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Public education in Soviet Russia
I.
In striving to systematize every state task, the Soviet government radically changed both the volume and the nature of that organ of government, which under the old regime was called the Ministry of Public Education.

This ministry was 1) predominantly school. A number of highly important cultural and educational institutions, even purely state ones, were outside its limits. So, the state theaters were in the Ministry of the Court, there is also a higher educational institution at the Academy of Arts. The Musical Department was in charge of the Imperial Musical Society, which strangely belonged to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Thus, the artistic education of young people and, in general, the regulation of relations between the state and the world of art were not among the tasks of the Ministry of Public Education.

In Soviet Russia, these tasks fall within the framework of the Commissariat of Public Education, and the corresponding departments constitute its special artistic section.

2) Partly the increased tasks of the state, partly the difficult situation in which both private and public and, finally, state publishing in Russia found themselves, prompted the Soviet government to create a large body that regulates the entire flow of books, choosing among the mass of works scheduled for publication , with an insufficient amount of paper, what is more necessary and more urgent, supervising the very process of making a book and, finally, regulating its distribution on socialist principles.

According to the plan adopted by all interested state institutions and submitted for approval by the V.Ts.I.K., this book-regulating center will also be a department of the Commissariat of Public Education.

But apart from the fact that such an extension of the concept of public education to art and literary publishing greatly expands and at the same time streamlines the educational task of the state, there is another serious difference between the Commissariat of Public Education and the former Ministry.

3) In its very spirit, the tsarist Ministry of Public Education had to take care not so much of the development of education in Russia, but of all kinds of constraint on it, so that this, unfortunately for the then government, the necessary river would not overflow its banks. And since the military and economic development of Russia nevertheless sternly set serious demands for the training of educated people, a number of departments, under the guise of special schools, set up their own small ministries of public education, where they sometimes livedbetter than under the heavy hand of the tsarist ministers of pedagogy. Not only the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and Agriculture hosted numerous educational institutions, essentially of a higher type than normal ministerial ones, but the same can be said about the military department and, oddly enough, even about synodal schools: with with all the contempt that the network of so-called parochial schools or the average type of theological school, diocesan women's school and other instruments of crippling youth deserved, it must be noted that even under the shadow of the synod, some pedagogically interesting units were formed.The need for such specializations completely disappears in Soviet Russia. According to the decree of the Council of People's Commissars, all the small ministries of public education in other commissariats must be liquidated, and the matter of public education in the most general and broadest sense is gradually being completely transferred to the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Education.

4) In compromising Russia, between February and October, there was a tendency to transfer all schools that did not have exclusive state significance to self-government bodies.

After all, even in tsarist Russia, the municipalities, especially the zemstvos, under the often intolerable supervision of the ministry, bore most of the burden of lower public education and passed on to independent secondary education. This trend was curtailed by the October Revolution. Schools, of course, are under the direct control of local councils, i.e., district, provincial and city departments of public education, but they develop within the framework of those general laws that are established by the Commissariat of Public Education. Schools in Russia are not municipal, but national, since the councils in Russia are not self-government bodies, in contrast to the state central authority, but a part of this state authority, which is allis the self-government of the working people.

5) The abolition of any payment for the right to study has made a private school in Russia impossible. The Commissariat of Public Education is not at all interested in curtailing private initiative and reducing all schools to one type, but the diversity of school life must henceforth be achieved within the state school, since in the absence of payment for the right to teach, only the state is able to maintain schools.

Nowhere in the world, therefore, does the Commissariat of Public Education have such a vast scope of tasks and such broad competence in matters of cultural construction.

In conclusion of this chapter, which seeks to give a general idea of ​​the construction of the very apparatus that manages the state affairs of education, I will list the main departments that together make up the Commissariat,

The Commissariat is headed by the People's Commissar and his deputy. Both of them are members of the Collegium, which consists of eleven persons and decides at its meetings all the current issues of any importance. Questions of greater significance, in accordance with a decision recently adopted by the Collegium, are discussed in an expanded composition of the Collegium, to which representatives of the Petrograd District Collegium are invited with a decisive vote. This decision follows from the recognition of the special cultural importance of such a center as Petrograd.

Finally, strictly fundamental questions, which are then subject to approval by the highest legislative institution, are preliminary considered by the so-called State Commission for Public Education, which includes representatives from various state institutions directly or indirectly interested in the educational business.

The entire vast area of ​​the Commissariat is divided into several sections: Pedagogical, Scientific and Artistic section. Some departments stand outside of any of these sections.

