The First Time in History
XI. Education in Soviet Russia
SOME delegates of the Usbek "nation" came to Moscow. "We want a teachers' institute," they said. It is a prosaic demand, but it covers the wildest romance of education that perhaps the world has ever seen.
You have never heard of the Usbeks? Neither have I! Neither has anyone else except a few anthropologists who study the half-wild tribes between Europe and Asia. Some eight or ten of these people, doubtless sons of privileged chieftains, once penetrated far enough into the world to learn Russian and receive a higher education. It isn't surprising that you and I missed meeting those eight
or ten.
In the days of the czar the Usbeks had not discovered the alphabet. It follows that they had no textbooks. No one, since the world began, even learned to read and write in Usbek. But then came the Russian Revolution.
Now there is an Usbek alphabet, reduced to simple Latin characters by learned philologists in Moscow in conference with those few Usbeks who knew Russian. There are textbooks in the Usbek language and schools in the Usbek villages. When the Usbeks send to Moscow for a teachers' institute, the
education authorities take it as a routine of business, instead of the gorgeous romance that it is.
For Russia is crammed with such romances. The Usbeks are only one of a dozen petty nations that received alphabet and schools since the revolution. There are the Seranie, a Finnish tribe in the far north near Archangel. There are the Kuktschi, a savage tribe in the Caucasus. And the Migrel and the Lazen and the Imeretiner,--and half a dozen more. I write these names with joy, for I want to be the first person to put them into English. Unless some anthropologist or British secret service man has beaten me, I think this is their first appearance.
In the Russia of the Revolution, there are schools carried on in sixty different languages, and textbooks printed in all of them. Some ten or twelve of these languages had first to be reduced to writing. This programme of teaching the new citizens of the soviets is based on a definite programme of equal chance for all races. "Shall we multiply universities in Moscow before we give village schools to the Bashkirs?" is the way they put it.
Nor are these alphabets only for minor tribes which cannot count in Russia's history. When I was in Baku, the world's greatest oil-district, I visited dozens of schools and kindergartens. I talked with eager young men who were back from organising village schools among the Tartars. The Russian workers, they told me, had nearly all learned reading and writing. But matters went slower with the Tartars, who make up half the oil workers of Baku. Their language had no modern alphabet, only an ancient literary Arabic with little relation to daily speech. Until after the Revolution, this vast population of Tartars was unlettered. Now they also have a new alphabet and are fast learning to read and write. This is a fact of importance in the oil history of the future, for the oil of Baku is not so far removed from Persian oil fields to the south, and the connection between the two is by means of these Mohammedan peoples.
One hundred and sixty million copies of textbooks were issued by the Government Publishing House in Moscow, in the five months from April to August, 1923, for the job of teaching Russia. This Government Publishing House is the largest publishing house in the world. It prints books of every kind, but by far its largest output is school textbooks.
They need this enormous number of books (more than one per person in Russia, more than fourteen for each of the twelve million children in the schools) --not only because old books are worn out, but because the whole system of education is new. Even textbooks on mathematics are rewritten, to conform to the new mode of teaching.
Is there a communist mathematics, I asked in amazement. They explained patiently. Their idea is modelled more on the Dewey ideas of education than on anything else we know in America. Every new book by Dewey is grabbed and translated into Russian for consultation. Then they make their own additions.
"We call it the Work School," said a teacher to me. "We base all study on the child's play and his relation to productive work. We begin with the life around him. How do the people in the village gee their living? What do they produce? What tools do they use to produce it? Do they eat it all or exchange some of it? For what do they exchange it? What are horses and their use to man? What are pigs and what makes them fat? What are families and how do they support each other, and what is a village that organises and cares for the families ?"
"This is interesting nature study and sociology?" I replied, "but how do you teach mathematics?" He looked at me in surprise.
"By real problems about real situations," he answered. "Can we use a textbook in which a lord has ten thousand roubles and puts five thousand out at interest and the children are asked what his profit is? The old mathematics is full of problems the children never see now, of situations and money values which no longer exist, of transactions which we do not wish to encourage. Also it was always purely formal, divorced from existence.
"We have simple problems in addition, to find out how many cows there are in the village, by adding the number in each family. Simple problems of division of food, to know how much the village can export. Problems of proportion,--if our village has three hundred families and the next has one thousand, how many red soldiers must each give to the army, how many delegates is each entitled to in the township soviet! The older children work out the food-tax for their families; that really begins to interest the parents in our schools.
"Physics and chemistry and all forms of science start very early and very simply. What is the earth into which seed is put? What different kinds of earth are there? What effect does water have and where does the rain come from? By the third year we try to make trips to factories and understand the beginning of collective industry.
"For our second main endeavour is to teach the child collective action. We are frankly trying to fit him to build a socialist state. The schools are our next battle-front for communism. We have our self-governed school community, in which teachers, children and janitors all have equal voice. It decides everything, what shall be done with the school funds, what shall be planted in the school garden, what shall be taught. If the children decide against some necessary subject, it is the teacher's job to show them through their play and life together that the subject is needed."
That's the programme,--a dream of advanced education such as the world has not yet seen. And the reality,--shows half-savage tribes which have never had an alphabet, and thousand-mile stretches of backward peasants who never learned reading and writing. It is a typically Russian combination: a gorgeous plan and an utterly backward people, and a handful of young enthusiasts who intend that the thing shall be done.
How are they managing it?
