Education and Art in Soviet Russia/Document 10
Document No. 9 shows how the teacher has been stimulated to take a real interest in the school work, in its curriculum, and in the ultimate welfare of the children, a thing which, under capitalist society, it may be frankly said he never does. But not only is the teacher made into a real teacher by the Soviet methods, but janitors, firemen, and other school employees are to have their tasks dignified and rendered less sordid by actual pleasant and official contact with the student body. The article by A. Okunkoff, which is printed as Document No. 10, is from the pen of a specialist in education, and deals specifically with the question: "How shall the janitor be made a human being, instead of a tyrant over teachers and pupils, as in America?"
From "Narodnoye Prosvieschenye" (People's Education) Issue
No. 10.
DOCUMENT No. 10
The Workers' School and the School Servants
By A. Okunkoff
The old school system, which is now departing into the sphere of oblivion, was a reflex of the dominant class relations and, therefore, the economic system of the school and, in particular, of the town school, even in its details, moved largely along the lines of the economic system of the present-day family institution. The contemporary middle bourgeois family of a city teaches a child, even from earliest infancy, to use paid services, the services of the domestic servants, the number of whom depends on the wealth of the parents. Nurses, maid servants, dishwashers, porters, and all other kinds of domestic servants train the mind of the children, from the very cradle, to the stability and the righteousness of an order of life in which the exploitation of other people's work is considered the necessary and natural addition to the comforts of existence. The children, after leaving such a home environment for the school, find here the same ranks of servants performing almost the same duties as in the family circle. The porters undressing the children and keeping their coats and dresses, men servants and nurses cleaning the rooms, scrubbers looking after the cleanliness of the floors, couriers running on errands, janitors and stokers—all these people, who are working in the school, appear to the children to be the same necessary addition to the comforts of school life as the corresponding persons outside of the school. Hence, the children very naturally acquire the idea of the "common," "base" labor which is the lot of the "lower" classes of humanity, doomed by forces unknown to the child to be the natural and eternal slaves of his will and that of other privileged people. In this manner the school system has nursed in its pupils a contempt for physical work and a scornful relation towards the mass of working people, on whom the bourgeois order has imposed all the hardship of this work. The bourgeois school makes of its pupils privileged idlers, people unable to work, and, very often, even exploiters. Heroic spiritual efforts were necessary later, a gigantic internal struggle, and a sharp revolution of viewpoints and habits of mind, in order to rid oneself from this poisonous inoculation of the school and to overcome the immunity resulting from it. And in fact, only after a kind of psychical "illness," could a man brought up in the school of the past absolve himself from inherited ideas and attain a healthy balance and a healthy, sound view of the life surrounding him.
On the other hand, the school servants themselves, put in such a situation, developed and strengthened in themselves a feeling of injury and bitterness because of their fate and, as a natural consequence thereof, an unfriendly feeling towards the pupils of the school, to these "gentlefolk's children" and favorites of destiny. It is hardly worth mentioning besides, that, alongside of all this, there was some evidence of demoralization also.
The new Labor school, which the Soviet power is trying to create, must not, of course, permit such education. Its tasks are diametrically opposed to the tasks of a bourgeois school. In respect to physical work the new school sets as its aim the cultivation of a high regard for all lines of productive work, and of a profound esteem for the millions of the working masses. The productive work of men, creating new cultural values and freeing humanity from the former fetters, irrespective of the category of work—this is the fundamental idea which should be laid as a cornerstone for the education of the new labor school. The conclusion, then, follows of itself, that in the labor school-commune the teachers and the pupils should take upon themselves all those labors which the old school imposed upon the shoulders of others and that, out of an ideal inspiration, the physical work necessary for the school life should be equally divided among the participants of the school in accordance with the physical strength of the respective age groups.
