On what grounds does the School of to-day teach this and not that, and in this and not that way?
Where, in our day, can we get such faith in the indubitability of our knowledge as would give us a right to educate people compulsorily? Take any medieval school, before or after Luther, take the whole scholastic literature of the Middle Ages, what a strength of belief and what a firm, indubitable knowledge of what was true and what was false, we see in them! It was easy for them to know that a knowledge of Greek was the one essential condition of education; for Aristotle's works were in Greek, and no one doubted the truth of his propositions till centuries later. How could the monks help demanding the study of the Holy Scriptures, which stood on an immovable foundation? It was well for Luther to demand the compulsory study of Hebrew, being sure, as he was, that in that language God himself has revealed the truth to man. Evidently, as long as man's critical sense was not aroused, the school had to be dogmatic; and it was natural for pupils to learn by heart the truths revealed by God, as well as Aristotle's science and the poetic beauties of Virgil and Cicero. For centuries after, no one could imagine any truer truth, or more beautiful beauty. But what is the position of the schools of our time, which retain these same dogmatic principles, while in the room next the class where the immortality of the soul is taught, it is suggested to the pupils that the nerves common to man and to the frog are what was formerly called 'the soul'; and where after hearing the story of Joshua the son of Nun read to him without explanations, the pupil learns that the sun never did go round the earth; and when after the beauties of Virgil have been explained to him, he finds the beauties of Alexandre Dumas (whose novels he can buy for sixpence) much greater; when the only belief held by the teacher is that nothing is true, but that whatever exists is reasonable; and that progress is good and backwardness bad, though nobody knows in what this progress, that is so generally believed in, consists?
Luther insists on teaching the Holy Scriptures from the originals, and not from the commentaries of the Fathers of the Church. Bacon enjoins the study of Nature from Nature, and not from the books of Aristotle. Rousseau wants to teach life from life itself as he understands it, and not from previous experiments. Each step forward in the philosophy of pedagogics merely consists in freeing the schools from the idea of teaching the younger generations what the elder generations believed to be science, and in substituting studies that accord with the needs of the younger generations.
Again, he says
It is very usual to read and hear it said that the home conditions, the coarseness of parents, field labour, village games and so forth, are the chief hindrances to school-work. Possibly they really interfere with the kind of school-work aimed at by the pedagogues; but it is time we understood that those conditions are the chief bases of all education, and far from being inimical to, or hindrances of the School, are its first and chief motive power.... The wish to know anything whatever, and the very questions to which it is the School's business to reply, arise entirely from these home conditions. All instruction should be simply a reply to questions put by life. But School, far from evoking questions, fails even to answer those which life suggests.... To such questions the child receives no reply; more especially as the police regulations of the School do not allow him to open his mouth, even when he wants to be let out for a minute, but obliges him to make signs in order not to break the silence or disturb the teacher.
The great questions, Tolstoy says, are: (1) What must I teach? and (2) How must I teach it? He remarks that a couple of centuries ago, neither in Russia nor in Western Europe could these questions have arisen. Education was then bound up with religion, and to become a scholar meant to learn the Scriptures. In Mohammedan countries this union of religion with education still exists in full force. To learn, means to learn the Koran, and therefore to learn Arabic. But as soon as the criterion of what to learn ceased to be religion, and the School became independent of the Church, the question of what to teach was bound to arise. That it did not arise suddenly, was due to the fact that the emancipation of the School from the Church took place gradually. But the day has at last come when the question must be faced; and no clear guidance is given us either by philosophy or by any definite consensus of opinion among those concerned with education. In the higher schools some advocate a classical, others a scientific, education; while in the primary schools, if the education is controlled by the priests it is carried on in one way, and if it is controlled by the anti-clericals it is carried on in another. Under these circumstances the only possible criterion must be the wish of the pupils or of their parents. Tolstoy then goes on to maintain that the demand of the mass of the Russian people is for tuition in the Russian and Ecclesiastico-Slavonic languages, and for mathematics.
As to how to teach, he contends that this resolves itself into the question, How to establish the best possible relations between those who want to learn and those who want to teach, and he says:
No one, probably, will deny that the best relation between a teacher and his pupils is a natural one, and that the opposite to a natural one is a compulsory one. If that be so, then the measure of all scholastic methods consists in the greater or lesser naturalness, and consequently in the less or more compulsion employed. The less the children are compelled, the better is the method; the more they are compelled, the worse is the method. I am glad that it is not necessary for me to prove this obvious truth. All are agreed that it cannot be good for health to employ foods, medicines, or exercises which create disgust or pain; and so also in learning, there can be no need to compel children to grind at anything dull or repugnant to them; and if it seems necessary to use compulsion, that fact can merely prove the imperfection of the methods employed. All who have taught children have probably noticed that the worse the teacher knows the subject he is dealing with and the less he likes it, the more he has to be stern and the more compulsion he has to use; while on the contrary, the better the teacher knows and loves his subject, the more free and natural will be his tuition.
If history be closely examined, it will be found that every advance in pedagogics has consisted merely in a diminution of compulsion, a facilitation of study, and a greater and greater approach to naturalness in the relations between teacher and pupil.
People have asked, How can we find the degree of freedom to be allowed in school? To which I reply that the limit of that freedom is naturally defined by the teacher, by his knowledge, and by his capacity to manage the school. Such freedom cannot be dictated; its measure is merely the result of the greater or lesser knowledge and talent possessed by the master. Freedom is not a rule, but it serves as a gauge when comparing one school with another, or when judging of new methods. The school in which there is less compulsion, is better than the one in which there is more. That method is good which, when introduced into a school, does not necessitate any increase of discipline; while that is certainly bad which necessitates greater severity.
From his main subject of Education, Tolstoy digresses in these articles into a discussion of other problems, in a way which reminds one of those wonderful essays he began to pour forth a quarter of a century later.
That he had been somewhat influenced by the Slavophils is indicated by his readiness to assume that Russia may advance along a line of her own, entirely different to that the Western nations have travelled. 'Progress,' in which like almost all his contemporaries he had believed, he now questions; and he indulges in a sharp attack on Macaulay for the third chapter of his History, which he says contains no proof that any real progress has been achieved. Buckle, similarly, is roughly handled for the assumption of progress that underlies his History of Civilisation; but most scathing of all is his onslaught upon Hegel, who (till Darwin appeared) was the rock on which many of the intellectual Liberals took their stand.
