Bewondering van John Dewey in 1928 voor de Russische Revolutie en voor het Russisch onderwijs in dienst van die revolutie Dewey praised the collusion of school and state!
Zowel Dewey als Freinet trokken rond 1925 naar Sovjet-Rusland en spraken achteraf hun bewondering uit voor het Russsch regime en het Russisch onderwijs, indoctrinatie inbegrepen Ook Dewey en Freinet wilden het onderwijs gebruiken/misbruiken om een nieuwe/marxistische maatschappij te realiseren
Passages uit :Impressions of Soviet Russia and the revolutionary world
By JOHN DEWEY 1928
Ik begrijp ook niet al te best dat zovelen de voorbije jaren - en onlangs ook prof. Patrick Loobuyck- zich in hun pleidooi voor burgerschapsvorming/maatschappelijke vorming op school beroepen op de visie en inzet van John Dewey destijds.
Woord vooraf
Long out of print, here is the complete text of the above book through the first six chapters. These chapters cover Deweys visit to Soviet Russia in the summer of 1928.
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A few words about the content of Deweys book follow.
Lenin coined a phrase for the Western intellectuals who parroted Soviet propaganda: useful idiots. That phrase spoken for, what shall we call the intellectuals who praised what was true? Though Dewey was a useful idiot, believing the lies told by Soviet intellectuals, he could also be an accurate reporter of what actually was happening. In both cases he was full of praise.
As is clear from Deweys gushing text, he arrived in Leningrad eager to admire the creation of what he calls a collectivistic mentality. To that end he excused, at times even admired, the methods of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Evil means to an evil end.
The Bolsheviks returned Deweys admiration. As Deweys books appeared in the West they published Russian translations, even during the Russian civil war brought on by the revolution when their resources were scarce. Deweys ideas were apparently judged as crucial to the revolution as any weapon in the arsenal of the Red Army. writes Paul Kengor in Dupes: How Americas Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, though in Deweys case he was as much fellow duper as one duped.
Dewey praised the collusion of school and state.
What Are the Russian Schools Doing?
Dewey: I gave in my last article some reasons for believing that in the transitional state of Russia chief significance attaches to the mental and moral (pace the Marxians) change that is taking place; that while in the end this transformation is supposed to be a means to economic and political change, for the present it is the other way around. This consideration is equivalent to saying that the import of all institutions is educational in the broad sensethat of their effects upon disposition and attitude. Their function is to create habits so that persons will act coöperatively and collectively as readily as now in capitalistic countries they act individualistically.
The same consideration defines the importance and the purpose of the narrower educational agencies, the schools. They represent a direct and concentrated effort to obtain the effect which other institutions develop in a diffused and roundabout manner. The schools are, in current phrase, the ideological arm of the Revolution. In consequence, the activities of the schools dovetail in the most extraordinary way, both in administrative organization and in aim and spirit, into all other social agencies and interests.
The connection that exists in the minds of Soviet educators between the formulation of attitudes and dispositions by domestic, industrial and political institutions and by the school may perhaps be indicated by reference to the account given, by one of the leaders of the new education, of his own development. His efforts at educational reform date back to the early years of this century, when he joined with a fellow Russian in conducting a social settlement in the working mens quarter of Moscow.
In 1911, wishing a broader field, he started an educational experimental station in the country, some eighty or a hundred miles distant from Moscow, getting assistance from well-to-do Russians of liberal temper. This school, so I was informed, was based on a combination of Tolstoys version of Rousseaus doctrine of freedom and the idea of the educational value of productive work derived from American sources.
The story thus far is of some historical significance in indicating some of the causal factors in the present Soviet educational system. But its chief value depends upon a further development; especially the effect upon the minds of educational reformers of the constant opposition of established authority to even the most moderate and non-political efforts at educational reform and amelioration of the condition of the working population. The educator of whom I am speaking began as a liberal reformer, not a radical but a constitutional democrat. He worked in the faith and hope that the school, through giving a new type of education, might peacefully and gradually produce the required transformations in other institutions. His pilgrims progress from reforming pedagogue to convinced communist affords a symbol of the social phase of the entire Soviet educational movement.