Here we approach the question whether there exists a necessity for school servants altogether and, if such a necessity exists, what place in the school system should be set aside for the school servants. The answer to this question is offered by the fundamental principle of the school system: the education of children in school must be in charge of no one else but those who are to be considered as instructors and, therefore, the instruction in the physical work necessary. for the economic welfare of the school life must be put in charge of persons who may be called pedagogues. Concrete instances will illustrate better the substance of this thesis. Let us assume that in the youngest group of children who have not yet the adequate habits of physical strength to be entrusted with performing any physical work, for instance making the fires, or preparing meals, we should have to resort to the use of other people's work, let us even say, the work of school pupils of an older age group. In such case there would be still necessary in the school an instructor-stoker or an instructor-cook, who should be fully conscious of his educational duties and who, consequently, would have to attain a certain level of pedagogical development. The heating of furnaces and the preparation of food may then, under his leadership, change not only into a very important, though purely mechanical work, into a mechanical productive work having a very great educational value, too, but it may become a source for the education and mental development of the children. Yet the leader-pedagogue will necessarily be compelled to have by his side a helper not from the ranks of the pupils. The moral and mental development of this helper must correspond to the indicated tasks of work in school. Another instance. If a nurse is necessary for the care of the children in the younger age group, the role of such nurse should be at the same time an educational one, and such nurse should be fully aware of her responsibility before society and should clearly understand the importance of her duties. The work of a nurse, a floor-scrubber, a stoker, etc., if it should prove impossible to do without their help, should be to some extent an expert work, a work which has a pedagogical foundation. Under such circumstances the word "servants" will assume in the school an entirely different meaning: the school servants will become, in fact, the lower pedagogical personnel corresponding, as regards its value in school, to the value of a surgeon's assistants and nurses at the time of operations.
If we should turn to the present realities of life, we would, indeed, find such conditions nowhere in school. The moral and intellectual level of the school servants very often does not correspond to their task and is, one may state it, directly inverse to the level of the luxuriousness of the school environment. This is not the fault, of course, of the staff of the lower servants. For obvious reasons, the responsibility for this is also in this case directly inverse to the educational level of the school directors and is the result of the former economic order of life.
To what extent the leading circles ignored up to the time of the November revolution, the problem of the school servants, is manifest if only from the circumstance that the school registers did not even take cognizance of the numerical force of the lower servants.
Even if we omit the question of guilt, the problem still remains and it is left to the Soviet school policy to perform this task. And when, with this policy in view, one reviews the ranks of the former school personnel, one can hardly find any personal points of support for a further movement. For that matter, however, a straight and honorable road is clearly indicated, along which not only will the movement not meet any obstacles, any differences, but not even a single contradiction. This road is the abolishment of the old and the preparation of a new working school army, with the improvement of its working conditions.
And indeed, if we examine into the school methods of hygiene and if we carry into execution the measures recommended by science, we cannot imagine that the work will be successful, if the executors of the first customary rules of health preservation will demonstrate a skeptical indifference toward them and if their existence will be surrounded by anti-hygienic conditions. When a helper, while opening ventilation or removing dust, or a nurse, while attending the children, will only care to execute these operations as an order, as a hard duty, and, while removing the dust, or touching the child will carry from the dark, damp, basement, which so often is used in schools for housing and crowding servant people in them, his or somebody else's germs and his anti-hygienic habits—then such help is directly dangerous for the school. The helper-servant must, to some little extent at least, be acquainted in a general way with the elementary rules of school hygiene. The same may be said of the helpers in any other household line. Thus the school is in need of qualified workers, instructors in school economy. The creation of an army of such instructors is rendered possible all the more, since the remuneration for school work is at present sufficiently high.
How, then, to create such an army? Up to the present time there were conducted everywhere pedagogical and general educational courses for instructors of all school grades. Corresponding courses of school economy must be quickly organized in various localities for the school servants and for the instructors, and these courses must not be of a narrow technical scope but with a number of subjects of a general educational character. We may rest assured that the lower servants themselves, who undoubtedly aspire to education, will heartily respond to the idea of the courses and will lend their support to these tasks. Then we could cherish a hope for the creation of a new school army, where from young to old every one would be imbued with the common idea and where the difference between the old and young, between the "gentle" and the "common" work, would disappear. The union of the teachers-internationalists and its branches must pay special attention to this question and to advancing the problem, in co-operation with the labor union of the servants (along the lines of specialization), most decidedly and quickly. The working out of the program and the introduction of the courses on school economy—this is the immediate task of groups of idealists who are interested in the problem of education.
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