Lev Vygotsky, Educational Psychology Chapter 19
Until now we have been concerned with the psychology of the pedagogical process from the point of view of pupil and student. We have tried to explain those laws and influences to which education is subordinated in terms of how this process depends on the child. The psychological well-springs of the educational process, insofar as they are embedded within the child’s psyche, have constituted the subject of all of our preceding discussions. This, in fact, is how things go in the majority of modern courses in educational psychology.
Such an approach is, however, extremely incomplete and one-sided. To get a complete idea of the entire integral process of education and to represent all the most important aspects of the overall process in the light of psychology, it is not only necessary to take into account the psychology of the work of the teacher; we also have to show what sorts of laws it is bound by. But we cannot make this the subject of the present concluding and brief chapter; only in a complete and fully developed course in educational psychology, which is a project for the future, could it find its proper place.
Science has yet to achieve the sorts of results and discoveries which would help it discover the key to the psychology of the teacher. Instead, we have only scattered data, only fragmentary remarks which have yet to be reduced to a system, and on top of that, certain attempts of a purely practical nature to assist in the vocational psychological selection of teachers. Do not forget that the development of a psychological profile for teachers within the realm of vocational psychology presents far greater difficulties than in other occupations.
Accordingly, we have to acknowledge the fact that it is hardly possible to write a scientifically rigorous chapter on the work of the teacher within the framework of educational psychology. Thought has been given to the most general considerations in this area more than once, however, so that the present volume would be incomplete without some discussion. Therefore, some space must be given over to a discussion of these basic considerations for the purpose of completeness and conclusiveness of the presentation.
There is no denying the fact that every theory of education imposes its own conditions on the teacher. In the pedagogics proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the teacher is only the child’s guardian and keeper, protecting him against bad influences and from becoming spoiled. For Tolstoy, such a person has to be an unfailingly virtuous person who arouses the child by own personal example. For ascetic pedagogics, an educator is someone who knows how to fulfill the precept, “Break the child’s will so that he does not perish.” In Domostroi, one again new capacities are required of the parent or teacher when it is prescribed, “Punish your son severely from the time he is a little boy, and you will be at peace in your old age and have some pleasure. And do not ease up when you are striking a small child, for he will not perish if he is beaten with a rod, but become wise. Because by striking his physical body you will save his soul from death.” For Guyau, the teacher is a hypnotist, and, according to Guyau, only he will be a good teacher who is able to convey ideas to someone else by means of hypnotic suggestion and to subordinate someone else’s will to his own. For Pestalozzi and Froebel, the educator is a kind of gardener who works with children. Fin Blonskii, the educator is an engineer who makes use of “anthropolitical methodology” [antropotekhnika], of a science of “child engineering,” that is, an engineer whose science of the cultivation of human beings operates just like plant-growing and animal husbandry, as if of the same type.
There have been many who have compared the work of a teacher with that of an artist, assigning paramount importance to all questions of individual creativity. On the other hand, there have been those, Kamenskii, for example, who have declared that “we have to hope that the method followed in tin education of human beings would become mechanical, i.e., that it should F prescribed in such definite form that everyone, whatever he is learning and whatever he is involved in, cannot but succeed.” Kamenskii has referred to I hr kind of teaching as reducing to a “teaching machine” [didakticheskaya mashina]. A similar view was maintained by Pestalozzi.
Thus, we see that every individual conception of the educational process r associated with a particular view of the nature of the work of the teacher. We can therefore well understand that new point of view which has now been put forward in pedagogics that attempts to construct a new system of education thereby creating all at once a new system of educational psychology as well, i.e., new a scientific discipline that serves to justify it. And it stands to reason that a new system of educational psychology, i.e., a new view of the nature of the educational process which attempts to explain absolutely every single one of its aspects and all its elements from a unified conception, leads to a new undermining of the work of the teacher.
