How Soviet teacher Makarenko changed society

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

As a rule, all Makarenko's innovations are attributed exclusively to pedagogy, obviously for the reason that Anton Semenovich was a teacher by education, considered himself a teacher, was considered by him to be around him, and finally, obeyed the People's Commissariat of Education. (And he even called his book "Pedagogical Poem"). But upon closer examination, we can see that Makarenko's work goes far beyond the standard framework of the pedagogical process. Take, for example, the fact that the teacher worked with a slightly different "contingent" than teachers usually get. The point is not even that instead of "home" children he had to deal with juvenile delinquents. The fact is that these very "juvenile delinquents" were actually not so juvenile. As Makarenko himself writes about the beginning of his work:

“On December 4, the first six inmates arrived at the colony and showed me some kind of fabulous package with five huge wax seals. The package contained "cases". Four were eighteen years old, were sent for armed robbery, and two were younger and accused of theft. Our pupils were beautifully dressed: riding breeches, smart boots. Their hairstyles were of the latest fashion. They weren't street children at all."

That is, four eighteen-year-old young men (the rest were a little younger) are, even by the standards of our time, no longer children. And then, in the conditions of the Civil War, people grew up even earlier.

Arkady Gaidar, at a much younger age, became the commander of a military detachment in the Red Army. What can we say about semi-partisan or semi-bandit detachments that were operating at that time in Ukraine, where such "kids" were full participants in hostilities: Makarenko himself mentions that "Makhnovists" of the appropriate age were sent to his colony. That is, at least some of the Makarenko colonists took part in the hostilities. But those who escaped such a fate could hardly belong to the "child category" either. Thieves' life also does not leave much room for "childhood", especially since the "history" of the pupils mentions not only thefts, but also robberies.

In general, the "contingent" that went to the teacher was, in many respects, a collection of already formed personalities, moreover, having a clearly antisocial worldview. It is unlikely that this category of citizens could have been intimidated with a “two”, a reprimand, a call to their parents (who, moreover, the majority did not have), deprivation of a scholarship, and the like. Moreover, for a huge number of arrivals, the prison no longer seemed particularly scary, since they had visited it more than once. For any other society, it would be an obvious waste, with which the conversation was short - to hide away so as not to interfere with "decent people". But for the young Soviet republic, every person was important, and she created various institutions to return former criminals to normal life. Anton Semenovich Makarenko became the head of one of these institutions. He was faced with an almost impossible task: to re-educate the street children coming to him into Soviet citizens.

It is clear that this task had an extremely remote relation to all pedagogy that existed before. If we add here the almost complete lack of resources, when there was not enough of everything: from banal food to educators, then it becomes clear how this situation differs from the usual idea of pedagogical activity. In fact, a unique experiment was set up, in which almost everything testified to its impossibility - with the exception of Makarenko's own belief in what he was doing. Therefore, considering this experience, we must go beyond the usual idea of the pedagogical process, and look at it in a broader sense. Moreover, one should not forget that it was precisely the "pedagogical community" - especially the representatives of pedagogical science that did not accept Makarenko's method. However, the teacher himself also considers the notorious "professors" in the most derogatory quality - a consequence of the persecution that the "pedagogical community" has been conducting all the time of his work. This in itself shows that Anton Semyonovich worked "beyond" the "secondary pedagogical" ideas of that time.

But what was the Makarenko method? It is not surprising, but despite the fact that a huge number of students of pedagogical universities without fail study Makarenko's books on the history of pedagogy, its essence still remains undisclosed. Because what is described in these is so far beyond the usual notions that it turns out to be impossible to assimilate and apply in “normal life”. But that is precisely why it makes sense to consider the Makarenko experiment in a completely different aspect than pedagogy. Because the essence of his method is actually simple: it consists in the fact that Makarenko was building communism.

