How Anton Makarenko helped labor create man

Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences Sergey Aksyonov, Head of the Department of General and Social Pedagogy of the Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University. K. Minina.

– How did it happen that Nizhny Novgorod became one of the centers for studying Makarenko’s pedagogical heritage?

– In 2003, with the support of the then rector Alexander Fedorov, a laboratory was opened at our university to study the legacy of Makarenko. Under the guidance of Makarenko scholar Anatoly Frolov, my colleagues and I prepared and published a new collection of works by Anton Makarenko in nine volumes, including business and personal letters, documents about his practical activities, archival materials, fragments of artistic and pedagogical works, speeches, articles, etc. This publication contains our scientific comments to each document, reflecting the results of domestic and foreign Makarenko studies, and in chronological order reflects Makarenko’s work. It took about ten years to complete this work. For the preparation of the nine-volume book, we received an award from the government of the Russian Federation in 2017 in the field of education. As part of the work of the laboratory, candidate and doctoral dissertations, monographs, scientific publications were prepared, conferences were held reflecting the results of our research.

— How interested are Russian scientists in Makarenko’s experience? Is Makarenko’s pedagogical system applicable today in a regular school?

— From a position of practice Makarenko is of interest to those who organize the production and economic activities of adolescents in the conditions of a pedagogically expedient cost-effective production for children and adults. The social pedagogy of Anton Makarenko is not actually used in the modern school. It fully operates “personally-oriented” pedagogy. Separate elements of Makarenko’s ideas and experience are used in various social and pedagogical organizations. A vivid example is the annual April competition of farm schools and other pedagogical associations that use the production labor of adolescents in education. For 17 years, more than 200 pedagogical teams have participated in the competition, it was held in various regions of the country. Another example is the revival of student agricultural brigades of collective farms and state farms in the Stavropol Territory, which have fundamentally changed in the new economic and production conditions.

– How was Makarenko’s labor education organized in practice?

— Modern student youth and practical teachers associate Makarenko primarily with “labor”, “team” and “self-government”. Makarenko acted in the 1920s-1930s, this would have been a different level of development of the state, a different educational policy. It is, of course, impossible to pull Makarenko out of the 1920s and scatter it around today’s schools. We must understand his true innovation, and only then adapt his ideas to modern conditions. The key for Makarenko is a person in the production system. It is unthinkable without industrial education of the highest level. Makarenko opposed the fetishization of labor in education, in the sense that labor is a pedagogically neutral means that can instill both industriousness and aversion to labor. It is not so much the work itself that is important, but how it is organized. In the Gorky colony, his children were engaged in crop and livestock production, using advanced agricultural methods – they even raised pigs, an English breed unique to that region. In the commune named after Dzerzhinsky, Makarenko opened up a wider field for the development of children’s and adult production. He was offered to set up the production of toys, but he preferred to organize a more complex production of industrial-type electric drills and cameras: it turned out that the pupils were helping to free the country from imports. We were lucky to talk with a pupil of Anton Makarenko – Ivan Demyanovich Tokarev. He was brought up in the commune named after Dzerzhinsky. Ivan Tokarev, when asked how Makarenko raised him, answered: “No way. We did not feel the pedagogical influence on ourselves. But we changed — we worked, studied, led a cultural life!” When the pupil got into the commune, he was given time to get acquainted with the life of the commune. If he accepted the rules of her life, then he stayed. Or left. Tokarev was struck by the high-tech optical shop – he, a tramp, had never even seen Ilyich’s light bulb before. Teenagers in the commune worked no more than four hours, but they were paid as if they were full-time workers under the laws of the time. The Gorky colony and the Dzerzhinsky commune are institutions of different status. If the pedagogy of struggle operated in the colony due to low funding and relocations with repairs, then the commune became a “monument to Iron Felix” with excellent living and working conditions. Makarenko brought handicraft workshops to high industrial production. Nobody gave them these productions. The commune received loans that were paid out of the profits.

– Who can benefit from and be interested in Makarenko’s books today?

– First of all, parents. Makarenko was ahead of his time. Perhaps today he would work on the creation of an iPhone or the creation of artificial intelligence. When he was asked to write a textbook on pedagogy, he said: “We must write a textbook for tomorrow.” It is interesting to psychologists, economists, managers, marketers. Yitzhak Adizes, a management guru, a well-known business consultant, admitted that two books turned his mind around: Pedagogical Poem and Arkady Gaidar’s Timur and His Team (1940).

– What was the essence of Makarenko’s pedagogical system?

