— 8 —
and I will tell you what kind of social order you have“. The school never stood outside of politics: the universities, the parish church schools, the primary schools under the Tsars, were so directed as to serve the interests of the landed gentry, the bourgeoisie. So it was and is everywhere, even in the freest democratic countries, like France and America.
Beginning at five years of age, in that same democratic France, the child enters the spiritual laboratory of the bourgeoisie; he is given a bourgeois reader, is taught bourgeois baby songs; from infancy he is told that there is and can be no better order of things than that which surrounds him; the idea is instilled into him that there never were, and cannot be, any greater heroes than the great French conquerors who subjugated foreign countries, seized colonies by force, and so on.
In Russia politics were applied to schools with peculiar brutality. Only arrant reactionaries were placed at the head of the department of Public Instruction, such as Uvarov, Shirinsky-Shakhmatov, Dmitri Tolstoy and others of the same brand.
In France and Germany, in England and America, they go to work more subtly, more cleverly, artistically. The European bourgeoisie are cleverer than the landlords in deceiving their people; they proceed with greater skill. But everywhere the same picture meets the eye:
