and educational.
The connection between extra-mural education and the
revolution follows a socio-educational pattern that has made
a n c l makes itself apparent in both past and present times
( f o r i n s t a n c e , i n Russia s historical experience and in the
experience of many developing countries today). At times
o f b a l a n c e i n social development, “in normal times ’, (as Lu­
nacharsky says in the speech), current educational problems
are mainly dealt with by the schools, which are socially and
educationally “tailored” to fit the society they serve. Major
shifts in society, economic and political, in breaking the struc­
ture of society also break through the educational system
so intimately connected with that structure, and education
is faced with tasks which the old schools were not able to
accomplish.
I n s u c h p e r i o d s i t becomes a starkly obvious necessity
to seek for new ways of spreading education, now education­
al forms. And in the forefront, alongside reform of the
s c h o o l s themselves, stands the task of organising extra-m ural
education. For a certain period of time these lasks become
leading and predominant within the general system of state
activities in education.
 NOTES 279

The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 brought

rxlra imiral education forward to be ranked among llie prime
political and social problems to he dealt with. It was es­
sential. in Lunacharsky's words, to give the people know ledge
in order to make it "capable of m aking use of its own
victory”.
In the speech here published Lunacharsky demonstrated
that, in the vast work of creating a new society and a new
man. extra-mural education was a key sector, a sector of
"prime, colossal im portance”; that it had become “a m ighty
lever", “a gigantic m achinery” for cultural and political en­
lightenm ent of the people—the people who had been “kept
in dungeons of darkness”.
In stressing the importance of the political and cultural
tasks of extra-mural education, Lunacharsky notes that it is
also “a m ighty lever for advancing the re-education, the
transformation of those who consider them selves educated
people”. Drawing in the in telligen tsia on a wide scale to take
an active hand in operating extra-mural education m eant that
it too became the object of social education.
Lunacharsky considers the nature, significance and aims
of extra-m ural education in close interconnection w ith the
general problems of educational philosophy. Lunacharsky
poses questions that never lose their actuality: w h a t i s e d u c a ­
t i o n ? w h o s h o u l d b e c o n s i d e r e d a n e d u c a t e d p e r s o n ? The bril­
liant lines in which he gives his answer to these questions
have an am azingly modern ring, even today.
In current educational practice extra-m ural education has
lost the all-em bracing scope it had at the time w hen this
speech w as made. So far as schools today are^ concerned, the
narrower concopt of “out-of-school work , in stitu tions for
out-of-school a ctiv ities” are more fam iliar. The term adult
education”, w hich has come into more general use, is also
narrower in its scope. These term inological changes reflect
the objective process w hich has made the tasks of extra-m u­
ral education more narrow ly specific, in step w ith the grad­
ual solution of w hat was its main task —raisin g the cultur­
al level of the people. But over recent decades, those of the
scien tific and techn ological revolution, a renew ed ten dency
has appeared to give a w ider interpretation to extra-m ural
education (in the term in ologically up-dated form of “perm a­
nent ed u cation ” or “continuous ed u cation ”).
There is a k een ly contem porary ring to L unacharsky’s
idea of a n ever-ceasin g process of education, w hich he se es
as the rational and gen eral-cu ltural source of extra-m ural
education. L unacharsky sees con tin u in g education as an u n ­
ceasin g addition to know ledge, dictated by the dem ands of
life w hich itse lf is being con stan tly renew ed, also as an ex ­
pression of the in dividu al s cap ab ilities for creative work and
self-d evelopm en t. The schools, L unacharsky stresses, “g iv e
o n ly the k e y s ” to education. T h ey “sh ould teach a person
h ow to work, sh ould estab lish certain correct m ethod s of
approach to the great m ystery that is our w orld ”, th ey sh ou ld
280 SUPPLEMENT

give “the first im petus” towards learning to know its se­

crets. A ll the rest is the business of extra-mural education,
w hich in Lunacharsky’s words “is life as it is”.

1. F e u e r b a c h , L u d w i g (1804-1872)—German materialist philosoph­

er and atheist, forerunner of Marxism.
Lunacharsky has in mind Feuerbach’s statem ent that “God did
not create man in his image, as the Bible says, it was man that
created god in his own i m a g e . . . .” [L. Feuerbach, S e l e c t e d P h i l o -
s o p f u c a l W o r k s Moscow, 1955, L e c t u r e s o n t h e N a t u r e o f R e l i g i o n ,
Vol. 2 . p. 701 (m Russian).]

2. B o r o d i n , A . P. (1833-1887)-em inent Russian composer. Bo-

rodin s most outstanding composition is his opera P r i n c e I g o r , which
is a model of national-heroic epic in music.

3. Lunacharsky is quoting the great Russian poet Alexander

Pushkin (1799-1837) [a line from his E p i g r a m ( f r o m t h e A n t h o l -
o g y ).]

„ t' Lunacharsky is referring to a short story, S o l i t u d e , by the

French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), in which he depicts
the spiritual alienation of man in the bourgeois world.

M7 fiA.T«/eQ\lde\ qU0 t-eid uSAth?t of the £r.eat Japanese artist Hokusai

(1760-1849), who said: At the age of six I tried to convey correct­
ly the form of things. Over half a century I produced m any pic­
tures, but until I reached the age of seventy I did not achieve
anything of importance. At 73, I was studying the structure of ani­
mals, birds, insects and plants. Thus I can say that until I reach
80 my art w ill still continue to develop, and by 90 I shall be able
to penetrate the very essence of a r t”

6 . P e o p l e s U n i v e r s i t i e s —cultural institutions open to all, one ef­

fective means of raising the educational level and satisfying the
spiritual needs of working people. The mass provision of People’s
U niversities was a task that the Soviet Union was only able to
accom plish some years after the defeat of the nazism in the Great
Patriotic War of 1941-45. People’s Universities became w idely de­
veloped in the 1950s, a n d by the early 1970s there were about six­
teen thousand People's Universities in the country, in which over
3 m illion people* were studying. Particularly popular are the Peo­
ple's Universities for the Study of Education, which account for
alm ost one-third of the total number of students in all the People’s
Universities.

7. Lunacharsky is referring to the soldiers’ uprising in Bulgaria

in September 1918.
 NOTES 2 8 l:

Communist Propaganda and the Educational System

Article first p u b l i s h e d in the newspaper Izveslia. on 26 M arch . 1919

The occasion for the article being written was provided

by a discussion in the press on the organisation of political-
educational work in the Soviet state. This discussion resulted
in the re-organisation, in 1920, of the Extra-Mural Depart­
m ent at the Commissariat for Education, to form the Prin­
cipal Committee of the Republic for Political Education ( G l a v -
p o l i t p r o s u c t ) ; N. K. Krupskaya, (1869-1939), the em inent figure
in the Communist Party and in the Soviet state, leading Mar­
xist educationist, V. I. Lenin s w ife and closest co-worker,
was appointed to lead this body. The above-mentioned occa­
sion for the article’s appearance, however, does not fully in­
dicate the scope of the problems it deals with. Beyond the
organisational question Lunacharsky sees the larger political
and social-educational problem, a m ost important problem for
the entire educational work of the Communist Party and it
is Ihis problem w hich he takes to provide the main heading
and title of the article C o m m u n i s t P r o p a g a n d a a n d t h e E d u ­
cational S yste m . .
In tellin g and practised form ulations Lunacharsky sum ­
m arises in this article the argum ents he has previously stat­
ed on the class nature of education, and sets out the aim s
and tasks of the educational policy of the Soviet governm ent.
Considering education as “an im portant weapon of class strug­
gle in the hands of the proletariat”, as an instrum ent of class
propaganda, he em phasises that education both w ithin the
schools and outside them m ust be informed by the spirit
of scientific socialism ”, m ust serve the aims of the building
of com m unism .

1. P e r s o n a l e q u a t i o n (or p e r s o n a l e r r o r ) — a term used in astron­

omy, to indicate a system atic error of the observer in fixing the
m om ent of a heavenly body passing through the field of telescope,
sextan t or other astronom ical instrument; this error depending on
the particular characteristics of the observations, their mode of reg­
istration, and the personal qualities of the observer. Lunacharsky
uses the term to indicate the personal attitudes of the worker stu­
dying social phenom ena.

2. Lunacharsky has in m ind the follow ing words of Ferdinand

Lassalle ( 1825 - 1864 ), a figure prom inent in the C.erman labour m ove­
ment: “The fourth estate, in whose heart there can be not even
the least, em bryonic trace of privileged attitudes, is for that very
reason synonym ous with all h u m a n ity . . . . W hen the fourth estate
rules the slate, that w ill bring with it a flowering of m orality, cu l­
ture and science such as has never been seen in history/'
282 SUPPLEMENT

The Tasks of Extra-Mural Education

in Soviet Russia
S p e e c h d e liv e re d at the First A ll-R u ssia Congress
on E x tra -M u ra l E d u c a tio n , on 6 M a y , 1919

The First All-Russia Congress on Extra-Mural Education

took place in Moscow from 6 to 19 May, 1919. About
eight hundred delegates attended the Congress. V. I. Lenin
addressed the Congress twice. The Congress considered a wide
range of questions in the field of extra-mural education and
passed a number of resolutions: on the liquidation o f ’ illit­
eracy, on the creation of a state system of institutions for
extra-mural education, etc. A special resolution was passed
on the current situation.
The current situation at the time the Congress m et was
the grim one of the Civil War, the days of terrible danger
hanging over the head of the young Soviet republic. In the
spring of 1919 the united forces of outside intervention and
internal counter-revolution began a new offensive, on a wider
scale than all preceding ones. Taking part in this, besides
the Russian White Guard armies, were troops from’ Britain,
France, Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Greece, Rou-
mania, and the bourgeois Baltic states. Describing the alarm ­
ing military^ situation at the time of the Congress, Lunachar­
sky remarked that the very calling of the Congress was pro­
foundly symbolic, indicative of the “m ight of our m ovem ent’’
and of the fact that the task of developing education in the
country was as important as gaining victory over the forces
of counter-revolution.
Lunacharsky’s speech at the Congress was intended in
his own words, to show “the im m ense breadth and im por­
tance” of extra-mural work, and to map out “at least the cen­
tral problems” which the Congress was called on to solve
This practical aim determined Lunacharsky’s approach to the
matter of extra-mural education. In contrast to the speech
W h a t is E d u c a t i o n ?, which reviewed the philosophic social-
political and general cultural aspects of extra-mural educa­
tion, Lunacharsky concentrates here on the practical side of
the question. The main points in the speech here published
are the actual tasks facing extra-mural education, its organ­
isation and its content, its means and its forms, the dif­
ficulties standing in the way of its development and the m eas­
ures needed to overcome them.
The principal tasks of extra-mural education as Lunachar­
sky saw them were “to ensure the right and the obligation
of every person to be literate” (“the daily bread of extra­
mural education in Russia”); to popularise science and art*
to spread technological knowledge; and to develop phvsical
education. All Ibis “im measurable field” of exira-m ural \v o rk
should also be, in his words, “shot through with the scarlet
.thread of political propaganda .
In sketching out the way forward to the solution of the
 NOTES 283

problems of extra-mural education, Lunacharsky makes his

own contribution to clarifying theoretical understanding of
thorn too. Ho expresses a great many valuable opinions, which
still retain their force even today, on the content of extra­
mural education, its didactic foundations, its methods.
On the theoretical side, of particular interest today are
the brilliant pages devoted to the socio-educational and so-
cio-psychological role of art, to the tasks of extra-mural edu­
cation “in the matter of art”. Of equal interest, in the light
of contemporary ideas on “continuous education”, is the in­
terpretation advanced by Lunacharsky of the concept of edu­
cation itself, and his views on the tasks of extra-mural edu­
cation.
The First All-Russia Congress on Extra-Mural Education
plaved a most important part in developing a broad m ove­
ment. with general public participation, to get rid of illiter­
acy throughout the country. Those taking part in the Con­
gress addressed a request to the Council of People’s Com­
m issariats to issue a decree on obligatory liquidation of illit­
eracy am ong the adult population (up to the age of 50)
a n d ‘among young people not attending schools. A draft de­
cree was produced bv the People’s Commissariat for Education
towards the end o f ‘ 1919, and on 26 December of that year
the Decree On the Liquidation of Illiteracy among the Popu­
lation of the Russian Federation was signed by Lenin. This
was the first state intervention of the Soviet governm ent on
instruction f o r a l l —a unique, am azing m anifesto on revolu­
tion in culture. The decree marked the beginning^ of a mass
onslaught on illiteracy, of energetic, planned action by the
Soviet state on this sector of the cultural front. .
The Soviet governm ent not only defined the liquidation
of illiteracy as a task laid upon the whole of the people, it
also provided the conditions essential for its execution.
Throughout the country, instruction was to be given at state
expense. The Commissariat for Education received the right
to call upon the whole literate population to take part, as
an obligatory national service, in the teaching of the illiter­
ate. The w orking day for all those being taught to read and
Avrite was shortened by two hours, without loss of pay. The
establishm ents controlled by the Commissariat Avcre em pow­
ered to make use of all prem ises suitable for teaching pur­
p oses—in factories, offices, clubs, private houses etc. The
Decree prescribed Avide involvem ent in the work of liq u i­
dating illiteracy of local branches of the C om m unist Party,
the trade unions and the Young Communist League, the Com­
m ission for Work am ong W omen, and other organisations.
The body in charge of the nationw ide m ovem ent to liquidate
illiteracy was the A ll-Russia Extraordinary Comm ission for
the Liquidation of Illiteracy, set up at the P eople’s Com m is­
sariat for Education on 19 June, 1920.1
1. The First All-R ussia Congress on Pre-School Education took
Place in Moscow in April 1919.
284 SUPPLEMENT

2. R i c a r d o , D a v i d (1772-1823)—English economist, the id eologist

of the industrial bourgeoisie in the struggle with the land-owning
aristocracy during the period of the Industrial Revolution. Karl
Marx said that Ricardo “gave to classical political economy its final
shape . (Karl Marx. .4 C o n t r i b u t i o n t o t h e C r t i q u e o f P o l i t i c a l E c o n ­
o m y , Moscow, 1971, p. 61).
3. M a l t h u s , T h o m a s R o b e r t ( 17G6-1834)—English economist, clergy­
man, founder of Malthusianism, a doctrine of vulgar sociology. In
his E s s a y o n t h e P r i n c i p l e o f P o p u l a t i o n he expounded view s which
later became widespread in bourgeois social thinking, especially in
the late nineteenth century ideas on political economy.
Lunacharsky is referring to what Marx said about Malthus in
th e o r ie s of S u rp lu s-V a lu e:
The scientific conclusions of Malthus are lc o n s i d e r a l e , towards
in*l- c*asscs *n general and towards the reactionary elem ents
ot trie ruling classes in particular; in other words he f a l s i f i e s sci-
ence lor these interests.*’ (Karl Marx, T h e o r i e s o f S u r p l u s - V a l u e ,
Part III, Moscow, 1975, p. 120.)

4. N. R. Krupskaya in her speech of w elcom e w hich opened the

Longress stressed the need for close links between extra-mural edu-
cation and political education of the m asses. Krupskaya proposed
that political guidance in the affairs of extra-mural education in the
republic should be entrusted to the Extra-Mural Department of the-
copie s Commissariat for Education, which should lik ew ise be re­
sponsible for coordinating the various sectors of extra-m ural work,
tvrupskaya s proposals envisaged the creation of a unified state sy s­
tem oi extra-mural education which would provide a basis for uni-
ncation of all cultural and educational work throughout the coun­
try J bese proposals were embodied in the Theses on the Organ­
isation of Extra-Mural Education in the Russian Federation w hich
were approved by the Congress.

On the Class School

L e c t u r e d e l i v e r e d o n 26 A p r i l , 1 920 f o r t h e b r a n c h
o f th e C o m m is sa ria t fo r E d u c a tio n at th e S v e r d l o v U n iv e r s ity

, ,*n *h e. work here published Lunacharsky dispels w id ely

held illusions that the state is abovo classes, and d isclo ses
the class purposes and class nature of state in stitu tio n s—
church, army, press, bourgeois governm ent. And am ong these
em erges, in sharp definition, the social role of the bourgeois
school as “an instrum ent for distorting the con sciousness of
the m asses”.
As enlightenm ent and culture progresses, the b ourgeois
school performs its social function, as Lunacharsky says, w ith
ever-decreasing success. “Science,” he says, “has a lw a y s im ­
pelled people towards socialism , if they were honest and took
a sufficiently wide view of thin gs.” This is w h y a ll progres­
sive educational theories have, in h is opinion, so cia list id ea s
as their kernel. And this is w hy the bourgeoisie is not in-
 NOTES 285

to rested in rrealing a truly scion Ii lie school system .