We have already pointed out in one of the early chapters that, from III standpoint of his own work, the teacher represents a person engaged in what is essentially a dual phenomenon, just like any type of human labor. A teacher can seem like a mere fount of knowledge, a reference volume or dictionary, a manual or illustration, in a word, an auxiliary aid and tool of education. It is not very hard to see, meanwhile, that it is just this aspect of the work of the teacher that made up nine-tenths of the content of the labor of the teacher in the Tsarist school, as we have shown earlier. Now this role is increasingly disappearing, and is being replaced in every way imaginable by the active energy of the student himself, who, at all times, has to himself seek and obtain knowledge on his own, even when he gets it from the teacher, and not gulp down all that stuff [pishcha] the teacher is filling him up with.
We have already taken leave of that prejudice which seemed to demand that the teacher educate. Consequently, we are also far from that view which supposes that a person has to carry heavy loads all by himself. It is in this sense that we are quite right in saying that the real secret of education lies in not teaching. The process of development is subordinated to the very same iron laws of necessity as is everything else in nature. Consequently, parents and teachers “have just as much power or right to prescribe to this new being as to tell the stars what path to follow.”
The student educates himself. A lecture that has been presented by the teacher in finished form may teach many things, but it inculcates only ability and drive, and everything it makes use of comes from the hands of others, without accomplishing anything or checking anything. For present-day education, it is not so important to teach a certain quantity of knowledge as it is to inculcate the ability to acquire such knowledge and to make use of it. And, like everything else in life, this may be achieved only in the very process of labor and in the very process of attaining this knowledge.
Just as you cannot learn how to swim by standing on the sea shore, that to learn how to swim you have to, out of necessity, plunge right into the water even though you still don’t know how to swim, so the only way to learn something, say, how to acquire knowledge, is by doing so, in other words, by acquiring knowledge.
Thus, the teacher must shoulder a new burden. He has to become the director of the social environment which, moreover, is the only educational factor. Where he acts like a simple pump, filling up the students with knowledge, there he can be replaced with no trouble at all by a textbook, by a dictionary, by a map, by a nature walk. When the teacher presents a lecture or explains a lesson, in these instances he is only partially acting in the role of teacher, say, in that area of his labor which establishes the child’s relationship to all the elements of the environment which affect him. Where he is simply setting forth ready-prepared bits and pieces of knowledge, there he has ceased being a teacher.
The greatest danger associated with the psychology of the teacher is that n is just this latter side of the teacher’s personality which might begin to assume the dominant role there. Thus, the teacher begins to think of himself as a tool of the educational process, as a record player, without a voice of his own, singing what some record suggests to him. Quite frankly, there is no denying the fact that every kind of occupation which contains an element of teaching superimpose characteristic indelible features on its practitioners, and creates pitiable figure, that assume the role of propounders of commonplace truths. It is no accident that the teacher, this walking storehouse of sayings, has always seemed like a comic figure, the object of laughter and mockery, and has always been a funny character beginning with the comedies of ancient Greece right down to modem stories. Chekhov’s “straitlaced man,” or that hero of his who would be forever saying, “The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea,” and “Horses eat oats and hay,” was for this reason alone a terrible sight, constituting a vivid example of the utter absence of personality, of someone who had finally lost all feeling and though!
That the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea is an extremely important scientific fact of vast educational import, and there is nothing funny about it. What is funny is that this fact is made into a roll of wool the individual wrap himself in, that it consumes his entire life, and that for this fact the person ha entirely ceased to exist. Truth is not a very wise thing if those who are its heralds are, for the most part, stupid, thus says a character in one old comedy about such a straitlaced person.
What is seen here in caricature basically constitutes a permanent feature of the teacher so long as he is treated as a tool of education. It is extraordinary curious that the very same picture Chekhov drew of teachers may be seen in all those professors who, 30 years ago, would give lectures on esthetics without understanding anything about esthetics and who were being profoundly convinced that it is not Shakespeare who is important, but the commentaries on Shakespeare. The point, that is, lies not at all in some little bit of knowledge, in a circumspection of outlook, and in how insignificant are the facts themselves The point is not that man always swims in shallow waters and knows very little rather that the very transformation of a person into a “teaching machine represents an extraordinarily willful misrepresentation of man, in terms of a human being’s own psychological nature.
