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The educational policy of the Soviet government

In a country artificially immersed in ignorance, educational tasks could not fail to rise to their full height the very next day after the people's revolution, which transferred power into the hands of the working masses. It is striking that neither the conquest of political power nor the conquest of the position of economic master of the country can be lasting if knowledge is not also won by the people.

Only with a high level of public education is possible a conscious, embracing the masses to the bottom of democracy. In the interim, a particularly important role should have been played by the intelligentsia, who enjoyed the odious privilege of exceptional education and were considered in Russia to be purely people-loving. Back in the era of the revolution of 1905-06. Kautsky hopefully pointed out that in Russia the cause of the working class would be facilitated by its devoted ally, its revolutionary intelligentsia. But Kautsky did not foresee then that at the hour of the real realization of his dreams, at the hour of the social revolution, he himself would turn out to be an enemy of the proletarian vanguard!

There is no bad without good! The disgusting sabotage on the part of the majority of the Russian, including primarily the so-called socialist intelligentsia, was an excellent lesson for the proletariat and emphasized the purely immutable need for it to quickly acquire real knowledge, as much as possible for itself and in its entirety for its children.

It was this task of enormous importance that fell on the shoulders of the Commissariat for Enlightenment.

It was extremely difficult to do this, because in the camp of saboteurs, one of the most irreconcilable detachments were just the gentlemen of the teacher, carried away on this path by All Russia. Teaches. Union. The central apparatus of the former Ministry of Nar was also sabotaged by officials. Prosv.

We found ourselves among the ruins, without a guidebook, without a real connection with the school, cut off from the provinces and with incredibly limited specially pedagogical forces.

During this year, other obstacles arose in our path. Suffice it to name half destroyed what was gradually getting better - the evacuation of the Commissariat to Moscow during the German offensive before the peace of Brest-Litovsk.

Nevertheless, at present, the central apparatus, and to a large extent the local one, has been established, the teaching staff in a significant part (lower classes) sincerely goes with us, in others it trails behind us willy-nilly.

A few words about the mechanism by which we have replaced the old ministry and its local bodies.

At the center of the Commissariat are the People's Commissar and his deputy and a collegium, currently consisting of 12 persons, which decides all current affairs that are beyond the competence of the heads of departments. Fundamental issues are resolved by the State Commission on Nar. Education, which, in addition to members of the collegium and heads of departments, includes representatives from the centers of Soviet power, from workers' professional and cultural organizations, and from that part of the teaching staff that stands on the platform of loyal cooperation with the Soviet government.

Finally, especially important questions—for example, the principles of a general school reform—are discussed at the All-Russian Congresses, the first of which, very crowded, friendly, and imbued with communist ideals, took place in Moscow in August.

In the localities, the affairs of public education are led by the Departments of Public Education under the Executive Committees of provincial, district, city, and, finally, volost. The provincial, district, and city departments corresponding to the central collegium have Councils for Public Education, which correspond locally to the State Commission.

Of course, the main concern of the Commissariat of National Education was to work out the general principles of a radical reform to replace the school apparatus we inherited from the tsarist regime.

In place of schools of all kinds and types, first of all sharply divided: into the lower school - for the common people and the middle school - for the privileged estates and wealthy classes, and then into women's and men's, real and classical, general and special educational institutions, the Commissariat put the Unified Labor School .

The unity of this school must be understood in two ways. Firstly , the class barrier is being destroyed, and the school is turning into one staircase. In principle, every child in Russia enters the same type of school and has the same opportunity as any other to complete higher education. Secondly, until the age of 16 any specialization is avoided. Education is given in the full sense of the word, polytechnic, the same for both sexes. Needless to say, this does not prevent the implementation of the principle of individualization and the greatest possible polymorphism within each school. Specialization in the full sense of the word is allowed only after the age of 16 on the already acquired foundation of general and polytechnic education. The school is declared absolutely secular; certificates, as documents giving special rights, are rejected, and ancient languages ​​are declared optional.

This school, one in principle, is divided into two stages, each of four years; This eight-year course is in principle recognized as obligatory.

Our school will be really public . In order to achieve this goal, not only is any payment for the right to study abolished, but children are also provided with free hot food, and the poorest with shoes and clothing. Needless to say, all teaching aids are delivered to students by the school.

The Commissariat is well aware of the immense difficulties that lie along this path. The country is ruined and hungry, teaching aids are far from enough for the needs of even the old school, much less for such a colossally expanded new one. But the Commissariat, with the support of the entire Soviet government, will take up the fight against this need and hope to overcome it, if not immediately, then in the near future.