To the bourgeois school Lunacharsky counterposes the
communist school. He formulates the ideal and the aims of
the unified, polytechnical labour school, and maps out the
practical ways forward to their attainment, bearing in mind
the difficulties the country had to live through and the ex­
perience, too. which had been built up over the two years
that had passed since the declaration that the unified labour
schoid was to be.
In his lecture Lunacharsky gives, for the first lime, a de­
tailed exposition of his view s on labour education (education
■Through labour” and education “for real labour”), and of his
concept of polytechnical education. The central point to which
attention is directed is, first and always, the educational im ­
portance of labour, the beneficial educational effects of la­
bour. If there is labour done w ithout these effects benig
achieved, then that is, in his words, “a crime perpetrated by the
school”. Lunacharsky analyses the different forms of labour
used in schools, the different methods of labour education
applied, and defines the principles and organisational lay-out
of labour training and polytechnical education for schools
of various grades.
The ideas Lunacharsky expresses in this work have not
lost their significance today. The resolution passed in De­
cember 1977 by the Central Committee of the Communist
Parly of the USSR and by the USSR Council of M inisteis
“On the Further Im provem ent of the Instruction and Educa­
tion Given to Pupils in General Schools, and Their Prepara­
tion for W orking L ife”, lays particular em phasis of the im ­
portance of “preparing school students for useful, productive
labour”, and outlines a broad curriculum of labour education
and instruction in the general school (see P r a v d a , 29 Decem ­
ber, 1977).

[The S v e r d lo v U n iv e rs ity (the Comm unist U niversity named

after Yakov Sverdlov) w as the first establishm ent for higher Party
education; it trained cadres for work in the Party and in Soviet
governm ental posts. If was created in 1919, on the basis provided by
the courses for Party propagandists and lecturers, under the auspices
of the Partv's A ll-R ussia Executive Committee; these had been
initiated by Yakov Sverdlov (1885-1919), Chairman of the E xecutive
Com m ittee and outstanding figure in the Comm unist Party and the
Soviet state. The first curriculum for the U niversity w as drawn up
by Sverdlov and approved by Lenin. In 1939 the U niversity w as
reorganised to becom e the Higher Party School and in 1978, the
A cadem y of Social S ciences under the Central Comm ittee of the
CPSU.]1

1. B r i a n d , A r i s t i d e (1862-1932)—French statesm an and diplomat.

From the 1880s onwards took an active part in the so cia list m ove­
m ent. E lected as a parliam entary deputy in 1902, becam e a m em ­
ber of the bourgeois governm ent in 1906, and w as in consequence
28G SUPPLEM ENT

ex p elled from the S ocialist Party. Betw een 1909 and 1931 he held
the p ost of Prim e M inister eleven tim es.

2. C h e r n o v , V. .1/. (1876-1952)—one of the leaders and theoreti­

cia n s of the Social R evolutionary party (the SR s). In 1917 w as Min­
ister of A griculture in the bourgeois P rovisional Governm ent, and
carried out ru thless repressive actions against the peasants. A fter
the October R evolution he w as one of tho organisers of a n ti-S oviet
revolts. In 1920 he em igrated abroad, where he continued his anti-
S oviet activities.
T s e r e t e l i I G. (1882-1952)—in May-Juno 1917 w as M inister of
F ostal and T elegraphic Com m unications, and later M inister for In-
r oS’ the bourgeois P rovisional Governm ent. A fter the
trium ph of Soviet power he w ent into em igration abroad.

in ^ \,^ '-^ b - j^ 75)— textile m anu factu ring m agn ate

v lll; . u,ssla ; M inister for Trade and Industry and, later, D ep-
n RA
EmiirratPd afm, tilern ‘. “ i th£ bourgeois P rovisional G overnm ent,
em igrated a Tier the October R evolution.
l n n ^ T U f , ^ ' ( 1?61- 1,9 25) —Prince in the old n obility, ow ner of great
S fn u f o r . a V " • Marcfb-Ju ly 1917 Chairman of the C ouncil of
i m l r™ M inister for Internal Affairs in the b ourgeois Pro-
unm en.l• A fter the October R evolution w en t in to em igra-
Soviet Russia^ m 1 le 01&an^sati° n ° f arm ed in terven tion against

industry*'Tne?10 l 7 1 1 (b- 1888)—m illionnairc, m agnate of the sugar

Foreinn 'A ffn il! L i f M inister of Finance and, later, M inister for
nratioif afiPr V oi 7 bourgeois P rovisional Governm ent. In em i-
again st organisers of arm ed in terv en tio n

1890 “ 4 M ember1'o f ' p S m e n t

ifprtaJMtateterm t S ™ ' GhanCellor of the E xchequ er 1908-
«vsmmydnfG ri0or^ ^ aS m ost colourful exp on en t of the b ou rgeois
system of deceiving the m asses of the people b y d em agogy. "I
‘S°fmr tbp bSyM 0I?1 ^ o y ^ G o o rg e ism , w rote Lenin fn 1916.
after the E nglish M inister Lloyd George, one of tho forem ost and
m ost dexterous representatives of this system in the cla ssic lan d
of the bourgeois labour party . A firstrdass b ourgeois m anipulator,
an astute politician, a popular orator w ho w ill d eliver an y sp e e c h e s
you like, even r-r-revolutionary ones, to a labour audience, and a
man who is capable of obtaining sizable sops for docile w ork ers
in the shape of social reform s (insurance, etc,) Lloyd G eorge serv es
the bourgeoisie splendidly, and serves it p recisely a m o n g th e
workers, brings its influence p r e c i s e l y to the proletariat, to w here
the bourgeoisie needs it m ost and w here it finds it m o st d ifficu lt
to su b ject the m asses m orally.” (V. I. Lenin, I m p e r i a l i s m a n d t h e
S p l i t in S o c i a l i s m . C o l l e c t e d W o r k s . Yol. 23, pp. 117-118.)
M i l l e r a n d , A l e x a n d r e E t i e n n e (1859-1943)—F rench p o liticia n , in
the 1890s joined the S ocialists and took the lead in th e op portu nist
w ing of the French socia list m ovem ent. In 1899 took office in a
 NOTES 287

reactionary bourgeois government, where he worked together with

General GallilTet (1830-1000), butcher of the Paris Communards,
who was given the post of War Minister.
It was this action of Millerand's that gave rise to the concept
of Millerandisin or m inistcrism, “m inisterial socialism '’—a form
of political collaboration with the bourgeoisie on the part of lead­
ers of socialist, parties. In 1008 Lenin called Millerandisin in France,
‘the biggest experim ent in applying revisionist political tactics
on a wide, a really national s c a l e . . . . ” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works,
Vol. 15, p. 37).
In 1004 Millerand was expelled from the Socialist Party; in the
period 1900 through to 1015 he occupied various m inisterial posts,
and from 1920 to 1924 was President of the French Republic.

5. Kant ski). Karl (1854-1938)—one of the leaders and theoreti­

cians of German Social-Democracy and of the Second International,
to begin with a Marxist, later a traitor to Marxism; the ideologist
of the most dangerous and harmful variety of opportunism Kauts-
kyism , which recognises the truth of Marxism in words, but in
deeds takes the direction of apologia for capitalism, denial of the
class si n iggle and of the socialist revolution. After the October R e\-
olulion Kaulsky came out against Soviet power and the dictator­
ship of the proletariat. , , . T • •
Kautskv's retreat from Marxism was laid bare by Lenin in 1 he
Collapse of the Second International (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works,
Vol. 21, pp. 207-259) and in The Proletarian Revolution and the Ren-
rgate Kaul sky ~(V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 227-
325) also in a number of other works.

b. Lunacharsky is alluding to the expression used by the great

Russian satirist ‘ Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), who repeatedly
ridiculed the “educational” policy (in Russian “policy of enlighten-
ing”—Trans.) of the tsarist governm ent and the activities of its
Ministry of Education. . . ...
Lenin also frequently used the same expression. In the article
On the Policy of Ministry of Education (written in 1913) Lenin
noted that “our Ministry of (forgive the expression) ‘Education
has the sob? aim of darkening national consciousness and conceal*
ing the beggarly state of public education in Russia . The Ministry
of Public M iseducation/’ Lenin emphasised, “is in essence a m in­
istry of police surveillance, m aking a mockery of young people
and abusing the desire of the people for know ledge.” The Ministry s
policy proved for all to see that “there is no more ^virulent, more
irreconcilable enem y to enlightenm ent of the people in Russia, than
the Russian governm ent”.

7. The figures quoted by Lunacharsky arc actually rather high­

er than they should have been. The first universal census of the
Russian population, made in 1897, showed that only 3 persons out
of 100,000 com ing from the rural classes had higher education, and
only one out of a thousand had secondary education. As was right­
ly remarked early in the twentieth century, “the influence of the
^288 SUPPLEMENT

sch ools touched to any very noticeable degree only the upper, w ell-
to-do strata of the peasant world; the poor got only the crumbs
from the hum ble table which the schools offered to the people”.

8. P a u l s e n , F r i e d r i c h (1846-1908)—German philosopher and edu­

cationist, professor of the University of Berlin. He directed his at­
tention m ainly to problems of the inter-relationship and inter­
dependence of ethics and education, and to seeking ways of edu­
cating the hum an being as part of the social whole. He was in
favour of renewing the content of education by bringing in the
latest data of scientific research, and by using more active teaching
m ethods.
The ideas quoted by Lunacharsky are set out in Paulsen's Ped -
'1gobies.

0. See Note 5 to article “On Social Education”.

10. Buisson , Ferdinand (1841-1932) —French educationist and ac­

tive public figure; in 1879-1896 was director of elem entary educa­
tion in France, and from 1896 held the Chair of Education in the
Sorbonne; was one of the initiators of the school reforms of the
end of the nineteenth century (the law s providing for free edu­
cation, for secular education, etc.). He spoke out in favour of the
separation of school from church, and of excluding religion from
the school curriculum. He was the Editor of a four-volume Diction­
ary oj Education and of the Primary School which was published
in the 1880s.

11. The circular “on the children of cooking w om en”, as it be­

came known, was issued on 18 June, 1887 by Minister of Education
I. D. Delyanov. This circular raised the fees for study in places of
secondary education and recommended a purge of pupils, “w ithout
due regard being paid” to existing rules and regulations; it also
required the Guardians of School Districts to m eet with “a liriu
refusal” aDy requests from “persons w ithout m eans or w ithout su f­
ficien t m eans” that their children should be accepted for places in
gymnazi i (secondary schools). “Given unwavering application of
this rule,” the circular noted, “the gymnazii and their preparatory
departments w ill be spared the presence w ithin them of the offspring
of coachmen, footmen, cooks, washerwomen, sm all shopkeepers and
suchlike persons, whose children it is not at all desirable—with
the possible exception of those gifted with special a b ilities— to bring
forward out of the sphere of life to w hich they belong.”

12. C l a s s i c a l e d u c a t i o n — type of general secondary education based

on study of the ancient Greek and Latin languages and their
literatures. In the modern (“real”) system there was no teaching
of the ancient languages, and the main attention was given to study
of the basis of the natural sciences, m athem atics and physics,
and to modern languages. , ,
In Russia the idea of classical education began to spread from
the seventeenth century onwards. But up to the m iddle of the nine-
 NOTES 289

teentli century the teaching given in secondary schools was of a

mixed character: one can see in it features belonging to both the
classical and the modern system s. The tendency to stress the clas­
sical side appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The em phasis on classical education w ent side by side with tho
stricter class criteria in selection for secondary education.
The reactionary “school reform” of 1871-72 confirmed the clas­
sical gymnazia as the only fully-recognised type of Russian se­
condary school, giving the right of entry to university. The “mod­
ern” schools brought into being by the same reform did not give
their pupils this right. Underlining the political significance of this
ruling, the then Minister of Internal Affairs P. A. Valuyev wrote
to Alexander II as follows: “The modern system of education has
alw ays and everywhere given greater scope to the spread of ma­
terialism and of crude socialistic ideas than has the classical sys­
tem.1’ The establishm ent of classical education, in V aluyev’s opinion,
was to make secondary education “healthier” in those places where
'social theories have taken the place of the sciences, materialism
has crowded out religion, and political am bitions have replaced
serious educational work”.
In line with this political attitude, classical education in the
Russian schools was given an extrem ely formal, “gram m arians
approach. Its function was to turn the pupils’ attention away from
the pressing problems of contemporary life, to avert any awakening
of civic conscience in R ussia’s young people, and furthermore to
act as a filter to stop propertyless youngsters getting to university.
“C lassical education^ rem ained the predominant type of second­
ary education in Russia right up to the Great October Socialist
Revolution.

13. Lunacharsky is quoting from memory Paulsen’s book A His­

torical Outline of the Development of Education in Germany (Mos­
cow ed., 1908, cf. pp. 229-235, 234-258.)

14. Lunacharsky has in mind the events of 1917 in Moscow. The

action of counter-revolutionary forces in Moscow was supported by
organised groups of bourgeois students.

15. R o u s s e a u , J c a n - J a c q u e s (1712-1778)—French philosopher of

the Enlightenm ent, writer, educationist.
R ousseau s educational view s found their fu llest expression in
the novel Emile or On Education. Rousseau was criticising the feu­
dal upper class system of education, which crushed the individ­
uality of the child. Considering freedom to be a natural right of
man, he advanced the idea of free education, w hich would bring
out all the good naturally latent w ithin tho child. Rousseau con­
demned authoritarianism in education and stressed that one m ust
not train a child to obey blindly w hat adults tell it to do. He was
an enem y of dogmatism and scholasticism , and a partisan of the
need to develop children’s powers of independent thought. Rous­
seau attributed particular importance to moral education, which
he saw as closely connected with education through work.
1 0 - 0 1 120
290 SUPPLEMENT

R ousseau's educational ideas, inspired by humanist and demo­

cratic altitudes, had a great influence on the development, of prog­
ressive educational theory and practice in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries.

16. See Note 8 to article “On Social Education '.

1 7 Ilcrbarl, Johann Friedrich (1 7 7 6 -!8 -il)-G m u a n i d e a l i s t phi­

losopher, psychologist and educationist. He attempted, on the basis
of the data provided by philosophy and psychology, to provide a
theoretical foundation for educational ideas: philosophy, in Iler-
b arts presentation, points out the aims of education, and psycho­
logy indicates the means to their attainment. The main aim of
education Herbert saw as bringing the human w ill into harmony
with ethical meals, and developing a wide range of interests in
the human individual. The aim, in his opinion, can be attained by
means of directing children”, by elevating instruction and moral
training.
Alongside many positive ideas, Herbart’s concept of education—
in particular, his theory of moral education (which was directed
towards inculcating “moderation” and a sense of hum ility, of de­
pendence upon higher forces) included, in his theory of “direct-
n ’ consisted m ainly in the suppression of the
c ild s wrong will* or w ilfulness) elem ents which often predomi-
„ ana £ave educational system as a whole a conservative
character, lh e se conservative elem ents were w idely developed by
llerbart s successors, who used his ideas to justify the concept of
11] .e,ducaLion- ^ is hardly accidental that “Her-
Co ! ,0 n a l ld ea® w ?re very P°Pu la«\ in the second half of
triesDmeteent^ C Ury’ m l^e governmental circles of m any coun-

, J 8; v L rZ b e ! \ Fnrie ? r! c h . (1/82-1852)-G er m a n
educationist, pupil
t * o o 7 C1i: °* Pastalozzi> the theoretician of pre-school education.
In 1837 he opened an establishm ent “for the play and occupations
of younger children to which he gave the name “kindergarten".
A child, in Froebels opinion, is a growing plant (hence the name
children s gaiden ); the aim of the kindergarten was to assist
the developm ent of natural powers and individual characteristics
in children, to satisfy their need for activity in concert with their
peers.
Froebel carried on active propaganda for the creation of kinder­
gartens, and trained women teachers for work in them. Kinder­
gartens, and the system of pre-school education elaborated by Froe­
bel, based upon the idea of all-round developm ent of the child by
m eans of play and exercises of various kind, found wide acceptance
and developm ent in m any countries throughout the world.

19. In pre-revolutionary Russia there were about a hundred dif­

ferent types of “people’s” primary schools, and none of them had
any connection with the secondary schools. Secondary education,
to say nothing of higher education, was the privilege of the prop-
 NOTES 291

erliotl classes. Only a liny number of children of working parents

succeeded in g ellin g into secondary schools. The census of 1897
showed that in estab lish m en ts of secondary education for m ales
those of peasant origin made up on ly 7.7 per cent of the total
number of pupils, and in establishm ents for fem ales—only 6.4 per
cent.
The October R evolution removed all privileges in the m atter of
education. In accordance with the directive “On the Universal La­
bour School in the Russian Socialist Federated R epublic”, issued
on 16 October, 1918, a unified labour school providing a nine-year
course w as created, divided into two grades: the first for children
from 8 to 13 years of age, and the second for those from 13 to 17.
From the school year 1932-33 the length of course in the general
schools w as increased to ten years.

20. Croquis (F ren ch )—a quickly made draft for a drawing,

w hether m echanical, topographical or artistic.
21. Lunacharsky has in mind the disciples of Tolstoy—a reli­
gious, U topian social trend which came into being in Russia at
the ciose of the n ineteenth century, under the influence of the great
Russian writer Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910). The Tolstoyans proposed
to transform society through m oral self-perfecting and teaching
“universal lo v e”, “nonviolent resistance to ev il”, and moral puri­
fication through p hysical labour. Lenin wrote that the Tolstoyans
“had converted the w eak est side of his doctrine into a dogma
(Lenin, Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revol uti on , Col-
lected Works, Vol. 15, p. 206).