Thus, the fundamental requirement imposed on the teacher under our new conditions is the utter rejection of all woolly thinking and the development of all those aspects which breathe of movement and life. In all those forms of which which teachers would engage before the revolution, there was a certain musty and stale odor, as in stagnant and undisturbed water, And this did not help ah nip the ordinary doctrine of the teacher’s sacred mission, of the teacher’s conscious ness of his very own ideal goals.
Psychologists have demanded of the teacher educational inspiration, and it is this which defined in their eyes the personality of the teacher. The concern has been with the teacher’s inner warmth. “A teacher who does not feel the beauty and the sacredness of his mission and who has entered the school, not because his heart was full of the desire to teach the youth, but just to have a job and to earn a living, is doing harm to the pupils and greater harm to himself,” says Hugo Münsterberg, the writer who has given the clearest expression of this view. What is required of the teacher is enthusiasm, and it is with such inspiration that the teacher may nourish the students.
Continues Münsterberg, “For the teacher at his desk it holds as true as for the minister in the pulpit, that without belief in his heart, he is doomed ... And if the enthusiasm has touched the soul, everything will become living and inspiring... There is no need for a distorted perspective. It is not necessary to teach the irregular verbs as if they were the center of the intellectual universe. Everything may remain in its right place... On the other hand, the pupil’s interest is absorbed because his interest in the enthusiastic teacher is projected into the indifferent material taught.”
These are the words of Hugo Münsterberg, one of the founders of the field of vocational psychology, and he has discovered nothing better than an inspired faith in the value of human ideals upon which the work of the teacher may be based. Truth in this view is mixed up with error. Münsterberg is quite correct when, speaking in the language of psychology, he demands of the teacher a certain innate emotional temperament. Whoever is neither ardent nor cold, but only lukewarm, can never be a good teacher. He is also right when he points to the danger of placing the work of teaching increasingly in the hands of women. “To put the education of boys in the years in which their manhood is developing, essentially into the hands of women cannot be without danger to the best interests of the community.”
It is also true that, because of the economic balance of forces, the occupation of teaching has become a place where all those who are maladjusted or unlucky, all those who have suffered defeats in every area of life huddle together. We can think of school as a refuge which life allots to vessels that have suffered shipwreck. It is for this reason that a natural selection of delicate, unfit, and crippled human material has been created for the vocation of teacher. It says something that there was a time when retired soldiers would take up teaching. Those who have retired from life’s battleground now, in fact, make up three- fourths of the ranks of teachers. “It is terrible,” writes one educator, “that there are so many spinsters and bachelors and, in general, every imaginable type of failure, among our teachers. 1 low can someone teach a child to have faith in life if his own life has been a failure?” So perhaps we should come right out with it and admit that far from everyone should be a teacher, but only those who are most suited to the profession.
With this the present-day point of view is fully in accord. Moreover, it is also in agreement with the demand that the teacher has to know a lot. He must possess a complete grasp of the subject which he teaches. “The teacher must draw from a full spring,” writes Münsterberg. “It is not enough that he know what he wants the pupils to know and that he hastily supply himself in the morning with a reserve fund to answer the questions of the next morning. He alone can give information in an interesting way who might give a hundred times more than In has a chance to give. If a teacher interprets a single poem, it makes all tin difference whether he is versed in the whole literature or not; and his nature stud may be confined to the elements in the class room and yet those element demand that the wide perspectives of real modern science be open before In eyes.”
This may be compared with the process of walking, when we can take a step with confidence only when we can see 1000 steps ahead of us, and it is only the path which our very next step is to follow which remains to be discovered. Tin example also elucidates for us quite well the role which has to be assigned n specialized knowledge in present-day pedagogics. The point is that to take and step forward, to place our foot down somewhere, an extraordinarily narrow space is needed. Why, then, do we need a wide and open road? It is needed in a so much for the foot, as for the eyes, so as to steer and regulate the movement of the foot. In just the same way, the teacher who has been relieved of tin obligations of having to instruct must know far more than before. Ultimately. m order to instruct, one need know very little, but one must know it clearly and distinctly. In order to guide the student’s own knowledge, one must know far more than he knows.
