 | Yasnaya Polyana School — Chapter 5 : The Free Development Of The SchoolBy Leo Tolstoy (1862) |
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| Yasnaya Polyana School — Chapter 5 : The Free Development Of The SchoolBy 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 is necessary that men should understand things as they are, should call them by their right names, and should know that an army is an instrument for killing, and that the enrollment and management of an army -- the very things which Kings, Emperors, and Presidents occupy themselves with so self-confidently -- is a preparation for murder." (From: "'Thou Shalt Not Kill'," by Leo Tolstoy, August 8,....)
• "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....)
• "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 5
Here I must defend myself. In giving this description of the Y. P. school, I have no intention of presenting a model of what is requisite and necessary for a school, but simply a description of the actual state of the school. I take it such descriptions have their utility. If I succeed in the following pages in clearly presenting a history of the development of the school, then the reader will clearly comprehend why the character of the school was formed as it was, why I consider such an order of things advantageous, and why it would have been an utter impossibility for me to have changed it, even if I had wished to do so.
The school had a free development from principles established in it by teacher and pupils. Notwithstanding all the weight of the master's authority, the pupil always had the right not to attend the school and not to obey the teacher. The teacher had the prerogative not to admit a pupil, and the power of exerting all the force of his influence on the majority of the pupils, on the society which was always forming among the scholars.
The farther the students advanced, the wider grew the scope of the instruction, and the more imperative became the demand for order. In consequence of this, in the normal and unconstrained development of a school, the more cultivated the pupils are, the more capable of order they will become, the more strongly they themselves will feel the necessity of order, and the more powerfully the teacher's influence on them in this respect will be felt. In the Y. P. school from its very foundation this rule was found true. At first it was impossible to classify either recitations or the subjects or the recreations or their tasks; everything was in confusion, and all attempts at classification were in vain. At the present time there are students in the first class who themselves insist on following a regular order of exercises, and are indignant when you call them from their lessons, and these scholars are all the time driving away the little ones who disturb them.
In my opinion this external disorder is useful and indispensable, strange as it may seem and inconvenient to the teacher. I shall frequently have occasion to speak of the advantages of this condition of things; of the imaginary inconveniences I will say this: In the first place, this disorder or free order is trying to us, simply because we are accustomed to something entirely different, in which we were educated. In the second place, in this, as in many similar circumstances, the employment of force is due to haste and lack of reverence for human nature. It seems to us that disorder is increasing, becoming more and more violent each instant, that there are no limits to it; it seems to us that there is no other way of putting an end to it than by employing main force, but really all it requires is to wait a little, and the disorder, or flow of animal spirits, would naturally diminish of itself, and would grow into a far better and more stable order than that which we imagine.
The scholars though they are little folk are nevertheless human beings, having the same requirements as we ourselves, and their thoughts run in the same groove. They all want to learn, and that is the only reason they go to school, and therefore it is perfectly easy for them to reach the conclusion that it is necessary to submit to certain conditions if they would learn anything.
Besides being human beings, they form a society of human beings united by one impulse. And where two or three are gathered together in My name there will I be also.
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.)
• "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....)
• "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....)
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 5