22. B l o n s k y Pavel Petrovich (1884-1941)- S o v i e t educationist and

psychologist. From the first days of Soviet power he played an ac­
tive part in transform ing the schools and in elaborating the theo­
retical foundations of Soviet thinking on education and psychology.
The book by B lonsky to w hich Lunacharsky refers, The Labour
S c h o o l (1919), had a great influence upon the form ation of the
ideas and principles of the poly technical labour sc^hool.
Kalashnikov, Al exei Georgievich (1893-1962)— Soviet physicist,
teacher, educationist; editor of the first Soviet Educational Encyclo­
paedi a, in three volum es (1927-29). Worked on problem s of edu­
cational theory, of the polytechnical labour school, and of teach­
ing m ethod for physics in the secondary school and in higher edu­
cation. Lunacharsky is referring to K alashn ikovs brochure Proo-
lems of the Industrial Labour School of the Immedi at e Future >
w hich came out in 1919.
23. N a r k o m z e m —ihe P eople’s Comm issariat of A griculture, one
of the eighteen P eople’s Commissariats (or “N arkom s”) w hich un­
der the 1918 C onstitution of the Russian Federation were the cen­
tral bodies of departm ental administration.
The first P eople’s Commissariats were formed by the directive
“On the E stablishm ent of a Council of P eople’s Com m issars”, w hich
w as approved by the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 October
10*
292 S U PP L E M E N T

(8th N ovem ber n ew sty le ), 1917. The Council of P eople’s Com­

m issa r s—the first Soviet governm ent—was headed by V. I. Lenin.
24. The E ighth Congress of the Russian C om m unist Party (Bol­
s h e v ik s ), w hich took place in March 1919, approved a new (second)
P arty Program m e (the first Programme of the Party had been ap­
proved by the Second Congress of the R ussian Social-D em ocratic
Party, held in B russels and in London in July/A ugust, 1903).
The n ew Programm e indicated, am ong other things:
• j r e Per^0C^. ° f the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the
period of preparation of the conditions required for full realisation
oi com m unism , the schools m ust be not o n ly a m eans of com m uni-
?atin& .e , P rinciples of com m unism in general, but also of bring-
m g the id eological, organisational and educative in fluence of the
proletariat to bear upon the sem i-proletariat and the non-proletarian
i t w o er r i n g , t m as?os’ in order to bring up a n ew g en ­
eration capable of finally a ch ievin g com m un ism .”

The R ole of the W orkers’ F acu lties (R abfaks)

The article was first p u b l i s h e d in the journal
V estn ik R abochikh F ak u ltelo v
( M e s s e n g e r of the W o r k e r s * Fac ul t i e s)
No 1, 1921, pp. 3-7.

i T{*e ru^es g o v ern in g en try to p laces o f h ig h er ed u ca tio n

r w ere approved by the C ouncil of P eo p le’s C om m issars
ot the R ussian F ederation in A u g u st 1918 m arked the b eg in ­
n in g of a radical restru ctu rin g of h igher ed u cation , and o p en ed
its doors w ide, g iv in g as it did tlie rig h t of en try to a n y
p lace of h ig h e r ed u cation to a ll p erson s, irresp ectiv e of n a ­
tio n a lity or sex, w ho had a ttain ed the ag e of six te e n . B u t
th e a b o litio n in la w of the lim ita tio n s on en try p r e v io u sly in
force w as in su ffic ie n t in itse lf, for a lo n g tim e to com e, to
be effective in b reak in g dow n the cla ss ch aracter of h ig h er
ed u ca tio n . It w as e s se n tia l to create th e a ctu a l c o n d itio n s
n e e d e d f o r d em o cra tisa tio n o f h ig h e r e d u c a tio n — to o r g a n ise
sp ee d e d -u p p relim in a r y in stru ctio n for en tra n ts draw n from
th e w ork ers and p ea sa n ts, and, in ad d itio n , to c h a n g e th e in ­
ter n a l fram ew ork o f life in p la c e s of h ig h e r ed u ca tio n . W ith
th is aim in m ind , it w a s d ecid ed to op en p rep a ra to ry c o u r s e s
sta r tin g in the a u tu m n of 1918.
The working experience of these courses soon showed that
even if the first task—preparing workers to enter higher edu­
cation had been solved, the second still remained—the
courses had practically no influence upon the life of the high­
er schools. Having been set up outside the latter, they were
in practice cut off from them, and were unable to change
their atmosphere to any great extent. The way out of the
dilemma was found by the workers themselves. “The young
Party comrades of the Zamoskvoretsky District,” wrote Lu­
nacharsky in his report on the work of the People’s Com-
 NOTES 293

m issariat for Education over the years 1917-1920, “cam e up

with an idea: w hy prepare workers for u niversity outside
tin* university? W ould it not be sim pler to take them in there,
and make Ilie u niversity prepare its own future students,
there on the spot?” (See* The People's Commissariat for Ed u ­
cation. 7.9/7—October 1920. A Brief Report. 1920, p. 59). This
was the origin of the “rabfaks11 or W orkers’ Faculties. The
first of them was opened at the beginning of 1919, on the
in itiative of the workers of Zam oskvoretsky District, at the
Institute of Commerce, which was sim u ltan eou sly re-formed
as the Karl Marx Institute of the Economy.
On 11 September, 1919 the People's Com m issariat for Edu­
cation of the Russian Federation approved a directive On
the Organisation of W orkers’ F aculties w ithin the U niversi­
ties. The system of W orkers’ F aculties was leg a lly form ulat­
ed on 17 Septem ber. 1920 by the decree On W orkers’ Fa­
cu lties issued by the Council of P eople’s Commissars. The
article here published w as w ritten by Lunacharsky soon af­
ter the publication of this decree, for the purpose of elucidat­
ing the aim s and the special characteristics of the faculties,
these new educational institutions.
In the article Lunacharsky sets out the three basic tasks
of the W orkers’ Faculties: 1) to provide “by-pass routes’’ to
bring new recruits into higher education; 2) to proletarianise
higher educational in stitu tions by bringing in “fresh for­
ce s” and “new blood” to the universities and other establish­
m ents of higher education; 3) to change the internal func­
tioning, “the actual m orphology” of these estab lish m en ts—
from their general ideological atm osphere to actual curri­
cula and m ethods of leaching. In the W orkers F aculties Lu­
nacharsky sees not only a m eans of “conquering the univer­
sities from w ithou t”, but lik ew ise a weapon for con q :^ st
from w ith in ”, for bringing about “a sh ift in all the valu es ac­
cepted w ithin the u n iversities”. That is w hy the \\o r k e r s
F aculty, in Lunacharsky s opinion, had to becom e an in te­
gral, fully valid part of the university, a liv in g organ of that
body”
This short article of the role of the W orkers’ F aculties
brings out in fu ll m easure one of the basic characteristics of
L unacharsky’s educational creativity, of his contribution as a
leader in the educational field. It offers a brilliant exam ple
of an alysis of social and educational facts and processes, and
a lesson in active intervention in these processes, in how
to take up and develop a valuable in itiative com ing from
below , from the m asses.
The issu e of the W orkers’ Faculties rem ained constantly
w ithin Lunacharsky’s field of vision. He believed that in tim e
(when the class structure of society w ould have altered, and
w ith it the social com position of the student body) the need
for W orkers’ F aculties would disappear. But at the period
w hen these F aculties were set up they played a unique role.
Lunacharsky defines this role as “a kind of academ ic Octo-
294 SUPPLEMENT

ber R evolution”. “The irruption of the proletarian mass . . .

into the R ussian u n iversities;’ he wrote, “lias made it pos­
sib le, at last, for this Sleeping Beauty to be aw akened, for
a start to be made on transforming d ecisively the method
and m anner of academ ic teaching.’’ Having started the “rev-
olution in higher ed u cation ’, the W orkers’ F aculties brought
J1! r^a breath of ozone” to “freshen up” its atmosphere.
[.4 B r i e f R e p o r t (as above), pp. 58-63].
By the mid-1920s, graduates of the W orkers’ Faculties
made up 40 per cent of the total number of entrants to places
of higher education. By the start of the 1930s, there were
over a thousand Workers’ Faculties, with over 350 thousand
students. In the second half of the 1930s, as general and se­
condary ediication became better developed throughout the
country the Workers’ Faculties began to lose their impor­
tance, their numbers were reduced, and in 1940 they were
wound up. In the tw enty years of their existence the Work-
ers fa cu lties played a major part in bringing to fulfilm ent
ie Communist Party’s policy of dem ocratising higher educa-
lon and training cadres to form a worker-peasant in telli­
gentsia. 1

1. The first Party conference on education, w hich had the task

ol preparing m aterials on “the organisation of educational affairs
m the Republic for the Tenth Congress of the Russian Commu-
?non , t1 ^ (Bolsheviks), took place in Moscow on 31 December,
1J-U-4 January, 1921. Among bodies participating in its work through
representatives were: the Young Communist League, the A ll-Rus­
sia Central Council of Trade U nions, the Commissariats for Edu­
cation of the Russian Federation and the Ukraine; also taking part
were the heads of Education Offices of various areas, and delegates
from the Eighth Congress of Soviets. The conference judged it
necessary to reduce the term of study in the general schools from
nine years to seven. Study in these schools would thus continue
not up to the age of seventeen (as had been envisaged in the Par­
ty programme approved by the Eighth Congress of the Par­
ty), but up to the age of fifteen. This reduction in the school-leav-
ing age was made necessary by the prevailing econom ic difficul­
ties, but the conference committed the error of attem pting to jus­
tify this temporary measure on theoretical grounds.
V. I. Lenin, who ow ing to illness was unable to be present
at the conference, condemned this attitude out of hand, and point­
ed out the inadm issibility of theorising about “polytochnical or
m onotechnical” education. “W hile we are t e m p o r a r i l y com pelled,’’
wrote Lenin in the article “On the Work of the Comm issariat for
Education”, “to lower the age (for passing from general polytech-
nical education to polytechnical-vocational training) from seventeen
years to fifteen, the P a r l y m u s t c o n s i d e r this low ering of the ago
as ‘on ly ’ (Point 1 of the Central Committee’s instructions) a prac­
tical expedient necessitated by the country’s poverty and ruin.”
(V. I. Lenin, “The Work of the P eople’s Commissariat for Educa­
tion ”, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 32, p. 124).
 NOTES 205

Yagim argum ents striving to “justify" this reduction were “noth­

ing hut nonsense . .."

2. The Central Board for Vocational Training of the P eople’s

Comm issariat for Education of the Russian Federation w as in e x is­
tence from 1021 to 1020. Its main functions were the organisation
of training of workers, and of sp ecialist workers with secondary
or higher educational qualifications, for all branches of the national
econom y, also the reform of higher education and the creation of
a system of vocational training at basic and secondary levels.

What Kind of School Does the Proletarian S tale Need?

Lecture delivered at a debate

in the House oj Soviets on 4 December , 1922.
First published in the journal V estnik Prosvcshcheniya (Education
M essenger) No. 10, 1922, pp. 1-29

The disastrous econom ic conditions w ithin the country,

produced by the First World War and made worse throughout
the course of the Civil War. were am ong the greatest hin­
drances barring the w ay of the Soviet S late’s developm ent.
W ith industry and agriculture in decline, the Soviet Govern­
ment was faced w ith the task of evolving a political line
which would ensure the quickest possible restoration of the
cou n try’s econom y. The line found was what becam e known
as the N ew Econom ic P olicy (NEP), which began to be ap­
plied in 1921, on the decision of the Tenth Congress of the
R ussian Com m unist Party (B olsh eviks), and which resulted,
in the second half of the 1930s, in the triumph of socialism
in the USSR. . , T r • t,
The scientific basis of NEP was given by V. I. Lenin. Its
essen ce lay in strengthening, on an econom ic basis, the a lli­
ance betw een so cialist industry and peasant petty-com m odity
production, by m eans of givin g wide scope to m oney-com m o­
dity relationships, and by drawing the peasantry into so­
cialist construction. XEP allowed of som e developm ent of cap­
italist elem ents, of a broadening of market relations, w hile
retaining control from outside in the hands of the socialist
state. , ...
The freedom allow ed to capitalist elem ents, w ithin certain
lim its was a temporary retreat. The Eleventh Congress of the
R C P(B), which took place in 1922, announced that this re­
treat was now at an end. In 1922-23, a re-grouping of forces
took place, and a preparation for launching the attack upon
capitalist elem ents. D uring the mid-1920s, the share of the
cap italist sector in the total trade turnover fell from 41 per
cent to 19 per cent. The task of bringing the m arket under
socialist, control had been accom plished.
The carrying through of the N ew Econom ic Policy m ade
it possible to com plete in fu ll the tasks of building the basis
of a socialist econom y—to revive agriculture and sm all in-
296 SUPPLEMENT

dustry, and then to restore and develop large-scale industry,

to prepare and carry through the socia list re-organisation of
agriculture, and thus, in the final result, to create the m a­
terial and techn ological basis for socialism .
The lecture here published was given by Lunacharsky at
a tim e w hen the struggle with capitalist elem ents w as be­
com ing acute, w hen the offensive against the sphere of pri­
vate capital w as under way. The them e for the debate—
“W hat kind of school does the proletarian state need?”— was
seen by Lunacharsky as presenting three aspects: for whom
w as the new school being created, for the proletariat or lor
the proletarian state? what sort of school “should be fought
for by the proletarian state?” and “w hat kind of school is
possible in the proletarian state?”, under the transitional con­
ditions of the building of socialism .
The activisation of bourgeois elem ents w hile the N ew Eco­
nom ic Policy was being applied, their increasing influence on
the schools, the danger that then appeared of an unduly high
proportion of the intake to the secondary schools com ing
from the better-off strata—all this gave rise to a d efen sive
reaction, an urge to give the schools over in full to the pro­
letariat, to the children of industrial workers. It w as this
trend that moved Lunacharsky to pose the first of his ques­
tions for whom is the new school being created, for the
proletariat or for the proletarian state?
^Even putting this— “the schools for the proletariat on-
i —?s an *ssue on ^ie agenda for discussion, struck Luna­
charsky as a gross political m istake “directly again st the
trend of all our political thin king”. D eveloping Lenin's ideas
on the essential nature of the NEP, its aim of achieving the
“link-up with the peasantry", Lunacharsky pointed out that
the task of the proletariat “was to build its own, proletarian
state out of the elem ents it finds already existin g in the
country . And it was from these elem ents that the school
needed by the proletarian slate was to be built.
In answ ering the second question—“what kind of school
does the proletarian state need to defend?”—Lunacharsky
stressed that this had in principle already been answered, in
the Declaration on the Unified Labour School, and at that
given moment it was the third question which was the most
im portant— what kind of school is possible in proletarian
R ussia?”
The idea already developed by him in the foregoing works,
on the vital need to define actual w ays of realising the ideals
of a socialist school, is here given more extended treatm ent.
The basic aim of Lunacharsky’s lecture is to mark out dis­
tinctly “w hat m ilestones, what first and nearest m ileston es
. . . can be set out to head for along this road, along the lin e
that w ill enable us to move nearer to the fixed, unchanging
ideals of our com m unist educational visio n ”. And Lunachar­
sky notes these m ilestones, maps out a plan for the realisa­
tion in practice of the unified labour polytechnical school,
in the concrete conditions of the early 1920s.
 NOTF.S 297

R ealising in practice the principles of the polytechnical

labour school Lunacharsky sees as “a revolution, which has
to . . . take place right inside the schools them selves”, and
the hardest of all the reforms that have to be made is “the
reform of ihe very soul of the teaching g iv en ”. In sayin g
Ibis, as in the lecture “On the Class School”, he em phasises
first, and forem ost “the educative and social significance of
scien tifically organised labour”, of “the educational effect
upon the pupils of labour”. This concept of labour is, in Lu­
nacharsky’s own words, “one of the most inspiring, important,
basic ideas in the field of proletarian educational theory”.
The work here printed is equally important in being typ­
ical of Lunacharsky h im self—Lunacharsky the statesm an
and the teacher, quick to sense the slightest shifts and turns
in socio-educational and socio-psychological processes, and in­
fluencing these processes in the right direction in the ligh t
of the overall tasks of building socialism .

1. The reference is to the Fifth All-R ussia Congress of the Work­

ers' and P easan ts’ League of Youth, held in Moscow 11-19 October*
1922. This Congress discussed such issues as “The Basic Tasks o f
Com m unist Education during the New Economic Policy , the Edu­
cation of Working Youth”, “Work in the Countryside’ , etc.

2. Lunacharsky has in mind Lenin’s report at the Tenth Con­

gress of the RCP(B), w hich gave the theoretical basis of the N ew
Econom ic Policy (V. I. Lenin, C o l l e c t e d l!7or/rs, Vol. 32, pp. 214-
237), also his report at the Fourth Congress of the Communist In­
ternational “Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Pros­
pects for tho World R evolution” (Op. cit., Vol. 33, p. 418).