From the time of Hegel and his famous aphorism: 'What is historic is reasonable,' a very queer mental hocus-pocus has prevailed in literary and in verbal disputes, especially among us, under the name of 'the historic view.' You say, for instance, that man has a right to freedom, or to be tried on the basis of laws of which he himself approves; but the historic view replies that history evolves a certain historic moment conditioning a certain historic legislation and a people's historic relation thereto. You say you believe in a God; and the historic view replies that history evolves certain historic views and humanity's relation to those views. You say the Iliad is the greatest of epic works; and the historic view replies that the Iliad is merely the expression of the historic consciousness of a people at a certain historic moment. On this basis, the historic view does not dispute with you as to whether man needs freedom, or whether there is or is not a God, or whether the Iliad is good or bad: it does nothing to establish the freedom you desire; to persuade or dissuade you of the existence of a God or of the beauty of the Iliad; it merely points out to you the place your inner need or your love of truth or beauty, occupy in history. It merely recognises—and recognises not by direct cognition, but by historic ratiocination.
Say that you love or believe anything, and the historic view tells you: 'Love and believe, and your love and faith will find their place in our historic view. Ages will pass and we shall find the place you are to occupy in history. Know however in advance, that what you love is not absolutely beautiful, and what you believe in is not absolutely true; yet amuse yourselves, children: your love and faith will find their place and application.'
It is only necessary to add the word 'historic' to any conception you like, and that conception loses its real vital meaning, in an artificially-formed historic world-conception.
Of the introduction of telegraphs and railways he remarks that people attribute great importance to these inventions, and boast of the progress that is being made, declaring that:
'Man is mastering the forces of Nature. Thought, with the rapidity of lightning, flies from one end of the world to the other. Time is vanquished.'
This, says Tolstoy, is excellent and touching.
But let us see who gains by it. We are speaking of the progress of the electric telegraph. Evidently the advantage and use of the telegraph is reserved for the upper, so-called 'educated' class; while the people, nine-tenths of the whole, only hear the droning of the wires and are hampered by the strict laws made for the protection of the telegraph.
Along the wires flies the thought that the demand for such-and-such an article has increased, and that the price must therefore be raised; or the thought that I, a Russian landed proprietress, living in Florence, have, thank God, recovered from my nervous prostration, and that I embrace my adored husband and beg him to send me 40,000 francs as quickly as possible.
Without going into exact statistics of the messages sent, one may be quite sure that they all belong to the kind of correspondence of which the above are samples. No peasant of Yásnaya Polyána in the Government of Toúla, or any other Russian peasant (and let it not be forgotten that the peasants form the mass of the people whose welfare 'progress' is supposed to secure) ever has sent or received, or for a long time to come will either send or receive, a single telegram. All the messages that fly above his head add no jot to his welfare, because all he needs he gets from his own fields and his own woods, and he is equally indifferent to the cheapness or dearness of sugar or cotton, to the dethronement of King Otho, the speeches of Palmerston and Napoleon III, or the feelings of the lady in Florence. All those thoughts that fly with the rapidity of lightning round the world, do not increase the fertility of his fields nor diminish the strictness of the keepers in the squire's or the Crown's forests, nor do they add to his or his family's working power, or supply him with an extra labourer. All these great thoughts may impair his welfare, but cannot secure or further it, and can have but a negative interest for him. To the True-Believers in progress, however, the telegraph wires have brought and are bringing immense advantages. I do not deny those advantages: I only wish to prove that one must not think, or persuade others, that what is advantageous for me, is a great blessing to all the world....
In the opinion of the Russian people what increases their welfare is an increase of the fertility of the soil, an increase in the herds of cattle, an increase of the quantity of grain and its consequently becoming cheaper, an increase of working power, an increase in woods and pastures, and the absence of town temptations. (I beg the reader to observe that no peasant ever complains of the cheapness of bread; it is only the political economists of Western Europe who soothe him with the prospect that bread will become dearer and render it more possible for him to purchase manufactured articles, in which he is not interested.)
Which of these benefits does the railway bring to the peasant? It increases the temptations; it destroys the woods; it draws away labourers; it raises the price of grain....
The real people, that is to say those who themselves work and live productively—nine-tenths of the whole nation—without whom no progress is conceivable, are always hostile to the railway. And so what it comes to is this: that the believers in 'progress,' a small part of society, say that railways increase the welfare of the people; while the larger part of the nation say that the railways decrease it.
Interesting, stimulating and suggestive as Tolstoy's articles were, and valuable as was the experience gained in his school, his magazine had very few subscribers and only existed for one year: the twelfth number was the last.
In an article written thirteen years later, he says of his attempts in 1861-2:
At that time I met with no sympathy in the educational journals, nor even with any contradiction, but only with the completest indifference to the question I was raising. There were, it is true, some attacks on a few insignificant details, but the question itself evidently interested no one. I was young at that time, and this indifference galled me. I did not understand that I with my question: How do you know what and how to teach? was like a man who, in an assembly of Turkish Pachas discussing how to collect more taxes from the people, should say to them: Gentlemen, before discussing how much to take from each man, we must first consider what right we have to collect taxes at all? Obviously, the Pachas would continue to discuss the methods of collecting, and would ignore the irrelevant question.
Before passing on to tell of the actual working of the Yásnaya Polyána school, there is one matter to be noted, small indeed in itself, but characteristic, and helpful for the understanding of Tolstoy's later development.
Tolstoy's personal honour has never been questioned, and the reader will remember that at Sevastopol he flatly refused to touch money which, according to the long-standing regimental custom, was at his disposal. Well, in his magazine he printed a story written by one of the boys in the school, and appraised it with enthusiasm. The hero of the story, who had been wretchedly poor, returns from the army with money to spare, and explains the matter to his wife by saying: 'I was a non-commissioned officer and had Crown money to pay out to the soldiers, and some remaining over, I kept it.'
Commenting on this, Tolstoy says:
It is revealed that the soldier has become rich, and has done so in the simplest and most natural manner, just as almost everybody does who becomes rich—that is, by other people's, the Crown's, or somebody's, money remaining in his hands owing to a fortunate accident. Some readers have remarked that this incident is immoral, and that the people's conception of the Crown as a milch cow should be eradicated and not confirmed. But not to speak of its artistic truth, I particularly value that trait in the story. Does not the Crown money always stop somewhere? And why should it not, once in a way, stop with a homeless soldier like Gordéy?
In the views of honesty held by the peasants and the upper class, a complete contrast is often noticeable. The peasants' demands are specially serious and strict with regard to honesty in the nearest relations of life; for instance, in respect to one's family, one's village, or one's commune. In respect to outsiders: the public, the Crown, or foreigners, or the Treasury especially, the applicability of the rules of honesty seems to them obscure. A peasant who would never tell a lie to his brother peasant, and who would bear all possible hardships for the sake of his family, and not take a farthing from a fellow-villager or neighbour without having fully earned it—will be ready to squeeze a foreigner or a townsman like an orange, and at every second word will lie to a gentleman or an official. If he is a soldier, he will without the slightest twinge of conscience stab a French prisoner, and should Crown money come his way, he would consider it a crime to his family not to take it. In the upper class, on the contrary, it is quite the reverse.... I do not say which is better, I only say what I believe to be the case....