Until now the student has always stood on the teacher’s shoulders. He has looked upon everything through his teacher’s eyes and judged everything by the way his teacher thought. The time has come to place the student on his own two feet and to recognize that there is not very much knowledge the teacher ran impart to the student, just as one cannot teach a child to walk by means of lectures and the most painstaking demonstration of skillful perambulation on the part of the teacher. The child must himself be made to walk and to fall, to suffer pain from injuries, and to decide what direction to follow. What is true as repaid walking, that it can be learned only on one’s own two feet, and only by one’s own tumbles, is equally applicable to all aspects of education.
But there is a profound divergence between the reasoning taken by the old Tsarist pedagogics and today’s pedagogics as regards the teacher’s idealism inspiration. Münsterberg is profoundly correct when he speaks of the relationship between every particular fact and the overall value of an entire subject, and points out that the experience of value has to be imparted to the student even m the study of the irregular verbs is profoundly true. The error lies only in the determination of the means through which psychologists have hoped to achieve the success they are aiming for.
Psychologists have seen as the guarantee of this success the enthusiasm that the teacher is imbued with, in the background which forms in the teacher’s own mind, and in the interest which arises in the student towards an inspiring teacher. All of this constitutes the greatest of psychological delusions. Inspiration, first of all, is psychologically so rare an event and so difficult a process to guide as to make it impossible to construct on its foundation any one thing of vital importance whatsoever. Either we end up with false inspiration, that image of false pathos where the teacher speaks of irregular verbs as if they were actually the center of the universe. Or, there is the inspiration which is not contagious, just like the actor who experiences sincerely and who cries real tears, but who makes the audience laugh. There is no counting how many times an inspiring teacher finds himself in such a situation.
Nor can we forget yet another noble type of teacher, the Don Quixote idealist who is infinitely enraptured with Livy’s style, or the contours of the island of Madagascar, to the greatest amusement of his students.
Whether someone is an inspiring teacher is not the point in the least. Nor is the problem the fact that this inspiration does not always reach the student. The real point is that the student must be made to become enraptured by the very same thing. It is even worse when inspiration does not succeed, and, like the case of the cold actor, there appears in the teacher that contrived, rhetorical pathos which found a rather splendid expression in the style of some of the textbooks from before the revolution, where history or geography was set forth in an exceedingly bombastic tone as a way of reaching the student’s feelings and inspiring him. But even when inspiration reached the student’s consciousness, it was always misguided, turning into veneration of the teacher after having assumed profoundly anti-pedagogical forms.
Nowhere did the sickness of the Tsarist pedagogics exhibit itself with such special clarity as in those instances when, in place of open warfare between teacher and student, there sprang up friendly relationships. The deification of the “favorite teacher,” which assumed the form of adoration, represents, in fact a genuine psychological problem that recalls that which in psychoanalysis is referred to as “transference.” By the term, transference, the psychoanalyst is referring to that special false relationship which springs up between the patient suffering from a neurosis and the doctor who is treating him when unhealthy, neurotic interest is focused on the doctor’s personality, when the interests nourishing the neurosis are associated with him, and the doctor’s personality turns into a wall that separates the patient’s inner world from the world outside.
Thus, the problem is, instead, to induce in the student inspiration of his own, and not to tell the teacher how to go into raptures when presenting the country’s history, as was done in the regulations distributed by the Prussian Ministry of Education.
Enthusiasm is akin to fraud, and inspiration to risk-taking. There is an age of enthusiasm even in poetry, this eternal refuge of this dark force. There is hardly a single American manufacturer who would entrust the management of his own factory to the enthusiasm of a manager, or an admiral who would entrust a ship to the enthusiasm of a captain. The preference is always for the experienced engineer and the skilled seaman. It is time that pedagogics, too, followed (In road and sought out people who possessed an exact knowledge of laws and the methodology through which the child’s own sense of inspiration could in aroused within the confines of his own soul, making use of whatever means were available, by whatever means possible, the child’s own inspiration.
Thus, exact knowledge of the laws of education – this, above all, is required of the teacher. It is in this sense that we can avail ourselves of Münsterberg expression, that there must exist many different types of teacher, though the Inn teacher is always the same, is applicable. And the true teacher is that teacher who constructs his own educational work not by inspiration, but on the basis of scientific knowledge. Science is the truest path to the mastery of life.