3. W orking out new curricula and syllabi for the schools w a s

one of the m ost com plex tasks of the People’s Commissariat for
Education in the 1920s. Curricula and syllabi were more than
an yth ing else subject to the influence of the demands set by con­
stantly changing conditions of life, and to the influence, too, of new
theoretical concepts. It is thus quite natural that changes in cur­
ricula and syllabi wero especially dynam ic in periods when the
old schools were breaking up and the new taking shape. Over the
years 1918-1929 curricula etc. were reviewed and made more pre­
cise in detail practicallv every year—-in 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921,
1923, 1925, 1927, and 1929.
In 1918-19 the m ain docum ent affecting curriculum and method
was the M a t e r i a l s o n E d u c a t i o n a l W o r k in t h e L a b o u r S c h o o l , which
defined only tho general line and content of instruction. At this
period the Commissariat for Education did not consider it n eces­
sary to interfere in the educational creativity of teaching collec­
tives, and the m ain work on curriculum and method took place in
the localities. In 1920, the Commissariat produced the first R e c o m ­
m e n d e d C u r r i c u l a for schools of the first and second stage, in two
versions, “fu ll” and “abbreviated”. At the sam e tim e R e c o m m e n d e d
S y l l a b i were published. But these curricula and syllabi were n ot
298 SUPPLEMENT

ob ligatory, the schools were able to make considerable alterations

to them according to local circum stances.
By 1922, the experience acquired of work in the schools con­
v in ced the Comm issariat, as Lunacharsky indicates in his report,
th at it w as essen tial to unify the materials on curriculum and
m ethod. In the sam e year the State Academic Council—the Com­
m issariat’s m ain centre of scientific work on m ethodology—started
on the task of evolving curricula and syllabi that would he the
sam e for all schools.
4. In order to make access to secondary education as w id ely
availab le as possible to young people in the countryside, the
“Schools for Rural Youth” were set up in 1923— these were in ­
com p lete secondary schools for general education, based on lirst-
stage schools and offering a three-year course.
5. Lunacharsky is referring to the old alphabetic method of teach­
in g children to read (in Russia this made its appearance in the
sixteenth century and continued in use until the m id-nineteenth
century), under which the main em phasis was on learning the
nam es of the letters (in this case those of the old Russian alphabet)
and reciting these in order as they made up syllables. (The uni­
v ersally known English equivalent in old primers being “The cat
sat on the m at”— T r a n s . )
6. D e w e y , J o h n (1859-1952)—American educationist, id ea list phi­
losopher, one of the leading representatives of pragm atism. In sch ools
follow ing the Dewey system there was no constant curriculum
w ith a logical system of teaching the separate subjects; on ly those
tilings were taught which could be practically applied. D e w e y s
educational ideas have exerted their influence on the organisation
of school education in various other countries also.
7. See Note 1 to the article “The Role of the W orkers’ Facul­
tie s”.

8. In his article on “Christianity and C om m unism ” Lunacharsky

■employed the same im age, as follows: “You rem em ber Poinpey, w ho
said, ‘J have only to stamp m y fool, and legions w ill appear; He
w as told, ‘Stamp, then,* because even if he had done so, no le ­
gion would have appeared anyw ay.” (Anatoli Lunacharsky, W h y I s
I t I m p o s s i b l e to B e l i e v e in G od?, Moscow, 1965, p. 90, in R ussian).

9. Lunacharsky is referring to the Fourth Congress of W orkers

in Education, which took place early in Decem ber 1922.10

10. In Russian abbreviation g u b o n o —the Gubernia (or Prov­

ince) Departments for Education. The Third A ll-R ussia C ongress of
heads of such departm ents was held in Moscow in October 1922.
The g u b e r n i a s , (created in the early eighteenth century) rem ained
as the main territorial and adm inistrative units up to the later
1920s. In 1924-1929, under the re-organisation of territorial d ivision s,
th e y were replaced by Regions, Territories, Districts.
 NOTES 209

11. S o t s v o s or G l a v s o t s v o s —short for the Central Board for So­

cial Education, a constituent part of the People’s Commissariat for
Education of the Russian Federation, set up in 1921; it dealt w ith
general-educational schools, pre-school institutions, children's homes,
and establishm ents for the socio-legal protection of minors (re­
ception centres, colonies, etc.), also establishm ents for further train­
ing of teachers in service. From 1930 onwards the functions of
G lavsotsvos began to be hived off. In 1933 separate boards were
set up for primary schools, secondary schools, teacher training, and,
later, for children's homes.

12. The Tenth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, held in December

1922, discussed the issue of education and the schools, as being one
of the most important and pressing matters for the building of so­
cialism . The Congress addressed an appeal to all working people,
callin g on them “to give everything possible, in effort and resources,
to assist the education of the people, to strengthen the positions
of the workers' and peasants’ slate on this front, henceforward of
prime im portance”.
Lunacharsky made a report to this Congress on 27 December,
1922. In the resolution passed after hearing this, the Congress noted
“ tin* heroic work done by the workers in education, who dur­
in g the grim years of financial crisis remained at their posts and
so helped to preserve the network of cultural and educational es­
tablishm ents”, and kept the schools in being. The Congress em­
phasised the need to “make drastic im provem ents in the material
living conditions of workers in the schools . . . in order that, as the
econom ic strength of the Republic is built up, there should be a
steady corresponding rise in the remuneration of workers in edu­
cation ”. ( E d u c a t i o n in t h e U S S R , Coll. Docs., p. 23)

13. Factory Training Schools (Fabrichno-Zavodskoye U cheniche-

s tv o )—these came into being in 1918 as a form of vocational train­
in g for young people already working in production. In 1921-22,
on the initiative of the Young Communist League, a m assive build­
up of such schools was started, with the purpose of training qual­
ified workers. The Factory Training Schools provided general edu­
cation, to the level of the primary or first-stage school, as w ell as
vocational instruction.
In 1920. with the start of the socialist reconstruction or the na­
tional econom y, Seven-Year Factory Schools were set up, which
gave vocational qualifications plus seven-year general education.
Em phasising the importance in the Factory Training Schools of
com bining instruction with productive labour, Lunacharsky said
that “they provide a model of how to bring all our schooling near­
er to the true Marxist school”.
In 1960-63 the Factory Training Schools were re-organised as
Trade and Technical Colleges (Professionalno-Tekhnicheskiye Uchi-
lishcha). In the 1970s, in line with the decisions of the Tw enty-
Fourth Congress of the CPSU (1971). there has been a wide de­
velopm ent of a new form which has more to offer in the field of
vocational training for the com ing years—the Secondary Trade and
3CK) SUPPLEMENT

T ech n ical C olleges, w hich give high-grade technical training and

fu ll secondary education at the sam e time. From the academ ic year
1070-71 to that of 1976-77, the number of these Secondary Trade and
T ech n ical C olleges increased from 615 to 3,086, and the num bers
of you n g people studying in them from 180,000 to l/i77,000 ( T h e
U S S R i n F i g u r e s , 1976, Moscow, 1977, p. 222).

14. Lunacharsky m eans the courses training teachers to work

in the Factory Training Schools; these were opened in 1921 in the
building of the former Empress Catherine’s Institute for D aughters
of the Gentry—a private, privileged educational estab lish m en t for
girls from noble fam ilies only.

15. In 1920, in the work L e f t - W i n g C o m m u n i s m — a n I n f a n t i l e

D iso rd er (Part II One of the Basic Conditions for the V ictory of
the Bolsheviks ) Lenin wrote: “It is, I think, alm ost u n iv ersa lly
realised at present that the B olsheviks could not have retained pow-
e r * *ru^W0 anc^ a ia ^ m onths, let alone two and a half years, w ith-
out the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party, or
w ithout the fullest and unreserved support from the entire m ass
0 j •e n WOr^1^ iC ass’ ^ a t *5, f rom all thinking, honest, devoted
and influential elem ents in it, capable of leading the backward stra­
ta or carrying the latter along t h e m . . . Only the history of Bol­
shevism during the e n t i r e period of its existence can sa fisfa cto rily
ai? aas been able to build up and m aintain, under m o st
difficult conditions, the iron discipline needed for the victory of the
proletariat. (V. I. Lenin, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 31, pp. 23-24).

Lunaeharsky is quoting from m em ory a passage from th e

Naval Code of the Emperor Peter the Great (1672-1725):
For ^ia ^ r00^ ev^ ^ies in ^ove m oney, so every on e
holding command . . . m ust guard h im self again st w rongful tak-
m g of m onies, and not only him self, but m ust w ith sev erity k eep
others also from it, and be content w ith that allotted them . For
m any state interests are oft lost through h is ev il . . . every com ­
m ander m ust hold this con tinu ally in m ind and abide by it.” [See
U s t a u M o r s k o i (Naval Code), On A ll that Concerns Good G overn­
ance of the Fleet at Sea. St. Petersburg, 1763, Book I, Chap. I, Ar­
ticle 3, p. 3j.

The P hilosop hy of the School

and the R evolution

S p e e c h d elivered at a gen era l m e e tin g

o f tw o u n io n s — th a t o f W o r k e r s in E d u c a ti o n ,
a n d t h a t o f W o r k e r s i n t h e A r t s — o n 2 2 M a y , 1923, i n T o m s k

The difficulties of the period of reconstruction could not

fail to be reflected in the condition of education in the y o u n g
country of the Soviets. In the years 1921-22 a tem porary re­
treat proved in evitab le in education: the num ber of sch o o ls
had to be reduced; som e out-of-school esta b lish m en ts w h ich
 NOTES 301

liad not su fficien t m atorial resources had to be closed; the

so-called “contract” schools were introduced, w hich w ere
m aintained by the public, not the state; p aym ent of fees
w as brought in for sch ools of the first and the second stage,
etc. T his situ ation continued until 1923. Then the gen eral
im provem ent of the econom ic situation in the country, the
restoration of the econom y, provided the basis for an im prove­
m ent in education.
In the article A F r e s h A d d r e s s to O l d T a s k s , n otin g the
start of this new resurgence on the education front, Luna­
ch arsky wrote: “In a w hole series of provinces ( g u b e r n i a s )
a definite upturn has taken place, and w e have gone deci­
siv e ly over to the o ffe n siv e . . . . W e are already addressing
ou rselves afresh to the old tasks . . . w hich were proclaim ed
by us in the first years of the R evolu tion ” ( N a r o d n o y e P r o -
s v e s h c h e n i y e (P eople’s E ducation), 1923, No. 3, p. 3). A m ong
th ese tasks, one of the m ost im portant w as the study of fun­
dam ental theoretical problem s in the lig h t of Marxism.
The experience in building a new , so cia list school, w ith
every hour bringing forth dozens of fresh questions, and—
even more im portant—the sharpening w hich NEP conditions
of life produced in the id eological struggle against bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois educational concepts—all this demanded
that theoretical stands be clearly defined. It w as essen tial to
clarify w hat w as the M arxist understanding of the basic ques­
tions of education, w hich were now the su bject of intense
discu ssion : w hat is education, w hat is its essen tial nature,
what aim s, objects and tasks has it. The work here published
is an answ er to these questions. Lunacharsky gave a bril­
lian t M arxist an alysis of “the philosophy of the school”, of
the inter-relationship of school and revolution, of “the m ost
im portant ideas in our basic educational policy ’. (The way
in w hich Lunacharsky stressed the p o l i c y — the p o l i t i c s — is
characteristic. Not ju st policy for the schools—the principles
of b uildin g the new school, w hich he had earlier dealt with
on more than one occasion, but e d u c a t i o n a l policy, i.e. the
Marxist interpretation of the cardinal, fundam ental education­
al problems, and their M arxist solution.)
In dealing with the essence of the above-mentioned prob­
lems, Lunacharsky at the same time develops further some
ideas he has already put forward, on the nature of the uni­
fied labour school. In this present work, as distinct from the
earlier ones, he is concentrating attention on the^ b r o a d l y
e d u c a t i o n a l (not merely instructional) task to be discharged
by the school. Under the prevailing conditions of heightened
ideological struggle, Lunacharsky brings this task to tbo fore­
ground, and provides a comprehensive definition of the aim
of education, noting also the ways and means needed for its
realisation.
In this work w e find a further developm ent given to one
of Lunacharsky’s favourite ideas, that of the essen tia lly so­
cia list nature of the educational ideals com m on throughout
hum anity (see the article “On the Class School”). The revo-
302 SUPPLEMENT

lution, he stresses, is the first phenom enon which “clears

the way*’ forward to these ideals, which creates the con d i­
tions for their realisation. In bringing these ideals to real
life, socialist teachers were together with the revolution brin­
g in g about “the only miracle recognised by scien ce— the trans­
form ation of m an”.
1. T h e S t a t e A c a d e m i c C o u n c i l —the leading centre for scien tific
m ethodological studies under the Commissariat for Education of th e
R ussian Federation—was set up in 1919. It had sections for research,
technological studies, educational studies, etc. The last-nam ed sec­
tion, created in 1921, was in the charge of N. K. Krupskaya. The
section ’s theoretical publication was O n t h e W a y to t h e N e w S c h o o l
(N a P u ty a k h k N ovoi S h k o ly e ).
In 1932 the State Academ ic Council w as abolished, and its
functions were taken over by the Council for T eaching M ethodology
of the People’s Commissariat for Education of the R ussian Fede­
ration, by the Academic Council for M ethodology and by the sp e­
cialised Commissions of the Committee for Higher Education.

2. Lunacharsky is referring to M. Jourdain— the hero of M oliere’s

comedy L e B o u r g e o i s G e n t i l h o m m e .

3. T h e Z e m s t v o s c h o o l s —elem entary schools in pre-revolution­

ary Russia, opened by the Z e m s t v o s (local bodies of self-govern ­
m ent) in rural localities and m aintained from local funds. Thu
Z e m s t v o s were created in 1864, and the first of these schools m ade
their appearance in the sam e year.
In spite of much discouragem ent from the tsarist governm ent,
the Z e m s t v o schools spread w idely in a short space of time. The
instruction and education they provided w as sign ifican tly better
than that in the governm ent schools under the M inistry of Educa­
tion and in the parish schools w hich were run by the clergy.
Many progressive Russian educationists worked in the Z e m s t v o
schools. In the Russia of the late nineteenth century the w ords
llZ e m s t v o school” or llZ e m s t v o education” were syn onym s of a ll
that w as new and progressive in educational theory and practice.
4. See Note 8 to article “On the Class School”.

5. See Note 5 to article “On Social Education”.

6. The reference is to Lunacharsky’s article “A Brief O utline

of the History of Education”, which appeared in a collection of
his work under the title P r o b l e m s o f P e o p l e ' s E d u c a t i o n , M oscow,
1925, pp. 24-50.

7. T a l l e y r a n d , o r T a l l e y r a n d - P e r i g o r d , C h a r l e s M a u r i c e d e (1754-
1838)— French diplom at and statesm an. The plan for reform of th e
schools w hich he put forward in 1791 reflected the ideas of m oderate
bourgeois circles and was directed against the feudal sy stem of
education; it provided that education .should be u n iversal and sh o u ld
be secular.
 NOTKS 303

L e p c l e t i e r — sec Note 11 to article “On Social Education”.

C o n d o r c e l —see Note 0 to article “On Social Education”.

8. R o u s s e a u —see Note 15 to article “On the Class School”.

P c s t a l o z z i —sec Note 8 to article “On Social Education”.
F r o e b e l —see Note 18 to article “On the Class School”.
F i c h t e , J o h a n n G o t t l i e b (1762-1814)— German id ealist philosopher,
representative of classical German philosophy, professor of the uni­
versities of Jena and Berlin. Ho devoted much attention to both
theoretical and practical work in the field of education. In his
S p e e c h e s to t h e G e r m a n N a t i o n (1804), Fichte put forward a plan
for creating a system of national education which would be the
sam e for ail Germans. Particularly interesting are Fichte’s ideas on
labour education, on the necessity of m aking children aware of
tlie general scientific basis of labour.
I I e r h f i r t —see Note 17 to article “On the Class School”.

