School teachers are workers of the negative. Of course it is not their individual fault, they were broken once and now they are obediently (for a small price!) fill the memory and the brains of their young victims with a stuffing of chewed knowledge: algebra, physics, chemistry, geometry, literature, history – all mixed together. The general nullity of the teachers, their low intellectual level, the fact that they do not rise above the general philistine level of development, speak for themselves, they are not the best people of our society. Tired and broken they practice ventriloquism according to the program. It is extremely rare for them to understand their students or to foresee them. It is sufficient to say that in the school report card in Russian literature I got a “three”. Still I was reading avidly, writing poetry non-stop from fifteen years old and a “three’ was obviously too little for me. But we did not like each other: the teacher and me. I could not put her a “three”, she could. I hope she is alive and at least once a week still and again ascertains her stupidity.
Right after the enthronement of the Soviet Power the revolutionary-Bolsheviks freely experimented with school to the utmost. Judging by “The SHKID Republic” there were teachers’ elections, school self-government. The future was planned to be interesting. They understood that if they wanted to cultivate a new man they also needed new schools. But it is one thing to contest the power in a revolutionary outburst. Another thing is to seize the power and to use it. To break at the same time many government institutions is an extremely arduous occupation. And a dangerous one too – you will break the old school and while you are building the new one there will not be any.
This is why the new school did not happen. They removed God’s Law and the letter “yat” replacing it by Pakrovsky’s history and materialism for students. The experiments of Makarenko and “The SHKID Republic” petered out. Everything was quietly returning on its circles. During the Great Patriotic War appeared the phenomenon of factory schools. After the war, I.V. Stalin having reconciliated himself with the Church and preoccupied by the strengthening of the government (Even before that he had returned officers and the shoulder-straps) began to rerun the classical education. The separate education of sexes was introduced, school uniform, belts and caps, paid education for the three senior classes and even Latin and Greek – dead languages. This imperial fashion did not last long, approximately from 1947 to 1955. And even it was not introduced everywhere, there were schools left with mixed education and without caps and belts. (They also tried to introduce a uniform for students.) During Khrushchev’s thaw the Stalinist attempt to resurrect an imperial school faded away. To the “democratic” and americanist Khrush it possibly looked as an out of place classicism. Just as “architectural extravagances” – they were starting to be really fought against: against the Stalinist imperial style of buildings of the MID, the hotel “Ukraine” and others. Meanwhile Latin, belts and caps were from the same set of imperialicity, together with the “architectural extravagances”. Khrush desperately needed a labor force for factories and plants and tractor drivers to upturn the soil, so school was made to last eight years. Workers and peasants were needed, so they were hastily fabricated in the eight-year schools.
Finally they came out with the present awkward school. Maybe they did not came out with it on purpose because the quality of the government elite – the rulers of the nation – was constantly decreasing and it is unlikely that Khrushchev and even less so Brezhnev were capable of reflecting about education, not speaking about estimating the relative qualities of education systems. After the genius of Lenin (Actually he did not leave any project of a new education. As far as I know.) and the perfect practician Stalin came the dumbheads. Dumbheads don’t have projects.
Returning to Stalin’s attempt of the Restauration of the classical education I will note once again that it was realized in the late period before his death when Stalin had come to imperialicity, having rejected the heritage of the 1917 revolution. It is unknown what he himself thought about his school but a hedgehog can understand that the new man could not have come out of a school where were taught Latin and Russian history, composed by the German Miller and other Germans on orders of the German dynasty of the Romanovs. The learned tsars’ history and obediently counted the revolutionary time from the invented date of the birth of Christ! So what was to happen? Of course not a new but a decrepit man! So with this kind of school they normally got the recreation of the ancient society.
(We needed more and more revolutionary spirit! My reproach to the revolution of 1917 is that it was not enough radical. It did not kill the ancient world but just muffled it for a time. But this will be discussed elsewhere…)
The school that exists, the sadist repressive governmental institution oriented at the suppression and the total deformation of the proper human essence has to be destroyed. Otherwise our society is condemned to recreate itself in the repulsive form in which it is today. There will always be serf-like ignorant pensioners, always will be butcher-like cops, always criminals will be recreated, always Gogol’s functionaries will appear, monumental archaic aunties-judges. Generation after generation. While the formation of these repellent creatures already begins on the school desk. Society fills up the kid a whole 11 years to death, until he has become a semi-fabricated product, a preparation for the above-enumerated types. This assembly line has to be disconnected. This is what we will do when we will come to power.
Every education should be a lot shorter. Five years are sufficient to receive a perfect average education. And the education has to be totally different.
Children today have an abnormally long childhood. The modern world has become a lot faster, information on television, information on the radio, all this makes possible a far more early possibility of knowing the world still outside of school. Apart from school. And our system of education was created in the West in the XIX century, has come to us from the West. We have to start earlier and to teach shorter.
We have to begin from five years old and to teach for no more than five years.
The teacher in the middle school has to be only one. It has to be a man, he has to have an artistic (painter, poet, writer) and military experience. No algebra, trigonometry, mathematics, physics and other abstract, never useful disciplines will be taught to the children. For the conservation and the transmission of such abstract knowledge there are scientists, it is their job. (There will be only a few scientists and the special knowledge will be limited to some small higher educational establishments.)
So as it begins to walk the child leaves his mother and comes to live in the House of Youth. The House is necessarily located in a picturesque environment with beautiful nature, outside of the city. The teacher is a master as it was already mentioned, – alone, he is necessarily a man. In case of necessity teachers of foreign languages are also enlisted but they do not bear the title of “master”. To help the master there will also be two instructors, no less then three, depending on the quantity of children in the House of Youth. Their function is to help the Master. There will be the following disciplines in the program:
History: With the account of “The New Chronology” of Fomenko / Nosovsky and the discoveries of Lev Gumilev.
Manuals will have to be elaborated.
Geography and knowledge of other countries, ethnography.
Foreign languages (western and eastern ones – more of eastern ones).
Weapons and military training. The teaching is not giving in classrooms. The skills of shooting, handling a grenade thrower, a mine thrower, driving and shooting from armored carriers, etc.
The art of public-speaking, poetry, composition and exposition.