In the future, every teacher will have to construct all his own work by psychology, and scientific pedagogics will become an exact science based on psychology. Scientific pedagogics must be based, says Blonskii, on scientific psychology, i.e., on sociobiological educational psychology. Thus, in place of quacks we will get scientists.
Thus, the first condition which we impose on the teacher is that he or she In a scientifically trained professional, that he or she be a true teacher before he is a mathematician, or a teacher of literature, or whatever. Only exact knowledge exact calculation, and sober thought can become the true tools of the educator In this sense, the primitive ideal of the educator qua nursemaid, which demanded of the teacher warmth, tenderness, and concern, is not quite to our tastes. On the contrary, for the psychologist the Tsarist school must be condemned just from the fact that it made the very profession of educator into one that demanded little talent. It reduced the educational process to such monotonous and negligible functions as to have methodically corrupted the educator in the most profound way possible.
And it was no psychological paradox that grades and detention room’ examinations and inspections, corrupted the educator even more than the student. The gymnasium exerted a greater educational influence on the teacher than on the students. No psychologist can write a single page that would hold an interest if his subject is the psychology of the teacher of the Tsarist school. Now in the light of psychoanalysis we can say without flinching that the pedagogic system as organized before the revolution was a place for the education of every possible type of mental illness in the teacher, and in the full sense of the word, created a kind of neurosis peculiar to the teacher. In this sense, Sologub’s hero, Peredonov, does not constitute any kind of absurd or monstrous fiction.
Now with all the problems the teacher has to deal with, which become more complex from one day to the next, the number of instructional techniques required have become so infinitely varied and their complexity so great that any teacher who would like to be a scientifically trained educator must master an extraordinarily large volume of knowledge.
It used to be that one only had to know one’s own subject, the curriculum, and, of course, how to raise one’s voice at the class in a difficult situation. Now pedagogics has become a real and complex art that grows out of a scientific foundation. Thus, what is required from the teacher is enhanced knowledge of the subject, and enhanced knowledge of the methodology of his craft.
Moreover, the very method of instruction demands of the teacher that same- sense of activity, that same sense of group spirit, with which the soul of the school must be infused with. The teacher must live within the school collective, as if an integral part of it. It is in this sense that the relationship between teacher and student can attain a force, a transparency, and a depth without equal in the entire social scale of human relationships.
But this is only half the problem. There is also the fact that the teacher has to satisfy a requirement that is of an absolutely opposite order. He must be a teacher through and through, but he must also be not only a teacher, or to put it somewhat more properly, he must be more than just a teacher. Strange as it may sound, if we think of it as a profession teaching constitutes, from the psychological point of view, a false reality, and there can be little doubt that it will vanish in the near future. This, of course, does not mean that rejecting what was said above regarding the extraordinary complexity of the specialized areas of knowledge the teacher has to possess. And though there can be little doubt that the teacher of the future will be not an instructor, but an engineer, a seaman, a political worker, an actor, a worker, a journalist, a scholar, a judge, a doctor, and so forth, this, however, does not mean that the teacher of the future will be a dilettante when it comes to pedagogics. Our only concern is that there exist within the very nature of the educational process, within its psychological essence, the demand that there be as intimate a contact, and as close an interaction, with life itself as might be wished for.
Ultimately, only life educates, and the deeper that life, the real world, burrows into the school, the more dynamic and the more robust will be the educational process. That the school has been locked away and walled in as if by a tall fence from life itself has been its greatest failing. Education is gist as meaningless outside the real world as is a lire without oxygen, or as is breathing in a vacuum. The teacher’s educational work, therefore, must inevitably be connected with his creative, social, and life work.
Only he who exerts a creative role in real life can aspire to a creative role in pedagogics. It is just for this reason that, in the future, the educator will also In an active participant in society. Whether in theoretical science, in the sphere of work, or in practical social activity, he will always relate the school and the real world through the subject which he teaches. Thus, pedagogical work will inevitably be linked to the broad social work that the scholar or political leader, the economist or the artist, pursues.