0. Lunacharsky is quoting from mem ory Martin Luther's words:

“So far as I am concerned, if I were obliged to leave preaching and
find another vocation, I know of no other work or profession w hich
I should prefer to being a schoolteacher or mentor of boys. For
1 am convinced that this, after preaching, is the m ost useful pro­
fession; this is the best work out of all the forms of work the
world knows, and indeed I am often in doubt as to which profes­
sion (preacher or teacher) is more honourable. One cannot, after
all, teach an old dog new tricks, and it is hard to reclaim old sin ­
ners, and this is in fact w hat wo are hoping to do by our sermons,
hence our labour is often in vain; but it is easy to bend and nur­
ture young trees, although in the process some may by accident
be broken”. (Sec P. Monro, H i s t o r y o f E d u c a t i o n , Part II, Moscow,
1914, p. 58)

The Tasks of Education W ithin

the System of Soviet Construction

R e p o r t d e l i v e r e d at t h e F i r s t A l l - U n i o n T e a c h e r s ' C o n g r e s s

F i r s t p u b l i s h e d in U chitclskaya Gazeta ^ ( T e a c h e r s G a zette),

o n 16 J a n u a r y , 1925

During the years 1923-25 decisive successes were achieved

in tho restoration of the national econom y. This econom ic re­
covery provided the essen tial basis needed for further cul­
tural and educational developm ent, and in its turn present­
ed the educational world w ith new tasks, ^w hose solution be­
cam e an integral part of the work of building socialism . These
tasks were discussed at the First All-U nion Teachers’ Con­
gress, which took place in Moscow on 11-19 January, 1925.
In the expression w hich it provided of the mood and in­
terests of the broad m ass of teachers (out of 1,559 d elegates
w ith full voting rights, 72 per cent were rural education
workers, and 28 per cent cam e from the tow n s), the Con-
304 SUPPLEM ENT

gross dem onstrated that during the years of S o v iet power a

radical ch an ge had taken place in the p olitical hopes and
id eo lo g ica l attitu des of the teachin g body, and in the char­
acter and direction of its practical work. The C ongress su m ­
m ed up the Party’s achievem ents in bringing together id eo ­
lo g ica l and political transform ation of teachers. “W herever
w e m ay w ork,” stated the d elegates in the D eclaration ap­
proved by the Congress, “we sh all everyw here be the faith-
lu l helpers of the Soviet governm ent and the C om m unist
P arty in their historic w ork—historic for the w hole w orld —
for we now know that the cause pursued by the Party is the
cause of all labouring hum anity.” [ N a r o d n o y e P r o s v e s h c h e n i y e
(P eople’s E ducation), 1925, No. 2, p. 170.]
In his guiding report on the new tasks of education w ith ­
in the general system of Soviet construction, L unacharsky
gave a tellin g outline of the significance of ed u cation — for
the further strengthening of the country’s d efen sive cap ab il­
ity, for the furl tier developm ent of the national econom y,
and in the creation of new, Soviet in tellig en tsia . A gain, as
in his lecture “The P hilosophy of the School and the R evo­
lu tion ” (1923), he indicated as the m ost im portant task the
im provem ent, in power and depth, of work on the com m un ist
education of the rising generation.
Lunacharsky considers all these tasks again st the broad
background of the general m ethodological and theoretical
problems of education, in close connection w ith the “p h ilo ­
sophy of the school”, and develops m any ideas already m en ­
tioned in the preceding works. This broad approach to the
an alysis of current tasks connects up not on ly w ith the sp e­
cial characteristics of Lunacharsky’s creative m ethod, n ot o n ly
with the need for further M arxist elucidation of basic edu­
cational problems. It was, also, dictated by the actual m ake­
up of the audience presented by the Congress, by the need
for socio-educational, Marxist education of the broad m asses
of the teachers them selves.
A nalysing the interaction, under the new conditions, of
the “three fronts”—m ilitary, econom ic and ed u cation al— Lu­
nacharsky stresses the ever-increasing part played by the
educational or “third front”. W hereas earlier, as he puts it,
“all three fronts had to be accom m odated to the first o n e”!
now at the lim e of sp eak ing “neither the defence of the coun­
try, nor governm ent of the state, nor the d evelopm en t of the
econom y can be envisaged w ithout rapid d evelopm en t of work
on the third front”.
Lunacharsky sees the im m ense im portance of the “ third
front” in the fact that it is the basic front of the revolution
in culture. Lunacharsky sees the raising of the cultural lev ­
el of the people as not only a m eans, but also as the end,
the aim, of building socialism .
H aving taken the general tasks of b uilding so cia lism as
h is point of departure, Lunacharsky then considers concrete
m atters of school d evelopm ent also: the financing of educa­
tion; work on curriculum and m ethods and on m oral edu-
 NOTES 305

cation; the m aterial situation and status of the teacher. In

the second part of the report he devotes especial attention
to educational work in the countryside. In the ligh t of the
resolution approved by the Thirteenth Congress of the Par­
ty O n W o r k i n t h e C o u n t r y s i d e (May 1924), Lunacharsky
notes two m ost im portant trends in the process of raising the
cultural level of the peasantry: changing forms and m ethods
in the work done on doing away with illiteracy, and the
struggle against the greater activity of the “kulak m ove­
ment"’—the light to get the peasants away from this m ove­
ment. Lunacharsky allots a m ost im portant role in this fight
to the rural teacher, who is, in his words, “an elem ent of
im m ense im portance in the link-up with the peasantry .
Lunacharsky sees the teachers as “a grandiose filter,
through w hich the new life passes”, as the chief actor in the
revolution in culture, as “the vanguard of the new world,
engaged in direct struggle for the new m an”, as people to
whom belongs “an uncom m only hard but uncomm only glo­
rious place in the building of the new culture .

1. Lunacharsky is quoting P. Natorp’s C u l t u r e o f a P e o p l e a n d

C u ltu re o f t h e I n d i v i d u a l , which w as written shortly before the
First World War and was published in Leipzig in 1911. For Natorp,
see also Note 18 to S p e e c h a t t h e F i r s t A l l - R u s s i a C o n g r e s s o n E d u ­
ca tio n .

2. In A n t i - D i i h r i n g , w hich appeared in 1878, Frederick E ngels

wrote that after the accom plishm ent of the socialist revolution,
“man him self, with full consciousness, (w ill) make his own his­
tory—only from that tim e w ill the social causes set m m ovem ent
by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure,
the results intended by him. It is the hum anity^ leap from the
kingdom of n ecessity to the kingdom of freedom . (Frederick En­
gels, A n t i - D i i h r i n g , Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978, p. 344).

3. Lunacharsky presented reports to the second session of the

eleventh A ll-R ussia Central E xecutive Committee on 15 October,
1924. In one report he stressed the vital need for all possible as­
sistance being given to the developm ent of education throughout
the country. _ _ 4
The Comm ittee in session recognised that im provem ent of the
m aterial situation of the schools” w as “a task not adm itting o f
postponem ent”, and it mapped out a broad programme of m easures
that would advance the developm ent of the schools. “Bearing in
mind that all the m easures indicated are im possible of fulfilm ent
on the very lim ited m aterial basis w hich was all that education
could dispose of during the past year”, the resolution stated, “the
Executive Comm ittee recom m ends that local bodies do all in their
power towards a further increase in the allocations made for edu­
cation (in the countryside in particular), and at the sam e tim e
it considers it essen tial that in the current year the proportion of
l / 2 2 0 - 0 1 120
306 SUPPLEMENT

the state budget allocated to the People’s Com m issariat for Edu­
cation should be increased.” ( E d u c a t i o n in t h e U S S R , Coll. Docs.,
pp. 24, 27).

4. P o t y o m k i n v i l l a g e s —pejorative appelation, allu d ing to the un-

real, “show ” villages created by order of Prince G. A. P otyom kin
(1739-1791) along the road to be travelled by the Em press Catherine
II (1726-1796) w hen she visited the Crimea in 1787.

5. N a r k o m f i n People s Comm issariat for Finance.

resolution of the second session of the eleven th All-

S r u SlaAi i n tra • E*ecutive Committee the follow ing passage -occurs:
..,e | ■ ^ "Russia Central E xecutive Committee recognises as essen ­
tial the establishm ent, from the academ ic year 1925-26, of a spe-
Kv l A P i k J epf ^ t0 be contributed to both by central and
by local budgets ( E d u c a t i o n i n t h e U S S R , Coll. Docs., p. 25). On
S t^ n f0USt’ 192r’ f?1011?w?nS a Proposal m oved by Lunacharsky, the
btatute on a Central Loan Fund for School B uilding in the Rus­
sian Federation was also passed.

, w I i - GoSl?ua* T Central. State P ub lishin g H ouse of the R ussian Fe-

ion, the first major Soviet pub lish in g concern, organised in
HnnCOnn 9 i nA.er ae? i,s of the P eople’s C om m issariat for Educa-
slrv ’ HH7^\onoT ' .* le ®rst l‘ead of Gosizdat w as V aclav Vorov-
and literaiy^crit'c^r0m m en^ worker and statesm an, p u b licist

. ^ c A p r o s-C e n lr a i ^ of the Trade Union for W orkers

in Education (192^-1934). This trade union covered workers in the
schools, kindergartens, children’s hom es, places of h igher educa­
tion, scientific (research) establishm ents and p olitical-edu cation al

9. N. K. Krupskaya who in the 1920s w as at the head of the

Central Committee of the R epublic for P olitical E ducation, a lso of
.,e Scientific and^ Educational Section of the State A cadem ic Coun­
cil of^ the People s Com m issariat for Education, m ade a report to
the First A ll-U nion T eachers’ Congress w hich d ealt w ith the prob­
lem s of working out new curricula, new textbooks, also new m eth ­
ods and organisational forms of teaching. In this report m uch space
was devoted to m atters concerning the C om m unist ch ild ren ’s m ove­
ment. [See: X. K. Krupskaya. P e d a g o g i c h e s k i y e S o c h i n e n i y a (Edu­
cational W orks), Vol. 2, Moscow, 1958, pp. 189-203, in R ussian].

10. Lunacharsky has in m ind the so-called “com p lex tea ch in g

program m es” and “com plex m ethod”, or “SAC program m es”— sin ce
these were worked out by the Scientific-E ducational S ection of
the State A cadem ic Council (SAC); a start w as m ade on introduc­
in g these into the schools in 1923.
 NOTES 307

The essen ce of the “com plex m ethod” lay in the concentration

of the teachin g m aterial around a basic nucleus of know ledge,
w hich w ould be linked to subsequent building-up and enrichm ent
of the ch ild ’s concepts and ideas of the surrounding world. In the
opinion of those w ho drew up the SAC programmes, the latter pro­
vided g u id elin es for syn th esis and generalisation from the teach­
ing m aterial, around three basic them es: nature, labour, society. The
central feature in the program m es w as to be the w orking activities
of hum an beings, studied in their connections w ith nature (as the
object of those activ ities), and w ith social life (as the result of
those a ctiv itie s). Thus, in the concept of the program m es’ producers,
the main aim of instruction would be attain ed —perception of the
phenom ena of life in their interconnection and interaction. All the
m aterial for the primary school w as arranged in these program m es
on the principle “from the child to the w orld”, and w as studied in
outw ard-extending concentric circles: in the first grade the basic
them es w ere connected w ith the ch ild ’s life in the fam ity and in
school, in the second grade they studied the life of their villa g e or
town, their republic, etc. In the second-stage schools, subject teach­
in g w as retained, although even here the study of different disci­
plines w as again concentrated around certain general com plex
them es. r
The SAG program m es had the object of overcom ing one of the
m ost marked drawbacks of the old school—the g u lf between school
learning and life, and the isolation of school subjects one from
another. The program m es tried to break do\vn the scholastic, dog­
m atic system of instruction that had reigned in the old-style school,
tried to bring learning close to the child’s interests and in accord
w ith the level and character of developm ent proper to the various
age-groups. The content, of the new program m es was closely linked
w ith the country’s econom ic and political tasks, and w as aimed at
form ing a new, com m unist world outlook. This was their funda­
m ental virtue, their claim to educational value. However, the new
content of the program m es w as devalued to a large extent by their
“com p lex” structuring.
The “com p lex” structure of the program m es deprived the old
“school su b jects” of their independent existence and qualitative
in dividu ality, and replaced system atic study of the fundam entals
of scien ce by scraps of know ledge, imparted by the w ayside in the
course of dealing w ith this or that “com plex”. The producers and
the ardent supporters of the “com plex” programmes tried to show
that the principle of “com p lexity” set the acquisition of inform a-
tion on a sound basis. But the experience of the m ass schools^ bore
w itn ess to the opposite. The m ass schools did not accept the com ­
plex m ethod”. “The m ajority of schools,” slated Lunacharsky in
October 1925, “have gone over to subject teaching, w hile consider­
in g n on eth eless that they are applying “the com plex”, b ecause
there are bits of this m ethod stuck into their teachin g here and
there” { E d u c a t i o n a n d R e v o l u t i o n , 1926, p. 399).
The curricula prepared by the P eople’s Comm issariat in 1927
abandoned the “com plete dissolution of boundaries” betw een sub­
jects in favour of “livin g com p lexes”, and this change ensured a
perceptible qualitative im provem ent in the know ledge gained by
20*
308 SUPPLEMENT

p up ils. T h ese new curricula becam e obligatory for the first tim e,
for a ll schools. The syllab i introduced in the sam e year were also
ob ligatory.
In su bsequent years the curricula of Soviet schools have been
re-worked according to the dem ands made by life, by social and
by scien tific progress. In 1966 the Twenty-Third Congress of the
CPSU se t two suprem ely im portant tasks for the schools to m e e t -
realisation of fu ll secondary education for all, and im provem ent of
th e content of education, also of the m ethods used by the schools
to im part it. The sam e year saw a start made on the gradual in ­
troduction into the schools of new curricula, produced to keep up
w ith the demands made by contem porary science, techn ology and

The Tw enty-Fifth Congress of the CPSU (1976) noted that the

m ost important task, realisation of full secondary education for
all young people in the USSR, had been practically dealt w ith,
and that the schools had su ccessfu lly carried through the transi­
tion to the new content of education.

. t 1- ,R K I t or R a b k r i n — i h e W orkers’ and P easants’ Inspection (Ra-

-kreatyanskaya In sp ek tsiya)—a state control body set up in
1920 w hich continued to function until 1934. Later re-organised
as the bodies for State, or later State and Party Control, and then,
since 1965 People s Control.

12. Lunacharsky is referring to the directive, approved by the

Soviet governm ent in 1924, on raising the w ages of teachers. On
? January, 1925, in the course of Congress work, a directive w as
also approved on pension provision for teachers and other workers
in education.

?,^20s, lar£ e-SC£de work was developed on “doing aw ay

w ith illiteracy (see Notes to article “The Tasks of Extra-M ural Edu­
cation in Soviet R ussia”). One of the forms this took w as the de­
velopm ent of schools and courses for adults, also of w hat w ere
,.? ° 'j n , a.s kihbez Centres” (from the first sy lla b les of the words
/i/cvidatsiya fc^gram otnosti—Russian for “doing aw ay w ith illite ­
racy — I r o n s . ) ; these were set up on the in itiative of N. K. Krup-
skaya and the Committee which she headed (the Central Com m ittee
o f the Republic for Political Education, known as G l a v p o l i t p r o s v e t
for short). In 1924 the Soviet governm ent took the decision m en­
tioned here by Lunacharsky, on the allocation of further funds for
settin g up Likbez Centres. In 1925, as m any as 1,400,000 people
w ere studying at these centres, more than three tim es as m anv as in
1922.

14. T h e v i l l a g e r e a d i n g - r o o m — one of the types of rural cultural-

ed u ca tio n a l institution which arose in the early years of Soviet
'power. The idea of creating such library-huts w as put forward by
Lenin. E m phasising the importance of creating support bases for
cultural work in the countryside, Lenin remarked in the course of
 NOTES 309

a discussion w ith the leaders of the People’s Commissariat for Edu­

cation, that “a perm anent place is vital, a cultural centre of sorts,
w hat you m ight call a village house-cum -reading room, w hich can
subscribe to the peasant newspaper, receive pam phlets, posters, and
where tin* peasant can go in his free tim e to read the paper or a
book, or listen to it being read, and to have a c h a t . . . [N. K oles­
nikova, H e T a u g h t U s to S e e t h e F u t u r e , in L e n i n s k i i j c S t r a n i t s y
(Docum ents, Memoirs, E ssays), Moscow, 1960, p. 52, in Russian],
Putting this su ggestion of L enin’s into practice, the Commissariat
for Education, w ith the support of the local bodies of Soviet power,
had brought 34,000 hut-reading-room s into being by the end of
1920.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the liut-reading-rooms were the centres
of the work of en ligh ten m ent in the villages. They played an im ­
portant part in doing aw ay w ith illiteracy, in m aking primary edu­
cation for all a reality in the countryside, and in helping Soviets
and Party bodies to carry through the collectivisation of agricul­
ture.
In later years these reading-room s were replaced by clubs or by
Houses or Palaces of Culture. At the beginning of 1977, there were
135,000 social centres in the USSR, and 114,000 of these were in ru­
ral localities (see U S S R i n F i g u r e s , 197 6 } p. 230).

