–22. Education
Vospitanie
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I
Every person possesses a particular gift and is capable of fulfilling a particular task. One must try to discover this particular gift in a child and direct his education accordingly. After a general instruction in those branches of knowledge that are good for all people, education should be directed toward developing those particular gifts that have been found in him. Education means nourishing the abilities of the child, not creating new abilities 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 understanding of life and of the world into which they have been sent to fulfill their human task.
Life is a duty, a task, a mission. For all that is sacred, do not preach to them doctrines of happiness, whether personal or general. Faith in personal happiness will make the child selfish; faith in general happiness will sooner or later lead him to the same thing. He will dream of what he cannot achieve, and in youth struggle for this unattainable thing; then, when he finds that he cannot quickly realize the dreams of his soul, he will concentrate on himself and try to win personal happiness, and thus sink into selfishness.
Teach him that life has meaning only as a task or duty; that happiness, the sun of happiness shining upon the traveler, may smile upon him too, and then he should rejoice and bless God for it; but the pursuit of happiness leads a person only to ruin and, most likely, to the loss of any possibility of ever enjoying happiness. Teach him that to perfect himself morally and intellectually for the sake of perfecting his fellow human beings is his direct obligation, that he must seek truth and then serve it in word and deed, embodying it in life fearlessly and unceasingly, that for determining truth he has been given two guides: his own consciousness, his own conscience, and tradition, or the consciousness of all humanity.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
II. From a Letter on Education
At the foundation of all upbringing must be placed, first of all, what has been neglected 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 educational activity. The religious understanding of life which, in my judgment, can and should become the foundation of people’s lives in our time, expressed most briefly, is 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 that will is the unification of all that lives and, above all, of people: in their brotherhood, in their service to one another. From the other end, this same religious understanding of life is expressed thus: the work of life is union with all that lives—above all, the brotherhood of people, service to one another. And this is so because we are alive only to the extent that we are conscious of being part of the infinite whole, and the law of the infinite is this very union. In any case, the vital manifestation of the religious understanding—the unification of all, achieved through love—is, above all, the brotherhood of people: this is the practical, primary law of life, and it is this that must be placed at the foundation of upbringing; and therefore everything that leads to unity is good and must be developed in children, and everything that leads to the opposite must be suppressed.
Children are always—and the younger they are, the more so—in that state which doctors call the first degree of suggestion. And children learn and are brought up only thanks to this state of theirs. (This susceptibility to suggestion delivers them completely into the power of their elders, and therefore one cannot be sufficiently careful about what and how we suggest to them.) So people always learn and are brought up only through suggestion, which operates in two ways: consciously and unconsciously. Everything we teach children—from prayers and fables to dances and music—all this is conscious suggestion; everything that children imitate independently of our will—especially in our life, in our actions—is unconscious suggestion. Conscious suggestion is instruction, education; unconscious suggestion is example, upbringing in the narrow sense, or, as I shall call it, enlightenment. Toward the first, all efforts in our society are directed; the second, however, involuntarily, because our life is bad, is neglected.
People, educators—or, most commonly—either hide their lives and the lives of adults in general from children, placing them in special conditions (cadet corps, institutes, boarding schools, and so on), or they transfer what should occur unconsciously into the realm of the conscious: they prescribe moral rules of life, to which they must add: fais ce que je dis, mais ne fais pas ce que je fais (do what I say, but don’t do what I do).
From this it happens that in our society education has advanced so disproportionately far, while true upbringing, or enlightenment, has not only lagged behind but is completely absent. If it exists anywhere, it is only in poor working families. But of the two sides of influence on children, the unconscious and the conscious, incomparably more important both for individuals and for society is the first—that is, unconscious moral enlightenment.
A family of a banker, landowner, official, artist, or writer lives a rich life—lives without drunkenness, debauchery, quarreling, or offending people—and wants to give a moral upbringing to its children; but this is just 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. Children will listen to rules about morality, about respect for people, but unconsciously they will not only imitate but will adopt as a rule that some people are called upon to clean boots and clothes, to carry water and refuse, to prepare food, while others are called upon to dirty clothes and rooms, to eat the food, and so on. If one seriously understands the religious foundation of life—the brotherhood of people—one cannot fail to see that people who live on money taken from others and who force these others to serve them for this money are living an immoral life, and no sermons of theirs will save their children from the unconscious immoral suggestion, which will either remain in them for their whole life, distorting all their judgments about the phenomena of life, or will be destroyed by them, after much suffering and error, with great effort and labor.