In the city of the future, there will not be any one single building from win h one might hang the sign, “school,” because the very word, “school,” win. h denotes in the rigorous sense of the word, “leisure,” and which has meant sell mg aside a special building and the assignment of particular individuals for “leisure” activities, will be absorbed altogether in work and in life, and schools will be held in factories, and in the public square, in museums and in the hospital and the churchyard.
As Münsterberg says, “There are windows in every class room; the right teacher will look out from his desk into the wide world, into the turmoil of men into the joys and duties of life ...” And in the school of the future, these windows will be opened as wide as can be, and the teacher will not only look out, but also actively participate in the “duties of life.” That which was responsible for the mustiness and spiritual stagnation in our schools, was due to and sprang from the fact that all the windows to the outside world in our schools had been tightly shut and shut, first and foremost, in the teacher’s own soul.
To many it seems that in our new system of pedagogics the teacher will have a negligible role to play, that it is a pedagogics without an educator, and a school without a teacher. To think that in the school of the future the teacher will have nothing to do is just like thinking that the role of man in mass production has diminished or been reduced down to nothing. One might even think that in the school of today the teacher has been turned into a mechanical mannequin. Bui on the contrary, the role of the teacher increases beyond all bounds, the school of today requires of the teacher a higher test for life in order that he possess the capacity to turn education into the creation of life.
There has existed until now, unfortunately, the conviction that since the educational process is expressed in a relationship between teacher and student, it is confined for the most part to imitation alone. Even in the latest systems of Marxist pedagogics, there are writers (e.g., Zalkind) who sometimes speak of a reflex of imitation as if it were a kind of foundation stone of education. “And the teacher has to seduce, he has to attract the individual who is to be educated,” Zalkind goes on, “with the tempting content of the example of his own example, else all attempts to set the student’s reflexive machinery in motion will come to naught.”
This is all basically false. To the extent that the pedagogical process is itself transformed in the light of scientific knowledge, all idea of the foundation and nature of education has been altered. Above all, the very concept of education has expanded. The concern is not simply with education, but with the “reforging of men,” in Trotsky’s expression. And this reforging requires, above all, as we have indicated repeatedly, the greatest possible use of the innate substance of behavior.
Therefore, none of the child’s reactions must go to waste. William James has said that
Respect then, I beg you, always the original reactions, even when you are seeking to overcome their connection with certain objects, and to supplant them with others that you wish to make the rule. Bad behavior, from the point of view of the teacher’s art, is as good a starting-point as good behavior; in fact, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, it is often a better starting-point than good behavior would be.
Thus does the creative character of the educational process manifest itself with full clarity. Thus does the creative nature of the educational process, directed not towards the simple cultivation of natural data, but towards the creation of “supra-natural” human life, becomes understandable.
In this sense, present-day pedagogics radically diverges from the theory of natural education, which sees the ideal of education in the past. For Tolstoy and for Rousseau, the child constitutes the ideal of harmony, and all subsequent education only spoils the child. For scientific psychology, the child is disclosed as a tragic problem, what with the terrible imbalance and disharmony of his development. Without saying a word of biogenetic parallelism, we may nevertheless declare that the newborn infant is a clot of previous experience, he is unclothed biology, and in the several years of his development he actually has to go through the entire path which mankind has gone through from the apes to the airplane.
The whole difference is that the child has to travel this road on his own two feet and not at all in parallel with the paths of history. Once we bear in mind the incredible vastness of this path, however, it becomes entirely understandable that the child will have to enter into a brutal struggle with the world, and that in this struggle the teacher has to have the final word. That is when we get the idea that teaching is like warfare:
The science of psychology, and whatever science of general pedagogics may be based on it,” says James, “are in fact much like the science of war Nothing is simpler or more definite than the principles of either... there would be nothing but victories for the masters of the science, either on the battlefield or in the school-room, if they did not both have to make their application to an incalculable quantity in the shape of the mind of their opponent. The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general .
