The book opens in a forest. A young man of twenty-one has come to a nameless settlement in the far north, at the end of a narrow-gauge line in the Arkhangelsk region, to begin his life as a teacher; and before he has taught a single lesson the school's director, Mikhail Fedorovich Parfenov, wakes him at six in the morning to go picking mushrooms. It is in the woods, watching the older man touch the mushrooms and name their kinds, that Yuri Azarov feels his vocation being born — "not with classroom work, but with sentiments of admiration, astonishment and conflict." Much later, he tells us, he "formulated for myself the principle of care in upbringing." Teaching: Calling and Skills is the record of that principle worked out across thirty-five years, and it is one of the warmest, most personal books Progress Publishers ever sent into English. It should be read for its warmth first, and questioned second, because the questioning matters far less than the thing it is questioning.
Azarov is not an institute committee and not an apparatus functionary writing to order. He is a practising teacher and pedagogical writer reflecting, in the first person and often against himself, on what it is to be good at this work — "To be a teacher is to be a member of a special profession," the introduction begins, and the whole book turns on the conviction that "everything that pedagogics achieved is transformed through the personality of the teacher." The structure follows a life: Part One, "How a Calling Is Born," is memoir; Part Two, "The Sources of a Teacher's Mastery," sets him among his masters — Konstantin Ushinsky, Anton Makarenko, Vasily Sukhomlinsky; Parts Three and Four move to the experiments of his maturity, in the village of Prelestnoye and in a teacher-training project in Latvia. This is a book about craft and character, written by someone who plainly loved the work and loved children, and its first claim on a modern reader is simply that it is true to the classroom in a way that very little writing about education manages to be.
It is worth being exact about when we are reading. The spine says 1988, and Inna Medow's English translation is of that year; but the text itself was finished a little earlier. The latest event it records is a visit "in early 1986" to Prelestnoye, and the book reads throughout like the mid-1980s rather than the end of the decade. That distinction turns out to matter, because 1988 was the height of glasnost, and one comes to a Soviet book on education from that year expecting the vocabulary of the hour. It is not here. The words perestroika, glasnost and Gorbachev do not occur once; neither does the Twenty-Seventh Congress, nor "acceleration," nor any of the reform slogans that saturated Soviet print in 1987–88. The word "restructuring" appears twice, both times in a purely pedagogical sense — once of Ushinsky's nineteenth-century reforms, once in a warning by Makarenko against people who wished to "reshape" and "restructure" everyone too fast. For a book about Soviet schooling published in 1988, that silence is a real finding, and it tells us what kind of object this is: not a manifesto of the reform years dressed for export, but a personal testament whose formation predates them, given an English jacket at the moment the system it describes was being argued over in the open.
And yet the reform current is present, if one looks at the pedagogy rather than the politics. The mid-1980s were the years of the Soviet "innovator teachers," a public movement for a pedagogy of cooperation against the drill-and-mark authoritarianism of the ordinary classroom, and Azarov belongs unmistakably to that ferment — one of his chapters is titled "Overcoming One's Own Authoritarianism," and among the colleagues he praises is Mikhail Shchetinin, one of the movement's best-known experimenters, whose work on training teachers he describes at length. So the book is reformist, but its reform is of the teacher's manner, not of the order the teacher serves. That gap — anti-authoritarian in method, untouched in its destination — is the whole of the small critical point this introduction will eventually have to make. It is better to earn the right to make it by first saying, plainly and at length, what is good here. There is a great deal.
Azarov's finest pages are about his own failures. The first long story in the book is of his nephew Victor, a difficult fifteen-year-old handed to the twenty-one-year-old teacher to "polish, process and shape," and of how completely Azarov mishandled him — imposing regimes, losing his temper, treating the boy as an extension of his own pride. The retrospective judgement is merciless and exact: "he was my property, which fate had given me to polish, process and shape. But he was not clay." Of the whole episode he writes, "Today, of course, I see myself as a tyrant in these personal pedagogics," and names the fault precisely — "that was my principal pedagogical error, which I did not recognize at the time." A book on teaching that begins by convicting its own author of tyranny toward a child has bought itself the right to be listened to, and the honesty is not a device; it recurs. Azarov's method, for all its confidence about "skills" and "mastery," is built on the memory of getting it wrong, and on the slow discovery that the child in front of you is not material to be worked but a person to be met.