Last year in Russia proper, not counting the Ukraine, 120,000 teachers out of a total of 150,000 took special courses to prepare themselves for this new form of school. They have to take these courses or lose their jobs to the new teachers who are being turned out of sixty new pedagogical institutes all over the land. For the older teachers, to save them, are three to six weeks' institutes with discussions, written tests and essays, held in three or four places in every province. Professors come from Moscow and Petrograd to hold them; all teachers must attend at least once a year.
They are a motley crew, these teachers. I talked with a group of them who were visiting Moscow on a five days' educational tour. This also was provided free of charge for half the teachers in the Moscow district; the other half would come the following year. Old gaunt men in threadbare clothes, old women wistfully eager to keep up, thin tall youths who had long outgrown their scanty clothing, energetic intelligent young women,--just the job lot of teachers as the Revolution found them, trying to make themselves over to fit the new world. They were going through big city institutes of learning, biological museums, physics laboratories. I asked them what chances they had to learn.
"This visit to the city," one girl told me, "and the Teachers' Institute for six weeks, and the Hecker American Correspondence Courses."
That is another romance,--those correspondence courses. A Methodist preacher from the East Side of New York was fired by the idea of educating Russia through correspondence courses on the American plan. He hoped first to enter with the Y. M. C. A. and spent two years with them organising courses. But America failed to recognise Russia and the Y. M. C. A. could not enter, so Dr. Julius Hecker, in the year of the famine, came over to Moscow with $5,000 and got a contract to run correspondence schools. He counts his pupils now by the tens of thousands.
His is not a profit-making concession, though he received free from the government a large building and much assistance. Most of his work is done on contract for government or labour organisations. The Department of Education desires courses for teachers, or the Trade Unions wish courses for foremen. He works them out, sells them at a price fixed by the organisation in question, at or below cost to insure widest use; and receives subsidies from the organisations to cover his losses.
Help of all kinds to educational projects is offered by the government, which knows it has not means enough to do the great job quickly. A committee on which I worked received the offer of a large estate on the Volga, if we could raise $5,000 for agricultural machinery and equipment, and build thereon a self-supporting children's colony, learning modern agriculture, The local authorities even offered to support the children free till the first harvest produced by their labour put the institution on its feet. But poor though they may be in money and anxious for assistance, one thing the educational authorities insist on,--that neither religion nor capitalist ethics shall be taught in the schools.
"The teacher must know how to teach nature study without God, and tell fairy-tales without the benevolent rich lord," said a man in the Central Department of education to me. I laughed, for I had seen the scheme at work.
Down in the Ukraine a teacher was telling a fairystory of Grimms,--yes, they still have fairy-tales, but strangely modified. It was the industrious goose-girl who marries a prince. Obviously in modern Russia a marriage with a prince does not include "they lived happily ever after." The teacher related the marriage as a fall from grace; the goose-girl was tempted and abandoned honest work, and was supported in a palace on money stolen from the common people, her early friends!
But the children refused such a shameful ending! They liked the goose-girl, so they had her refuse the prince and marry a coal miner who rose through ability and industry to be "red director" for the state mines of the district! The ending invented by the children is now adopted for the fairy-tale of Grimm.
Like everything in Russia, education went through its period of utter breakdown and confusion. In the days of the czar the village schools were church controlled. In the cities were expensive gymnasiums and real schools for the sons of the upper classes. In the last few years before the war the larger cities introduced some free city schools for sons of smaller officials who could not afford the gymnasium. But children of manual workers had little chance to learn.
During the Great War many larger city schools were taken over as hospitals and for other war uses. This use continued also during the civil war and the great epidemics. The new school authorities tried at once to get the buildings, but against the demands of war and disease there was little chance.
"We had some horrible experiences as a result of these war-uses," said a member of the school-management to me. "In Smolensk we took back a high school that had been a hospital for venereal diseases. We had no soap nor disinfectants; the blockade of the Entente kept these things out. We cleaned as well as we could with water. But soon they came to me: 'What shall we do; the children are coming down with syphilis' ? So we had to close the building."
These frightful times are past; for two years there have been soap and disinfectants in Russia, and a most energetic Board of Health. But the famine also brought hardship to the schools. I visited a school building in the village of Novo Semekino, near Samara, in the early autumn of the famine. Tiny, primitive, with one room holding perhaps forty children, it had been built in the days of the czar. With the revolution came zeal for education, and the year before the famine it was working three shifts. One group of children came in the morning, another in the afternoon, and a group of adults in the evening.
All over Russia I met similar expansions of school buildings,--before the famine. But now the building in Novo Semekino was shut, for the school master had fled to get food. All through the famine districts this happened. I went to seven villages organising kitchens; in three the schoolmaster had gone; in the four where the school teacher remained (they were usually self-sacrificing young women who stayed longer than the men), we saved them by making them managers of the A. R. A. food kitchens. But they no longer had time for teaching.
During that terrible winter I talked with Lunarcharsky. "Education has been strangled by the famine," he said. Half a million children in orphan homes came upon the budget of the school authorities. The State went on the new economic policy; in place of supplying everyone with food, including teachers, it was trying to make ends meet and acquire a gold basis. There was no money for education; the schools began closing.
Other difficulties also came, incident to imposing a new form of education on teachers who knew nothing about it and who were still vaguely antagonistic. "I must admit," said a Communist to me, "that the results were funny. Even our friends had to say: 'What kind of schools are these?' The teacher took the idea of work by the children, but nothing