In the first place, there was the striking and unescapable fact that those reforming and progressive endeavors which were hampered in every possible way by the Tsars régime, a fact that certainly influenced many liberal intellectuals to lend their coöperation to the Bolshevist government. One of them, not a party * member, told me that he thought those intellectuals who had refused to coöperate wherever they could with the new government had made a tragic mistake; they had nullified their own power and had deprived Russia of assistance just when it was most needed. As for himself, he had found that the present government cleared the way for just the causes he had had at heart in the old régime, and whose progress had always been hopelessly compromised by its opposition; and that, although he was not a communist, he found his advice and even his criticism welcomed, as soon as the authorities recognized that he was sincerely trying to coöperate. And I may add that, while my experience was limited, I saw liberal intellectuals who had pursued both the policy he deplored and the one he recommended. There is no more unhappy and futile class on earth than the first, and none more fully alive and happyin spite of narrowly restricted economic conditions, living quarters, salaries, etc.than the second.
This first consideration, the almost unimaginable contrast between the career and fate of social aspirations under the old régime and under the Soviet government, is something to which I, at least, had not given due weight in my prior estimates of Bolshevist Russia. And I imagine there are many who, while they are aware in a general way of the repressive and despotic character of the Tsars government, unconsciously form their appraisal of the present Russian system by putting it in contrast with an imaginary democratic system.
They forget that for the Russian millions the contrast is with the system of which alone they have had actual experience. The Russian system of government at the present time is like that to which the population has been accustomed for centuries, namely, a personal system; like the old system, it has many repressive traits. But viewed in the only way which the experience of the masses makes possible for them, it is one that has opened to them doors that were formerly shut and bolted; it is as interested in giving them access to sources of happiness as the only other government with which they have any acquaintance was to keep them in misery. This fact, and not that of espionage and police restriction, however excessive the latter may be, explains the stability of the present government, in spite of the comparatively small number of communists in the country. It relegates to the realm of pure fantasy those policies for dealing with Russia that are based on the notion that the present government is bound to fall from internal causes if only it can be sufficiently boycotted and isolated externally. I know of nothing that is more indicative of the state of illusion in which it is possible for isolated groups to live than the fact that, of five or six Russian dailies published by the émigrés in Paris, three are devoted to restoration of the monarchy.
I have become involved in a diversion, though one naturally suggested by the marvelous development of progressive educational ideas and practices under the fostering care of the Bolshevist governmentand I am speaking of what I have seen and not just been told about. However, the second factor that operated in the transformation of the educator (whose history I regard as typical and symbolic) takes us out of the region of reforming and progressive ideas into that of communism proper. It is the factor that would, I am sure, be emphasized by every communist educator rather than that which I have just mentioned. The frustration of educational aims by economic conditions occupied a much larger place in the story of the pilgrims progress from pedagogy to communism than did explicit and definite political and governmental opposition. In fact, the latter was mentioned only as an inevitable by-product of the former. There
are, as he puts it, two educations, the greater and the smaller.
The lesser is given by the school; the larger, and the one finally influential, is given by the actual conditions of life, especially those of the family and neighborhood. And according to his own story, this educator found that the work he was trying to do in the school, even under the relatively very favorable conditions of his experimental school, was undone by the educativeor miseducativeformation of disposition and mental habit proceeding from the environment. Hence he became convinced that the social medium and the progressive school must work together, must operate in harmony, reinforcing each other, if the aim of the progressive school was not to be constantly undermined and dissipated; with the growth of this conviction he became insensibly a communist. He became convinced that the central force in undoing the work of socialized reform he was trying to achieve by means of school agencies was precisely the egoistic and private ideals and methods inculcated by the institution of private property, profit and acquisitive possession.
The story is instructive because of its typically symbolic character; if it were expanded, it would also lead into an account of the definite content of Soviet school activities in the concrete. For as far as the influence of this particular educator is concerned, the subject-matter, the methods of teaching, and the spirit of school administration and discipline are all treated as ways of producing harmony of operation between concrete social conditionstaking into account their local diversityand school procedures. My contacts were not sufficiently prolonged to enable me, even if space permitted, to give an adequate report of the structure and technique of this work of harmonization. But its general spirit may at least be suggested. During the transitional régime, the school cannot count upon the larger education to create in any single and whole-hearted way the required collective and coöperative mentality.