The Pedagogical section primarily includes a huge department, which disposes of more than half of the entire budget - the department of the Unified School. Theoretical questions connected with this or that reform of the school business, which was undertaken by the Commissariat, are developed in the Department of School Reform. In addition, the section includes the departments: Technical Schools, Pre-School, Out-of-School and Teacher Training Departments.

The Scientific section includes the departments: Scientific, in charge of the affairs of learned societies, the Department of Higher Educational Institutions and the Library.

In the Artistic section - the departments: Fine Arts, Monument Protection, Musical, Theatrical, State Publishing Houses and the Cinematographic Department.

The following departments are not included in the sections: Financial, Construction, Economic, Supply of Schools and Management of the Affairs of the Commissariat.

The activities of the Commissariat are enlivened by constant congresses. I will highlight the most important ones. the All-Russian Congress of Representatives of the Departments of Public Education, that is, the Provincial and District Administrations of Public Education; the main business of this congress was the final establishment of the principles of the Unified Labor School. All-Russian Conference on Teacher Training. Two congresses of teachers of internationalists. Conference of representatives of the Provincial Departments.

All-Russian conference of representatives of out-of-school subdivisions. All-Russian Conference of museum workers (in Petrograd). Two All-Russian Conferences on the Reform of Higher Educational Institutions. The All-Russian Congress on Preschool Education is currently meeting in Moscow. On May 5, the All-Russian Congress on Out-of-School Education, the 15th All-Russian Congress on the Peasant and Workers' Theater will open. I am not referring here to the literally hundreds of provincial and district congresses convened in Moscow, Petrograd and other major centers of Soviet Russia.

The Commissariat of Public Education has a very large number of various auxiliary and expert Commissions and Committees. The most important of these institutions is the State Academic Council, which is entrusted by the C.I.K. to carry out the reforms of the Higher School in Russia. This State Academic Council consists of 5 persons appointed by V.Ts.I.K. and 5 by appointment of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. Its chairman is the Commissar of National Education.

In view of the extremely difficult food situation in the country, the question of saving children became acute before the Soviet government. For this purpose, the Council of People's Commissars has created a special Council for the Protection of Children, which includes responsible representatives of the following Commissariats: the Commissariat of Social Welfare, Labour, Health and Food. The Chairman of the Council for the Protection of Children is the People's Commissar for Education*). The Council for the Protection of Children has also been entrusted with the most important task of evacuating children to distant colonies, that is, to Ukraine, along the Volga, etc.

Such, in general terms, is the structure of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment.

Now let's get acquainted with the main features carried out by nm in various areas of reforms or, more precisely, revolutionary changes.

(To be continued).

Petrograd

End of April 1919

*) At present, Soviet Russia has promulgated and is implementing a decree on free meals for all children of the Republic under the age of 14 years.

Editorial.

Public education in Soviet Russia
At the end of my last article in No. 4 of the journal "III International" I promised to devote the next regular article to questions of out-of-school affairs, but since the Out-of-school Department is just bringing all aspects of my work to the attention of the upcoming October celebrations, I prefer to postpone the report up to the 7th number in order to use perfectly accurate numerical data.

Now I am thinking of acquainting the comrades in the Third International with another, very serious phenomenon in the field of Soviet public education.

In one of my articles, I pointed out that, despite the very friendly attitude of the People's Commissariat for Education towards teachers from the very first days, we met a very resolute and full of hatred rebuff from the latter. True, from the first days it was clear that the center of such a rebuff was the All-Russian Teachers' Union, at the head of which were entirely teachers of the secondary school, mainly of the Socialist-Revolutionary and Left Socialist-Revolutionary persuasion.

As for the mass of teachers, which made up the entire union, numbering up to 50 thousand members, and even more so the mass that stood completely outside this union (up to 300 thousand teachers), then, approaching the level of the national teacher, these elements hesitated, were unable to understand the issue, and the higher they stood in the educational hierarchy, the more definitely they were spiteful and resisted.

For a long time we tolerated the existence of the All-Russian Teachers' Union, so as not to show violence in such a matter as school, which, perhaps, was unnecessary.

But the further development of the mood of teachers led us to a different conclusion. The All-Russian Teachers' Union, clearly assuming the character of a political center, plugged up like a cork the nascent good relations of teachers to the revolutionary school and at the same time began to quickly lose sympathy even among the lower ranks, from where more and more and more ardent and increasingly numerous testimonies of sympathy.