To return to the story. The mention of the Crown money, which at first seems immoral, in our opinion has a most sweet and touching character. How often a writer of our circle, when wishing to show his hero as an ideal of honesty, naïvely displays to us the dirty and depraved nature of his own imagination! Here, on the contrary, the author has to make his hero happy. His return to his family would suffice for that, but it was also necessary to remove the poverty which for so many years had weighed on the family. Where was he to take money from? From the impersonal Crown! If the author is to give him wealth, it has to be taken from some one, and it could not have been found in a more legitimate or reasonable way.
No doubt Tolstoy's statement of peasant morality is true enough; but Tolstoy's attitude towards the matter is remarkable. He has always had a keen sense of personal morality, but when public morality was in question, his decisions seem to me often to have been at fault.
Passing from the moral to the economic aspect of the question, to Western ears it sounds strange to hear the medieval or Oriental conception so boldly announced, that property 'has to be taken from some one' before it can be obtained. In our world, wealth has, during the last five generations, been increased enormously by inventions, by organisation, by division of labour, by the skilful utilisation of the forces of Nature, as well as by co-operation and the bringing together into one place of industries and individuals mutually helpful; and it has become impossible for us to believe that the only way to obtain wealth is by depriving some one else of wealth they already possess.
Birukof.
Fet.
Tolstoy's letter to A. Maude.
Tolstoy's Educational Articles.
Löwenfeld's Leo N. Tolstoj.
P. A. Sergeyenko in Niva, No. 7, 1906.
Yásno-Polyána School. Freedom in class. Natural laws. A fight. Theft and punishment. A walk and talk on art. Peasants' opinion of the school. Gymnastics. Reading. The Bible. Penmanship. Grammar. History. Geography. Drawing. Singing. Composition. A literary genius. Art: exclusive or universal? Reading useless for lack of what to read. The value of freedom in education. A contrast.
As already mentioned, Tolstoy's magazine, besides its theoretical articles, contained others describing the work done at the Yásno-Polyána school, and from these we learn in his own words, how Tolstoy and his pupils, and the masters (including the young German, Keller, whom he had brought back with him from abroad) were occupied in November and December 1861. The following passages are part of his description of the school:
No one brings anything with him, neither books nor copy-books. No homework is set them. Not only do they carry nothing in their hands, they have nothing to carry even in their heads. They are not obliged to remember any lesson, nor any of yesterday's work. They are not tormented by the thought of the impending lesson. They bring only themselves, their receptive nature, and an assurance that it will be as jolly in school to-day as it was yesterday. They do not think of their classes till they have begun. No one is ever scolded for being late, and they never are late, except perhaps some of the older boys whose fathers occasionally keep them at home to do some work. In such cases the boy comes to school running fast and panting. Until the teacher arrives, some gather at the porch, pushing one another off the steps or sliding on the ice-covered path, and some go into the rooms. When it is cold, while waiting for the master, they read, write, or play about. The girls do not mix with the boys. When the boys take any notice of the girls, they never address any one of them in particular, but always speak to them collectively: 'Hey, girls, why don't you come and slide?' or, 'Look how frozen the girls are,' or, 'Now girls, all of you against me!'
Suppose that by the time-table the lesson for the youngest class is elementary reading; for the second, advanced reading; and for the third, mathematics. The teacher enters the room, on the floor of which the boys are lying in a heap, shouting, 'The heap is too small!' or, 'Boys, you're choking me!' or, 'Don't pull my hair!' etc.
'Peter Miháylovitch!' cries a voice from the bottom of the heap, to the teacher as he enters: 'Tell them to stop!'—'Good morning, Peter Miháylovitch!' cry others, continuing their scrimmage. The teacher takes the books and gives them to those who have followed him to the cupboard, while from the heap of boys on the floor, those on top, still sprawling, demand books. The heap gradually diminishes. As soon as most of the boys have taken books, the rest run to the cupboard crying, 'Me too! Me too!'—'Give me yesterday's book!'—'Give me Kóltsof!' and so forth. If a couple of boys excited by their struggle still remain on the floor, those who have taken books and settled down, shout at them, 'What are you up to? We can't hear anything! Stop it!' The excited ones submit, and, panting, take to their books; and only just at first swing their legs with unspent excitement as they sit reading. The spirit of war flies away and the spirit of reading reigns in the room. With the same ardour with which he pulled Mítka's hair, he now reads Kóltsof's works: with almost clenched teeth, with sparkling eyes, and oblivious of all around him but his book. To tear him from his reading now would need as much effort as formerly to tear him from his wrestling.
They sit where they like: on the benches, tables, window-sills, floor, or in the arm-chair. The girls always sit together. Friends from the same village, especially the little ones (among whom there is most comradeship) always sit together. As soon as one of them decides that he will sit in a certain corner, all his chums, pushing and diving under the forms, get there too, and sit together looking about them with faces that express as much happiness and satisfaction as though, having settled in that place, they would certainly be happy for the rest of their lives. The large arm-chair (which somehow found its way into the room) is an object coveted by the more independent personalities.... As soon as one of them decides to sit in it, another discerns his intention from his looks, and they collide and squeeze in. One dislodges the other, and curling up, sprawls with his head far below the back, but reads like the rest, quite absorbed in his work. During lessons I have never seen them whispering, pinching, giggling, laughing behind their hands, or complaining of one another to the teacher.
The two lower classes sort themselves in one room, the upper class in another. The teacher appears, and in the first class all surround him at the blackboard, or lie on the forms, or sit on the table, near him or near one of the boys who reads. If it is a writing lesson, they place themselves in a more orderly way, but keep getting up to look at one another's exercise books, and to show their own to the teacher. According to the time-table there should be four lessons before dinner; but sometimes in practice these become three or two, and may be on quite other subjects. The teacher may begin with arithmetic and pass on to geometry; or may begin with Sacred History and end up with grammar. Sometimes teacher and pupils are so carried away, that a lesson lasts three hours instead of one. Sometimes the pupils themselves cry: 'Go on, go on!' and shout contemptuously to any who are tired: 'If you're tired, go to the little ones!'
In my opinion this external disorder is useful and necessary, however strange and inconvenient it may seem to the teacher. Of its advantages I shall have frequent occasion to speak; but of its apparent disadvantages I will say:
First, this disorder, or free order, only frightens us because we ourselves were educated in, and are accustomed to, something quite different. Secondly, in this as in many similar cases, coercion is used only from hastiness or from lack of respect for human nature. We think the disorder is growing greater and greater, and that it has no limit. We think there is no way of stopping it except by force; but one need only wait a little, and the disorder (or animation) calms down of itself, and calms down into a far better and more durable order than any we could devise.