The traditional customs and institutions of the peasant, his small tracts, his three-system farming, the influence of home and Church, all work automatically to create in him an individualistic ideology. In spite of the greater inclination of the city worker towards collectivism, even his social environment works adversely in many respects. Hence the great task of the school is to counteract and transform those domestic and neighborhood tendencies that are still so strong, even in a nominally collectivistic régime.
In order to accomplish this end, the teachers must in the first place know with great detail and accuracy just what the conditions are to which pupils are subject in the home, and thus be able to interpret the habits and acts of the pupil in the school in the light of his environing conditionsand this, not just in some general way, but as definitely as a skilled physician diagnoses in the light of their causes the diseased conditions with which he is dealing.
So this educator described his philosophy as Social Behaviorism. Whatever he saw, a mode of farming, farm implements, style of home construction, domestic industry, church building, etc., led him to ask for its probable effect upon the behavior of those who were subject to its influence. On the other hand the teacher strove to learn, whenever he was confronted with any mode of undesirable behavior on the part of a pupil, how to trace it back to its definite social causation. Such an idea, however illuminating in the abstract, would,of course, remain barren without some technique to carry it into effect.
And one of the most interesting pedagogical innovations with which I am acquainted is the technique which has been worked out for enabling teachers to discover the actual conditions that influence pupils in their out-of-school life; and I hope someone with more time than I had at command will before long set forth the method in detail. Here I can only say that it involves, among other things, discussions in connection with history and geography, the themes of written work, the compositions of pupils, and also a detailed study throughout the year of home and family budgets. Quite apart from any economic theory, communistic or individualistic, the results are already of great pedagogical value, and promise to provide a new and fruitful method of sociological research.
The knowledge thus gained of home conditions and their effect upon behavior (and I may say in passing that this social behaviorism seems to me much more promising intellectually than any exclusively physiological behaviorism can ever prove to be) is preliminary to the development of methods which will enable schools to react favorably upon the undesirable conditions discovered, and to reinforce such desirable agencies as exist. Here, of course, is the point at which the socially constructive work of the school comes in. A little something will be said about this later in detail, when I come to speak of the idea of socially useful work as a criterion for deciding upon the value of projectsfor Soviet education is committed to the project method. But aside from its practical working out, it is also interesting in that it locates one of the burning points of present Russian pedagogical theoretical education. For there is still a school that holds that educational principles can be derived from psychology and biologyalthough the weight of citations from Marx is now eclipsing their influenceand that correct educational methods are bound to produce the desired effect independently of concrete knowledge of domestic and local environment.
I have dwelt too long on certain general considerations, at the expense of any account of what schools are actually doing and how they are doing it. My excuse is that, in relation to the entire Russian situation, it is these generic points of social aspiration and contact that are significant. That which distinguishes the Soviet schools both from other national systems and from the progressive schools of other countries (with which they have much in common) is precisely the conscious control of every educational procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose. It is this reference that accounts for the social interlocking to which I referred at the outset. The point may be illustrated by the bearing of school activity upon the family institution as that is conceived by the orthodox Marxian socialists. That thorough-going collectivists regard the traditional family as exclusive and isolating in effect and hence as hostile to a truly communal life, is too familiar to require rehearsal. Apart, however, from the effect of the oft-recited Bolshevist modifications of marriage and divorce, the institution of the family is being sapped indirectly rather than by frontal attack; its historic supports, economic and ecclesiastical, are weakened. For example, the limitation of living quarters, enforced in Russia as in other countries by the War, is deliberately taken advantage of to create social combinations wider than that of the family and that cut across its ties. There is no word one hears oftener than Gruppe, * and all sorts of groups are instituted that militate against the primary social importance of the family unit. In consequence, to anyone who looks at the matter cold-bloodedly, free from sentimental associations clustering about the historic family institution, a most interesting sociological experimentation is taking place, the effect of which should do something to determine how far the bonds that hold the traditional family together are intrinsic and how far due to extraneous causes; and how far the family in its accustomed form is a truly socializing agency and how far a breeder of non-social interests.