So then, upbringing, unconscious suggestion, is the most important thing. But for it to be good and moral, it is frightening to say that the whole life of the educator must be good. What is to be called a good life?—they will ask. There are infinitely many degrees of goodness, but there is one general and main feature of a good life: it is the striving toward perfection in love. This very thing, if it exists in the educators and if the children catch it from them, then the upbringing will not be bad.
For the upbringing of children to be successful, it is necessary that the people doing the upbringing ceaselessly bring up themselves, that they help one another more and more to realize what they are striving for. And the means for this, besides the main one—the internal one, the work of each person on his own soul—can be very many. One must seek them, think them over, apply them, discuss them…
All this is hints about one side of the matter—upbringing. Now about education.
About education I think this: science, learning, is nothing other than the transmission of what the wisest people have thought. And wise people have always thought in three different directions of thought—they have thought: 1) philosophically, religiously, about the meaning of their life—religion and philosophy; 2) experimentally, drawing conclusions from observations made under certain conditions—the natural sciences: mechanics, physics, chemistry, physiology; and 3) mathematically, drawing conclusions from the propositions of their thought—mathematics and the mathematical sciences. All three kinds of sciences are real sciences. One cannot pretend to knowledge of them, and there can be no half-knowledge: either you know or you don’t know. All three kinds of sciences are cosmopolitan; they all not only do not divide but unite people. They are all accessible to all people and satisfy the requirement of the brotherhood of people. The juridical sciences and specifically the historical sciences are either not sciences or are harmful sciences and should be excluded. But besides the fact that there exist three branches of science, there also exist three ways of transmitting this knowledge. (Please don’t think I am forcing everything into threes; I wanted there to be four or ten, but it came out as three.)
The first way of transmission—the most common—is words. But words in different languages, and therefore there arises yet another science—languages, again corresponding to the requirement of the brotherhood of people (perhaps the teaching of Esperanto is also necessary, if there were time and if the students wished it). The second way is the plastic arts, drawing or modeling—the science of how to transmit to another through the eye what you know. And the third way is music, singing—the science of how to transmit one’s mood, one’s feeling.
Besides these six branches of teaching, a seventh should also be introduced: the teaching of craftsmanship, and again corresponding to the requirement of brotherhood—that is, such as is needed by all: locksmithing, carpentry, sewing… So that teaching is divided into seven subjects.
What portion of time to devote to each, besides the obligatory labor for one’s own maintenance, will be decided by the inclination of each student.
I imagine it thus: the teachers distribute the hours for themselves, but the students are free to come or not. However strange this may seem to us, who have so distortedly set up education, complete freedom of instruction—that is, for the student, male or female, to come to study when they want—is a necessary condition of all fruitful instruction, just as a necessary condition of nutrition is that the person being fed should want to eat.
The only difference is that in material matters the harm of departing from freedom is immediately apparent—there will immediately be vomiting or stomach upset—whereas in spiritual matters the harmful consequences will not appear so soon, perhaps after years.
Only with complete freedom is it possible to lead the best students to the limits they can reach, and not hold them back for the sake of the weak, and they, the best students, are the most needed. Only with freedom is it possible to avoid the common occurrence: the arousing of aversion to subjects which, if taught at the right time and freely, would be loved; only with freedom is it possible to learn which specialty each student is inclined toward; only freedom does not disturb the educational influence. Otherwise I will tell a student that there should be no violence in life, and over him I will commit the most grievous violence—mental violence.
I know that this is difficult, but what is to be done when one understands that any departure from freedom is ruinous for the very work of education. And it is not so difficult when one firmly decides not to do what is foolish.
—Leo Tolstoy
Translator’s Notes:
- Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) was an Italian revolutionary and philosopher. His rejection of “happiness” as a goal reflects his opposition to utilitarian ethics.
- Tolstoy’s letter encapsulates his mature educational philosophy from the Yasnaya Polyana school experiments.
- The distinction between образование (education/instruction) and воспитание (upbringing) is central. Tolstoy adds просвещение (enlightenment) for unconscious moral formation through example.
- The French phrase fais ce que je dis, mais ne fais pas ce que je fais highlights the hypocrisy of educators who preach one thing and practice another.
- Tolstoy’s dismissal of juridical and historical sciences reflects his view that they serve state interests rather than universal brotherhood.
- The seven subjects Tolstoy proposes: religion/philosophy, natural sciences, mathematics, languages, visual arts, music, and practical crafts.