V. Sukhomlinsky on Education

One of the gentlest books on this list, and the record of a genuinely humane life spent among children.

Vasily Sukhomlinsky (1918-1970) was the village schoolmaster of Pavlysh in central Ukraine, who spent his working life in one rural school and kept notebooks running, on his own count, to three thousand seven hundred pages, each page devoted to a single pupil. This volume gathers his writings into six sections - Education, Study, Work, Beauty, The Collective, and Morals and Convictions - with a warm prefatory essay by the journalist Simon Soloveichik.

His pedagogy is built on attention to the individual child rather than the class or the year-group: on reading and being read to, on time spent outdoors, on the belief that a child who is failing is a child who has not yet been understood. He is remembered for the practices that went with it - the lessons held in the open air, the fairy-tales the children wrote themselves, the room set aside for thinking - and for an insistence that what goes by the name of education is finally a recreation of oneself in another person.

His major books ran from the collective-spirit study of 1956 through I Give My Heart to Children in 1969 to The Birth of a Citizen, published a month after his death. The writings here belong to the 1950s and 1960s; what belongs to the later date is the selection and the framing.

Translated by Katharine Judelson.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the editorial act that shaped the selection.