Our special concern here is with the rôle of the schools in building up forces and factors whose natural effect is to undermine the importance and uniqueness of family life. It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with a relaxation of older family ties.
What is going on in Russia appears to be a planned acceleration of this process. For example, the earliest section of the school system, dealing with children from three to seven, aims, in the cities, to keep children under its charge six, eight and ten hours per day, and in ultimate ideal this procedure is to be universal and compulsory. When it is carried out, the effect on family life is too evident to need to be dwelt uponalthough at present even in Moscow only one-tenth of the children of this age are in such schools. Nor does the invasion of family life stop at this point in dealing with young children. There are in contemplation summer colonies in the country, corresponding to our fresh-air homes for children from slums, in which children from these all-day kindergarten schools will spend a large part of the summer months. Some of the summer colonies are already in existence; those visited compare favorably with similar institutions anywhere, with respect to food, hygiene, medical attention and daily nurture. Now, it would be too much to say that these institutions are deliberately planned with sole reference to their disintegrating effect upon family life; there are doubtless other more conspicuous causes. They are part of a whole network of agencies by means of which the Soviet government is showing its special care for the laboring class in order to gain its political support, and to give a working object-lesson in the value of a communistic scheme. One derives from this, as from many other social undertakings, the impression that the Soviet authorities are trying to forestall, in deliberately planned and wholesale manner, those consequences of industrialization which in other countries have crept upon society piece-meal and unconsciously. For every large industrial center in any western country shows that in fact the effect of machine industrialization has been to disintegrate the traditional family. *
From this point of view, the Russian government is doing on a large scale what private philanthropy has done in our cities by means of crèches, etc. But even when these allowances are made, it remains true that we have here a striking exemplification of the conscious and systematic utilization of the school in behalf of a definite social policy. There are many elements of propaganda connected with this policy. But the broad effort to employ the education of the young as means of realizing certain social purposes cannot be dismissed as propaganda without relegating to that category all endeavor at deliberate social control.
Reference to this phase of Soviet education may perhaps be suitably concluded by a quotation from Lenin that has become a part of the canonical scriptures of Bolshevist educational literature. For it indicates that, were it necessary, official authority could be cited for the seemingly extreme statements I have made about the central position of the schools in the production of a communist ideology as a condition of the successful operation of communist institutions. The school, apart from life, apart from politics, is a lie, a hypocrisy. Bourgeois society indulged in this lie, covering up the fact that it was using the schools as a means of domination, by declaring that the school was politically neutral, and in the service of all. We must declare openly what it concealed, namely, the political function of the school. While the object of our previous struggle was to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the aim of the new generation is much more complex: It is to construct communist society.
The idea of a school in which pupils, and therefore, studies and methods, are connected with social life, instead of being isolated, is one familiar in educational theory. In some form, it is the idea that underlies all attempts at thorough-going educational reform. What is characteristic of Soviet education is not, therefore, the idea of a dovetailing of school activities into out-of-school social activities, but the fact that for the first time in history there is an educational system officially organized on the basis of this principle. Instead of being exemplified, as it is with ourselves, in a few scattering schools that are private enterprises, it has the weight and a authority of the whole régime behind it. In trying to satisfy my mind as to how and why it was that the educational leaders have been able in so short a time to develop a working model of this sort of education, with so little precedent upon which to fall back, I was forced to the conclusion that the secret lay in the fact that they could give to the economic and industrial phase of social life the central place it actually occupies in present life. In that fact lies the great advantage the Revolution has conferred upon educational reformers in Russia, in comparison with those in the rest of the world.
I do not see how any honest educational reformer in western countries can deny that the greatest practical obstacle in the way of introducing into schools that connection with social life which he regards as desirable is the great part played by personal competition and desire for private profit in our economic life. This fact almost makes it necessary that in important respects school activities should be protected from social contacts and connections, instead of being organized to create them. The Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the coöperative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation.