In another place he says:
Our school evolved freely from the principles brought into it by the teachers and pupils. In spite of the predominant influence of the teacher, the pupil always had the right not to go to school; and even when in school, not to listen to the teacher. The teacher had the right not to admit a pupil....
Submitting naturally only to laws derived from their own nature, children revolt and rebel when subjected to your premature interference. They do not believe in the validity of your bells and time-tables and rules. How often have I seen children fighting. The teacher rushes to separate them, and the separated enemies look at one another askance, and even in the stern teacher's presence cannot refrain from giving one another a parting blow, yet more painful than its predecessors. How often, any day, do I see some Kirúshka, clenching his teeth, fly at Taráska, seize his hair, and throw him to the ground, apparently—though it costs him his life—determined to maim his foe; yet not a minute passes before Taráska is already laughing under Kirúshka. One, and then the other, moderates his blows, and before five minutes have passed they have made friends, and off they go to sit together.
The other day, between lessons, two boys were struggling in a corner. The one, a remarkable mathematician about ten years old, is in the second class; the other, a close-cropped lad, the son of a servant, is a clever but vindictive, tiny, black-eyed lad, nicknamed Pussy. Pussy seized the mathematician's long hair and jammed his head against the wall; the mathematician vainly clutched at Pussy's close-cropped bristles. Pussy's black eyes gleamed triumphantly. The mathematician, hardly refraining from tears, kept saying: 'Well, well, what of it?' But though he tried to keep up appearances, it was plain he was faring badly. This went on for some time, and I was in doubt what to do. 'A fight, a fight!' shouted the boys, and crowded towards the corner. The little ones laughed; but the bigger ones, though they did not interfere, exchanged serious glances, and their silence and these glances did not escape Pussy's observation. He understood that he was doing something wrong, and began to smile shamefacedly, and by degrees let go of the mathematician's hair. The mathematician shook himself free, and giving Pussy a push that banged the back of the latter's head against the wall, went off satisfied. Pussy began to cry, and rushed after his enemy, hitting him as hard as he could on his sheepskin coat, but without hurting him. The mathematician wished to pay him back, but at that moment several disapproving voices were raised. 'There now; he's fighting a little fellow!' cried the onlookers, 'get away, Pussy!'—and therewith the affair ended as though it had never occurred, except, I think, that both combatants retained a dim consciousness that fighting is unpleasant, because both get hurt.
In this case I seemed to detect a feeling of fairness influencing the crowd; but how often such affairs are settled so that one does not know what law has decided them, and yet both sides are satisfied! How arbitrary and unjust by comparison are all School methods of dealing with such cases. 'You are both to blame: kneel down!' says the teacher; and the teacher is wrong, because one boy is in the wrong, and that one triumphs while on his knees, and chews the cud of his unexpended anger, while the innocent one is doubly punished....
I am convinced that the School should not interfere with that part of education which belongs to the family. The School should not, and has no right to, reward or punish; and the best police and administration of a School consist in giving full freedom to the pupils to learn and get on among themselves as they like. I am convinced of this; and yet the customary School habits are still so strong in us that in the Yásno-Polyána school we frequently break this rule....
During last summer, while the school-house was being repaired, a Leyden jar disappeared from the physical cabinet; pencils disappeared repeatedly, as well as books—and this at a time when neither the carpenters nor the painters were at work. We questioned the boys. The best pupils, those who had been with us longest, old friends of ours, blushed and were so uneasy that any Public Prosecutor would have thought their confusion a sure proof of their guilt. But I knew them, and could answer for them as for myself. I understood that the very idea of being suspected offended them deeply and painfully. A gifted and tender-hearted boy, whom I will call Theodore, turned quite pale, trembled and wept. They promised to tell me, if they found out; but they declined to undertake a search. A few days later the thief was discovered. He was the son of a servant from a distant village. He had led astray, and made an accomplice of, a peasant boy from the same village; and together they had hidden the stolen articles in a box. This discovery produced a strange feeling in the other pupils: a kind of relief and even joy, accompanied by contempt and pity for the thief. We proposed that they should allot the punishment themselves. Some demanded that the thief should be flogged, but stipulated that they should do the flogging; others said: 'Sew a card on him, with the word thief.' This latter punishment, to our shame be it said, had been used by us before, and it was the very boy who a year ago had himself been labelled liar, who now most insistently demanded a card for the thief. We consented, and when one of the girls was sewing the card on, all the pupils watched and teased the punished boys with malicious joy. They wanted the punishment increased: 'Let them be led through the village; and let them wear cards till the holidays,' said they. The victims cried. The peasant boy who had been led astray by his comrade, a gifted narrator and jester, a plump, white, chubby little chap, wept without restraint and with all his childish might. The other, the chief offender, a hump-nosed boy with a thin-featured, clever face, became pale, his lips quivered, his eyes looked wildly and angrily at his joyous comrades, and occasionally his face was unnaturally distorted by a sob. His cap, with a torn peak, was stuck on the very back of his head; his hair was ruffled, his clothes soiled with chalk. All this now struck me and everybody else as though we saw it for the first time. The unkindly attention of all was directed to him, and he felt it painfully. When, with bent head and without looking round, he started homeward with (as it seemed to me) a peculiar, criminal gait, and when the boys ran after him in a crowd, teasing him in an unnatural and strangely cruel way as though, against their will, they were moved by some evil spirit, something told me that we were not doing right. But things took their course, and the thief wore the card that whole day. From this time he began, as it seemed to me, to learn worse, and one did not see him playing and talking with his fellows out of class.
One day I came to a lesson, and the pupils informed me, with a kind of horror, that the boy had again stolen. He had taken twenty copecks (seven pence) in coppers from the teacher's room, and had been caught hiding them under the stairs. We again hung a card on him; and again the same revolting scene recommenced. I began to admonish him, as all masters admonish; and a big boy, fond of talking, who was present, also admonished him—probably repeating words he had heard his father, an innkeeper, use: 'You steal once, and you do it again,' said he distinctly, glibly, and with dignity; 'it becomes a habit, and leads to no good.' I began to get vexed. I glanced at the face of the punished boy, which had become yet paler, more suffering and harder than before; and somehow I thought of convicts, and suddenly I felt so ashamed and disgusted that I tore the stupid card off him, told him to go where he liked, and became convinced—and convinced not by reason, but by my whole nature—that I had no right to torment that unfortunate boy, and that it was not in my power to make of him what I and the innkeeper's son wanted to make of him. I became convinced that there are secrets of the soul, hidden from us, on which life may act, but which precepts and punishments do not reach.