— The uniqueness and essence of his socio-pedagogical creativity is based on a significant distinction between teaching and upbringing in an organically holistic pedagogical process, in which upbringing is the main thing. Pedagogy appears for the first time as the science of education. In the mid-1930s, Anton Makarenko openly declared: “We do not have educational pedagogy.”

He asserted the most important thesis: bringing the theory and practice of education in full compliance with the “pedagogy of the entire Soviet society” implies the right and duty of pedagogy to “outstrip society in its human creativity”, relying on the visible features of its further development, its huge potential.

Makarenko believed: a well-educated person cannot be uneducated when a team develops, an individual develops. Upbringing and education are turning into one of the main factors of a progressively, dynamically and steadily developing human civilization, becoming on a par with the development of the economy, socio-political life and culture of the country.

– Who and for what criticized Makarenko?

– Disputes around the pedagogy of Makarenko during his lifetime and then were and are being conducted mainly on some “details of education”: discipline, self-government, punishments, organization of the team, and so on. In some periods, they openly came out on issues of politics, philosophy, and ethics of education. The main opponent of Makarenko’s views was the People’s Commissar for Education of the Ukrainian SSR Nikolai Skripnik. He supported the leadership of the Ukrainian Komsomol and the pioneer organization in the fight against Makarenko, and in 1932 he sharply criticized his ideas, recognizing his successful practice. Grigory Vashchenko, a professor at the Poltava Pedagogical Institute, was the first to openly criticize Makarenko in January 1926, accusing him of “returning to the old methods of education” and seeing in “punishments” a “symptom of a reaction.” Vashchenko, however, recognized the practical achievements of Makarenko in education, and the fact that it is not punishment that determines these successes. Any punishment was prohibited by the “Regulations on the Unified Labor School of the RSFSR”, published in September 1918. Among Makarenko’s opponents was Nadezhda Krupskaya. In May 1928, in a report at the Congress of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League in Moscow, she sharply criticized Makarenko’s institution for the use of punishments. This was the last straw in the decision of Anton Makarenko and the authorities to dismiss him from the Gorky colony. Krupskaya was supported by the People’s Commissar of Education of the RSFSR Anatoly Lunacharsky.

– Can we say that Makarenko’s popularity saved him from more significant problems?

– Makarenko, as a scientist and practitioner, has been widely known in Ukraine since about 1923, when he himself and other specialist teachers saw in his success the correctness of his chosen path in pedagogy and the need to disseminate and expand his ideas and experience. Throughout the country and the world, his fame expanded and grew in connection with the publication of the “Pedagogical Poem” (a magazine version in three parts) in 1933-1935. All three parts together were first published in 1937. The “poem” was perceived not only as an artistic manifesto of a new pedagogy, but also as a herald of a new life, a remarkable socio-political world order. One of the foreign reviews said: this book is “worth a thousand propaganda books.” It was only in England that it was considered mainly as a “book on pedagogy”. Representatives of official Soviet pedagogy and pedologists refrained from making any assessments. The reader has become a real connoisseur: queues formed in libraries to receive a book, sometimes they waited for a month or more. “Pedagogical Poem” began its history as one of the favorite, very necessary books that help to live intelligently and love life.

– Anton Makarenko died in 1939. How did they begin to study his legacy in the USSR and abroad?

— In our country, a turn to the legacy of Makarenko occurred during the Great Patriotic War. In 1943, the Laboratory for the Study of the Heritage of A. S. Makarenko was created at the Department of Pedagogy of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, the head was Galina Stakhievna Makarenko (widow.— “b”). The laboratory began to collect publications of Anton Makarenko, publish collections of his works during the formation of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR.

In 1945-1949, The Pedagogical Poem was published in Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Romania, Albania, and in 1957 in China. By the mid-1950s, it was published in Italy, France, Japan, Denmark, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Iceland, India, Argentina, Uruguay. In different countries it was reprinted from 3 to 12 times. At the same time, in the West in the 1950s, the attitude towards the Makarenko heritage was sharply critical. Since the 1960s, it has been replaced by the desire to objectively understand it. In this work, the leading place was taken by the Makarenko-Referat laboratory, established in 1968, at the Research Center for Comparative Pedagogy at the University of Marburg (Germany). The laboratory began to turn into a center of international Makarenko studies. She became a member of the Ostforschung, a broad program of studying the Eastern Bloc in order to ideologically struggle between socio-political systems and, at the same time, apply the ideas and experience of Makarenko to improve not only upbringing, education, but the entire social system of Western countries. Against this background, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences in March 1975 decided to publish and further develop the works of A. S. Makarenko, initiating the renewal of Makarenko studies in our country.

Interviewed by Maria Bashmakova