 | Yasnaya Polyana School — Chapter 16 : Objections AnsweredBy Leo Tolstoy (1862) |
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| Yasnaya Polyana School — Chapter 16 : Objections AnsweredBy Leo Tolstoy (1862) |
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Father of Christian Anarchism
: In 1861, during the second of his European tours, Tolstoy met with Proudhon, with whom he exchanged ideas. Inspired by the encounter, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana to found thirteen schools that were the first attempt to implement a practical model of libertarian education. (From: Anarchy Archives.)
• "The Government and all those of the upper classes near the Government who live by other people's work, need some means of dominating the workers, and find this means in the control of the army. Defense against foreign enemies is only an excuse. The German Government frightens its subjects about the Russians and the French; the French Government, frightens its people about the Germans; the Russian Government frightens its people about the French and the Germans; and that is the way with all Governments. But neither Germans nor Russians nor Frenchmen desire to fight their neighbors or other people; but, living in peace, they dread war more than anything else in the world." (From: "Letter to a Non-Commissioned Officer," by Leo Tol....)
• "It usually happens that when an idea which has been useful and even necessary in the past becomes superfluous, that idea, after a more or less prolonged struggle, yields its place to a new idea which was till then an ideal, but which thus becomes a present idea." (From: "Patriotism and Government," by Leo Tolstoy, May 1....)
• "Only by recognizing the land as just such an article of common possession as the sun and air will you be able, without bias and justly, to establish the ownership of land among all men, according to any of the existing projects or according to some new project composed or chosen by you in common." (From: "To the Working People," by Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya P....)
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Chapter 16
I see honorable, worthy, liberal men, members of charitable societies, who are ready to give and do give a part of their substance to the poor, who have founded and are founding schools, and who on reading this will shake their heads and say:
"It is not good! Why spend so much energy in developing them? Why cultivate in them sensibilities and capacities which will place them in a false and dangerous position toward their own class? Why educate them out of their sphere?"
I am not speaking now of those who betray themselves by saying:
"It will be a fine state of affairs when all want to be thinkers and artists, and no one will be willing to labor."
These men say up and down that they don't like to work, and therefore it is necessary that there be people unfitted for any form of employment, and that they work like slaves for others. Who knows whether it is good or bad or necessary to educate them out of their sphere? And who can take them out of their sphere? That is precisely like a mechanical action. Is it good or is it bad to add sugar to flour, or put pepper into beer?
Fedka is not constrained by his torn caftan, but he is tormented by moral questions and doubts, and you want to give him three rubles, the catechism, and a little story of how labor and humility, which you yourself cannot endure, are useful for a man. He does not need the three rubles, he will get them and have them as soon as he does need them, and he will learn to work without you just as he learned to breathe. He needs what you have been brought to by your life and that of ten generations of your ancestors, uncrushed by work. You have leisure to investigate, to think, to suffer give to him the results of your sufferings that is the only thing he needs.
And you, like the Egyptian priest, hide from him under a mantle of mystery, you bury in the earth, the talent given you by history. Do not be afraid! nothing human is injurious to man. Do you doubt it? Give way to your feeling, and it will not disappoint you. Trust your lad to nature, and you may be sure that he will take only what history commanded you to give him, what has grown in you through sufferings.
From : Wikisource.org
Father of Christian Anarchism
: In 1861, during the second of his European tours, Tolstoy met with Proudhon, with whom he exchanged ideas. Inspired by the encounter, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana to found thirteen schools that were the first attempt to implement a practical model of libertarian education. (From: Anarchy Archives.)
• "Only by recognizing the land as just such an article of common possession as the sun and air will you be able, without bias and justly, to establish the ownership of land among all men, according to any of the existing projects or according to some new project composed or chosen by you in common." (From: "To the Working People," by Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya P....)
• "It usually happens that when an idea which has been useful and even necessary in the past becomes superfluous, that idea, after a more or less prolonged struggle, yields its place to a new idea which was till then an ideal, but which thus becomes a present idea." (From: "Patriotism and Government," by Leo Tolstoy, May 1....)
• "...for no social system can be durable or stable, under which the majority does not enjoy equal rights but is kept in a servile position, and is bound by exceptional laws. Only when the laboring majority have the same rights as other citizens, and are freed from shameful disabilities, is a firm order of society possible." (From: "To the Czar and His Assistants," by Leo Tolstoy, ....)
Nathan Haskell Dole (August 31, 1852 – May 9, 1935) was an American editor, translator, and author. He attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and graduated from Harvard University in 1874. He was a writer and journalist in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. He translated many works of Leo Tolstoy, and books of other Russians; novels of the Spaniard Armando Palacio Valdés (1886–90); a variety of works from the French and Italian. Nathan Haskell Dole was born August 31, 1852, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He was the second son of his father Reverend Nathan Dole (1811–1855) and mother Caroline (Fletcher) Dole. Dole grew up in the Fletcher homestead, a strict Puritan home, in Norridgewock, Maine, where his grandmother lived and where his mother moved with her two boys after his father died of tuberculosis. Sophie May wrote her Prudy Books in Norridgewock, which probably showed the sort of life Nathan and his older brother Charles Fletcher Dole (1845... (From: Wikipedia.org.)
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Chapter 16