Declaring an eight-year course as a matter of principle . The Commissariat instructs all councils to take into account the total number of children of school age, place all those who are physically possible to be included in schools, according to educational institutions, and issue certificates to the rest that they are temporarily out of school through no fault or unwillingness of their parents. Having found out the number of such children for each locality, the Commissariat will immediately begin to develop the school network. It is planned to open ten thousand first-level schools and one thousand second-level schools for the next year. 1

The labor character of the school lies in the fact that labor, both purely pedagogical and especially productive, will be the basis of education.

In the first stage school, this will be labor primarily within the walls of the educational institution: in the kitchen, in the garden, in special workshops, etc. Labor must be productive in nature, especially in the sense of serving by children all the needs of the school hostel available to them. At this stage, it has a predominantly domestic and handicraft character, in the city, naturally, closer to the mud of the workshop, in the countryside - to the type of farm. At the same time, it is planned, however, to move all city schools to the countryside for the summer, if possible.

In the secondary school, the productive and broadly social character of labor is emphasized more sharply. We deal here with children from the age of thirteen. From this year, light but real work outside of school is possible , participation in factory or factory work, assistance to serious agriculture, cooperation in some kind of trade, assistance to some business, public or state. From this age, we merge child labor, the participation of the child in the struggle of society for existence and development with his upbringing. The school, without taking its eyes off the teenager, protecting him from harm, turning every act of this labor to the benefit of his general physical and mental development, leads him into the very thick of social productive work.

This task is the newest and most responsible.

Only through the experience and careful cooperation of the teacher with the technicians and the workers' administration of factories and factories will we gradually find the correct methods of close contact between pedagogical and industrial life.

Meanwhile, this is where we come across something original, which is characteristic only of the communist approach to the school problem.

Every time Marx had to talk about education, he turned specifically to the issue of child labor and insisted that not the prohibition of child labor, but its streamlining and transformation into the polytechnical basis of education through rational combination with science, physical exercises and aesthetic development will give harmonious and truly modern man.

Such, in the most general terms, is the labor basis of the general education school. Of course, some specialization is also possible for a teenager, the study of this or that technique predominantly ; individual schools of the second stage may, according to local conditions, naturally focus their attention on local production, however, so that, using the example of a specific production, they develop all the possibilities in the student and acquaint him with the whole culture, and not lock him into a specialty. True specialization, the transition to vocational training, in the opinion of the Commissariat, is permissible only at the third stage from the age of sixteen, in schools that we call higher, or in institutions of an out-of-school type.

The Commissariat considers it highly desirable at the second stage to destroy the involuntary but excessive specialization between urban and rural schools. It is necessary not only to turn city schools into colonies for the summer, but to import them in turn for a while Tue. during the winter season, pupils from village schools of the second level to factory and cultural centers.

For the implementation of the grandiose reform sketched here, worked out by the Commissariat in cooperation with the first All-Russian Congress on Public Education in relatively detail, a significant number of well-trained teachers is, of course, necessary.

The school policy of the Commissariat was as follows:

1) if possible, paralyze the influence of the sabotage Vser. Uch. Union;

2) to rally into a broad trade union, especially the grass-roots teachers, while relying on the so-called Union of Uch. - Internationalists;

3) to equalize the rights of teachers of lower and secondary schools, if possible leveling their wages as well;

4) to raise as high as possible the general level of this payment;

5) promote in every possible way the development and multiplication of educational institutions for the training of teachers;

6) for the time being, resort to the organization of teacher training courses as widely as possible.

This policy was approved at a number of teachers' congresses and found its final definition at the Moscow Conference on the question of teacher training.

In all the respects envisaged, the Commissariat has achieved a very real success. The teachers' union is exhausted and asks for mercy. Grassroots teachers are getting better organized, and the dozens of congratulatory telegrams received by the People's Commissar from teachers' congresses show the continuous growth of sympathy for the Soviet government among the people's teachers. 2

I borrow a page from the official report of the People's Commissariat for Education, submitted in September 1918 to the Council of People's Commissars, on the actions of the Commissariat to raise the economic, moral and intellectual level of teachers :

“On June 26, the Council of People's Commissars, on the proposal of the People's Commissariat for Education, took measures that stand completely apart in the annals of the school history of more than one Russia. The remuneration of folk teachers was immediately increased more than twice, with the payment of the difference for three months ago, starting from March. The corresponding expenditure item in the budget of public education for the second half of 1918 rose to almost a billion, as the ideal of truly universal education was approached, as a network of new schools was opened are transferred in relation to wages to the first, i.e., the highest, category). This expenditure must reach several billions: the annual budget of the unified labor school,billion rubles. But working Russia will spare nothing in order to have a school worthy of a hundred million people of workers and peasants, who for the first time in the world have taken power directly into their own hands. 3