In fact, if Anton Semyonovich himself had been told about this, he would hardly have taken it seriously. The teacher was, first of all, a practitioner. He perceived communism as an idea unattainable at the current time - a time of hunger, cold and homelessness. We cannot say how much the teacher believed in the coming of communism in the future - he was never a member of the CPSU (b), but he had a clear idea of Marxism and Marxist methods. Not being a party member, he nevertheless demonstrated all the qualities and ideas that a real communist should have, and in his pedagogical work he moved exactly where he should have moved to build a new society. In absolute poverty, bordering on poverty, when every pood of flour had to be extracted "with a fight," and the colony employees had to be found "by the piece," he managed to find the basis of the mechanism that could become the embryo of that "practical Utopia" into which his colony turned into the future.

The basis for the transition to communism in Makarenko - just like in the founders of Marxism - was the collective. Despite the fact that this conclusion looks commonplace, in fact, this is a very serious innovation (especially in education). Indeed, despite all his huge (educational) history, despite the works of Jan Amos Comenius, Pestalozzi, and other great teachers, pedagogy still retains its ancient, original basis: the basis of pedagogy is the "teacher-student" relationship. Yes, our schools no longer represent a semblance of the "Platonic Academy", the industrialization of education has long changed everything - except for the essence: it is the work of the teacher that is obliged to shape the personality and mind of the student. This worked wonderfully in the days of Plato and Aristotle, but when the number of students increased a huge number of times, then this system is expected to fail. With the number of 20-30 - and in a modern school with a "cabinet-lesson" system and much more - students per teacher - this system cannot provide the required level of relationships.

The only thing that remains possible is a “formal” discipline, supported by an external repressive system: before the revolution, for example, it reached the point of using direct violence against a student; in Soviet times, direct violence was eliminated, but indirect violence remained - in the form of a hypothetical father's belt.. Such "disciplinary pedagogy", despite the fact that it gives at least some result, is generally ineffective. Learning from under the bat is not the best thing to do, since the interaction between teacher and student has maximum information resistance. Low efficiency is usually overcome by the huge amount of time spent on training, so at least something remains. But disadvantages, of course, the sea - and above all, the impossibility of full-fledged education - that is, the formation of the required personal qualities. It is possible to "hammer" into a student's head the rules of grammar or the basis of trigonometry in this way, but it is unlikely that it will be possible to change the behavior of a thief to the behavior of a Soviet citizen in this way. Even such a powerful repressive system, which is a prison, is usually incapable of such a thing, and what can we say about the "secondary" level of violence.

Therefore, it is obvious that in the case of a colony for street children, this method was absolutely inapplicable. It was all the more inapplicable in this particular case, when there were no funds for the corresponding repressive apparatus. But fortunately, Makarenko approached the matter differently. His innovation was the use of the "internal mechanics" of the collective of pupils. Such a deviation from pedagogical dogmas allowed him to manage with minimal efforts - and at the same time not only ensure the assimilation of new knowledge by the pupils, but be able to completely reformat their personality, completely eliminate their criminal inclinations. At the level of modern ideas, this is generally unlikely. Even if we discard the semi-fascist ideas about "genetic predisposition" and other such popular nonsense, it is still considered that a person's personality is extremely stable, and even the struggle with insignificant habits and character traits takes a lot of time (and when the person himself wants it). And here it is - from thieves to communards! From people for whom the very fact of physical labor was an act of humiliation - to active workers, and in agriculture! No wonder during the time of Makarenko's work, few people believed in the very reality of such a rebirth.

It's about the team. A person, as I have written many times, is extremely sensitive to alienation. That is why he tries with all his might to avoid it - even when the structure of life requires the opposite. That is why, in highly alienated industrial production, specific work collectives are formed that reduce the anti-human effect of this alienation. But this is not unique to industrial workers. The semi-criminal and criminal "personalities" who make up the main contingent of the Gorky colony, in this sense, were no different from the representatives of the proletariat. Only instead of a dehumanizing production process, the notorious "thieves' environment" acted as a source of pressure. The fact is that at this time (1920) the "thieves' world" was a special, ultralibertarian space - a world where "the war of all against all" reigned. The underworld itself usually gravitates towards social-Darwinian morality, but at that moment there was especially tough competition: because of the Civil War and devastation, millions of people were thrown into the world of crime.