The central place of economic connections in the dovetailing of school work with social life outside the school is explicitly stated in the official documents of Commissar Lunacharsky. He writes: The two chief present problems of social education are: (1) The development of public economy with reference to Socialist reconstruction in general and the efficiency of labor in particular; (2) the development of the population in the spirit of communism. The aims of education are set forth as follows: (1) The union of general culture with efficiency of labor and power to share in public life; (2) supply of the actual needs of national economy by preparation of workers in different branches and categories of qualifications; (3) meeting the need of different localities and different kinds of workers. Like all formal statements, these propositions have to be understood in the light of the practices by which they are carried into effect.
So interpreted, the fact that among the aims the union of general culture with efficiency of labor precedes that of supply of special needs through preparation of workers assumes a significance that might not otherwise be apparent. For perhaps the striking thing in the system is that it is not vocational, in the narrow sense those words often have with us, namely, the technical training of specialized workers. On the contrary, such training is everywhere postponed and subordinated to the requirements of general culture, which is, however, itself conceived of in a socially industrial sense; that is to say, as discovery and development of the capacities that enable an individual to carry on in a coöperative way, work that is socially useful, socially useful being conceived in the generous sense of whatever makes human life fuller and richer. Perhaps the easiest way to grasp the spirit of the industrial connections of school work with general social activities is to take the utterances of our own Manufacturers
Association on the same topic and then reverse them. Preparation for special occupations is deferred to the stage of special schools called Technicums, * which can be entered only after seven years of the public unified school ** have been completed. These schools are called polytechnic, but the word is a misleading one in its ordinary English associations. For with us it signifies a school in which individual pupils can select and pursue any one of a considerable number of technologies, while in the Russian system it signifies a school in which pupils, instead of receiving a mono-technical training, are instructed in the matters which are fundamental to a number of special industrial techniques. In other words, even in the definitely vocational schools, specialized training for a particular calling is postponed until the latest years, after a general technological and scientific-social foundation has been laid.
As far as could be determined, there are two causes for the adoption of this broad conception of industrial education, in identification with the general culture appropriate to a coöperatively conducted society. One is the state of progressive educational theory in other countries, especially the United States, during the early formative years after the Revolution. For a leading principle of this advanced doctrine was that participation in productive work is the chief stimulus and guide to self-educative activity on the part of pupils, since such productive work is both in accord with the natural or psychological process of learning; and also provides the most direct road to connecting the school with social life, because of the part played by occupations in the latter. Some of the liberal Russian educators were carrying on private experimental schools on this basis before the Revolution; the doctrine had the prestige of being the most advanced among educational philosophies, and it answered to immediate Russian necessities.
Thus from an early period the idea of the school of work (Arbeitschule, école du travail, escuela dacción) was quite central in post-revolutionary school undertakings. And a main feature of this doctrine was that, while productive work is educative par excellence, it must be taken in a broad social sense, and as a means of creating a social new order and not simply as an accommodation to the existing economic régime.It gave the idea a definitely socialistic form by interpreting the idea of work on the basis of the new estate of the worker brought about by the proletarian revolution. The change was a more or less gradual one, and even now there is hardly a complete translation or fusion. But the spirit of the change is well indicated in the words of one of the leaders of educational thought: A school is a true school of work in the degree in which it prepares the students to appreciate and share in the ideology of the workerswhether country or city. And by the worker is here meant, of course, the worker made conscious of his position and function by means of the Revolution. This transformation of the earlier bourgeois reforming idea through emphasis upon the ideology of the labor movement thus continued and reinforced the earlier emphasis upon the general idea of the connection of the school with industry.
In lieu of this account I can only pay my tribute to the liberating effect of active participation in social life upon the attitude of students. Those whom I met had a vitality and a kind of confidence in lifenot to be confused with mere self-confidencethat afforded one of the most stimulating experiences of my life. Their spirit was well reflected in the inscription which a boy of fourteen wrote upon the back of a painting he presented me with. He was in one of the schools in which the idea just set forth is most completely and intelligently carried out, and he wrote that the picture was given in memory of the school that opened my eyes. All that I had ever, on theoretical grounds, believed as to the extent to which the dull and dispirited attitude of the average school is due to isolation of school from life was more than confirmed by what I saw of the opposite in Russian schools.