To raise the material level of the worker in the public school meant, however, to do only half the job, and not the most important one at that. Bourgeois society not only kept the body of the educator of the popular masses in hunger and cold, it tried to keep his mind in the dark: the history of teachers' sabotage showed how far-sighted the bourgeoisie was in this case. The new Russia needs not only a teacher who is not physically overwhelmed with want, but also a mentally alert, really educated, really cultured teacher. The old type of teacher training institutions, teachers' institutes and teachers' seminaries, were completely inadequate for this task. Their course deliberately kept at the level of high school. although not teenagers studied in them, but adults, moreover, in teacher's institutes, they even already tested their strength in school work: only those who had taught in elementary school for at least two years were admitted to teachers' institutes. A meeting for the training of teachers, arranged by the People's Commissariat in the second half of August 1918, worked out new plans for both teachers' seminaries and institutes. The latter are turning into higher educational institutions corresponding to the pedagogical faculty of the university. Instead of the law of God, etc., new subjects have been introduced into the course of teachers' seminaries, such as, for example, the history of socialism, the foundations of the theory of law, etc.4

Here is a brief summary of Soviet work in the field of teacher training. It was reopened after October 1917: teachers' institutes - 4, teachers' seminaries - 42, permanent pedagogical courses - 10, short-term pedagogical courses - 110. 31 teachers' seminaries and 6 permanent pedagogical courses were taken under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat and transformed. During the current summer, under the Commissariat, central pedagogical courses were organized according to the new program, attracting more than 800 students, exclusively folk teachers and female teachers. Courses where comrade acted as lecturers. Bukharin, Reisner, and others, went through with great enthusiasm.

I will add to this that similar work is going on in the provinces, especially in the Northern region, where in Petrograd courses were organized, first for 400, and then for 2,000 teachers, but in the region - 11 such courses with 200-500 students each. five

The Commissariat of National Education considers it necessary, not limited to caring for children of school age, but now to set itself a goal. - to organize a two-year preparatory and compulsory kindergarten at all primary schools. In anticipation , the Preschool Department launched a wide range of activities to organize playgrounds, clubs and colonies. Among the latter, children's labor koloshi in Tsarskoe Selo deserve special attention, since they are the first stone in the conceived by the Commissariat of the transformation of this best place near gigantic St. Petersburg into a huge Detskoye Selo .where many thousands of proletarian children will be resettled. During the summer, this colony sheltered up to 1,600 children, some of whom have remained to this day; it is planned to expand the colony to 2,000 children and more before the onset of 1919.

In the matter of feeding and caring for children, the Commissariat of Public Education is in live contact with the Commissariat of Social Welfare. 6

By the will of the Council of People's Commissars, all schools of other departments passed into the hands of the Commissariat of Public Education, and due to the circumstances of the time, almost absolutely all private educational institutions.

Turning to the reform of higher education , I will point out that this reform, conceived by the Commissariat, was discussed by all the universities and higher technical schools of Russia, both locally and at two crowded meetings in Moscow.

Some of the wishes of the Commissariat were accepted by the professors, some were carried out contrary to the opinion of the professors, but with a guarantee on their part to obey the demands of the revolutionary people. The main features of the reform of higher education are as follows: higher education in Russia is declared public. Every citizen who has reached the age of 16 may enter any institution of higher education. Everyone is allowed to listen to the lectures directly. Persons who, according to the verification, are capable of starting practical work, are directly allowed to do so. Persons who are not sufficiently trained receive this training according to the plans and under the guidance of the professors of this educational institution in special preparatory courses.

Professors occupy departments on the basis of a certain way organized all-Russian competitions, renewed every 10 years for each department (for teachers of the Unified School, election by Soviet bodies and periodic re-elections are also mandatory).

Higher schools with such a composition enjoy wide autonomy, moreover, professors and students participate in their self-government in a fair proportion. Associate professors and other teaching staff of higher educational institutions received the title of professor and equal rights with them.

In addition to the main Educational Association, which meets the former tasks of higher education, each of them is also obliged to develop an Educational Association, which is a serious help to the cause of out-of-school education of the people. The Educational Association, firstly, is expressed in the organization of a lecturer's institute for the preparation of lecturers for public universities, which are beginning to cover the Russian land, and, secondly, in the opening of public courses, in a condensed form giving the essence and the latest achievements of individual sciences not for specialists, but for people wishing to supplement their general education.