It may be said that any department of life could be treated in this way: we have merely to invert an established order founded on the experience of men, and a topsy-turvy millennium is born. It may also be said that in the foregoing pages Tolstoy appears as the evangelist of an educational system founded on the free play of youthful instincts which, speaking merely the language of natural animal life, call for sympathetic discipline. But in his Confession Tolstoy has treated his educational writings with such scant respect that criticism is disarmed; more especially as the actual working of his school was extremely interesting and much more successful than might have been expected.
N. V. Ouspénsky, the writer, narrates that he visited Yásnaya Polyána in 1862, and Tolstoy, having to leave him alone for awhile, asked him to glance at some of the compositions the boys had written in school. Taking up one of these, Ouspénsky read:
One day, Lyóf Nikoláyevitch (Tolstoy) called Savóskin up to the blackboard and ordered him to solve a problem in arithmetic. 'If I give you five rolls, and you eat one of them, how many rolls will you have left?'... Savóskin could nohow solve this problem, and the Count pulled his hair for it....
When Tolstoy returned Ouspénsky pointed out to him this essay, and Tolstoy, sighing heavily, crossed his hands before him and merely said: 'Life in this world is a hard task.'
Ouspénsky considered that he had unearthed an extraordinary contradiction between theory and practice; but no one who realises the difficulty and novelty of Tolstoy's attempt, and how far he is from claiming perfection for himself or for his achievements, should agree with Ouspénsky. On the contrary, the essay proves a freedom of relation between teacher and pupil, which would certainly not have existed had the hair-pulling been other than impulsive and exceptional.
The school was closed, or nearly so, during the summer, as most of the pupils then helped their parents with field work; obtaining, Tolstoy considers, more mental development that way than they could have done in any school. To make up for this, the hours of study in winter were long.
The classes generally finish about eight or nine o'clock (unless carpentering keeps the elder boys somewhat later), and the whole band run shouting into the yard, and there, calling to one another, begin to separate, making for different parts of the village. Occasionally they arrange to coast down-hill to the village in a large sledge that stands outside the gate. They tie up the shafts, throw themselves into it, and squealing, disappear from sight in a cloud of snow, leaving here and there on their path black patches of children who have tumbled out. In the open air, out of school (for all its freedom) new relations are formed between pupil and teacher: freer, simpler and more trustful—those very relations which seem to us the ideal which School should aim at.
Not long ago we read Gógol's story Viy [an Earth-Spirit] in the highest class. The final scenes affected them strongly, and excited their imagination. Some of them played the witch, and kept alluding to the last chapters....
Out of doors it was a moonless, winter night, with clouds in the sky, not cold. We stopped at the crossroads. The elder boys, in their third year, stopped near me, asking me to accompany them further. The younger ones looked at us, and rushed off down-hill. They had begun to learn with a new master, and between them and me there is not the same confidence as between the older boys and myself.
'Well, let us go to the wood' (a small wood about 120 yards from the house), said one of them. The most insistent was Fédka, a boy of ten, with a tender, receptive, poetic yet daring nature. Danger seems to form the chief condition of pleasure for him. In summer it always frightened me to see how he, with two other boys, would swim out into the very middle of the pond, which is nearly 120 yards wide, and would now and then disappear in the hot reflection of the summer sun, and swim under water; and how he would then turn on his back, causing fountains of water to rise, and calling with his high-pitched voice to his comrades on the bank to see what a fine fellow he was.
He now knew there were wolves in the wood, and so he wanted to go there. All agreed; and the four of us went to the wood. Another boy, a lad of twelve, physically and morally strong, whom I will call Syómka, went on in front and kept calling and 'ah-ou-ing' with his ringing voice, to some one at a distance. Prónka, a sickly, mild and very gifted lad, from a poor family (sickly probably chiefly from lack of food), walked by my side. Fédka walked between me and Syómka, talking all the time in a particularly gentle voice: now relating how he had herded horses in summer, now saying there was nothing to be afraid of, and now asking, 'Suppose one should jump out?' and insisting on my giving some reply. We did not go into the wood: that would have been too dreadful; but even where we were, near the wood, it was darker, and the road was scarcely visible, and the lights of the village were hidden from view. Syómka stopped and listened: 'Stop, lads! What is that?' said he suddenly.
We were silent, and though we heard nothing, things seemed to grow more gruesome.
'What shall we do if it leaps out ... and comes at us?' asked Fédka.
We began to talk about Caucasian robbers. They remembered a Caucasian tale I had told them long ago, and I again told them of 'braves,' of Cossacks, and of Hádji Mourát.[46] Syómka went on in front, treading boldly in his big boots, his broad back swaying regularly. Prónka tried to walk by my side, but Fédka pushed him off the path, and Prónka—who, probably on account of his poverty, always submitted—only ran up alongside at the most interesting passages, sinking in the snow up to his knees.
Every one who knows anything of Russian peasant children knows that they are not accustomed to, and cannot bear, any caresses, affectionate words, kisses, hand touchings, and so forth. I have seen a lady in a peasant school, wishing to pet a boy, say: 'Come, I will give you a kiss, dear!' and actually kiss him; and the boy was ashamed and offended, and could not understand why he had been so treated. Boys of five are already above such caresses—they are no longer babies. I was therefore particularly struck when Fédka, walking beside me, at the most terrible part of the story suddenly touched me lightly with his sleeve, and then clasped two of my fingers in his hand, and kept hold of them. As soon as I stopped speaking, Fédka demanded that I should go on, and did this in such a beseeching and agitated voice that it was impossible not to comply with his wish.
'Now then, don't get in the way!' said he once angrily to Prónka, who had run in front of us. He was so carried away as even to be cruel; so agitated yet happy was he, holding on to my fingers, that he could let no one dare to interrupt his pleasure.
'Some more! Some more! It is fine!' said he.
We had passed the wood and were approaching the village from the other end.
'Let's go on,' said all the boys when the lights became visible. 'Let us take another turn!'
We went on in silence, sinking here and there in the rotten snow, not hardened by much traffic. A white darkness seemed to sway before our eyes; the clouds hung low, as though something had heaped them upon us. There was no end to that whiteness, amid which we alone crunched along the snow. The wind sounded through the bare tops of the aspens, but where we were, behind the woods, it was calm.
I finished my story by telling how a 'brave,' surrounded by his enemies, sang his death-song and threw himself on his dagger. All were silent.
'Why did he sing a song when he was surrounded?' asked Syómka.
'Weren't you told?—He was preparing for death!' replied Fédka, aggrieved.
'I think he sang a prayer,' added Prónka.
All agreed. Fédka suddenly stopped.
'How was it, you told us, your Aunt had her throat cut?' asked he. (He had not yet had enough horrors.) 'Tell us! Tell us!'
I again told them that terrible story of the murder of the Countess Tolstoy,[47] and they stood silently about me, watching my face.