Thus does pedagogics disclose itself from the standpoint of the battlefield Zalkind says that since the goods of three-fourths of modern social reflexive installations constitute, because of the chaotic structure of mankind capitalism, a collection of sociophobias. For this reason the inculcation of a concrete social force in any one individual is a bitter struggle, now concealed now explicit, between teacher and student. Therefore, “sociogogy” (pedagogics, psychotherapy) must not and cannot be politically indifferent. The true sociologist, i.e., teacher is always politically involved. The education of social reflexes constitutes the education of all the individual’s social patterns of behavior, i.e., political education. Pedagogics (sociogogy) is never and was never politically indifferent, since, willingly or unwillingly, through its own work on the psyche (social reflexes), it has always adopted a particular social pattern, i.e., political line, in accordance with the dominant social class that has guided its interests.
Therefore, the borders of education have never before spread so far apart as today, when the revolution has undertaken the task of re-educating all of mankind and has created in the midst of its very being a clear-cut direction for education. Bear in mind that the sociogogics of the individual reduces the production of consistent and profound changes in all its socially reflexive settings, i.e., in all its reflexes without exception, since all of them are diminished by the social elements. The education of opinions, of sensations, of knowledge, of drives – all of this is only a partial and improper expression of a single common conception of the education of the individual as a whole, in all his functions, and especially in the social portion of these functions, since an inculcation of definite knowledge, sensations, and so on is, at the same time, the education of a definite social type of breathing, of digestion, and so on. Opinions and feelings cannot be isolated from the “organs,” neither in a theoretical sense nor in a practical sense, and it is necessary to be done with this fictionalizing as soon as possible.
Let us add to this the fact that such functions of the organism as growth, the formation of bone, and so on also depend to a large degree on public education. Thus, education reveals itself as the greatest problem in the world, the problem of life as creation. It is in this sense that Zalkind is correct when he merges artistic creativity together with every other mental act.
Zalkind also said that other than in quantitative strength, the basic elements of the process of artistic creation do not differ whatsoever from any of the other mental acts, even the simplest. Every impulse in man’s mental machinery, the slightest shift in the chain of so-called thoughts, sensations, and so on constitutes an act of social adaptation of the individual, the manifestation of the individual’s social struggle for self-preservation. Only a state of social discomfort will induce a change in the mental machinery. Utter happiness would submerge it in deep slumber. The source of every movement of the soul, from the slightest thought to the discovery of a genius, is one and the same.
Every thought that has ever been expressed, every picture that has ever been drawn, every sonata that has ever been composed, has been born out of a state of unease in their originator, who has sought through re-education to change this state of unease into that of the greatest contentment. The greater the intensity in this sense of unease and, at the same time, the more complex the individual’ mental mechanism, the more natural and the more insurmountable the pedagogical eruptions of this unease, the more powerfully do they force their way outside.
The creative person is always from the race of the discontented. This is why education can never be limited to a single faculty. For such dislocations and snags, an inner affinity is needed between teacher and student, they must be close in terms of feelings, and in terms of thinking. Education is a process of mutual and continuous adaptation of both camps, where sometimes it is guide or leader which represents the most active and the most original effective side, am sometimes those who are being led.
A pedagogical process of this sort comes to be a real social world, like the shifting of victory from one side to another in a field of battle, like a tense batik in which the teacher is, in the best of cases, the embodiment of a small part o the class (often he is in a class all by himself). All his personal traits, his entire experience of feelings and thoughts, other than the will, he makes continuous use of in this atmosphere of tense social struggle, this inner pedagogical effort. The chain of his personal dissatisfactions, his discontent, his strivings is adapted ant the pedagogical revelations which ensue consequently constitute all told that very chain of artistic creativity which we have sketched just above. The teacher as educator cannot but be an artist. Pure objectivity in the educator is utter nonsense. A teacher who is sober-minded teaches no one.