The Commissariat also proposes in the future to oblige all higher educational institutions to organize within their bosoms special Scientific Associations specifically for the development of scientific problems and purely scientific work. However, in view of the strange resistance of the professors, especially the university ones, the Commissariat came to the conclusion that it was more rational to organize such scientific institutes outside the university, which was obviously too weak for such a triune life. 7

The Educational Association of Higher Educational Institutions will bring us close to the tasks of out-of-school education , to which, of course, the Commissariat attaches great importance.

In anticipation of the influx of new communist enlightened masses that the school will give us, we must urgently meet the thirst of adults for knowledge. For this purpose, it is planned to create a number of people's universities in the capitals, cities and villages, as well as the development of a dense network of libraries for the use of the people, both settled and circulating; - telegraph department.

In order to bring unity into the activities of large central libraries, they are currently merged under the leadership of the Central Library Commission , which is developing questions of their greatest public accessibility by organizing, among other things, the exchange of books and mailing them to subscribers. The public library in Petrograd received a new, profoundly democratic constitution and significant funds for its expansion. We also note here that all state archives are centralized and turned into the property of science.

The victorious people got a huge royal, lordly, church property. Along with the official museums, the Commissariat of Public Education created new museums, turning into them the historical, artistically most valuable palaces of kings and nobles. Protecting them in a troubled time of ferment, when the culturally valuable property of the hated classes was in danger of being destroyed. The Commissariat of Public Education created a special body, the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity, which not only preserved much that was doomed to destruction without its intervention, but also turned into a center for the nationalization and democratic use of all the cultural heritage of the overthrown privileged groups.

In the same way, the former imperial, now state theaters have not only been preserved by the Commissariat, but have also gained broad artistic autonomy and, despite the incredibly difficult conditions of the transitional period, are functioning satisfactorily, more and more both in terms of repertoire and through the mediation of special performances organized for the working public, approaching the only worthy spectator - the working people. The state theaters of St. Petersburg, having pursued a sabotage policy for quite a long time, ended up recently presenting the People's Commissar with a very touching address of thanks.

In addition, the Commissariat supports Soviet theaters and the network of communal theaters in St. Petersburg.

The Theater Department actively develops the issues of stage teaching methods in the general school, special theater education, children's theater, theater history and theory, publishing magazines and works devoted to these issues. eight

In the same way, the state orchestra, the choir and the synodal choirs, which have passed to us from the Ministry of the Court and from the Synod, have been transformed on democratic grounds. At the present time, the State Orchestra will give one concert every week, so to speak, of a musical-academic character, two folk concerts in the magnificent halls of the Winter Palace, which has been turned into the People's Palace of Arts, and one concert in turn in the districts.

Both the best, perhaps in the world, choir, the chapel and the synodal, have been turned into publicly accessible People's Academies of Music and Singing. A purely folk character was also given to various musical schools inherited from the military and naval departments. The conservatories were taken over by the Commissariat of Public Education, and soon a conference of musicians was convened to discuss a radical reform of these higher musical educational institutions. The Department of Music also organizes singing courses for teachers in all major centers, and a plan for music education in the Unified Labor School has been developed. The musical trade was nationalized. and put a limit to speculation in the music market.

The Department of Fine Arts , having abolished the completely decrepit Academy of Arts, radically democratized the higher educational institution that belonged to it. It has been made public. The professors were re-elected by the students themselves, and thus the State Free Art Workshops were founded. Art schools have also been refreshed: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Stieglitz, the Stroganov School, etc.

The Department of Fine Arts has an Artistic and Industrial Department , which deals with the issue of raising the artistic side of production and for this purpose is currently managing a porcelain factory, a lapidary factory and organizing extensive workshops in Tsarskoye Selo. We note here that the porcelain factory, on the order of the Commissariat of Food, produces hundreds of thousands of dishes for the peasants, decorated with the new coat of arms of the Soviet Republic and revolutionary sayings.

The Department of Fine Arts also fell under the responsibility of removing the most ugly monuments in moral and aesthetic terms and opening new monuments to the great figures of the revolution, thinkers and poets.

In most cases, these monuments are still of a temporary nature and serve as a kind of monumental basis for the propaganda of revolutionary ideas among the masses. The best of them will be immortalized. To this day, monuments to Radishchev have been opened in Petrograd. Dobrolyubov and Ferdinand Lassalle, a permanent monument to Dostoevsky, very original to Stepan Razin and others, is ready in Moscow.

In addition, stone and metal boards are made with sayings that contribute to the same monumental propaganda of revolutionary and communist truths.