15. Soviet Russia inherited from pre-revolutionary tim es an ex­

trem ely insignificant num ber of pre-school institutions: in 1917 there
were only 177 in all, and the num ber of children attending them
was under 5,000. The task of creating a system of pre-school edu­
cation becam e, from the first days of Soviet power, one of the m ost
im portant am ong the sum total of educational tasks facing the Com­
m unist Party and Soviet governm ent. It w as vital to define the prin­
ciples to be follow ed in building a pre-school education system ,
what its educational foundations were to be, and it was lik ew ise
vital to train cadres of workers for pre-school institutions, \ \ ork
on all this began as early as 1918, and the first review of its achieve­
m ents w as given by the First All-R ussia Congress of Pre-school
Education (April 1919), w hich brought together the creative forces
available for theoretical elaboration of the bases of the new, So­
viet system of pre-school education.
The Civil War and the difficulties of the first years of the pe­
riod of reconstruction held up the building of pre-school establish­
m ents. In the second half of the 1920s, with tho im provem ent in
the econom ic situation, the question of developing pre-school edu­
cation w as once again brought forward by the P eople’s Commissa­
riat for Education of the Russian Federation as one of the first pri­
orities. On a proposal made by A. V. Lunacharsky and N. K. Krup­
skaya, the Fourth A ll-R ussia Congress of Pre-school Education w as
convoked in Decem ber 1928, its object being to rouse public in i­
tiative in the m atter of “raising the pre-school sector to a higher
le v e l’’.
In his address to the Congress, w hich w as published in P r a v d a
on 1 December, 1928, Lunacharsky em phasised the close connection
of pre-school m atters w ith the general problem s of educating the
310 SUPPLEMENT

new man, problems w hich by the late 1920s had taken on especial
urgency and relevance (see the article “The Education of the New
Man” and the Notes to this).
Botli in the address to the Congress and in subsequent utterances
on the subject, Lunacharsky stressed that “the work of education
m u s t start at pre-school age”, that “the most important, the m ost
fundam ental education of all, that which leaves its mark on all
later life, is pre-school education”.
Oj* 26 June, 1929, on the initiative of the People’s Commissariat
for Education, a joint conference took place in Moscow w hich
brought together representatives of the central and Moscow-area bo­
dies of the Party, the Young Communist League, and the trade
umons, and this m eeting addressed an appeal to all working peo-
• 4.1^ ° un^ e tlieir efforts in order to advance pre-school education
in the country generally”. Speaking to this conference in session;
Lunacharsky said: We expect enormous results from the pre-school
Y-;nReVu°^tiona,r.y SI?ring has come late t0 this street,
where the little children live, but now it seem s she is with us at
last, now she is showing herself, speedy in action, and before long
h l L r ’MASPv CeTS ° f 2ur ilancL wil1 Srow green and break forth in
hloom. [A V. Lunacharsky, O n t h e P r e - s c h o o l C a m p a i g n , in N a P*~
t y a k h k N o v o i S h k o h j e (On the Road to the New School), 1929, No.
7, pp. 10-13].
These words of Lunacharsky found confirmation in the years im-
follow;ng- Whereas in 1927 there were 2,100 pre-school
establishments (kindergartens and nurseries), with 107,500 child-
ren attending them, in 1932 the numbers had grown to 19,600 es­
tablishments with 1 061,700 children in them. In subsequent years
f « V u Umb5r ° f ch'ldre1n receiving pre-school education increased
tenfold and more. By the beginning of 1977 there were 117,000 pre­
school establishments, with 12,108,000 children attending them.

16. K u l a k s —a term (literal m eaning in Russian—“a fist”—Trans.)

which hrst came into use in Russia in the 1890s, to denote the
rising rural bourgeoisie, those who rapaciously exploited the poor­
er peasants. The k u l a k s met the Great October Socialist Revolu­
tion with hostility During the Civil War and afterwards, they be­
came the principal social force representing petty-bourgeois coun­
ter-revolution.
In the 1920s, the k u l a k s carried on anti-Soviet agitation and or­
ganised grain strikes ’, refusing to sell grain to the state at fixed
prices. The policy of the Soviet government was to lim it the free­
dom of action of the k u l a k s and gradually edge them out.
The start of collectivisation in agriculture evoked bitter opposi­
tion from the k u l a k s . They organised anti-Soviet revolts, murdered
the active workers of the collective-farm movement. Given this
state of affairs, the Soviet government went over, at the close of the
1920s, to a policy of liquidating the k u l a k s as a class. K u l a k s were
deported from areas due for complete collectivisation, their property
was confiscated and handed over to the collective farms as part of
their inalienable stock.
The victory of the collective-farm way of life in the USSR res-
 NOTES 311

cued the peasantry from exploitation by the k u l a k s and did aw ay

w ith the conditions that had made it possible for the latter to come
into being.

17. An S . H .— member of the petty-bourgeois Socialist-R evolution­

ary Parly, which existed in Russia from 1902 till 1922. The S.R.s
expressed the attitudes and interests of the petty bourgeoisie and
of a section of the better-off peasantry. After the victory of the
Great October S ocialist R evolution the leaders of the S.R. Party
worked to sabotage the Soviet governm ent, organising conspiracies,
diversions and rebellions. In 1918 the S.R.s organised attem pts on
L enin’s life, and the murders of other prom inent mem bers of the
C om m unist Party. These actions against the Soviet governm ent
brought the S.R. Party inlo isolation, and finally to self-disso­
lution.

The Art of the Word in School

A r t i c l e fi r s t p u b l i s h e d in t h e j o u r n a l Iskusstvo v Slikolye
( A r t in S c h o o l ) , M a y , 1 9 2 7 , N o . 1

The “com plex” program m es introduced in the schools in

the years 1923-25 (see Note 10 to article “The Tasks of Edu­
cation w ithin the System of Soviet Construction”), view ed
the ch ild ’s native language purely as a technical tool of as­
sistan ce in studying the “com p lexes” of phenom ena found
in life. The natural consequence of such an approach w as the
im plicit denial of any educative, form ative role to be played
by Ihe native language, and an underestim ation of its im ­
portance as a subject in its own right, and a m ost impor­
tant one at that. The results of this approach were not slow
in sh ow ing them selves: the level of literacy of school pupils
fell considerably, w hich evoked serious alarm am ong teach­
ers and obliged the P eople’s Com m issariat for Education to
review teaching program m es in order to im prove the teach­
in g of the R ussian language. The new curricula approved by
the C om m issariat in 1927 treated Russian as a separate sub­
ject of study. The publication of the curricula started a broad
m ovem ent concerned w ith teaching m ethods for R ussian lan ­
guage; raisin g the level of literacy of school pupils becam e a
strand oT prime im portance in the general work of the school.
However, this struggle to raise the lev el of literacy w as
on ly one aspect of the general aim —that “the art of the
word” (or as contem porary jargon has it—“lan guage sk ills”—
T r a n s . ) should be m astered in school. The article by Luna­
charsky here published w as devoted to d iscu ssin g this gener­
al aim. In the article Lunacharsky dem arcates three objects
w hich should be attained in the course of school study of the
n ative language: “elem en tary lan guage control, i.e. the acqui­
sition of a certain vocabulary, the ab ility to construct both
spoken and w ritten sen ten ces correctly, k now ledge of sp el­
lin g, etc.”; secon dly “the ab ility to use lan gu age to describe
312 SUPPLEMENT

the real w orld accurately or to express a logical train o f

thou ght”; and la stly ab ility in “the artistic use of lan gu age”.
It is on this third task, the m ost com plex and least w ell dis­
charged one in school practice, that Lunacharsky concentrates
h is attention in this article.
The central place in the article is occupied by Lunachar­
sk y ’s recom m endations on how to achieve m astery of artistic
lan guage, and these retain their interest and relevance even
today. Of particular interest is his advice that children should
be taught to appreciate “not only the content but also
the form ” of literary works, that one should “get their at­
tention to dw ell on the m usic, the colour, the exp ressiveness
of this or that phrase; on the plastic and dynam ic q ualities
of this or that figure of speech”, and should point out to them
how and by w hat m eans this is achieved”.
Lunacharsky pays great attention to “the p upils’ own ef­
forts , to drawing them into direct, spontaneous, and by vir­
tue of this invariably artistic narration of these or those
events actually experienced by them ”. Besides this ‘‘m em oir
realism , as Lunacharsky calls it, it is vital also to foster by
all possible m eans the children’s im aginative work, which is
a very ^important educative elem en t”. Fantasy, dream ing o f
dreams “are as it were battle m anoeuvres in the mind, a
gam e, an exercise, leading up to the fulness of activity of the
mature person”.
Lunacharsky directs accentuated attention in his article
t°» .g a t i n g collective feeling, “socially educated originaii-
ty . And the art of the word, more than any other one as­
pect of school life,” Lunacharsky em phasises, “can be a m ean s
towards this education of individuality linked in harm ony
with the other individualities that surround it.” These prob­
lem s of education in collectivism , of the m utual relationship
of the collective and the individual, are dealt w ith more
fu lly by Lunacharsky in other works in this volum e, “The
Education of the New Man” and “The Educational Tasks of
the Soviet School”.

1. B e r g s o n , H e n r i (1859-1941)—French id ealist philosopher, m em ­

ber of the Academ ie Frangaise. A central place in B ergson’s phi­
losophy is occupied by the problem of creativity. The ab ility to
create, according to Bergson, is connected w ith irrational intuition,
which, like som e g ift of God, is given only to the chosen few . Berg­
son counterpoises intuition to intellect, the conceptual m ode of
thinking, w hich he considers false, liable to distort reality. Luna­
charsky is thinking of h is book C r e a t i v e E v o l u t i o n (1907).

2. U s p e n s k y , G l e b (1843-1902)— Russian writer, em in en t repre­

sentative of the dem ocratic trend in Russian literature, author of
m any sk etch es and short stories on the life of the R ussian coun­
tryside and that of the urban poor, also on the spiritual searchin gs
of the R ussian in telligen tsia. U spensky’s artistic m ethod w as m ark­
ed by its organic syn th esis of research in depth, em otion ally charged
 NOTES 313

presentation, and vivid im agery. V. I. Lenin, who had a high

opinion of U spensky's work, remarked that he had “an extraordi­
nary artistic talent that penetrated to the very heart of the phe­
nom ena”. (V. I. Lenin, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 1, p. 256)
3. P i e r r e H a m p , (pseudonym , real name H e n r i L o u i s B o u r i l l o n ,
1876-1962)—French writer, one of the creators of the “industrial
novel"; author of the novels F r e s h F i s h , C h a m p a g n e , R a i l s , etc.
•i F u r m a n o v , D m i t r i (1891-1926)—Soviet writer, author of the
w ell-know n novel C h a p a e v (1923), dealing with the life of the le­
gendary Civil War hero V assili Chapaev, commander of the divi­
sion that cam e to bear his name. In 1919 Furmanov was political
com m issar in Chapaev’s division.
5. The ideas of Lev Tolstoy here referred to by Lunacharsky
com e from the great Russian writer’s tract “What is Art?” (1897-98).

6. P u s h k i n , A l e x a n d e r (1799-1837)—great Russian poet, the found­

er of modern Russian literature. The language of Pushkin’s works,
w hich com bines strict literary standards w ith the livelin ess of ac­
tual speech, exerted a decisive influence on the formation of the
Russian national literary language, and rem ains its foundation to
this day.
7. G o g o l, N i k o l a i (1809-1852)—great Russian writer, the found­
ing father of Russian critical realism. Carrying on the work begun
by Pushkin, Gogol h im self made a rich contribution to the Russian
language.

Sociological Prem ises of Soviet Educational Theory

A r t i c l e fir s t p u b l i s h e d in Pedagogicheskaya Entsiklopediya

( E d u c a t i o n a l E n c y c l o p a e d i a ) , 1927, Vol. I , p p . 1-10

The first Soviet E d u c a t i o n a l E n c y c l o p a e d i a , in three volu­

m es, was prepared for publication in tim e for celebration of
the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The E d u c a ­
t i o n a l E n c y c l o p a e d i a was a first attem pt to bring together
and analyse from a Marxist standpoint the w hole range of
problems, both theoretical and practical, involved in educa­
tion in all its aspects. It contained reference m aterial and
theoretical background for all aspects of educational thought,
on all departments of institutional education and general cul­
tural-educational work. We find contributing articles to this
encyclopaedia by the foremost figures in Soviet education:
A. V. Lunacharsky, N. K. Krupskaya, P. P. Blonsky, S. T.
Shatsky and m any others. The appearance of the E d u c a t i o n a l
E n c y c l o p a e d i a w as a great event in educational life. It play­
ed an im portant part in providing ideological and theoretical
am m unition for the great m ass of teachers, and in expound­
in g the M arxist-Leninist foundations of Soviet educational
thought.
21-01120
314 SUPPLEMENT

L u nacharsky’s “Sociological Prem ises of Soviet Educational

T h eory” w as the introductory article in the first volum e. It
posed a num ber of m ost im portant m ethodological and theo­
retical problem s w hich later received treatm ent in depth in
S oviet educational studies. In this article Lunacharsky is the
first to introduce the concept of “educational sociology”, ex­
p lain in g w hat this essen tially is, and w hat its place is w ith­
in gen eral “theoretical sociology” and w ithin educational the­
ory. He considered that the m ost important tasks of educa­
tion al sociology were: to analyse the state and the “natural
roots” of the national educational system ; to bring out the
correlation of educational principles to “the correct forward
m ovem ent” to the aim s of communism; to explain and cri­
tically analyse bourgeois educational theories, and to counter­
poise^ to these an educational theory “w hich flows from tho
principles of^ socialism ”. Lunacharsky described the “socio­
logical sen se” of the Soviet unified labour school as being
“the reflection of the principles of Soviet dem ocracy”, and he
gave a clearcut form ulation of the Marxist view on the natu­
re and objects of the labour school.
Making his contribution to answering one of the m ost
hotly debated questions of that period—the relationship bet­
w een the social environm ent and the school—Lunacharsky in
this article asserted the active, m otive part to be played by
the school, its right and duty to intervene in the life of so­
ciety and to oppose undesirable influences arising from it.
More than th is—em phatically stated Lunacharsky, carrying
on the^best traditions of progressive Russian educational tho­
ught—“the school as an educative institution of the state,
m ust become filled w ith the new spirit sooner than is the
case w ith the life of society in general, it m ust rise above
the petty things of daily living, from it m ust come the truly
educative forces. The school m ust correct the distortions for­
ced upon the child by life ”.

1. See Note 16 to “Speech at the First All-R ussia Congress on

Education”.
2. Show ing up bourgeois democracy in its true colours is a the­
me of major importance in Karl Marx’s work. “A ll his life,” wrote
Lenin, “Marx fought m ost of all the illusions of petty-bourgeois
dem ocracy and bourgeois democracy. Marx scoffed m ost of all at
em pty talk of freedom and equality, w hen it serves as a screen for
the freedom of the workers to starve to death, or the equality bet­
w een the one who sells h is labour-power and the bourgeois who
a lleged ly freely purchases that labour in the open m arket as if
from an equal, and so forth. Marx explains all this in h is econom ­
ic w orks” (V. I. Lenin, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 29, p. 199).

3. Lunacharsky has in m ind Lenin’s statem ent that “everyone,

having performed as m uch social labour as another, receives an
equal share of the social p r o d u c t...” (V. I. Lenin, T h e S t a t e a n d
R e v o l u t i o n , C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 25, p. 470)
 NOTES 315

4. H a r r i o t , E d o u a r d (1872-1952)—French politician, publicist, h is­

torian, writer; mem ber of the Academic Frangaise from 1947. Be­
came a parliam entary deputy in 1919, occupied m inisterial posts
at various times; in 1924-25 and 1932 was Prime M inister and Mi­
nister for Foreign Affairs. In 1924, the Herriot governm ent establish­
ed diplom atic relations w ith the Soviet Union, and in 1932 signed
a pact of non-aggression with the USSR. At the time of the occu­
pation of France by Nazi troops, Ilerriot supported the resistance
of national forces to the invaders. The years 1942-45 Herriot spent
in a German concentration camp, and was liberated by the Soviet
Army.
In the 1920s, there w as a m ovem ent in France in favour of the
“new education”, w hich tried to popularise the idea of creating a
school w hich would educate all children up to the age of eighteen.
In 1924, the Herriot governm ent set up a com m ission to produce a
draft law em bodying this idea. The draft, w hen produced, w as re­
jected by the French parliam ent in 1927.

5. Lunacharsky is referring to Karl Marx’s I n s t r u c t i o n s f o r the-

D e l e g a t e s o f t h e P r o v i s i o n a l G e n e r a l C o u n c i l , in w hich Point 4 sets-
out Marx’s view s on education, on the tasks and principles of the
polytechnical labour school. These I n s t r u c t i o n s were approved as a
resolution at the Geneva Congress of the First Internationale, 3-8-
September, 18G6. The sam e Congress approved the Constitution and
Rules of the International W orking Men’s Association. (See: Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, S e l e c t e d W o r k s , in 3 volum es, V ol.
2, p. 77)

6. In the I n s t r u c t i o n s f o r t h e D e l e g a t e s o f t h e P r o v i s i o n a l G e ­
n e r a l C o u n c i l o n P a r t i c u l a r Q u e s t i o n s Karl Marx stressed that "the
com bination of paid productive labour, m ental education, bodily
exercise and polytechnic training will raise the working^ class far
above the level of the higher and middle classes”. (Op. cit., Vol. 2r
P- 81).

7. Lunacharsky is referring to S c h o o l s o f T o m o r r o w , by J. and1

E. Dew ey, which describes the experience gained in nine of the
best, in the authors’ opinion, schools in America (a Russian edi­
tion of this book appeared in Moscow in 1922). See also Note 7 to-
“W hat Kind of School Does the Proletarian State Need?”

8. The reference is to N. M. T ulaikov’s book S e l s k o k h o z y a i s t v e n -

n iy e k o l l e d z h i ( v u z i ) S o y c d i n y o n n y k h S l i t a t o v [Agricultural Col­
leg es (of higher education) in the United States], Moscow, 1924.