In conditions of such a high level of inferno, for many, the only way to preserve personality was to isolate it from the outside world as much as possible. As the saying goes: "Do not believe, do not be afraid, do not ask!" Hence, it is clear why no punishment ever and nowhere should lead to the "correction" of a criminal: because an increase in suffering (and what else means punishment) only led to an increase in inferno, and, accordingly, to isolate him from the outside world and to preserve his state. A person who is used to seeing in those around him only enemies who are ready to destroy (and in the criminal world, destruction could be literal) in order to achieve his goals, tried to preserve all the structures of his personality to the last. And it seemed that there were no means to remove this "entrance blockage" - because no sufficiently deep "contacts" are impossible here.

From the point of view of “our world” in general, the only thing that can help is long-term contact with the psychoanalyst (or his substitute teacher). But this is in the case of considering a person as a "spherical individual in a vacuum." Placement in the collective of colonists just meant its active interaction with other members of the collective. Moreover, that interaction in the absence of internal competition, with the understanding that the destruction of each other in one form or another - which was the meaning of "thieves" life - is impossible. It was the absence of enemies in the environment (they were brought to the “external level”) that was the “key” that made it possible to do without the help of a psychoanalyst

The inclusion of a new individual in the general activity was inevitable. And then - an amazing thing: the seemingly unshakable personality structure was rebuilt in the right direction, and a huge number of "thieves" habits simply disappeared. In fact, and this is understandable, the personality, in itself, is a system, not rigidly determined (“soul”), but adaptable to the current reality. And if reality does not imply the advantage of specific behavioral models, then those that are most attractive to a person are chosen - that is, in the absence of hostility, the openness of "information exchange" was chosen. That is why the Makarenko collective turned out to be such an effective mechanism not only for adapting yesterday's "thieves" to a different life, but also for instilling in them qualities that were absolutely uncharacteristic before, such as diligence or responsibility. Moreover, not surprisingly, almost all pupils - the percentage of "marriage" was vanishingly low.

We can say that the Makarenko colony has shown us the great educational potential of an inalienable society. This natural experiment completely crossed out the then prevailing (and still relevant now, and even among a huge number of leftists.) Opinion about the initial division of people according to "quality". Any idea that “only 20% (or even 5%) of people are suitable for communism after this experiment no longer had the right to exist. Makarenko proved that everyone is suitable for communist relations, the only question is whether there are conditions in society for the disclosure of the communist potential of a person.

And here the most important question arises: how to make these conditions arise? The main problem of “Makarenko's pedagogy” is that it does not have an unambiguous answer to how to form this collective. Apparently, even Anton Semyonovich himself did not know this. But, nevertheless, he was able to understand the most important thing: the colony's collective is a self-reproducing system, which (under certain conditions) is able not only to exist for a long time, but also to "rebuild" newly entering members into carriers of their "culture". It was this property of the collective that allowed the teacher to build “one more” Makarenko colony named after Dzerzhinsky, to which we owe a FED camera. But the very process of the formation of the colony as a complex system remained a huge question for the author himself.

In the "Pedagogical Poem" Makarenko, in general, meticulously recorded the numerous subtleties of building a single mechanism, expressed in a constant desire to reduce internal contradictions, including between pupils and educators. It was necessary to walk along the "razor's edge" between the requirements of discipline, and, as a consequence, hierarchy (important for the functioning of the colony's economy), and the need for the absence of an elite, since that would inevitably lead to the emergence of internal barriers. Then, at the initial stage, when the team was small, it was necessary to “manually” resolve all kinds of fluctuations, which, under a different set of circumstances, would lead to collapse. And this despite the fact that everything that was happening was absolutely unobvious and contradicted both existing social ideas (common sense) and the pedagogical science that existed at that time. Now it's hard to say what it cost Makarenko to bring the colony to a "stable regime", it is only clear that he paid for it with his early death.