That is why in 1918, at the end of the year, we finally decided to dissolve the All-Russian Teachers' Union and replace it with a trade union of a different type.

What? “There are disagreements here. The teachers themselves, especially the top teachers, had the intention of founding a broad trade union, which would be the second edition of the All-Russian Teachers' Union, on the other hand, some communist teachers, as well as some representatives of the People's Commissariat, wanted to arrange an extremely narrow, closed union, with a brightly communist coloring. .

From this point of view, even the already existing political Union of Teachers of the Internationalists seemed too broad.

After a thorough discussion of these questions at a conference of representatives of provincial departments and in the communist faction of the Congress of Teachers of Internationalists, the middle line prevailed. Initially, it was planned to create a very broad teachers' union, however, so that the organizing core of the local branches of this union would always be communists or people who definitely proved their sympathy for the party. Then, a certain selection had to be made, i.e. teachers could become members of the union only upon recommendation. At the same time, it was supposed not to make the threshold of the front door too high and to create an organization of many thousands.

The trade union must, of course, belong to the common family of workers' trade unions. In contact with the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions, our original plan was changed. The All-Russian Council took the view that teachers should be organized on the basis of the same rules (with the exception of some detailed and formal changes) on which all workers' trade unions are based.

As is known, trade unions in Soviet Russia are considered non-Party organizations. At the same time, however, there is a paragraph in the statutes emphasizing that only workers who recognize the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary means of implementing the socialist system can be members of trade unions.

Comrade workers pointed out to us that recognition of this paragraph by the teacher is quite enough to consider him a worthy collaborator in revolutionary work on the school.

The professional workers were even against the name we put forward: the Trade Union of Educational and Socialist Culture Workers.

The word "socialist", as a political word, they wanted to throw out. In the end, however, they agreed that it was useful to keep the word in this combination.

The first congress of the new trade union, which took place in July of this year. G., chose a central committee consisting entirely of communists, and showed in general a rather high level of organization of the revolutionary teachers.

Indeed, at this congress the Communists constituted the majority, and the minority went so in step with the Communists that no differences of opinion were ever noticed between these two elements.

The union immediately turned out to be extremely strong: 70,000 members joined it. There are probably more than 80,000 at present, as the union is growing and expanding fairly quickly.

The People's Commissariat for Education recognizes great potential for the Union and believes that it is precisely with teachers organized in this way that the most friendly work will be established. Meanwhile, without an agreement between the leaders of the school business and the workers of the school, a radical reform in fact becomes little possible. In all likelihood, in the very near future, the People's Commissariat for Education will recognize the right of trade unions to have legalized representatives with a decisive vote, both in central and local collegiums.

I will also note that in the Union, folk teachers and teachers of the first stage school predominate to a colossal extent. They predominate not only insofar as there are more of them in general, but also in percentage terms, in comparison with the actual proportion between these teachers and the teachers of the former secondary school.

The number of professors in the Trade Union is even smaller.

The Union, however, includes not only school workers, but also workers in pre-school and out-of-school affairs, and likewise all kinds of school ministers. The trend of the People's Commissariat of Education is such that school servants, the so-called lower staff - porters, janitors, cooks, etc., would also receive a certain pedagogical training, because persons who are close to educational work and to children must certainly have certain knowledge for in order not to commit gross faux pas and not to disturb the general course of pedagogical work.

Sympathy among teachers towards the reform of the school has clearly risen. This is marked by the facts I have reported here. This is also underscored by the sheer volume of letters and inquiries we have been receiving lately.

A whole series of outstanding educators, who in the past stood in skeptical contemplation at a distance from live work, are now showing great activity and keeping pace with us.

True, at the same time, impatience is expressed in some Soviet circles about the slowness of the degeneration of the second stage school. This impatience is expressed in other cases by a desire to put additional pressure on teachers, by a desire in general to sharpen the influence of the Government and the proletariat on school personnel (mainly in Petrograd), or vice versa, by a sharp lowering of our requirements for this personnel and by a desire to come to terms with backward teachers (these tendencies noticeable in Moscow).

But it goes without saying that the People's Commissariat of Education will not allow any hesitation in one direction or the other, being sure that the path on which it has embarked cannot, of course, lead immediately to completely satisfactory results, because the task is too grandiose, but that this path is unquestionably correct. So, following it, we are already stating such a huge success as the fact of the rapid organization of the union, one and a half times larger than the old All-Russian Teachers' Union and standing immeasurably higher than it in its active mood.

A. Lunacharsky.

Kremlin, 3/X-19.