'The fellow got caught!' said Syómka.
'He was afraid to go away in the night, while she was lying with her throat cut!' said Fédka; 'I should have run away!' and he gathered my two fingers yet more closely in his hand.
We stopped in the thicket, beyond the threshing-floor at the very end of the village. Syómka picked up a dry stick from the snow and began striking it against the frosty trunk of a lime tree. Hoar frost fell from the branches on to one's cap, and the noise of the blows resounded in the stillness of the wood.
'Lyóf Nikoláyevitch,' said Fédka to me (I thought he was going again to speak about the Countess), 'why does one learn singing? I often think, why, really, does one?'
What made him jump from the terror of the murder to this question, heaven only knows; yet by the tone of his voice, the seriousness with which he demanded an answer, and the attentive silence of the other two, one felt that there was some vital and legitimate connection between this question and our preceding talk. Whether the connection lay in some response to my suggestion that crime might be explained by lack of education (I had spoken of that) or whether he was testing himself—transferring himself into the mind of the murderer and remembering his own favourite occupation (he has a wonderful voice and immense musical talent) or whether the connection lay in the fact that he felt that now was the time for sincere conversation, and all the problems demanding solution rose in his mind—at any rate his question surprised none of us.
'And what is drawing for? And why write well?' said I, not knowing at all how to explain to him what art is for.
'What is drawing for?' repeated he thoughtfully. He really was asking, What is Art for? And I neither dared nor could explain.
'What is drawing for?' said Syómka. 'Why, you draw anything, and can then make it from the drawing.'
'No, that is designing,' said Fédka. 'But why draw figures?'
Syómka's matter-of-fact mind was not perplexed.
'What is a stick for, and what is a lime tree for?' said he, still striking the tree.
'Yes, what is a lime tree for?' said I.
'To make rafters of,' replied Syómka.
'But what is it for in summer, when not yet cut down?'
'Then, it's no use.'
'No, really,' insisted Fédka; 'why does a lime tree grow?'
And we began to speak of the fact that not everything exists for use, but that there is also beauty, and that Art is beauty; and we understood one another, and Fédka quite understood why the lime tree grows and what singing is for.
Prónka agreed with us, but he thought rather of moral beauty: goodness.
Syómka understood with his big brain, but did not acknowledge beauty apart from usefulness. He was in doubt (as often happens to men with great reasoning power): feeling Art to be a force, but not feeling in his soul the need of that force. He, like them, wished to get at Art by his reason, and tried to kindle that fire in himself.
'We'll sing Who hath to-morrow. I remember my part,' said he. (He has a correct ear, but no taste or refinement in singing.) Fédka, however, fully understood that the lime tree is good when in leaf: good to look at in summer; and that that is enough.
Prónka understood that it is a pity to cut it down, because it, too, has life:
'Why, when we take the sap of a lime, it's like taking blood.'
Syómka, though he did not say so, evidently thought that there was little use in a lime when it was sappy.
It feels strange to repeat what we then said, but it seems to me that we said all that can be said about utility, and plastic and moral beauty.
We went on to the village. Fédka still clung to my hand; now, it seemed to me, from gratitude. We all were nearer one another that night than we had been for a long time. Prónka walked beside us along the broad village street.
'See, there is still a light in Mazánof's house,' said he. 'As I was going to school this morning, Gavrúka was coming from the pub, as dru-u-nk as could be! His horse all in a lather and he beating it! I am always sorry for such things. Really, why should it be beaten?'
'And the other day, coming from Toúla, my daddy gave his horse the reins,' said Syómka; 'and it took him into a snow-drift and there he slept—quite drunk.'
'And Gavrúka kept on beating his horse over the eyes, and I felt so sorry,' repeated Prónka again. 'Why should he beat it? He got down and just flogged it.'
Syómka suddenly stopped.
'Our folk are already asleep,' said he, looking in at the window of his crooked, dirty hut. 'Won't you walk a little longer?'
'No.'
'Go-o-od-bye, Lyóf Nikoláyevitch!' shouted he suddenly, and tearing himself away from us, as it were with an effort, he ran to the house, lifted the latch and disappeared.
'So you will take each of us home? First one and then the other?' said Fédka.
We went on. There was a light in Prónka's hut, and we looked in at the window. His mother, a tall and handsome but toil-worn woman, with black eyebrows and eyes, sat at the table, peeling potatoes. In the middle of the hut hung a cradle. Prónka's brother, the mathematician from our second class, was standing at the table, eating potatoes with salt. It was a black, tiny, and dirty hut.
'What a plague you are!' shouted the mother at Prónka. 'Where have you been?'
Prónka glanced at the window with a meek, sickly smile. His mother guessed that he had not come alone, and her face immediately assumed a feigned expression that was not nice.
Only Fédka was left.
'The travelling tailors are at our house, that is why there's a light there,' said he in the softened voice that had come to him that evening. 'Good-bye, Lyóf Nikoláyevitch!' added he, softly and tenderly, and he began to knock with the ring attached to the closed door. 'Let me in!' his high-pitched voice rang out amid the winter stillness of the village. It was long before they opened the door for him. I looked in at the window. The hut was a large one. The father was playing cards with a tailor, and some copper coins lay on the table. The wife, Fédka's stepmother, was sitting near the torch-stand, looking eagerly at the money. The young tailor, a cunning drunkard, was holding his cards on the table, bending them, and looking triumphantly at his opponent. Fédka's father, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned, his brow wrinkled with mental exertion and vexation, changed one card for another, and waved his horny hand in perplexity above them.
'Let me in!'
The woman rose and went to the door.
'Good-bye!' repeated Fédka, once again. 'Let us always have such walks!'
Thus Tolstoy for the second time found himself faced by the question: What is Art? which had arisen when he spoke to the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. This time it was put to him by a ten-year-old peasant boy, and it seemed to him that: 'We said all that can be said about utility, and plastic and moral beauty.' Twenty years later, after achieving the highest fame as a literary artist, he returned to the subject and tried to write an essay on the connection between life and Art, thinking that he would be able to accomplish it at a single effort. It proved, however, as he tells us, 'that my views on the matter were so far from clear, that I could not arrange them in a way that satisfied me. From that time I did not cease to think of the subject, and I recommenced writing on it six or seven times; but each time, after writing a considerable part of it, I found myself unable to bring the work to a satisfactory conclusion, and had to put it aside.' Only after another fifteen years' study and reflection did he succeed, in 1898, in producing What is Art? which raised such a storm in the esthetic dovecots, and induced the editor of Literature to declare that 'There was never any reason for inferring that Count Tolstoy's opinions on the philosophy of art would be worth the paper on which they were written'; while A. B. Walkley was asserting that 'this calmly and cogently reasoned effort to put art on a new basis is a literary event of the first importance.'