From that discovery the humane doctrine grows. The teacher's first instrument is not technique but attention — "the ability of a teacher to create the most delicate types of relations with children," expressed "through glances, smiles, barely perceptible movements, a line from a poem." One chapter is called "A Teacher's Heart Must Be Nourished by Love," another "A True Teacher Enjoys Communicating with Children," and Azarov means both literally; the book ends on a long, unhurried conversation with a village art teacher about drawing, courage and humour, in which the governing idea is that "communicating with children is always a festive occasion." He insists, against a hardening orthodoxy of his day, that every child is gifted and that the school's task is to help each one find the field in which he can feel strong — not to sort the creative few from the rest. He is scornful of the curriculum-head as dispatcher, the functionary who tells a young teacher to change a fair mark to a kinder one so the inspectors will be satisfied. The scene is worth pausing on, because it is one of the sharpest things in the book and Azarov reports it without a word of editorial framing. His head of curriculum in the northern settlement, confronted with a stack of failing dictations, simply instructs him: "Simply change it." When the young Azarov protests that the work does not merit a higher mark, the answer is candid — "As soon as you submit such marks a commission will arrive, they will criticize you," and prove that the teacher, not the pupils, has failed. That is the machinery of falsified achievement, the inflated pass-rate demanded from above, shown at the classroom's ground level by a man who was told to take part in it in his first term and never forgot the taste. He lets it stand as reported, because a reader can see for himself what it is.
Part Two, where he places himself among his masters, is the most substantial thing in the volume and the most useful to a reader outside Russia. His portrait of Ushinsky — "the passionate voice of Konstantin Ushinsky," raised when tsarist Russia's revolutionary democrats were calling for "a struggle to free the people from serfdom and bring them enlightenment" — is a genuine piece of intellectual history, and his account of Makarenko, the great pedagogue of the orphaned and delinquent, is affectionate and clear-eyed about the tension between Makarenko's collective and Azarov's own bias toward the single child. Most of all, this book is a companion to another in this series. Azarov devotes an entire section to Vasily Sukhomlinsky, "director of the Pavlysh village school," praises his To Children I Give My Heart, and reaches — retelling the horror of Sukhomlinsky's young wife, tortured and hanged by the Gestapo with their newborn son murdered before her — the same formula the Sukhomlinsky volume turns on: "There is no such thing as abstract humaneness, humaneness must be irreconcilably hostile to any oppression, slavery or arbitrariness." A reader who has the companion edition, V. Sukhomlinsky on Education (Progress, 1977), will recognise the whole moral world; Azarov is a citizen of it, and his book is, among other things, a warm secondary testimony to how the Soviet pedagogy of the heart understood itself.
None of this is diminished by being Soviet, and most of it would survive the removal of every Soviet reference. The attention to the individual child, the refusal to treat the pupil as clay, the conviction that the teacher's own inner life is the real curriculum, the self-critical honesty about one's own authoritarian reflexes — these are contributions to the craft of teaching, full stop, and English-speaking teachers can take them straight. That is the rescue, and it is the larger part of the book.
The critical point is small, structural, and — as with Sukhomlinsky — not a charge against the man. It is that every pedagogy in the Soviet Union, however tender, was required to arrive at the same terminus: the formation of a loyal Soviet citizen equipped with a settled Marxist-Leninist world outlook. Azarov's book carries that freight more lightly than almost any other title in this series — its ideological surface is remarkably thin. Lenin is named half a dozen times and never doctrinally (as Krupskaya's husband, as the name of an order and a university); there is no atheism in the book at all, and when an old icon hangs in the corner of a peasant's hut it passes without a word of disapproval. The load the book does carry is patriotic and collectivist rather than anti-religious or scholastic, and it sits, tellingly, at the seams — in the places where the education of the heart is handed on to the education of the citizen.
