 | Yasnaya Polyana School — Chapter 23 : How The Pupils Learned To WriteBy Leo Tolstoy (1862) |
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| Yasnaya Polyana School — Chapter 23 : How The Pupils Learned To WriteBy 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.)
• "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....)
• "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....)
• "...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, ....)
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Chapter 23
Writing was conducted in the following method: — The pupils were taught simultaneously to recognize and form the letters, to spell and write words, to understand what was written, and to write. They would take their places round the wall, marking off divisions with chalk, and one of them would dictate whatever came into his head, and the others would copy it. If there were many of them, then they divided into several groups. Then they took turns in dictating, and all read it over to one another. They printed out the letters, and at first corrected the errors of spelling and syllabification, then those of misused letters.
This class formed itself. Every pupil who learns to write the letters is seized with a passion for writing, and at first the doors, the outside walls of the school and of the cottages where the pupils live, would be covered with letters and words. But they took .ven greater pleasure in writing a whole phrase, such, for instance, as this: "To-day Marfutka and Olgushka [22] had a fight."
In order to organize this class the teacher had only to teach the children how to act together, just as an adult teaches children to play any infantile game. And, in fact, this class went on without change for two years, and every time with as much gaiety and animation as in a good game. This included reading and conversation, and writing and grammar.
In this writing, the most difficult part of learning a language for a beginner is attained spontaneously: that is, faith in the unalterability of the form of a word whether printed or spoken their own word. I think that every teacher who tries to teach a language without depending on a grammar must meet with this first difficulty.
You wish to direct the pupil's attention to some word, menyd, "me," for example. You take his sentence: "Mikishka pushed me from the steps." That is what he said.
"Pushed whom?" you ask, wishing him to repeat the sentence, and hoping to hit on the word me.
"Nas us," he replies.
"No, but what did you say?" you ask.
"We fell off the steps, owing to Mikishka," or "Because he pushed us, Praskutka 2 flew down, and I after her," he will reply.
And here you try to get your accusative case and its ending. But the pupil cannot understand that there was any difference in the words he used.
But if you take a little book, or begin to repeat his sentence, he will distinguish with you, not the vital word, but something entirely different.
When he dictates, every word is caught on the fly by the other pupils, and written down.
"What do you say? what is that?" and they will not let him change a single letter.
In doing this disputes are all the time rising, from the fact that one writes one way and another another, and very soon the one who dictates begins to ponder how to say it, and begins to realize that there are two things in speech: form and content. He will utter some phrase, thinking only of its meaning. Swiftly, like one word, the phrase flies from his lips. The others begin to question him: "How?" "What?" and when he repeats it several times in succession he explains the form and the constituent parts of speech, and confirms them by a word.
Thus they write in the third, that is, the lowest, class one being able to use the cursive script, another printing his words.
We not only do not insist on the cursive script, but if we permitted ourselves to put any restrictions on the scholars, we should forbid them to write in the cursive script, which destroys the hand and is not legible.
Cursive letters spontaneously enter into their handwriting: a pupil learns a letter or two of one of the older boys; others imitate it, and frequently write whole words in this way: dyadenka, "little uncle," and before a week is over all are using the cursive script.
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.)
• "People who take part in Government, or work under its direction, may deceive themselves or their sympathizers by making a show of struggling; but those against whom they struggle (the Government) know quite well, by the strength of the resistance experienced, that these people are not really pulling, but are only pretending to." (From: "A Letter to Russian Liberals," by Leo Tolstoy, Au....)
• "...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, ....)
• "...the dissemination of the truth in a society based on coercion was always hindered in one and the same manner, namely, those in power, feeling that the recognition of this truth would undermine their position, consciously or sometimes unconsciously perverted it by explanations and additions quite foreign to it, and also opposed it by open violence." (From: "A Letter to a Hindu: The Subjection of India- Its....)
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 23