We have, however, as yet only reached the year 1862, and must not anticipate.
At first the peasants were rather afraid of the school, but before long they gained confidence and the report became current among them that: 'At Yásno-Polyána school they learn everything, including all the sciences, and there are such clever masters that it is dreadful; it is said that they even imitate thunder and lightning. Anyway, the lads understand well, and have begun to read and write.' Another very general opinion was that: 'They teach the boys everything (like gentlemen's sons) much of it is no use, but still, as they quickly learn to read, it is worth sending the children there.'
Naturally Tolstoy, himself in those days an ardent gymnast, had parallel and horizontal bars put up, and gave the children physical training. To the effects of this on the stomach, the village mothers did not fail to attribute any digestive troubles that befell their children from time to time; especially when the long Lenten fast was succeeded by a return to more appetising food, or when, after such luxuries had long been lacking, fresh vegetables again came into use in summer.
In his account of the Yásno-Polyána school, Tolstoy tells us there were about forty pupils enrolled, but more than thirty were rarely present at a time; among them were four or five girls, and sometimes three or four male adults who came either for a month or for a whole winter. Most of the boys were from seven to ten years old. (Tolstoy says that children learn to read most rapidly, easily and well, between the ages of six and eight.)
There were four teachers, and generally from five to seven lessons a day. The teachers kept diaries of their work, and discussed matters together on Sundays, when they drew up plans for the coming week. These plans were, however, not strictly adhered to, but were constantly modified to meet the demands of the pupils.
Tolstoy's sister told me of another Sunday occupation at Yásnaya Polyána in those days. Tolstoy used to invite all the boys from the neighbouring schools within reach, and used to play games with them; the favourite game being Barre, which I assume to be a form of 'Storm the Castle.'
Tolstoy came to the conclusion that teachers involuntarily strive to find a method of teaching convenient for themselves, and that the more convenient a method is for the teacher, the less convenient it is for the pupil; and only that method is good which satisfies the pupils.
His theory of freedom as the basis of success in instruction, was put to a rude test by the fact that for a considerable time his pupils made little or no headway in learning to read. He says:
The simple thought that the time had not yet come for good reading and that there was at present no need of it, but that the pupils would themselves find the best method when the need arose, only recently entered my head.
After telling how the boys first met the difficulty of mastering the mechanical process of reading, Tolstoy goes on to tell how in the upper class progress was suddenly made owing to what seemed an accident.
In the class of advanced reading some one book is used, each boy reading in turn, and then all telling its contents together. They had been joined that autumn by an extremely talented lad, T., who had studied for two years with a sacristan, and was therefore ahead of them all in reading. He reads as we do, and so the pupils only understand anything of the advanced reading (and then not very much of it) when he reads; and yet each of them wishes to read. But as soon as a bad reader begins, the others express dissatisfaction, especially when the story is interesting. They laugh, and get cross, and the bad reader feels ashamed, and endless disputes arise. Last month one of the boys announced that at any cost he would manage, within a week, to read as well as T.; others made the same announcement, and suddenly mechanical reading became their favourite occupation. For an hour or an hour-and-a-half at a time, they would sit without tearing themselves away from the books, which they did not understand; and they began taking books home with them; and really, within three weeks, they made such progress as could not have been expected.
In their case the reverse had happened of what usually occurs with those who learn the rudiments. Generally a man learns to read, and finds nothing he cares to read or understand. In this case the pupils were convinced that there is something worth reading and understanding, but felt that they lacked the capacity; and so they set to work to become proficient readers.
A difficulty of enormous importance was the absence of books really suitable for simple folk to read.
The insoluble problem was that for the education of the people an ability and a desire to read good books is essential. Good books are, however, written in a literary language the people don't understand. In order to learn to understand it, one would have to read a great deal; and people won't read willingly unless they understand what they read.
Connected with this difficulty of finding books suited to the understanding of peasants and of peasant children, was the parallel difficulty of finding literary subjects that interested them. This was first met by reading the Old Testament stories to them:
A knowledge of Sacred History was demanded both by the pupils themselves and by their parents. Of all the oral subjects I tried during three years, nothing so suited the understanding and mental condition of the boys as the Old Testament. The same was the case in all the schools that came under my observation. I tried the New Testament, I tried Russian History and Geography, I tried explanations of natural phenomena (so much advocated to-day), but it was all listened to unwillingly and quickly forgotten. But the Old Testament was remembered and narrated eagerly both in class and at home, and so well remembered that after two months the children wrote Scripture tales from memory with very slight omissions.
It seems to me that the book of the childhood of the race will always be the best book for the childhood of each man. It seems to me impossible to replace that book. To alter or to abbreviate the Bible, as is done in Sonntag's and other school primers, appears to me bad. All—every word—in it is right, both as revelation and as art. Read about the creation of the world in the Bible, and then read it in an abbreviated Sacred History, and the alteration of the Bible into the Sacred History will appear to you quite unintelligible. The latter can only be learnt by heart; while the Bible presents the child with a vivid and majestic picture he will never forget. The omissions made in the Sacred History are quite unintelligible, and only impair the character and beauty of the Scriptures. Why, for instance, is the statement omitted in all the Sacred Histories, that when there was nothing, the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and that after having created, God looked at His creation and saw that it was good, and that then it was the morning and evening of such and such a day? Why do they omit that God breathed into Adam's nostrils the breath of life, and that having taken one of his ribs He with the flesh closed up the place thereof, and so forth? One must read the Bible to unperverted children, to understand how necessary and true it all is. Perhaps one ought not to give the Bible to perverted young ladies; but when reading it to peasant children I did not alter or omit a single word. None of them giggled behind another's back; but all listened eagerly and with natural reverence. The story of Lot and his daughters, and the story of Judah's son, evoked horror but not laughter....
How intelligible and clear it all is, especially for a child, and yet how stern and serious! I cannot imagine what instruction would be possible, without that book. Yet when one has learnt these stories only in childhood, and has afterwards partly forgotten them, one thinks: What good do they do us? Would it not be all the same if one did not know them at all? So it seems till, on beginning to teach, you test on other children the elements that helped to develop you. It seems as if one could teach children to write and read and calculate, and could give them an idea of history, geography, and natural phenomena, without the Bible, and before the Bible; yet nowhere is this done: everywhere the child first of all gets to know the Bible, its stories, or extracts from it. The first relations of the learner to the teacher are founded on that book. Such a general fact is not an accident. My very free relations with my pupils at the commencement of the Yásno-Polyána school helped me to find the explanation of this phenomenon.