9. T h e F i r s t E x p e r i m e n t a l S t a t i o n f o r E d u c a t i o n was a group of
m odel-cum -experim ental institutions under the Comm issariat for
Education of the Russian Federation, set up in 1919 by the leading
Soviet educationist S. T. Shatsky (1879-1934). It consisted of tw o
sections: a country section in Kaluga Province, and an urban on e
in Moscow. The country section included 13 first-stage schools, on e
21*
316 SUPPLEMENT

secon d-stage school, and 4 kindergartens. The teachers’ collective

o f the F irst E xperim ental Station for Education, under S hatsky’s
leadership, took an active part in socialist transformation of the
countryside, and carried out a great deal of work on doing away
w ith illiteracy and providing political education for the local in­
habitants, and in im proving general and cultural conditions of life
for the peasants. The work of the Station continued until 1936.

10. Lunacharsky refers to a passage in Lenin’s speech to the

Third Congress of the Young Communist League, on 20 October,
1920: “.. .the generation of those who are now fifteen years
o l d . . . should tackle all its educational tasks in sucli a way
that every day, in every village and city, the young people shall
en g a g e in the practical solution of some problem of labour in com ­
m on, even though the sm allest or the sim plest. The success of com ­
m un ist construction w ill be assured w hen this is done in every
village, as com m unist em ulation develops and the youth prove that
they can unite their labour”. (V. I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth
L eagues ’, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 31, p. 299)

11. T h e Y o u n g P i o n e e r s —a m ass voluntary organisation for

-children of 10 to 15 years of age; this was set up in May 1922.
A year later, 1923-24, the first groups of Oktyabryata cam e into
bein g—voluntary groups of schoolchildren aged 7 to 9, attached to
Pioneer com panies in schools, w ith the aim of preparing children
for entry to the Pioneers (the first groups formed of these y o u n g ­
er children were made up of those born in the year of the Octo-
Rey ° luli° n7 1917, hence the nam e Oktyabryata, or “children
o f October”).
. October 1922, at the Fifth Congress of the Y oung Commu­
nist League, the S t a t u t e o n t h e W o r k o f t h e P i o n e e r O r g a n i s a t i o n
w as approved, w hich marked out the m ain tasks of P ioneer work,
its content and m ethods. In 1924, the Pioneers were honoured by
Lenin s nam e being attached to their organisation, w hich thus be­
cam e the Lenin P ioneer Organisation. By this tim e it had becom e
a truly m ass organisation for children, w ith more than one and a
half m illion mem bers. A directive of the Central Comm ittee of the
R ussian C om m unist Party (B olsh eviks), of 4 A ugust, 1924, em pha­
sised that the basic aim of the m ovem ent w as “to be a school of
C om m unist education”.
In h is article “The Children’s M ovem ent and C om m unist Edu­
ca tio n ” (1924), Lunacharsky noted that the Pioneer m ovem ent
brought children into the thick of w hat w en t on in so ciety and
integrated them organically w ith the work of the people as a w ho­
le, w ith the p eop le’s work to build socialism . It gave children “a
form of collective work . . . in w ays not over-extending the strength
o f children, but enabling them to be of perceptive and u sefu l ser­
vice to so ciety ”.
The Pioneer organisation has played and still continues to play
a major part in the Communist education of successive generations;
it is an important factor, giving them a firm ideological ground­
ing and drawing them into active participation in the social and
 NOTES 317

political life of the country. At the present time the Pioneer orga­
nisation unites more than 25,000,000 children and young people.
12. Other works by Lunacharsky which deal with problems o f
the education of a new intelligentsia, drawn from the workers and
peasants, are: T h e I n t e l l i g e n t s i a . I t s P a s t . P r e s e n t a n d F u t u r e (1924)r
and T h e I n t e l l i g e n t s i a a n d R e l i g i o n (1925), as w ell as many others.

Education of the New Man

L e c t u r e d e l i v e r e d o n 23 M a y , 192S, in L e n i n g r a d

The problems of education in its various aspects have

been treated by Lunacharsky in many works which the read­
er has already met in the pages of this present volume. But
they are dealt with most fully and com prehensively in two
speeches which he made in 1928—“Education of the
New Man” and “The Educational Tasks of the Soviet School”.
These speeches to som e extent summed up his thinking on
the subject. They provide a synthesis of Lunacharsky’s view s
on the fundam ental aim s of com m unist education.
The different audiences for which the lecture “Edu­
cation of the New Man” and the report “The Educational
Tasks of the Soviet School” were intended to determine their
differing characters and the differing accentuation on various
points which they contain. The lecture is a model of true
educational propaganda, w hile the report is a no less bril­
liant exam ple of profound theoretical investigation of the
most important problems of education. Differing in their gen­
ie and com position, but one in their idea and aim, in their
lin e of advance, these two works rightfu lly form part of So­
viet. educational literature’s fund of “golden classics”.
At the end of the 1920s issues of com m unist moral edu­
cation had becom e particularly high on the order of the day.
S ocialist reconstruction of the econom y m eant that there
was a firm advance again st capitalist elem ents taking place
on all fronts, including that of education. After the F ifteenth
Congress of the Communist Party (1927), w hich had under­
lined the vital need to strengthen the revolutionary, class
nature of educational work, the tasks of com m unist education
becam e a subject enjoying m uch attention in m any circles
of society. The role of 'th e school in the fight for “the new
m an” becom es a central them e for the press. The Central
Board for Social Education ( G l a v s o t s v o s ) noted in its report
for 1928 that it w as especially noticeable how strongly peop­
le felt “the need to increase the im portance attached to edu­
cational m atters”, w hich had com e to the forefront “in th e
course of the last year”.
In his lecture on “Education of the New Man” Lu­
nacharsky indicated two “zones of phenomena” which “oblige
one to raise one’s voice concerning something of a change”
in the work of the schools, and which brought “questions of
318 SUPPLEMENT

m oral education to the forefront”. One of these “zones of

p hen om en a” w as the logic of developm ent of the schools
them selves: they had now entered into a phase of develop­
m en t at w hich they could already discharge the tasks of
com m u n ist education successfu lly.
Instruction and moral education are two in divisib le func­
tio n s of the school, but their performance does not, however,
alw ays proceed in step, with the sam e degree of success. In
periods of break-up of a school system which does not m eet
the new dem ands of so ciety’s developm ent, the tasks w hich
com m only appear to be of the m ost im m ediate im portance
are those of reviewing the aim s and content of education in
school review of curricula and syllabi, of the system of tea­
ch in g methods used. It is questions of instructional educa­
tion which receive m ost attention, in both theoretical and
practical work.
The com plexity of m oral-educational problem s sh ow s itself
also in the length of tim e w hich is required for their solution.
For the young Soviet school this com p lexity w as com pounded
by the fact that in the field of m oral education it haa no h e­
ritage at all to look back to. W hereas in the theory and prac­
tice of teaching in school it w as possible to find som e sup­
port in the best of w hat had been bequeathed by the old
school, the old educational theory, here, in this m oral-edu­
cational field, it w as necessary from the very b egin n in g to
open up entirely new paths, on the basis of the fundam en­
tal principles and aim s of com m unist m oral education as for­
m ulated in the classics of M arxism and in the resolu tions of
Party congresses.
To cope w ith these tasks an accum ulation of practical
experience and theoretical backing was required, as w as re-
equipm ent, ideologically and p olitically, of the principal, lead­
in g actor on the school scen e—the teacher, who had to be­
com e, as Lunacharsky puts it, u. .. an en gin eer w orking to the
finest of tolerances as he constructs that am azing, m ost fi­
nely-w rought prim ary cell, w ithout w hich so ciety has no
m ean in g— the hum an p ersonality”. [A. V. Lunacharsky, T r e -
t i i F r o n t (The Third Front), C o l l e c t i o n o f E s s a y s , M oscow
1925, p. 26.]
The second “zone of p henom ena”, w hich Lunacharsky pre­
sen ts as linked with the upward turn in the econom y and
with the advance of the revolution in culture, included “the
excep tion ally accelerated tem po of our advance towards pro­
ducing the new m an”, and “the excep tion ally atten tive rev­
iew now being undergone by the principles and p aths w e
have been follow in g up to n ow ”. It w as now b ecom in g “of
utm ost im portance”, as Lunacharsky n otes in the lecture
here published, lo tackle the problem of ed u cating “the hu­
man being of the future ’ and to work out new , so c ia list
moral standards.
Under (he given n ew conditions it w as essen tia l to ana­
lyse the experience already gain ed in m oral-educational work,
and lo m ake the educational tasks of the Soviet school more
 NOTES 319

precise and more concrete. It was also essential, over and

above that, to define more closely the concept of the final
aim towards w hich all the m oral-educational work of the
school was directed—the ideal of the new man. This was all
the more necessary since, as the country had started to move
along the road of industrialisation, there had been som e dis­
sem ination of view s which considered the school as nothing
more than an instrum ent reproducing the labour force, and
of concepts which saw “the new Am erica” as the social ide­
al, and “the man who can fix a screw in properly” as the
ideal product of education. These “educational id eals” of the
proponents of w hat Lunacharsky called “the screw-fixing phi­
losophy” ( g a i k i s m ) were closely related to the view s of tho­
se who saw socialism as “the com m unalisation of the hum an
b ein g”.
In his lecture Lunacharsky demonstrated the untenability
of all these concepts, show ing that the new society would
need not only “good production workers” but also, and more
than all else,—hum an beings capable of carrying through “the
re-ordering of hum an life ”. Socialism presupposes, to use
Lunacharsky's words, not “m achinisation” and “com m unalisa­
tion of the hum an b ein g”, but the fu ll flowering of hum an
individuality, w hile at the sam e tim e all the “hum an w ills”
are united to the m axim um possible extent into “one single
organised force”. This last was the ideal to w hich education of
the young should be directed, and for w hose sake “we carry
on the work, for w hose sake we exist, and w ithout which it
would not be w orthw hile to live and to work”.
D eveloping Lenin's ideas on the role of the school in the
transformation of society and of man, em phasising that the
socialist school had to become “the first real foretaste of the
socialist society”—in this lecture on “Education of the
N ew Man” Lunacharsky gave a profound analysis of the
educative tasks of the school and of the content and forms
of moral, labour, physical and aesthetic education.

1. The principles of the p o l y t e c h n i c a l l a b o u r s c h o o l , as proclaim ­

ed in 1918 at the First All-R ussia Congress on Education in its
Declaration of the Unified Labour School, required a long period of
tim e and much concentrated work by the Communist Party and
the w hole Soviet people before they could be realised in practice.
They were realised as the socialist reconstruction of the country
roceeded, as the econom y developed and provided the m aterial
E asis for the re-organisation of the schools, as the schools them ­
selves developed and became capable of discharging more and more
su ccessfu lly the tasks of com m unist education of the rising g en e­
rations. The directive approved in December 1977 by the Central
Committee of the CPSU and by the USSR Council of M inisters,
“On Further Im provem ent of the Instruction and Education of Pu­
pils in the General Schools, and their Training for W ork”, stressed
that today the Soviet general school is “gen u inely a school of the
whole people, w hich has consistently put into practice the L eninist
320 SUPPLEMENT

p rin cip les of th e unified labour polytechnical school”. (P r a u d a ,

29 D ecem ber, 1977).

2. See N ote 10 to “The Tasks of Education W ithin the System

of S oviet C onstruction”.

3. See N ote 6 to “W hat Kind of School D oes the Proletarian

S tate N eed?”

4. T h e S o v i e t e x h i b i t i o n o n e d u c a t i o n , show ing the achievem ents

of the Soviet educational system and of Soviet educational studies,
w as organised in Denmark in 1927, for the tenth anniversary of
the Great October Socialist Revolution.
In later years exhibitions on Soviet education were held abroad
on m ore than one occasion. In 1955, a perm anent Soviet exhibition
on education was set up in Geneva, under UNESCO.

5. Lunacharsky is referring to a passage in one of L enin’s last

W° i ^ ’ an art*c^e **^n Cooperation” (1923): . . cultural revolution
would now suffice to m ake our country a com pletely socia list coun­
try; but it presents im m ense difficulties of a purely cultural (for
we are illiterate) and m aterial character (for to be cultured w e m ust
achieve a certain developm ent of the m aterial m eans of production,
m ust have a certain m aterial b a se )”. (V. I. Lenin, O n C o o p e r a t i o n ,
C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 33, p. 475).

6. N i e t z s c h e , F r i e d r i c h (1844-1900)—German id ealist philosopher,

who preached the cu lt of the “superm an”, the pow erful persona­
lity standing above all moral rules and tram pling the ordinary
people harshly underfoot for the satisfaction of his own lu st for
power. N ietzsche treated the m asses of the people with contem pt,
sin g in g the praises of the “chosen few ” and ju stify in g their acts
of violen ce and crim es again st m orality, their urge to in stig a te war.
W ith the nam e of N ietzsche is linked one of tlie m ost reactionary
trends in the cultural life of Europe (particularly in Germ any) dur­
in g the first, decades of the tw entieth century. N ietzscheanism w as
the resu lt of applying the philosophy and id eology of N ietzsche to
the conditions of im perialism ; it found its final expression in N a­
zism . The N azis proclaim ed N ietzsche to be their id eologist, carry­
in g the reactionary tendencies of his teachings to the extrem e.

7. L unacharsky is referring to the elections to the R eichstag in

1928, w hich show ed a considerable increase in the num ber of vo­
tes cast for candidates representing the Com m unist and Social-
D em ocratic P arties in Germany.
8. An oblique quotation from the D i v i n e C o m e d y , by the great
Italian poet D ante A ligh ieri (1265-1321): “Abandon hope, all y e
who enter h ere”—the inscription over the gates of H ell. (D i v i n e
C o m e d y , Canto 3, “H e ll”.)

9. See Note 3 to “The Tasks of Education W ithin the S ystem o f

S oviet C onstruction”.
 NOTES 321

10. Lunacharsky is referring to Lenin's speech at the First All-

Russia Congress of Workers in Education, 28 August, 1918. Em­
phasising the role to be played by the new, socialist school in the*
building of a socialist society, Lenin noted in this speech that the
creation of such a school was one of the important “com ponent
parts of tlie struggle we are now waging*’. “...O u r work in the
sphere of education is part of the struggle for overthrowing the
bourgeoisie," said Lenin, “.. .the working people are thirsting for
know ledge because they need it to win . . . they see how indispens­
able education is for the victorious conclusion of their struggle.”
(V. I. Lenin, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 28, pp. 87-88.)
11. On 26 November, 1925 Lunacharsky delivered a report, at-
the invitation of the German Society of Friends of the New Rus­
sia, in the Beethoven Hall in Berlin. A report on this m eeting ap­
peared in the journal N a r o d n o y e P r o s u e s h c h e n i y e (People’s Educa­
tion), 1926, Nos. 4-5, pp. 253-256.
12. In bis pamphlet W h a t I s A r t ? Lew Tolstoy wrote: “To evoke
in oneself a feeling already experienced and, having evoked it, to
t r a n s m i t it by m eans of movements, lines, sounds, and im ages con­
veyed in words, in such a way that others experience the same
feelin g—that is the activities called art. Art is human activities
consisting in one man consciously, by m eans of certain outward
signals, conveying to another man the feelings he has experienced,
and in other people having these feelings transmitted to them and
liv in g them over again." (L. N. Tolstoy, C o l l e c t e d TI7orA*s, Vol. 30,
Moscow, 1961, p. 65.)
13. S c o u t i n g —one of the m ost widespread bourgeois forms of
children’s and youth m ovement; arose in 1907 on the initiative of
an English colonel, R. Baden-Powell. The educative system on which
it is based is expounded in Baden-Powell’s book A i d s to S c o u t i n g
(1898).
In Russia, the Boy Scout m ovem ent started in 1909. In 1919, the
Second Congress of the Young Communist League disbanded the
Scouts as being an organisation inappropriate to the tasks of com­
m unist education of young people. The leadership of the People’s
Commissariat for Education supported Ibis decision by the League.
W hile rejecting the bourgeois character of the Scouts, however,
the Commissariat did point to the desirability of utilising some of
the methods of Scouting in the work of the com m unist m ovem ents
for children and young people.
“Scouting,” wrote N. I\. Krupskaya in 1922 in an article on “The
Young Communist League and the Boy Scouts", “has an irresistible
attraction for youngsters, there is som ething in it which gives them
satisfaction, which attaches them to that organisation. That som e­
thing is its m e t h o d o f a p p r o a c h to t h e y o u n g s t e r . ' ' (N. K. Krupskaya,
W o r k s o n E d u c a t i o n , Vol. 5, Moscow, 1959, p. 37, in Russian). The
strong points of the Boy Scout m ovem ent Krupskaya considered
to be its careful study of the psychology and interests of children,
its encouragem ent of the children’s own initiative, its love of trav­
el, heroism, rom antic adventure, its use of liv ely forms of activi-
322 SUPPLEMENT

ties, its colourful and attractive cerem onies. “The Y oung C om m unist
L eagu e m u st,” em phasised Krupskaya, “bring these m ethods of work
i n t o its ow n practice as quickly as possib le.” (op. cit., p. 48.)