But the worst thing was that it was impossible to understand the need to preserve the colony as a single functioning system at the level of the then prevailing ideas. The ideas of nonequilibrium systems, and indeed of the systems approach in general, were absent in the 1920s and 1930s. It is now clear that, given a favorable coincidence of circumstances, the Makarenko method could be “massively multiplied” throughout the country by transferring a certain number of pupils to other collectives. Where the latter, due to their high negentropy, could reformat the existing order in their own way (as happened with Kuryazh). But at that time, such thoughts were simply impossible - because they lay beyond the bounds of the existing scientific understanding. Moreover, the colonies already created by Makarenko were quickly destroyed after his dismissal, trying to include them in the existing pedagogical system.

However, there is no point in being surprised at this - since no one knew that Makarenko's method was something newer than just a “good school”. Moreover, the Soviet Union itself was such a powerful negentropic force that it simply did not need even more advanced systems. Communist education seemed superfluous in a country that had soared from a backward small-commodity country to a superpower, and education had risen from parish schools to a network of institutions. Interest in the Makarenko system came later, when the country faced the first manifestations of the education crisis - in the 1960s. It was then that the "Communards movement" arose in the country - but that's another story.

Of course, you can talk a lot about Makarenko. The number of significant innovations in his work is extremely large - what is worth, for example, his understanding of the high importance of the role of labor in the education system. Hardly anyone else was able to use this factor so effectively in their work. And this despite the fact that Makarenko's work was used in the exact opposite of the “usual” role for pedagogy: not as some “additional” load that the pupil has, but as the main field of activity, as the main ordering factor of collective life. It was important that the teacher always tried to reduce as much as possible the alienation of labor, its formality. For example, he always tried to provide his pupils with a complete production cycle - from agricultural production in the first colony named after Gorky, to making cameras in the colony named after Dzerzhinsky. It was important that the colonists saw the result of their labor with their own eyes, so that they understood why the labor efforts were being made.

For the sake of this, he constantly emphasized the production nature of labor, its economic component - in the form of funds received by the colony. This fact caused rejection among many colleagues-teachers for an allegedly non-communist basis. In fact, given the general marketability of the Soviet economy, it is “non-commodity labor” that would mean a high degree of alienation, little meaningfulness of actions. And so, the pupils received a salary exactly to the same extent as the rest of the Soviet workers. In this sense, the idea of a colony as a society that has a communist internal structure, but at the same time has "external" and "internal" money exchange is interesting as a certain model of the coexistence of different types of relations. In general, Anton Semyonovich can be considered, not just as a teacher, albeit a great one, but also as one of the founders of "experimental communism". His work brilliantly confirms the brilliant conclusions that the founders of the communist theory made in their time, and above all, the possibility of the existence of a society based not on competition, but on the cooperation of members. In the same way, he confirmed the possibility of free, unalienated labor and its attractiveness for man. In this regard, Makarenko's work goes far beyond the scope of pedagogy as such.

However, it can be said that this pedagogy in a communist society goes beyond the framework that is customary for it in a class society. Once upon a time, the skills and abilities that he received in his family seemed sufficient to educate a new member of society. Then such a mechanism began to be lacking, and pedagogy was created, as such, designed to train new workers and citizens for existence in a complex system of industrial production. Makarenko, on the other hand, marks a new era - an era when it becomes possible and necessary to teach not just production skills, but the very way of a new life. And if he did not manage to fully implement this matter, then there is nothing to worry about. The former rarely reach the end …

Books by Anton Semenovich Makarenko: