This is one of the gentlest books in the whole Progress Publishers list, and it needs to be read with that in mind before anything critical is said about it. It gathers the writings of Vasily Sukhomlinsky (1918–1970), the village schoolmaster of Pavlysh in central Ukraine, into a single English volume, translated by Katharine Judelson and prefaced by the journalist Simon Soloveichik's warm essay "Sukhomlinsky's Paradox." The man it presents spent his working life in one rural school, kept notebooks that ran, on his own count, to "three thousand seven hundred pages and each one of those pages is devoted to one person and one person only— my pupil," and believed to the point of certainty that "everything that goes by the name of education is a wondrous recreation of oneself in Man." Whatever else is true of this book, it is the record of a genuinely humane life spent among children, and no reader should come away doubting that.
It is worth being exact about what the object in front of us is. The spine says 1977, but Sukhomlinsky had been dead for seven years by then and the writings themselves belong to the 1950s and 1960s — his major books ran from Fostering the Collective Spirit among Schoolchildren (1956) through I Give My Heart to Children (1969) to The Birth of a Citizen, published a month after his death in 1970. So the text is older than its date; what is 1977 is the act of selection and framing. Somebody in Moscow chose which passages of a much-loved dead teacher to set before the English-reading world, arranged them under six headings — Education, Study, Work, Beauty, The Collective, Morals and Convictions — and had Soloveichik write an introduction explaining what they mean. The critical interest of this edition lies almost entirely in that editorial act, not in the man, and the distinction between the two is the whole argument of what follows.
It helps to ask what a book like this was for in 1977. Progress Publishers issued its English titles as the export arm of Soviet ideological production, and by the mid-1970s — the high Brezhnev years of "developed socialism" and détente — the most useful face Soviet education could show the West was not the drill-sergeant collective but exactly this: a tender, book-loving, nature-loving village schoolmaster whom any humane teacher in London or New York could admire. Sukhomlinsky was, by 1977, safely dead and being gently canonised, his school at Pavlysh already a place of pilgrimage. He made an ideal export precisely because his gentleness was real; a reader charmed by the fairy-tales and the Thinking Room would absorb, along with them, the Communist upbringing and the Soviet patriotism in which the edition carefully embeds them. That is not a reason to distrust the man. It is a reason to read the frame with open eyes.
Start with what is best here, because it is considerable and because a reader told to be suspicious of everything learns nothing. Sukhomlinsky's pedagogy is built on attention to the individual child — not the class, not the year-group, but the particular boy or girl in front of him — and on the conviction that a child's feelings are the ground everything else grows from. He begins his teaching, Soloveichik notes, "not in the classroom but outside in meadows or woodland," leading children first to the beauty of nature, then of art, then of one another. He built a library of only three hundred books, the "Thinking Room," and asked his pupils to read and reread the finest of them. He laid on eighty different hobbies for five hundred children, from poker-work to radio-electronics, so that every child could find one field in which to feel "strong and intelligent." He collected the fairy-tales his pupils invented and bound them into folders. One of his chapter titles is "Music Keeps the Heart Straight," and he means it literally.
Most of all he refused cruelty. He "eradicated with methodical consistency all the hundred and one things which can humiliate even a single child," disliked competitive sport because it manufactures losers, and would not let a teacher shout at a weak pupil. His deepest practical insight is disarmingly simple and still not widely acted on: "Before a child can be educated he has to be rendered educable." A child who cannot yet listen is not to be scolded for not listening; his capacity to listen has first to be patiently grown. From this follows a whole ethic of the teacher's love — the readiness to wait years for the moment when a particular child is at last struck by the beauty of a spring meadow, and the refusal to count a good deed unless the child felt joy in doing it, since "education of emotions can only be discussed in terms of emotions." His formula for what a school is for could be carved over any schoolhouse door: a school is only worthy of the name "if the main subject taught in it is the Science of Man, when knowledge of the world starts out from knowledge of man's soul."
The book's signature idea, the one Soloveichik builds his whole essay around, grows straight out of this refusal to humiliate. Sukhomlinsky noticed that a child's desire to learn does not come first and produce success; it comes second, in the wake of success. "The desire to learn," Soloveichik summarises, "comes only in the wake of success in study" — from which it follows, absurdly, that "in order for a child to make good progress at school ... he must make good progress at school." Sukhomlinsky's answer to the circle is not to break it but to prime it: give even the weakest child some real, hard-won victory, "some sphere of activity for each child, where he can come into his own," so that "each child should outstrip his fellows at least in something and feel himself strong and intelligent." Interest then follows ability rather than preceding it. "Without curiosity there can be no school," he wrote, and he meant it as an engineering problem — how do you manufacture curiosity in a child who has none? — rather than a platitude. Anyone who has taught a discouraged child will recognise that this is true and hard to do, and that Sukhomlinsky did it.
His account of work and of the collective belongs to the same humane instinct. He was scornful of make-work: "Labour as such has no interest for children," he wrote, and cared nothing for the size of a harvest, only for "the number of difficulties that have been overcome." Enthusiasm, for him, was contagious rather than teachable — "Children cannot be taught to enjoy work, but they can be infected with that enjoyment" — and the collective's real force was atmospheric, "the disciplinary impact of intelligent, happy work in a collective," not the pressure of commands or punishments. It is telling that when the American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner's Two Worlds of Childhood: US and USSR is invoked in the framing essay, Sukhomlinsky's editors bridle at its central term: children, they insist, are not shaped by copying "models" but by "collective impulses in an overall creative atmosphere." Whatever one thinks of the claim, it is a real and generous picture of how a group can carry an individual along, and it is worlds away from the barked drill that the word "collective" can suggest.
Behind the doctrine stands a life that earns it. Sukhomlinsky was a peasant carpenter's son who nearly starved as a student and set out for his studies with "a few potato scones and two glasses of fried soya beans" to his name. He was gravely wounded at the front near Moscow in 1941 and carried shell splinters near his heart for the rest of his life; they eventually killed him, and in his last years he went on teaching while knowing it. His young wife, Vera Povsha, helped the partisans under German occupation, was captured, tortured, and hanged, after a Nazi officer had used their newborn son to try to make her inform. Out of that grief Sukhomlinsky wrote the sentence that anchors the whole book: "I am filled with two emotions—love and hate. Love for children and hatred for fascism." When a small girl came to him in tears because her father had abandoned the family and other children were taunting her, he told her, "I shall be your father. You can tell that to everyone: I am your father" — and he already had a family of his own. A pedagogy of tenderness written by a man with that much cause for hardness is not sentimental. It is a decision.
Here the historical texture begins to complicate, and it is worth drawing out slowly because the 1977 edition works hard to keep it smooth. Sukhomlinsky's stress on the single child, on the inner emotional life, on beauty and the fairy-tale, sat awkwardly with the dominant orthodoxy of Soviet education, which descended from Anton Makarenko — the great pedagogue of the 1920s and 1930s who had rebuilt orphaned and delinquent children through the discipline of the collective. Makarenko's collective was a demanding thing: the group formed the individual, and the individual was answerable to the group. Sukhomlinsky's instinct ran the other way, toward the individual child's feelings, and in the 1960s that instinct drew fire. He was accused, in effect, of an "abstract humanism" — of a softness that neglected the collective and the hard business of forming Soviet citizens.
The 1977 volume knows this and disarms it. Soloveichik's essay concedes that "attempts were made to contrast the work of Sukhomlinsky and Makarenko, and indeed they still occur today," and then spends several pages insisting the contrast is superficial, that Sukhomlinsky is Makarenko's faithful "continuator," that "collective education does not in any way undermine individuality." That the framing essay needs to make this argument at such length is itself the evidence: there was a live controversy, and the edition's job is to settle it in the direction of orthodoxy. It is a fair enough reading of Sukhomlinsky — his collective genuinely is a reciprocal, gentle thing, one where the group exists to serve the child at least as much as the reverse ("the potential of any working collective is measured by the development of the individual capacities of each individual member"). But the reader should notice the operation. A teacher who was, in his own time, a mild dissenter from the reigning method is here enrolled posthumously as its confirming instance. The tension is real; the framing exists to dissolve it.
The critical point in this book is narrow, and it is structural rather than personal. It is not that Sukhomlinsky was a hypocrite or a propagandist — he was manifestly neither. It is that every pedagogy in the Soviet Union, however humane, was required to arrive at the same destination: the formation of a loyal Communist citizen, and the passages where Sukhomlinsky's education of the heart is made to carry that freight are where the book quietly strains.
They are easy to find. The Communist upbringing is explicit and constant. He read his pupils "extracts from Lenin's life and his works" from their first days at school, taught them that "the Communist Party represents the flower of our people, its finest sons and daughters," and set out to make them "heirs to the communist ideals of their fathers and grandfathers." Patriotic education is stated in the strongest terms: the aim is to "educate a true patriot ready to lay down his life for the independence of his Soviet Homeland." And a series of talks called "Men with Ardent Hearts" held up model Communists for the children to love, among them "Felix Dzerzhinsky" — a choice that repays a pause. Dzerzhinsky founded the Cheka, the first Soviet political police, and the machinery of terror is a strange thing to find inside a curriculum whose governing principle is the cultivation of kindness. Sukhomlinsky presents him, in perfect good faith, as proof that "supreme happiness for the Communist consists in loyal service to his people." The pedagogy of tenderness is being asked to underwrite a figure whose historical work was the opposite of tender, and it does so without noticing the seam.
The seam shows most plainly in one remarkable passage on the emotions. Having built his whole method on sensitivity, Sukhomlinsky writes that "our main goal in education is to foster in the heart of citizens of the future an irreconcilable hostility to the enemies of our country," to school them in "lessons in noble hatred," and to end with "man's heart" able to embrace everything "from sensitive tender concern for a mother to hatred for the enemy or uncompromising rejection of ideological opponents." He resolves this for himself with a beautiful and dangerous sentence — "courage is the supreme expression of human kindness, and hatred for the enemy is an expression of real humanity" — which makes love and hatred continuous, the same faculty pointed in two directions. As a description of a soldier who has watched fascism murder his wife, it is unanswerable. As a principle of universal schooling it hands something over: it lets the definition of "the enemy" and "ideological opponents" be filled in from outside, by the party-state, while the teacher supplies the emotional intensity. Sukhomlinsky trains the heart; who the heart is to hate is decided elsewhere.
This is the limit of a child-centred humanism operating under those conditions, and it is worth naming precisely. Sukhomlinsky can teach a child to feel deeply, to love beauty, to be sensitive to another's suffering. What he cannot do, within this frame, is turn that sensitivity back onto the society the child is being formed for — to ask whether the "Homeland" the child is to die for is just, whether the "enemies" are really enemies, whether an "ideological opponent" might be right. The "revolutionary scientific-materialist world outlook" is offered as the settled destination of all this feeling, never as one of its possible objects. A pedagogy that awakens the emotions and then forbids them their most important application — judgement of the order they live under — is doing something genuinely valuable and something quietly circumscribed at the same time. The 1977 selection, by placing "Morals and Convictions" as the culmination toward which "Beauty" and "The Collective" build, presents the circumscription as the fulfilment. That is the framing's deepest move, and it is worth seeing through even while honouring everything the book contains.
The tradition this series writes from — the anti-Stalinist Marxism of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International — thought about exactly this problem, and, interestingly, it did not answer Sukhomlinsky's humanism with more humanism. It answered with more honesty about the gap the 1977 framing closes.
In August 1923, writing on "The Tasks of Communist Education," Leon Trotsky warned against precisely the move this book performs. He cautioned "not to permit any formless humanitarian interpretation of the conception 'new man'." The transitional society, he argued, could not yet manufacture the finished, harmonious human being by careful schooling: "we do not create the abstractly harmonious and perfect citizen of the commune, but we form the concrete human beings of our epoch," people "who have still to fight for the creation of the conditions out of which the harmonious citizen of the commune may emerge." The point is not a colder pedagogy — Trotsky's essay is about liberating the mind from "ignorance and superstition" — but an insistence on telling the truth about where one is standing. You cannot form the free human being of the future inside an unfree present and pretend the present has already delivered him. To claim otherwise, Trotsky thought, was "a wretchedly childish Utopia." (International Press Correspondence, vol. 3 no. 56, 16 August 1923.)
The irony is sharp and worth stating plainly. The revolutionary is less willing than the beloved village schoolmaster to promise a finished, harmonious soul, because the revolutionary insists on measuring the promise against the actual society and finding it wanting. What the 1977 edition offers as Sukhomlinsky's crowning achievement — the seamless production of the good child who is also the loyal citizen — is exactly the seamlessness Trotsky refused, on the grounds that the seam is where the truth lives. Behind them both stands Marx's oldest hope for education, the "all-round development of the individual," the human being freed to develop every capacity — a hope that Marx always tied to the transformation of the society that stunts people, never to schooling alone. Sukhomlinsky has the hope in full; what his position cannot supply, and what the framing is designed to make him not need, is the second half — the standing question of whether the society around the school deserves the citizens it is asking the school to produce.
None of this diminishes the book, and it should not be read as if it did. Sukhomlinsky's attention to the whole child, his refusal of humiliation, his patience, his conviction that beauty and the emotions are the foundation and not the decoration of an education — these are real contributions, and English-speaking teachers have drawn on them for half a century with good reason. The most moving pages here would lose nothing if the Soviet frame around them fell away tomorrow; much of what he says about children could be said, and has been said, by humane teachers in any society. Read this volume for the pedagogy of the heart, which is genuine, and read the framing — the placing of "Convictions" at the summit, the enrolment of a gentle dissenter as an orthodox witness, the lessons in noble hatred set beside the lessons in kindness — as the price a humane teacher paid, and a dead one was made to keep paying in 1977, for working where he worked. The tenderness was his own. The uses it was put to were not always his to choose.