Those seams are easy to find once you look. Azarov ties the teacher's sincerity, the very quality he prizes most, to civic formation: the teacher's cases reveal "the teacher's ideological conviction, his patriotism," and the children respond when he addresses them "not only as adults but also as citizens of their country." He endorses Makarenko's demand that the teacher "possess a keen political sense," which Makarenko called "the most important attribute of our teaching competence" — a striking thing to rank first in a book whose whole argument is that love and attention come first. And where he reports the classroom in another teacher's voice, the destination is stated flatly: the Latvian experiment's aim was "developing a Marxist-Leninist world outlook on the part of students," and the essence of moral education in a Soviet school, another passage explains, is an unshakeable belief in the rightness of certain ideals — "the essence of ideological and political education in Soviet schools." When Azarov describes how a research teacher is to be trained, the two halves are set side by side without friction: "a knowledge of a society's ideology and culture, and in mastering the arsenal of professional knowledge and skills." Ideology and craft, learned together, as one competence.
There is nothing sinister in the tone of any of this; that is precisely the point. The apparatus into which the caring teacher is fitted — the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol, the "military and patriotic education," the "moral image of a Soviet school student," the University of Marxism-Leninism where teachers upgrade their qualifications — appears in the book as the natural furniture of the world, unremarked because unquestioned. And this is where the 1988 date returns to sharpen the reading. Azarov has written a whole book about overcoming authoritarianism — but the authoritarianism he overcomes is the teacher's, in his manner toward the child. The far larger question — whether the world outlook the child is being formed toward is itself open to the child's judgement, whether a pupil taught to feel deeply and think for himself might turn that faculty on the "settled ideals" and find them wanting — never arises. The individual approach awakens the emotions and the intelligence and then points them at a destination fixed from outside. Azarov trains the heart and the mind superbly; who the heart is finally to serve, and what the mind is finally allowed to doubt, is decided elsewhere. At the very moment the whole society was learning to doubt those things aloud, this book, gentle and honest as it is, does not.
The tradition from which these introductions are written — the anti-Stalinist Marxism of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International — thought hard about exactly this problem, and, revealingly, it did not answer the Soviet pedagogy of the heart with a colder pedagogy. It answered with more honesty about the gap.
The book's last sentence is a small, beautiful circle: "I am convinced that harmoniously developed people can only be reared by other harmoniously developed individuals." It is the oldest hope of socialist education — Marx's aim of the all-round development of the individual, the human being freed to unfold every capacity — and Azarov holds it in full. But Marx always tied that hope to the transformation of the society that stunts people, never to schooling alone; and Azarov's circle, that only the harmonious can rear the harmonious, quietly assumes the harmony it is supposed to be producing. Writing on "The Tasks of Communist Education" in August 1923, Trotsky warned against precisely this move — against "any formless humanitarian interpretation of the conception 'new man'." In an unfree and unfinished society, he argued, you cannot manufacture the finished citizen 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, who have still to fight for the creation of the conditions out of which the harmonious citizen of the commune may emerge." To try to form that harmonious citizen "by careful laboratory work, in an extremely disharmonious transition stage of society" would be, he wrote, "a wretchedly childish Utopia." (International Press Correspondence, vol. 3 no. 56, 16 August 1923.)
The irony is worth stating plainly, because it is the reverse of what one expects. The revolutionist is less willing than the loving schoolteacher to promise a finished, harmonious soul — not out of coldness, but because he insists on measuring the promise against the actual society and telling the truth about the distance. What Azarov offers as the crown of his art, the seamless rearing of the harmonious person, is exactly the seamlessness Trotsky refused, on the ground that the seam is where the honesty lives. This is the same limit the companion Sukhomlinsky volume reaches, and it is a limit of the situation, not of the men. Both were real teachers doing genuine good inside a frame that would not let the good turn back and judge the frame.
Read it, then, for the calling and the skills, which are its title and its substance and are entirely real. Azarov's attention to the single child, his honesty about his own failures, his refusal to treat a pupil as clay, his insistence that a teacher's heart must be nourished by love and that communicating with children is a festive occasion — these are gifts to anyone who teaches, in any society, and they lose nothing if the Soviet frame around them dissolves. The thin ideological seams should be seen for what they are: not the book's purpose but its border, the fixed edge past which a humane and self-critical pedagogy of the mid-1980s was not permitted to inquire, even in the year everything else was being inquired into. There is even a small, unfashionable wisdom in the book's insistence that good work and good spirits belong together — "The most difficult work is performed easily and cheerfully when one is in a good mood," the village art teacher tells him near the end, and a school run on that principle would be a kinder place than most. The tenderness and the craft were Azarov's own, hard-won across thirty-five years. The destination they were made to serve was not his to choose, and it is the one thing in this generous book that he never thought to question.