There are three or four special points that call for notice in the identification established between cultural and industrial education. One of them is suggested by the official statement regarding the meeting by the schools of local conditions and needs. Soviet education has not made the mistake of confusing unity of education with uniformity: on the contrary, centralization is limited to the matter of ultimate aim and spirit, while in detail diversification is permitted, or rather encouraged. * (NVDR:Diversity in accidental details, conformity in ultimate aim; this was a Stalinist idea. Editor.]
Its province has its own experimental school, that supplements the work of the central or federal experimental stations, by studying local resources, materials and problems with a view to adapting school work to them. The primary principle of method officially laid down is that, in every topic, work by pupils is to begin with observation of their own environment, natural and social. (The best museum of natural and social materials for pedagogical purposes I have ever seen is in a country district outside of Leningrad, constructed on the basis of a complete exhibit of local fauna, flora, mineralogy, etc., and local antiquities and history, made by pupils excursions under the direction of their teachers.)
This principle of making connections with social life on the basis of starting from the immediate environment is exemplified on its broadest scale in the educational work done with the minority populations of Russiaof which there are some fifty different nationalities. The idea of cultural autonomy that underlies political federation is made a reality in the schools. Before the Revolution, many, most of them had no schools, and a considerable number of them not even a written language. In about ten years, through enlisting the efforts of anthropologists and linguistic scholarswhich branch of science Russia has always been strongall the different languages have been reduced to written form, textbooks in the local language provided, each adapted to local environment and industrial habits, and at least the beginnings of a school system introduced. Aside from immediate educational results, one is impressed with the idea that the scrupulous regard for cultural independence characteristic of the Soviet régime is one of the chief causes of its stability, in of the non-communist beliefs of most of these populations. Going a little further, one may say that the freedom from race- and color-prejudice characteristic of the régime is one of the greatest assets in Bolshevist propaganda among Asiatic peoples. The most effective way to counteract the influence of that propaganda would be for western nations to abandon their superiority-complex in dealing with Asiatic populations, and thereby deprive Bolshevism of its contention that capitalism, imperialistic exploitation and race prejudice are so inseparably conjoined that the sole relief of native peoples from them lies in adoption of communism under Russian auspices.
The central place of human labor in the educational scheme is made manifest in the plan for the selection and organization of subject-matter, or the studies of the curriculum. This principle is officially designated the complex system. Details appropriately belong in a special educational journal, but in general the system means, on the negative side, the abandonment of splitting up subject-matter into isolated studies, such as form the program in the conventional school, and finding the matter of study on some total phase of human lifeincluding nature in the relations it sustains to the life of man in society. Employing the words of the official statement: At the basis of the whole program is found the study of human work and its organization: the point of departure is the study of this work as found in its local manifestations. Observations of the latter are, however, to be developed by recourse to the experience of humanitythat is, books, so that the local phenomena may be connected with national and international industrial life.
It is worthy of note that, in order to carry out this conception of the proper subject-matter of study, it is necessary for the teachers themselves to become students, for they must conceive of the traditional subject-matter from a new point of view. They are compelled, in order to be successful, both to study their local environment and to become familiar with the detailed economic plans of the central government. For example, the greatest importance is attached in the educational scheme to natural science and what we call nature-study. But according to the ruling principle, this material must not be treated as so much isolated stuff to be learned by itself, but be considered in the ways in which it actually enters into human life by means of utilization of natural resources and energies in industry for social purposes. Aside from the vitalization of physical knowledge supplied by thus putting it in its human context, this method of presentation compels teachers to be cognizant of the Gosplan that is, the detailed projects, looking ahead over a series of years, of the government for the economic development of the country. An educator from a bourgeois country may well envy the added dignity that comes to the function of the teacher when he is taken into partnership in plans for the social development of his country. Such an one can hardly avoid asking himself whether this partnership is possible only in a country where industry is a public function rather than a private undertaking; he may not find any sure answer to the question, but the continued presence of the query in his mind will surely serve as an eye-opening stimulus.