In the field of literature, the Commissariat abolished completely posthumous literary property and monopolized for five years the right to publish the liberated. thus, literary works, in order, having withdrawn from the hands of private entrepreneurs. give them to the people in the best possible form and at the most affordable price.

Waiting for the first; critically checked, sustained in the new spirit of the editions of our classics, of which Nekrasov will soon be published in this respect, the State Publishing House under the Commissariat threw on the market a huge number of works of the classics, using the available matrices for this, which made it possible to sell at an unheard-of price in the post-war period chain complete collections of works: Shchedrin, Uspensky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov. Zhukovsky, Krylov, Koltsov, Nikitin, etc. I list here only those authors whose works have either been published in full or appeared in the first volumes.

In the near future, the Department of Foreign Literature begins to function under the leadership of Maxim Gorky. Further expansion of the publishing house is also foreseen with the direct participation of this writer.

The scientific department is set to mobilize all the scientific forces of Russia for work on solving the problems that life puts before the Soviet government. The Academy of Sciences, the Association for Exact Knowledge and a number of scientific societies of all kinds work in contact with the scientific department.

Both through this department and through the department of higher education, a number of new scientists and educational institutions have been opened. These are: the Physics Institute in Moscow, the X-ray Institute in Petrograd, the Institute of Photography and Phototechnics in the same place, the universities in Voronezh, Tambov and Nizhny Novgorod, the Polytechnic in Voznesensk. 9 For the latter, the local population collected 7 million rubles. Kostroma also collected 2 million rubles to open a university there.

The Mining Institute in Moscow, which is extremely important for Russia, will soon begin to function, and should specifically contribute to the development of local coal.

The newly organized scientific and technical department under the Higher Council of the National Economy is working in close contact with the scientific department of the Commissariat of National Education.

The Film Committee of the Commissariat of Public Education is also in some contact with the latter , both in Petrograd and in Moscow, widely expanding its activities in all areas of filmmaking, from the production and purchase of materials to filming and organizing cinemas.

Finally, the highest institution of socialist science in Russia, the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences, is also under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Public Education and, as an educational institution, will be a great hotbed of communist consciousness in our country. 10

From this summary sketch, the reader can see how large and abundant the area now led by the Commissariat of Public Education, what work is in full swing within its framework, and what modest in relation to the ideal, but more than noticeable successes have already been achieved under the most unfavorable circumstances.

In addition to this article and a brief report submitted some time ago to the Council of People's Commissars, the Commissariat of Public Education to prepare an extensive report, at least on some aspects of its activities, supplied with digital data and accompanied by the estimate that it submits to the central government for approval at the end of 1918 of the year.

The difficulties surrounding the work of the Commissariat are colossal. But, proud of his role as one of the comrades in the friendly family of Soviet commissariats, he is equally far from timidity, leading to opportunism, and from impetuosity, which turns into despair when the lofty goal set is not immediately achieved in full. eleven

A. Lunacharsky.

Approximately this number of schools have been opened this year. ( Note 1919 ).
Teaches. The union was completely painlessly dissolved, and the teachers organized into a broader, already numbering up to 80,000 members, union of workers in the school and socialist culture. ( Note 1919 ).
In fact, the budget of the Unified School for the first half of 1919 has already significantly exceeded this amount and is going over 10 billion.
Since then, it was decided in principle to turn all seminaries into institutes. ( Note 1919 ).
This work expanded considerably in 1918-19. The exact figures will be published in a special report of the Nar Commissariat. Prosv.
According to the decision of the Council of People's Commissars, all children's institutions of the People's Commissariat of Security are transferred to the People's Commissariat of Education.
Unfortunately, this reform was not carried out completely, and the universities underwent renovation only in parts (for example, the destruction of the elders, the abolition of the Faculty of Law and its replacement by a broad Faculty of Social Sciences, etc.). In general, universities are difficult to reform. An important decision is to open special working faculties for each. I would also like to note the opening of several new universities and higher institutions. ( Note 1919 ).
At present, theater policy is unified by a special decree and is directed by the Central State Committee for Theater Affairs or the Central Theatre. ( Note 1919 ).
Universities were also opened in Kostroma and Smolensk, the Academy of the History of Materialistic Culture was organized, etc. ( Note 1919 ).
Occupied with the struggle and state building, the commissariats could not devote enough time to the Academy. It needs quieter times to thrive.
This article was written a year ago. All the theoretical part of it remains true. In practice, what successes have been achieved is partly noted in the notes, and partly will be listed in detail in a special report prepared for the October holiday of 1919.