Education. From a Letter on EducationВоспитание. Из письма о воспитании

Every man possesses a particular gift and is capable of fulfilling a definite task. One must try to discover this particular gift in the child and direct his instruction in keeping with it. After general teaching in those branches of knowledge that are good for everyone, his instruction must be directed toward developing the particular gifts that have been found in him. Education means the nourishing of the child’s faculties, not the creating of new faculties that are not in him. The latter is impossible.

But one thing is necessary for all children. It is necessary to give them a true idea of life and of what the world is like into which they have been sent to fulfill their human task.

Life is a duty, a task, a mission. For the sake of all that is holy, do not preach to them doctrines of happiness, either personal or common. Belief in personal happiness will make a child a lover of self; belief in the common happiness will sooner or later bring him to the same thing. He will dream of what he cannot realize, and in his youth he will fight for this unrealizable thing; then, when he finds that he cannot soon realize the dreams of his soul, he will concentrate on himself and try to win personal happiness, and so he will sink deep in self-love.

Teach him that life has meaning only as a task or a duty; that happiness, the sun of happiness that shines on the wayfarer, may smile on him too, and then he should rejoice and bless God for it; but that the search for happiness leads a man only to ruin and, most likely, to his losing the possibility of ever enjoying happiness. Teach him that to perfect himself morally and intellectually for the sake of the perfecting of his fellow men is his direct duty; that he must strive to attain the truth and then serve it in word and deed, embodying it in life fearlessly and unceasingly; that to determine the truth he has been given two guides: his own consciousness, his conscience; and tradition, or the consciousness of all mankind.

At the foundation of all education there must stand, first of all, what has been abandoned in our schools: the religious understanding of life, and not so much in the form of teaching as in the form of a guiding principle of all the work of education. The religious understanding of life which, as I understand it, can and must become the foundation of the life of the people of our time will be, put as briefly as possible, this: the meaning of our life consists in fulfilling the will of that infinite principle of which we are conscious of being a part; and this will is the uniting of all that lives, and first of all of people: their brotherhood, their serving one another. From the other end, this same religious understanding of life will be expressed thus: the work of life is union with all that lives — first of all, human brotherhood, serving one another. And this is so because we are alive only in the measure that we are conscious of ourselves as a part of the whole of the infinite, and the law of the infinite is this union. In any case, the manifestation in life of the religious understanding — the union of all, attained by love — is, first of all, human brotherhood: this is the practical, the chief law of life, and it is this that must be set at the foundation of education; and therefore it is good and right that everything that leads to union be developed in children, and everything that leads to the opposite be suppressed.

Children are always — and the more so the younger they are — in the state that doctors call the first degree of suggestion. And children learn and are educated only thanks to this state of theirs. (This susceptibility of theirs to suggestion puts them wholly in the power of their elders, and so we can never pay enough attention to what we suggest to them, and how.) So people always learn and are educated only through suggestion, which takes place in two ways: consciously and unconsciously. Everything we teach children — from prayers and fables to dancing and music — all this is conscious suggestion; everything children imitate regardless of our wishes — above all in our life, in our actions — is unconscious suggestion. Conscious suggestion is teaching, instruction; unconscious suggestion is example, education in the narrow sense, or, as I shall call it, enlightenment. In our society all efforts are directed to the first; the second, unintentionally, because our life is bad, is neglected. Those who educate either — and this is the most usual — hide their own life, and the life of grown-ups generally, from children, placing them in exceptional conditions (cadet corps, institutes, boarding schools, and the like), or carry what ought to happen unconsciously over into the realm of the conscious: they prescribe moral rules of life, to which it is necessary to add: fais ce que je dis, mais ne fais pas ce que je fais (do what I say, but do not do what I do).

From this it comes about that in our society instruction has gone so disproportionately far ahead, while true education, or enlightenment, has not only fallen so far behind but is altogether absent. If it exists anywhere, it is only in poor working families. And yet of the two sides of the effect on children, the unconscious and the conscious, the first — that is, unconscious moral enlightenment — is beyond all comparison the more important, both for individuals and for human society.