A child or a man on entering school (I make no distinction between a ten-, thirty-, or seventy-year-old man) brings with him the special view of things he has deduced from life and to which he is attached. In order that a man of any age should begin to learn, it is necessary that he should love learning. That he should love learning, he must recognise the falseness and insufficiency of his own view of things, and must scent afar off that new view of life which learning is to reveal to him. No man or boy would have the strength to learn, if the result of learning presented itself to him merely as a capacity to write, to read, and to reckon. No master could teach if he did not command an outlook on life higher than his pupils possess. That a pupil may surrender himself whole-heartedly to his teacher, one corner must be lifted of the veil which hides from him all the delight of that world of thought, knowledge, and poetry to which learning will admit him. Only by being constantly under the spell of that bright light shining ahead of him, will the pupil be able to use his powers in the way we require of him.
What means have we of lifting this corner of the veil?... As I have said, I thought as many think, that being myself in the world to which I had to introduce my pupils, it would be easy for me to do this; and I taught the rudiments, explained natural phenomena, and told them, as the primers do, that the fruits of learning are sweet; but the scholars did not believe me, and kept aloof. Then I tried reading the Bible to them, and quite took possession of them. The corner of the veil was lifted, and they yielded themselves to me completely. They fell in love with the book, and with learning, and with me. It only remained for me to guide them on....
To reveal to the pupil a new world, and to make him, without possessing knowledge, love knowledge, there is no book but the Bible. I speak even for those who do not regard the Bible as a revelation. There are no other works—at least I know none—which in so compressed and poetic a form contain all those sides of human thought which the Bible unites in itself. All the questions raised by natural phenomena are there dealt with. Of all the primitive relations of men with one another: the family, the State, and religion, we first become conscious through that book. The generalisations of thought and wisdom, with the charm given by their childlike simplicity of form, seize the pupil's mind for the first time. Not only does the lyricism of David's psalms act on the minds of the elder pupils; but more than that, from this book every one becomes conscious for the first time of the whole beauty of the epos in its incomparable simplicity and strength. Who has not wept over the story of Joseph and his meeting with his brethren? Who has not, with bated breath, told the story of the bound and shorn Samson, revenging himself on his enemies and perishing under the ruins of the palace he destroys, or received a hundred other impressions on which we were reared as on our mothers' milk?
Let those who deny the educative value of the Bible and say it is out of date, invent a book and stories explaining the phenomena of Nature, either from general history or from the imagination, which will be accepted as the Bible stories are; and then we will admit that the Bible is obsolete....
Drawn though it may be from a one-sided experience, I repeat my conviction. The development of a child or a man in our society without the Bible, is as inconceivable as that of an ancient Greek would have been without Homer. The Bible is the only book to begin with, for a child's reading. The Bible, both in its form and in its contents, should serve as a model for all children's primers and all reading books. A translation of the Bible into the language of the common folk, would be the best book for the people.
When pupils came from other schools where they had had to learn Scripture by heart, or had been inoculated with the abbreviated school-primer versions, Tolstoy found that the Bible had nothing like as strong an effect as it had on boys who came fresh to it.
Such pupils do not experience what is felt by fresh pupils, who listen to the Bible with beating heart, seizing every word, thinking that now, now at last, all the wisdom of the world is about to be revealed to them.
In reading the above passages, it should be borne in mind that in Russian usage 'The Bible' means the Old Testament only.
Besides the Bible, the only books the people understand and like, says Tolstoy, are those written not for the people but by the people; such as folk-tales and collections of songs, legends, proverbs, verses, and riddles. There was much in his experience which fits in with what Mr. Cecil Sharp and Miss Neal of the Espérance Club, have lately been demonstrating by their revivals of English Folk Songs and Dances: namely, that there is an excellent literature and art which children and common folk appreciate and assimilate as eagerly and excellently as any one, and which it is the height of folly for cultured people to despise; and his keen perception of the gap that separates the art and literature accessible to the people from the art that by its artificiality is beyond their reach, led him subsequently to undertake, first a series of school primers, and then the re-telling of a number of folk-tales and legends, which have reached more readers, and perhaps benefited the world more, than anything else he has written.
With penmanship it happened at Yásno-Polyána school, as with reading:
The pupils wrote very badly, and a new master introduced writing from copies (another exercise very sedate and easy for the master). The pupils became dull, and we were obliged to abandon calligraphy, and did not know how to devise any way of improving their handwriting. The eldest class discovered the way for itself. Having finished writing the Bible stories, the elder pupils began to ask for their exercise-books to take home [probably to read to their parents]. These were dirty, crumpled, and badly written. The precise mathematician P. asked for some paper, and set to work to rewrite his stories. This idea pleased the others. 'Give me, too, some paper!'— 'Give me an exercise-book!' and a fashion for calligraphy set in, which still prevails in the upper class. They took an exercise-book, put before them a written alphabet copy from which they imitated each letter, boasting to one another of their performance, and in two weeks' time they had made great progress.
Grammar turned out to be an unsatisfactory subject, and to have hardly any connection with correct writing or speaking.
In our youngest—the third—class, they write what they like. Besides that, the youngest write out in the evening, one at a time, sentences they have composed all together. One writes, and the others whisper among themselves, noting his mistakes, and only waiting till he has finished, in order to denounce his misplaced e or his wrongly detached prefix, or sometimes to perpetrate a blunder of their own. To write correctly and to correct mistakes made by others, gives them great pleasure. The elder boys seize every letter they can get hold of, exercising themselves in the correction of mistakes, and trying with all their might to write correctly; but they cannot bear grammar or the analysis of sentences, and in spite of a bias we had for analysis, they only tolerate it to a very limited extent, falling asleep or evading the classes.
History on the whole went badly, except such bits of Russian history as, when told poetically, aroused patriotic feelings. On one memorable occasion the whole class went wild with excitement and eager interest. That was when Tolstoy, with a poet's licence, told of the defeat of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812.
Except in this legendary way, the teaching of history to children is, in Tolstoy's opinion, useless. The historic sense develops later than the artistic sense:
In my experience and practice the first germ of interest in history arises out of contemporary events, sometimes as a result of participation in them, through political interest, political opinions, debates, and the reading of newspapers. Consequently the idea of beginning the teaching of history from present times should suggest itself to every intelligent teacher.
Of geography as a subject for the education of children, Tolstoy has an even lower opinion:
In Von Vizin's comedy The Minor, when Mitrofánoushka was being persuaded to learn geography, his mother said: 'Why teach him all the countries? The coachman will drive him where he may have to go to.' Nothing more to the point has ever been said against geography, and all the learned men in the world put together cannot rebut such an irrefragable argument. I am speaking quite seriously. What need was there for me to know where the river and town of Barcelona are situated, when for thirty-three years I have not once had occasion to use the knowledge? Not even the most picturesque description of Barcelona and its inhabitants could, I imagine, conduce to the development of my mental faculties.