In American literature regarding Soviet education, the complex system is often identified with the project method as that has developed in our own country. In so far as both procedures get away from starting with fixed lessons in isolated studies, and substitute for them an endeavor to bring students through their own activity into contact with some relatively total slice of life or nature, there is ground for the identification. By and large, however, it is misleading, and for two reasons. In the first place, the complex method involves a unified intellectual scheme of organization: it centers, as already noted, about the study of human work in its connection on one side with natural materials and energies, and on the other side with social and political history and institutions. From this intellectual background, it results that, while Russian educators acknowledge hereas in many other thingsan original indebtedness to American theory, they criticize many of the projects employedthey do not belong to any general social aim, nor have definite social consequences in their train.
To them, an educative project is the means by which the principle of some complex or unified whole of social subject-matter is realized. Its criterion of value is its contribution to some socially useful work. Actual projects vary according to special conditions, urban or rural, and particular needs and deficiencies of the local environment. In general, they include contributions to improvement of sanitation and hygienic conditions (in which respects there is an active campaign carried on, modelled largely upon American techniques), assisting in the campaign against illiteracy; reading newspapers and books to the illiterate; helping in clubs, excursions, etc., with younger children; assisting ignorant adults to understand the policies of local Soviets so that they can take part in them intelligently; engaging in communist propaganda, and, on the industrial side, taking some part in a multitude of diverse activities calculated to improve economic conditions. In a rural school that was visited, for example, students carried on what in a conventional school would be the separate studies of botany and entomology by cultivating flowers, food-plants, fruits, etc., under experimental conditions, observing the relation to them of insects, noxious and helpful, and then making known the results to their parents and other farmers, distributing improved strains of seed, etc. In each case, the aim is that sooner or later the work shall terminate in some actual participation in the larger social life, if only by young children carrying flowers to an invalid or to their parents. In one of the city schools where this work has been longest carried on, I saw, for example, interesting charts that showed the transformation of detailed hygienic and living conditions of the homes in a working mens quarter effected through a period of ten years by the boys and girls of the school.
A word regarding the system of administration and discipline of Soviet schools perhaps finds its natural place in this connection. During a certain period, the idea of freedom and student control tended to run riot. But apparently the idea of auto-organization (which is fundamental in the official scheme) has now been worked out in a positive form, so that, upon the whole, the excesses of the earlier period are obsolescent. The connection with what has just been said lies in the fact that as far as possible the organizations of pupils that are relied upon to achieve self-discipline are not created for the sake of school government, but grow out of the carrying on of some line of work needed in the school itself, or in the neighborhood.
Here, too, while the idea of self-government developed in American schools was the originally stimulating factor, the ordinary American practice is criticized as involving too much imitation of adult political forms (instead of growing out of the students own social relationships), and hence as being artificial and external. In view of the prevailing idea of other countries as to the total lack of freedom and total disregard of democratic methods in Bolshevist Russia, it is disconcerting, to say the least, to anyone who has shared in that belief, to find Russian school children much more democratically organized than are our own; and to note that they are receiving through the system of school administration a training that fits them, much more systematically than is attempted in our fessedly democratic country, for later active participation in the self-direction of both local communities and industries.
While an American visitor may feel a certain patriotic pride in noting in how many respects an initial impulse came from some progressive school in our own country, he is at once humiliated and stimulated to new endeavor to see how much more organically that idea is incorporated in the Russian system than in our own. Even if he does not agree with the assertion of communist educators that the progressive ideals of liberal educators can actually be carried out only in a country that is undergoing an economic revolution in the socialist direction, he will be forced into searchings of heart and mind that are needed and wholesome. In any case, if his experience is at all like mine, he will deeply regret those artificial barriers and that barricade of false reports that now isolates American teachers from that educational system in which our professed progressive democratic ideas are most completely embodied, and from which accordingly we might, if we would, learn much more than from the system of any other country. I understand now as I never did before the criticism of some foreign visitors, especially from France, that condemn Soviet Russia for entering too ardently upon an Americanization of traditional European culture.