Some family of a banker, a landowner, an official, an artist, or a writer lives a life of wealth — lives without drinking, without dissipation, without swearing, without wronging people — and wants to give its children a moral education; but this is as impossible as it is impossible to teach children a new language without speaking that language and without showing them books written in that language. The children will listen to rules about morality, about respect for people, but unconsciously they will not only imitate but will take to themselves as a rule that some people are called to clean boots and clothes, carry water and slops, and cook food, and others to dirty clothes and rooms, eat the food, and so on. Once we seriously understand the religious foundation of life — human brotherhood — we cannot fail to see that people who live on money taken from others, and who make those others serve them for that money, are living an immoral life, and no sermons of theirs will rid their children of the unconscious immoral suggestion, which will either remain in them all their lives, distorting all their judgments about the phenomena of life, or will be destroyed by them, with great effort and labor, after much suffering and many mistakes.

And so education, unconscious suggestion, is the most important thing. And for it to be good, moral, what is needed — fearful as it is to say — is that the educator’s whole life be good. “What is to be called a good life?” people will ask. There are infinitely many degrees of goodness, but there is one common and chief mark of a good life: the striving toward perfection in love. If this very thing is in the educators, and if the children are infected with it, the education will not be a bad one.

For the education of children to succeed, those who educate must never stop educating themselves, and must help one another to realize more and more fully what they strive for. As for the means to this, besides the chief one — the inward one, each of us working on our own soul — there may be very many. They must be sought out, thought over, applied, discussed…

All these are hints at one side of the matter — education. Now about instruction. About instruction, this is what I think: science, learning, is nothing other than the passing on of what the most intelligent people have thought. And intelligent people have always thought along three different lines of thought — they thought: 1) philosophically, religiously, about the significance of their life — religion and philosophy; 2) by experiment, drawing conclusions from observations set up in a particular way — the natural sciences: mechanics, physics, chemistry, physiology; and 3) they thought mathematically, drawing conclusions from the propositions of their own thought — mathematics and the mathematical sciences. All three of these kinds of science are real sciences. You cannot counterfeit a knowledge of them, and there can be no half-knowledge: either you know or you do not. All three of these kinds of science are cosmopolitan; all of them not only do not divide people but unite them. All of them are accessible to all people and satisfy the demand of human brotherhood. The juridical and the specifically historical sciences, on the other hand, are not sciences, or are harmful sciences, and must be excluded. But besides there being three branches of science, there are also three ways of passing on this knowledge. (Please do not think I am forcing things into threes; I would have liked there to be four, or ten, but it came out three apiece.)

The first way of passing it on — the most usual — is words. But words are in different languages, and so there appears one more science, languages, again in keeping with the demand of human brotherhood (perhaps the teaching of Esperanto is needed too, if there were time and the pupils wished it). The second way is plastic art, drawing or modeling — the science of how to pass on to another, for the eye, what you know. And the third way is music, singing — the science of how to pass on your mood, your feeling.

Besides these six branches of teaching, a seventh must be brought in as well: the teaching of crafts, again in keeping with the demand of brotherhood, that is, such as everyone needs: metalwork, joinery, carpentry, sewing… So teaching divides into seven subjects.

What share of the time to give to each, beyond the obligatory labor of serving oneself, will be decided by each pupil’s inclination.

This is how I picture it: the teachers set out their hours for themselves, but the pupils are free to come or not. Strange as this seems to us, who have set up instruction so monstrously, complete freedom in teaching — that is, that pupils, boys and girls, should come to learn of their own accord, when they want to — is the necessary condition of all fruitful teaching, just as the necessary condition of nourishment is that the one being nourished should want to eat.

The only difference is that in material things the harm of departing from freedom shows at once — at once there will be vomiting or an upset stomach — while in spiritual things the harmful consequences will not show so soon, perhaps after years. Only with complete freedom is it possible to lead the best pupils as far as they can go, and not hold them back for the sake of the weak; and they, the best pupils, are the ones most needed. Only with freedom is it possible to avoid the usual thing: the arousing of aversion to subjects that, if taught at the proper time and freely, would be loved; only with freedom is it possible to find out which pupil has a bent for which specialty; only freedom does not disrupt the influence of education. Otherwise I will be telling pupils that there must be no violence in life, while committing against them the gravest violence of all — violence to the mind.

I know that this is hard, but what can you do, once you understand that every departure from freedom is ruinous to the very work of instruction? And it is not so hard, after all, once you have firmly made up your mind not to do anything foolish.