It should be clear to the reader that the more intense this discontent, wine provides the initial push for all movement of the soul, the more intense is the movement itself, and therefore education and creativity are always tragic processes, inasmuch as they always arise out of “discontent,” out of trouble! from discord. The world evolves without any particular purpose in mind. It i just for this reason that childhood is the natural time of education, that it is the time of the greatest tragedy, discord, and incompatibility between the individual and the environment. The harmony of education arises out of dissonance, which it thereupon strives to resolve. The older we become and the greater is our sense of fitting in and the greater is our feeling of contentment in the world, the less that remains in us of the creative spirit and the less amenable are we to education
None of that pedagogics which sugar-coated the “golden time of placid childhood” and sweetened the educational process with rose-colored water lies along our road. On the contrary, we know that the tragedy of childhood is the greatest motive force for education, just as hunger and thirst are the inspirers of the struggle for existence. Education, therefore, must be guided in such a way as not to conceal and not to mask the stern features of the true “discontent” of childhood, but to push the child into a confrontation with this discontent in the sharpest way possible and as often as possible, and to force him to conquer it.
Life then discloses itself as a system of creation, of constant straining and transcendence, of constant invention and the creation of new forms of behaviour. Thus, every one of our thoughts, every one of our movements, and all of our experience constitutes a striving toward the creation of a new reality, ,i breakthrough to something new.
Life becomes creation only when it is finally freed of all the social forms that distort and disfigure it. Questions of education will have been resolved when questions of life will have been solved.
Then man’s life will become one of continuous creation, a single esthetic ceremony that will arise not out of a striving toward the satisfaction of isolated little needs, but out of conscious and brilliant creative eruption. Eating and sleeping, love and play, work and politics, every feeling and every thought, all will become the subject of creation. What is now realized within the narrow confines of art will thence infuse all of life, and life will become creative labor.
The infinite potential for the creation of life in its infinite diversity disclose itself to the teacher. Not in the narrow confines of his own personal life and lie own personal affairs will one become a true creator in the future. It is then dial pedagogics, as the creation of life, will assume the foreground: “Alongside technology,” writes Trotsky, “pedagogics, in the broad sense of psychophysical formation of new generations, becomes the domain of social thought. Pedagogical systems will gather about themselves powerful camps. Socially inculcated experience and the competition of diverse methodologies will assume a scope that now cannot even be dreamed of.”
Man, finally, has taken it upon himself to make a serious effort to discover a sense of inner harmony. He has given himself the task of instilling in the movement of his own limbs, whether in labor, in walking, or in play, a degree of intelligibility, appropriateness, and economy of the highest order, and, thereby, elegance. He wishes to become master of all the semi-conscious processes in his organism, and then all the unconscious ones as well, such as breathing, the coursing of his bloodstream, digestion, and reproduction, and, within necessary limits, to subordinate them to the dominance of reason and the will.
The human species, which crystallized in the form of homo sapiens, once again enters into a process of radical redevelopment and becomes the subject of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychological conditioning at man’s very own hands. This is fully within the realm of development. Man first banished the dark elements from industry and from ideology, supplanting brutish routine with scientific technology and religion with science. Next he drove the unconscious out of politics, having toppled the monarchy and class-conscious democracy and replaced them with apologetic [raisionalislicheskii] parliamentarianism, and then at one fell swoop, by the transparent Soviet dictatorship. The blind element had firmly lodged in economic relationships, but man chucked it out through the socialist organization of labor.
Finally, in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, in the spontaneous well-springs, in the underground of our soul, we find the nature of man himself concealed. Isn’t it clear that the greatest efforts of analytic thought and of creative initiative will be led in just this direction? The human species did not cease crawling about on all fours in front of god, tsar, and capital just so that it could then bend down submissively before the dark laws of heredity and blind sexual selection! The free man wishes to attain the greatest sense of balance in the workings of his organs, the most uniform development and use of his own tissues, in order to, at one fell swoop, bring the fear of death within the realm of the organism’s appropriate reactions to danger. For otherwise there can little doubt that man’s extreme disharmony, the extraordinary anatomical and physiological unevenness in the development and use of man’s organs and tissues impart to living instinct an unhealthy, pinched, hysterical fear of death which obscures reason and feeds foolish and humiliating fantasies of life after death.
Man has set himself the goal of becoming master of his own feelings, of lifting the instincts to the heights of consciousness and making them transparent, of stretching the thread of will into what is concealed and into the underground, and to thereby lift himself up to a new stage, to create a “higher” sociobiogical type, a, so to speak, super-man.