 | Yasnaya Polyana School — Chapter 4 : The ClassesBy Leo Tolstoy (1862) |
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| Yasnaya Polyana School — Chapter 4 : The ClassesBy 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.)
• "...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 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....)
• "You are surprised that soldiers are taught that it is right to kill people in certain cases and in war, while in the books admitted to be holy by those who so teach, there is nothing like such a permission..." (From: "Letter to a Non-Commissioned Officer," by Leo Tol....)
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Chapter 4
The two smaller classes are put by themselves in one room; the older scholars are in another. When the teacher goes to the first class, all gather around him at the blackboard, or on the benches, or they climb on the table, or sit down around him or one of those that are reading.
If it happen to be for writing, they take more comfortable positions, but they keep getting up, so as to look at each other's copy-books and show their own to the teacher. It is calculated that the time till dinner will be occupied by four lessons; but often only three or two are introduced, and sometimes the roster is entirely changed. If the teacher begins with arithmetic, he may go over to geometry; or if he begins with sacred history, he may end with grammar.
Sometimes the teacher and the pupils get carried away, and instead of one hour the class lasts three hours. There have been cases where the pupils themselves cried, "More! more!" and they exclaim against those things which bore them: "That is stupid! Go to the little ones,"they cry contemptuously.
In the class for religious instruction, which is the only one that is held with any approach to regularity, because the teacher lives two versts away, and comes only twice a week, and in the drawing class, all the pupils are gathered together. Before these classes begin, liveliness, racket, and external disorder are the rule of the day; one drags benches from one room into the other, another scuffles, another goes home to the mansion
after bread, another heats that bread in the oven, another borrows something, another goes through gymnastic exercises; but just the same as in the tumult of the morning, it is far more easy to bring order out of chaos by leaving them to their natural impulses than by setting them down by main force.
In the present spirit of the school, to restrain them physically is impossible. The louder the teacher shouts,
this has been tried, the louder shout the scholars; his voice only excites them. If you succeed in calming them, or start them in another direction, this sea of youths will begin to rage less and less violently, then come to rest. But for the most part, it is not necessary to say anything.
The class in design, which is the most popular with all the school, takes place at noon, after lunch; and when they have been sitting three hours, and here again it is necessary to lug benches and tables from one room into another, and the racket is terrible! But still, as soon as the teacher is ready, the scholars are ready also, and any one who delays the beginning of the class is disciplined by the scholars themselves.
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....)
• "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....)
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 4
