Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

After establishing his reputation as an author, Tolstoy turned his thoughts to education. At the time free education for peasant children did not exist in Russia. Occasionally, a village would boast of a priest or an ex-soldier who taught a few children at so much per head. The subjects were elementary, the method a mixture of blows and learning by heart, and the results negligible. This situation Tolstoy wished to remedy by substituting public education based on entirely original pedagogical methods. In 1858, he opened a school in a single room of his large manor house at Yasnaya Polyana and, after a year of highly successful teaching, he proposed the establishment of a Society of National Education to set up public schools, design courses of instruction, train teachers and publish a pedagogical journal.

Tolstoy received no official encouragement for his proposed program. Aware that he was trying to handle large abstract concepts of educational theory he went abroad in 1860 to study them in Germany, France, and England. After visiting schools at Kissingen, he jotted down in his diary: “It is terrible! Prayers for the king; blows; everything by rote; terrified, beaten children.”

When Tolstoy talked with workers and children on the streets, he found them intelligent, free-thinking, and surprisingly well informed, but with no thanks to their schooling which left him with an impression of the futility of the subjects taught and the lifeless, unimaginative methods of teaching them.
“What I saw in Marseille and in all other countries amounts to this: everywhere the principal part in educating a people is played not by schools, but by life.”

Tolstoy returned to Russia in 1861 and erected a three-room schoolhouse where he worked for the next year and a half with self-sacrificing zeal on theoretical and practical problems of education. He expounded his theories and described his practice in a magazine he founded called Yasnaya Polyana.

Tolstoy believed that all education should be free and voluntary. He supported the desire of the masses for education, but he denied that the government or any other authority had the right to force it upon them. Pupils should come to learn of their own accord, for if education were good, it would be found as necessary as the air they breathed “and the need would manifest itself like hunger.” Over the door of the school he placed the inscription: “Enter and Leave Freely.” Certainly the atmosphere of his school convinced the children that education was a precious and joyous heritage.

On a cold winter morning the bell would ring. Children would run out into the village street. There was no lagging on the way, no urge to play the truant. Each child was eager to get there first. The pupils carried nothing in their hands, no homework books or exercises. They had not been obliged to remember any lesson. They brought only themselves, their receptive natures, and the certainty that it would be as jolly in school that day as it had been the day before.
Attendance was non-compulsory and free to all and the students often continued an hour or more beyond closing time, “because it is impossible to send the children away – they beg for more.”

He had no patience with the widespread pedagogical conviction that education should mould the character and improve the morals of students. These were matters for family influence, he declared, and the teacher had no right to introduce his personal moral standards or social convictions into the sanctity of the home.

There was a curriculum but no consistent order was followed, however, and lessons were lengthened or omitted according to the degree of interest. Originality was the guiding spirit. Freedom ruled, but never to the extent of anarchy. When Tolstoy purposely left the room in the middle of a lesson to test the behaviour of his students, they did not break into an uproar as he had observed was the case in similar circumstances in classrooms he visited abroad. When he left, the students were enjoying complete freedom, and hence they behaved as though he were still in the room. They corrected or praised each other’s work, and sometimes they grew entirely quiet. Such results, he explained, were natural in a school where the pupils were not obliged to attend, to remain, or to pay attention.

In this free atmosphere of student-dominated learning, certain traditional subjects were resisted in a manner that led Tolstoy to doubt their ultimate usefulness. Grammar was such a subject. To write correctly and to correct mistakes made by others gave his pupils pleasure, but this was only true when the process was unrelated to grammar.

In one article he described how he accompanied several of the pupils home one evening entertaining them with tales of Caucasian robbers and brave Cossacks. At the end, by one of those quick transitions of children, an older pupil suddenly asked why they learnt singing at school. Tolstoy was puzzled at how to explain the usefulness of art and rhetorically asked “what is drawing for?”. A second pupil asked, “Yes, why draw figures?” and a third, “What is a lime tree for?” At once they began to speculate on these questions, and the fact emerged that not everything exists for use, that there is also beauty, and that art is beauty.