Lunacharsky repeatedly attacked the bourgeois norm s of fa­

m ily life, the en slavem ent of w om en w ithin the fam ily, the con­
tem ptuous ^attitude show n towards women. In an arliclo of 1026
ne wrote: ‘W e need the m an w ho is aflame with life, who se es his
young love, bis relationship w ith a woman, as one of the m om ents
of b righ tn ess and great significance in his life. He is sparing w ith
p assion and tenderness, but then h is “rom ances” are truly pure,
profound and beautiful; they do not tear apart the web of his re­
lation ship to the revolution, to his comrades, to the world at largo,
th e y are harm oniously integrated into those relationships.” [ K r a s ­
n a y a G a z e t a (Red G azette), 26 July, 1926]

The Educational Tasks of the Soviet School

R e p o r t d e l i v e r e d to a c o n f e r e n c e o f t e a c h e r s
o f s o c i a l s t u d i e s , o n 27 J u n e , 1928

The report here published has m any points of sim ila rity —■
in aims, problems dealt w ith and ideas expressed— w ith the
lecture on ‘ Education of the New Man”, given before
a am erent type of audience one month before the conference
of social studies for teachers took place. In his report Lu-
nacharsky concentrated his attention on theoretical a n a ly sis
of the educational tasks of the school, on the nodal problem s
of educational theory: the social role of education and its
p f u naj “ rf th° aim s °* com m unist education in the period
S L 5 f n n dlCtoi ° rah!P ,?f ,t h ° , Pr°letariat; the functions, tasks,
direction and m ethod of educational work in the schools at
the new stage of building socialism then reached. U nder the
conditions of full-scale building of socialism , the tasks of
education become, in Lunacharsky’s words, “. . . the pre-con­
dition for further econom ic and political su ccesses, n ot to
m ention that it is they that bring about the transform ation
of hum an life w hich gives true m eaning to the w holo m ove­
m ent of the proletariat”. At the new stage of that period,
w hen in Lunacharsky s words “com m unist public opinion had
attained som e m atu rity”, w hen it was v ita l to “take m ore
en ergetic steps to win the children”, a task w hich then as­
sum ed great im portance w as that of u nitin g the efforts of
school, public opinion and fam ily in w orking on the educa­
tive process. In d elin eatin g this task Lunacharsky noted that
these n ew lim es brought w ith them n ew dem ands upon the
teacher, and new dem ands upon educational sc ie n c e f w hich
m u st be based upon “precise pedagogical k n o w led g e”. “The
pointers w hich our leaders h ave given u s” w ere, as Luna­
charsky said, a reliable com pass to point us alon g the w a y
to building the n ew school. B ut in order to com p lete th is
 NOTES 323

“grandiose edifice”, it w as not enough “m erely to have a

c o m p a ss’, ll w as essen tial that theoretical studies in depth
should be m ade of the problem s of education, and prim arily
of the problem s of com m unist moral education.
Lunacharsky considered that the m ost im portant of these
problem s w as the interaction of collective and individual, the
formal ion of the personality w ithin the collective. Lunachar­
sky asserted that the m ain characteristic of the new m an
m ust be collectivism , thinking of on eself not as “I” but as
‘ w e ’, and he again (as in the lecture “Education of the
New Man”) in sisten tly em phasised that education of an in­
dependent, creative individual (its form ation being grounded
"on a collective basis” ) is “the guarantee of w id ely applied
d ivision of labour w ithin so ciety ”, and the guarantee of so­
ciety's moral health and cultural richness.
Lunacharsky’s report overflows w ith ideas that fu lly retain
their urgency today. One of them , in particular, am ong those
w hich still have a very real contem porary m eaning, is the
idea of unity, of the close m utual link-up betw een instruction­
al le a ch in g 'a n d moral education. The content put into sub­
ject teaching in schools is, as Lunacharsky says “a great
ed u cative force”, it “opens up a w hole com plex of educative
w ork”. Instruction, he points out, m ust be directed towards
the form ation of a m aterialist, M arxist world outlook, and
the form ation of this outlook m ust proceed “cyclically, start­
in g w ith sim pler forms and gradually passing on to more
com plete on es . It is no less im portant, in Lunacharsky's opin­
ion, to m ake instruction an active force in form ing the
ch ild ’s character. Instruction m ust be “lively, m oving and
therefore ed u cative”.
No less im portant today is Lunacharsky’s opinion on the
m ost sign ifican t part p layed by labour education in the gen ­
eral process of educating youngsters in a com m unist way.
S tressing that “the im portance of labour in education is
en orm ou s”, Lunacharsky in this report considers “the issue
of labour in the sch ool” under three asp ects—labour m ethods
and labour approach in teaching; the teaching of actual la­
bour processes; and the m orally educative role of labour. Of
particular in terest are Lunacharsky's ideas on the functions
of labour education and learning work processes w ithin the
form ation of the world outlook. In contem porary Soviet edu­
cational thinking, and in the practice of Soviet schools today,
the them e of labour education and teaching work processes
is one of the m ost im portant. The decree of the Central Com­
m ittee of the CPSU and the USSR Council of M inisters on the
schools, approved in December 1977, maps out a broad pro­
gram m e of m odernisation of labour education and instruction,
of all-round im provem ent in the preparation for u seful pro­
ductive work given to school pupils.
L unacharsky’s view of the nature and tasks of aesth etic
education is lik ew ise extrem ely fertile and full of pointers
for the future. The idea (put forward in the lecture
“ Education of the New Man' ) that the basic aim of aesth etic
324 SUPPLEMENT

education is to educate “the hum an em otions” ( n o t only to

develop artistic ab ilities and the ability to appreciate real life-
and works of art) is further developed in the work now
under consideration. Noting the profound influence w hich em o­
tional experience exerts upon character formation, Lunachar­
sky em phasises that “the basic mode of u se” of aesthetic
education is to organise em otional experiences in such a w a y
that they w ill a ssist the formation of com m unist character
traits, and educate a person “powerfully and la stin g ly ” in th e
spirit of com m unist ideals. Lunacharsky view s aesthetic edu­
cation “as one of the m ethods of social education” And so­
cio-political education is, in his words, “the a x is” around
w hich everything done in the field of education m ust be
“connected up”.
In the ligh t of the ideas so popular today about “on­
going or developing” education, it is particularly interest­
ing to see w hat Lunacharsky has to say, in the work under
discussion, on the need to acquaint even children of the
younger age-groups with a wide range of scientific concepts,
and to note his idea that “even the sm allest child can be
told the history of culture, as a glorious fairy-tale”.

1. Lenin em phasised on num erous occasions that the b uilding

of socialism “. . . can be achieved only by slow, persistent work to
re-educate the m asses” (V. I. Lenin, “Draft Programme of R .C .P.(B )”
C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 29, p. 112). In his speech to a conference of
education workers on 3 November, 1920, it is the m ain ideas of
this which Lunacharsky is paraphrasing, Lenin said: “W e do not
hold the Utopian view that the w orking m asses are ready for a
socialist s o c ie t y .. . Education workers, and the C om m unist Party
as the vanguard in the struggle, should consider it their funda­
m ental task to help enlighten and instruct the w orking m asses, in
order to cast off the old w ays and habituated routine we have in ­
herited from the old system . . . . This fundam ental task of the
entire socialist revolution should never be neglected during consid-
eralion of particular p r o b le m s ....” (V. I. Lenin, “Speech delivered
at A ll-R ussia Conference of Political Education of W orkers of Guber­
nia and Uyezd Departments, Novem ber 3, 1920”, C o l l e c t e d W o r k s ,
Vol. 31, p. 365.)

2. Lunacharsky is referring to the follow ing, from L enin’s speech

of 20 January. J919 to the Second All-R ussia Trade Union Congress,
—“The workers were never separated by a Great W all of China
from the old society. And they have preserved a good deal of the
traditional m en tality of cap italist society. The workers are build­
ing a new society w ithou t them selves having becom e new people,
or cleansed of the filth of the old world; they are still standing up
to their knees in that filth. We can only dream of clearing that filtn
away. It would be utterly U topian to think this could be done all
at once”. (V. I. Lenin, “Report at the Second A ll-R ussia Trade
Union Congress”, January 20, 1919; C o l l e c t e d W o r k s , Vol. 28, pp. 424-
25.)
 NOTES 325

3. S c h o o l s o f t h e f r e e c h i l d — schools organising their work on

the basis of the theory of “free education” (a trend in bourgeois
educational thought of the second half of the nineteenth century
and the early twentieth century; its ideal was free development,
unhindered by any lim itations, of the child’s powers and ab ilities—
the full unfoiding of the individual). The ideas of “free education”
have their source in the theory of natural education developed by
Jean-Jacquos Rousseau, who opposed the authoritarian educational
methods prevalent in the schools in his day.
In Russia the ideas of “free education” were partially put into
practice in the “House of the Free Child” which was opened in
Moscow in 1906 and continued lo function until 1909.

4. Lunacharsky is alluding to the follow ing passage in Marx’s

C a p i t a l : “A spider
conducts operations that resemble those of a
weaver, ami a bee puts lo shame many an architect in the construc­
tion of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from
the best of bees is this, that the "architect raises his structure in
im agination before he erects it in reality”. (Karl Marx, C a p i t a l ,
Vol. 1, p. 174.)

5. See Note 8 to the article “The Philosophy of the School and

the R evolution”.

6. The Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,

approved by an extraordinary session of the USSR Supreme Soviet
on 7 October, 1977, em phasises that in the USSR today “a develop­
ed socialist society has been b u i l t . . . . It is a society of mature
socialist social relations, in which, on the basis of the drawing to­
gether of all classes and social strata and of the juridical and fac­
tual equality of all its nations and nationalities and their fraternal
cooperation, a new historical com m unity of people has been form­
ed—the Soviet people”.
“Developed socialist society,” says the Constitution, “is a nat­
ural, logical stage on the road to com m unism .”
“The supremo goal of the Soviet state is the building of a class­
less com m unist society in which there w ill be public, com m unist
s e lf- g o v e r n m e n t ....” [ C o n s t i t u t i o n ( F u n d a m e n t a l L a w ) o f t h e U n i o n
o f S o v i e t S o c i a l i s t R e p u b l i c s , Moscow, 1977, p. 13-14 (Eng. ed.).]

7. See article On th e C la ss S c h o o l and Note 11 to this article.

8. C a m e r a l or c h a m b e r (governm ent office) s c h o o l —a form of

education organised in pre-revolutionary Russia of the first half of
the nineteenth century; its purpose was “to train person capable of
serving in the econom ic or adm inistrative services”.

9. M a c h i s m —a subjectivist-idealist trend in philosophy and the

m ethodology of science, which came into being early in the twen­
tieth century under the influence of the work of the Austrian phys­
icist and philosopher E r n s t M a c h (1838-1910) and his followers. In
326 SUPPLEMENT

k eep in g with, the spirit of subjective idealism , the Machists assert­

ed that the world is “a com plex of sensation s”, and that the task
of scien ce, therefore, is m erely to describe those sensations. Ma­
ch ism se t up to be “the philosophy of the natural scien ces” and
tried to take up a position in philosophy “above party considera­
tio n s”—-the parties being the m aterialists and the idealists. T hese
pretensions, and the actually subjective-idealist nature of M achism,
were subjected to sharp criticism by V. I. Lenin in his M a t e r i a l i s m ,
a n d E m p i r i o c r i t i c i s m (1909).

10. S o l i p s i s m — an extrem e form of subjective idealism , according

to w hich the only undoubted reality is man and his consciousness,
w hile the objective world exists only in the consciousness of the
individual. Also characteristic of solipsism is the assertion that sen­
sation is the only source of perception. A critique of solipsism is
given by V. I. Lenin in M a t e r i a l i s m a n d E m p i r i o c r i t i c i s m .

1L Lunacharsky has in mind the ideas expressed by E ngels in

A n ti-D iih rin g (1877-78). In this work (Section 3, S o c i a l i s m ) E n g els
wrote: . . . j u s t as the older manufacture, in its time, and handi­
craft, becom ing more developed under its influence, had come in to
collision with the feudal tram mels of the guilds, so now modern
industry, in its more com plete developm ent, com es into collision
with the bounds w ithin w hich the capitalistic mode of production
holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown
the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between pro­
ductive forces and m odes of production is not a conflict engendered
in the mind of man . . . . It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us,
independently of the w ill and actions even of the m en who have
brought it on. Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex, in
thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first,
of the class directly suffering under it, the w orking class.” (Frede­
rick Engels, A n t i - D i i h r i n g , , Moscow, 1978, Progress P ublishers,
pp. 324-25.)

12. P a v l o v , I v a n (1849-19361—em inent Soviet physiologist, creat­

or of the m aterialist theory of higher nervous activities. The foun­
dation of his consistent m aterialist approach to the study of the-
higher functions of the brain, in anim als and in man, w as his the­
ory of “conditioned reflexes”—com plex accommodatory reactions of
an organism , w hich arise in response to particular c o n d i t i o n s —
hence the name.

13. T r e t y a k o v A r t G a l l e r y , in Moscow—the largest collection of

Russian and Soviet art in existence; it takes its name from its
founder, P. M. Tretyakov, a major figure in the Russian art world
(1832-1898). Tretyakov, who began to collect paintings in 1856, set
him self the aim of creating a gallery of national art w hich w ould
be accessible to all. In 1892 he presented his collection to the city
of Moscow. In 1918 the Tretyakov Gallery w as nationalised. Dur­
ing the years of Soviet power, its stock has been m ultiplied more
than tenfold.
 NAME INDEX

A F

Alexander II 289 Feuerbach, L. 45, 280

Fichte, J. G. 164, 248, 303
B Foerster, F. W. 36, 37, 39, 91„
157, 158, 159, 230, 276
Baden-Powell, R. 236, 321 Froebel, F. 95, 164, 290
Barbusse, H. 265 Fiilop-Miller 238
Bebel, A. 42, 278 Furmanov, D. 199, 313
Beethoven, L. 72
Bergson, H. 198, 312
Blonsky, P. P. 106, 291, 313 G
Borodin, A. P. 48, 280
Brecht, B. 265 Galliffet 287
Brezhnev, L. I. 270 Gogol, N. 201, 313
Briand, A. 87, 285-286 Gorky, M. 264
Buisson, F. 91, 288

C
H
Hamp, P. 198, 313
Catherine II 306 Herbart, J. F. 95, 164, 290*
Chapaev, V. 313 Herriot, E. 209, 315
Chernov, V. M. 87, 286 Hokusai 280
Chernyshevsky, N. 274 Humboldt, W. 34, 38, 276
Condorcet, M. J. A. N. 42, 164,
277
J
D
Jelferson, T. 269
Dante, A. 320
Delyanov, I. D. 288 K
Dewey, E. 315
Dewey, J. 127, 212, 218, 298, Kalashnikov, A. G. 106, 291
315 Kautsky, K. 88, 287
Dobrolyubov, N. 274 Kolesnikova, N. 309
Konovalov, A. I. 87, 286
E Kordes, V. 221
Krupskaya, N. K. 78, 135,
Engels, F. 177, 203, 222, 254, 178, 181, 187, 281, 284, 302,
255, 305, 326 306, 308, 309, 313, 321-322
328 NAME INDEX

L R

Lassalle, F. 62, 207, 281 Ricardo, D. 69, 284

Lenin, V. I. 5, 29, 120, 140, 143, Robespierre, M. 235, 277
174, 193, 203, 208, 216, 221, Rolland, R. 265
227, 236, 237, 243, 244, 264, Rousseau, J.-J. 95, 164, 289-290,
265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 325
273, 276, 282, 283, 284, 286,
287, 291, 292, 294, 297. 300,
308-309, 311, 314, 315, 316, S
320, 321, 324, 325, 326
Lepeletier, L. M. 42, 164, 277 Schiller, F. 42, 278
Lloyd George, D. 87, 286 Shatsky, S. T. 313, 315
Lobe 230 Shaw, B. 265
Luther, M. 168, 303 Shchedrin, M. E. (Saltykov) 88,
Lvov, G. E. 87, 286 287
Smith, A. 36, 69, 276
M Sverdlov, Y. 284

Mach, E. 325 T
Malthus, T. 69, 284
Marx, K. 21, 69, 82, 127, 162 Talleyrand, C. M. 164, 302
190, 206, 207, 210, 211, 217 Tereshchenko, I. 1. 87, 286
222, 226, 242-243, 247 254 Tolstoi, D. A. 91, 288
273, 276, 284, 314,’ 315,’325 Tolstoy, L. N. 199-200, 234, 291,
Maupassant, G. 50, 280
Millerand, A. E. 87, 286-287 Tretyakov, P. M. 327
Moliere 146, 302 Tsereteli, I. G. 87, 286
Montaigne, M. 42, 277 Tulaikov, N. M. 212, 315

U
•Natorp, P 38, 174, 273, 305
Uspensky, G. 198, 312-313
^ 26°274 11 (Nikolai R°mano
N ietzsche, F. 223, 320
V
Valuyev, P. A. 289 .
Vladimir Ilyich (see Lenin V. I-)
Pao
UQoen’ F- 90'91’ 156> 157> 281
289 Vorovsky, V. 306
Pavlov, I. 256, 326
Pestalozzi, J. H. 38, 95, 16. W
277, 290 ’
Peter the Great 153, 300 W ilhelm II 22, 93, 158, 252
Plato 34, 276
Potyomkin, G. A. 306 Z
Pushkin, A. 201, 280, 313
Zernov 141