In another article, Tolstoy recounted an experience which excited him greatly. When set themes had failed to inspire his students, he suggested they write a story on peasant life. The pupils found this difficult too, but one boy proposed that Tolstoy write the story himself, in competition with them. He composed several pages and then was interrupted by Fedka, who climbed on the back of his chair and read over his shoulder. Tolstoy explained the plot of the story and the boys immediately became interested. They criticized what had been done and suggested different ways of continuing. Tolstoy set to work to write at their dictation. Syomka and Fedka angrily rejected superfluous details offered by the others and eventually took command of the situation. The rest of the boys went home leaving Tolstoy and the two boys to work feverishly till eleven, bothered neither by hunger nor tiredness. Tolstoy was tremendously excited and admitted that he had felt such a strong emotion only two or three times in his life. He was amazed at the discovery of such artistic and creative powers in two peasant lads who could scarcely read or write, and it seemed almost offensive that he, a nationally known author, was virtually unable to instruct these eleven-year-old pupils in his art. For two more days they worked enthusiastically at the story before Tolstoy needed to go away for a few days. When he returned he found the story had been lost in a craze for making paper planes that had swept the school. Fedka and Symka were aware of Tolstoy’s keen disappointment and offered to reproduce the story. They came to school one evening at nine o’clock and locked themselves in his study. At midnight Tolstoy was admitted and allowed to read the story which was remarkably similar to the original. Some new details had been added, but the tale retained the same truth and feeling for beauty as the first version and Tolstoy subsequently published it in his magazine.

After the emancipation of the serfs, the government encouraged peasants to open their own schools and by 1862 there were no less than thirteen village schools in Tolstoy’s area, and their teachers, at the peasants’ request, were all zealous disciples of Tolstoy’s pedagogical approach. These teachers caught from him a devotion and enthusiasm in what was essentially a pioneering venture. Living like peasants in the dirty, stuffy huts where they held their classes, and using tables for blackboards, they worked from seven in the morning until late at night. At first, like Tolstoy, they had to overcome the ignorant suspicions of peasant fathers and mothers who distrusted these newfangled methods of teaching and were alarmed because their children were not regularly beaten by the masters. But the fact that they were entirely free to send them to school or take them out overcame resistance. Finally, the happiness of the youngsters and their obvious progress in so short a time won the parents’ complete confidence in the system.

In a few periodicals several teachers, weary of slavish Russian devotion to foreign models in pedagogy, bravely encouraged the less extreme aspects of his school. But, in general, his efforts failed to inspire enthusiastic acceptance among educators. His principle of freedom for both teachers and pupils was too radical for even the most progressive theorists.

Worse still, in the eyes of critics, was Tolstoy’s conviction that his educational ideas amounted to a revolt against established opinion in the name of healthy common sense. Moreover, he scorned scientific exposition in his articles and used the simple and forceful prose of which he was a master. If he had elected to write treatises on experimental pedagogy in the accepted trade jargon, buttressed with elaborate footnotes and well-chosen citations from approved authorities, he would doubtless have gained a hearing, even if an unfavourable one.

Certain government officials regarded Tolstoy’s activities in education with dark suspicion. In October, 1862, the Minister of the Interior suggested that the censor’s attention should be specifically directed toward correcting the situation. Tolstoy’s educational articles did call into question the whole contemporary concept of morality. His extremely radical position represented a danger not only to the whole foundation of educational practice, but to the authority of the State.

Because of his marriage, various discouragements, and a suddenly renewed interest in fiction writing, which included writing War and Peace, Tolstoy abandoned his school and the pedagogical magazine at the end of 1862. But his concern for the education of the young remained with him for the rest of his life. In 1872 he published a complete curriculum for beginning pupils but was disappointed when it was received with a deluge of sharp, even vicious, reviews. Stubbornly he turned once again to teaching peasant children in his district, in order to demonstrate the methods he advocated in his book.

In 1874 Tolstoy submitted an article to a popular magazine in which he condemned the phonetic and visual methods of teaching then used in Russian elementary schools and sharply criticized teachers who followed German pedagogy for failing to understand or respect the educational needs of the Russian masses. The ‘only criterion for pedagogy is freedom, the only method is experience’ he wrote.

The article created a great stir among the public, infinitely more so than all of Tolstoy’s publications on educational themes had in the past.
It was undeniable that the work was attractively written, but now it had also come from the pen of the famous author of War and Peace’, and he had had the good sense to print it in a widely read periodical. Although the experts, with few exceptions, vigorously attacked him, his views elicited widespread sympathetic response among laymen. After years of striving he at last had the satisfaction of knowing that his theories had reached the general public.

Despite hostility to Tolstoy’s educational practices and writings during his lifetime, since then there has been a tendency to acclaim him a brilliant innovator and one of the most significant of educational reformers. Experimental schools in America and abroad have profited from the full accounts he left of his own experiences.

The information for this article has been taken from the chapter Writings on Education at www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy