EDUCATION AND CULTURE

by Leo Tolstoy

Translated from the Original Russian and edited by Leo Wiener

Assittant Professor of Slavic Languages at Harvard University

There are many words which have no clear definition and are easily taken one for the other, but yet are necessary for the transmission of thought. Such words are “ education,” ” culture,” and even ” instruction.”

Pedagogues sometimes do not acknowledge any distinction between culture and education, and yet are not able to express their thoughts otherwise than by using the words culture, education, instruction, or teaching. There must certainly be separate conceptions corresponding to these words. There may be some reasons why we do not wish to use these conceptions in their precise and real sense; but these conceptions exist and have a right to exist separately.

In Germany there exists a clear subdivision of the concepts as Erziehung (education) and Unterricht (instruction). It is assumed that education includes instruction, that instruction is one of the chief means of education, and that every instruction has in it an educational element, erziehliges Element. But the concept of culture, Bildnng, is mistaken either for education, or for instruction. The most general German definition will be like this: education is the formation of the best men in conformity with the ideal of human perfection, worked out by a certain period. Instruction which introduces a moral development is a means, though not an exclusive

means, toward its attainment; among the other means, outside of instruction, is the placing of the subject under education into certain conditions favourable to the ends of education, — discipline and compulsion, Zucht.

The spirit of man, say the Germans, must be broken in as the body is broken in by gymnastics. Dcr Geist nrnss gcziichtigt werden.

Culture, Bildung, in Germany, in society, and sometimes even in pedagogical literature, as already mentioned, is either mistaken for instruction and education, or is represented as a social phenomenon with which pedagogy has nothing to do. In the French language I do not even know a word corresponding to the concept of culture: educationy instruction, civilization are entirely different concepts. Even thus there is no word in English which corresponds to the concept of olrazovanic (culture).1

The German practical pedagogues sometimes do not acknowledge the subdivisions into education and culture: both are welded into one inseparable whole. In talking once with the famous Diesterweg, I led him up to the question of culture, education, and instruction. Diesterweg spoke with malicious irony of people who made such subdivisions, for according to him all these ran together. And yet we spoke of education, culture, and instruction, and we clearly understood each other. He himself said that culture had an educational element which was included in every instruction.

What do these words mean ? How are they understood, and how should they be understood ?

iThe Russian word for “culture,” obrazovanie, means also “formation,” being derived from a word meaning “image” or “form.” Tolstdy is mistaken in not finding an equivalent word for it in English, for “culture” very nearly covers it. However, in this essay what is translated by “ education ” more nearly corresponds to “bringing up,” while what is translated by “culture” frequently corresponds to the English connotations of “education,” as which it is translated elsewhere in these essays.

I will not repeat the discussions and conversations I have had with pedagogues in respect to this subject, nor will I copy from books those contradictory opinions which are current in literature regarding this matter, — that would be a waste of time, and everybody who has read my first pedagogical article may verify the truth of my words, — but will only try to explain here the origin of these conceptions and the causes of their obscurity.

According to the conceptions of the pedagogues, education includes instruction.

The so-called science of pedagogy is interested only in education, and looks upon a man receiving his culture as upon a being entirely subject to the educator. Only through him does the man in the formative period of culture receive cultural or educational impressions, whether these impressions be books, stories, memorizing, artistic or bodily exercises. The whole external world is allowed to act upon the pupil only to the extent to which the educator finds it convenient. The educator tries to surround his pupil with an impenetrable wall against the influences of the world, and allows only so much to pass through his scientific scholastico-educational funnel as he deems to be useful. I am not speaking of what has been done by so-called unprogressive men, — I am not fighting windmills, — I am speaking of the comprehension and application of education by So-called excellent, progressive educators. Everywhere the influence of life is removed from the cares of the pedagogues; everywhere the school is surrounded with a Chinese wall of book knowledge, through which only so much of the vital cultural influence is admitted as may please the educators. The influence of life is not recognized. Thus the science called pedagogy looks upon the matter, for it assumes the right to know what is necessary for the formation of the best man, and it considers it possible to remove every extra-educational influence from its charge; even thus they proceed in the practice of education.

On the basis of such a view, education and culture are naturally confused, for it is assumed that if there were not education, there would not be culture. Of late, when people have begun dimly to conceive the necessity of a freedom of culture, the best pedagogues have come to the conclusion that instruction is the best means of education, but that the instruction is to be compulsory, obligatory, and thus have begun to confuse all three conceptions of education, culture, and instruction.

According to the conceptions of the theoretical pedagogue, education is the action of one man upon another, and includes three acts : (1) the moral or forcible influence of the educator, — mode of life, punishment; (2) teaching and instruction, and (3) the direction of vital influences upon the person under education. The mistake and confusion of ideas, in our opinion, arises from the fact that pedagogy takes for its subject education, and not culture, and does not perceive the impossibility for the educator of foreseeing, weighing, and defining all the influences of life. Every pedagogue admits that life introduces its influence before school and after school, and, in spite of all efforts to remove it, even into school. This influence is so strong that the whole influence of the school’education is for the greater part annihilated; but the pedagogue sees in this only an insufficient development of the science and art of pedagogy, and insists upon regarding as his problem the education of men according to a certain pattern, and not their culture, that is, the study of the paths on which men become cultured, and the cooperation to this liberal culture. I admit that Untcrricht, teaching, instruction, is part of Erzichung, education, but culture includes both.

Education is not the subject of pedagogy, but one of the phenomena to which pedagogy cannot help paying attention; the subject of pedagogy ought to be and can be only culture. Culture, in its widest meaning, in our opinion, forms the sum total of all those influences which develop a man, give him a wider world conception, and furnish him with new information. Children’s games, suffering, punishments of parents, books, work, compulsory and free instruction, the arts, the sciences, life, — everything gives culture.

Culture in general is to be understood as the consequence of all those influences which life exerts on man (in the sense of the culture of a man we say ” a cultured man ”), or, as the influence itself of all vital conditions upon man (in the sense of the culture of a German, a Russian peasant, a gentleman, we say, “This man has received a good ora bad culture [training],” and so forth). It is only with the last that we have to deal. Education is the action of one man upon another for the purpose of making the person under education acquire certain moral habits (we say, ” They have educated him [brought him up] a hypocrite, a robber, or a good man.” The Spartans educated brave men, the French educate one-sided and self-satisfied men). Instruction is the transmission of one man’s information to another (one may instruct in the game of chess, in history, in the shoemaker’s art). Teaching, a shade of instruction, is the action of one man upon another for the purpose of making the pupil acquire certain physical habits (one teaches how to sing, do carpentry, dance, row, declaim). Instruction and teaching are the means of culture, when they are free, and means of education, when the teaching is forced upon the pupil, and when the instruction is exclusive, that is, when only those subjects are taught which the educator regards as necessary. The truth presents itself clearly and instinctively to everybody. However much we may try to weld what is disconnected, and to subdivide what is inseparable, and to subordinate thought to the existing order of things, — truth is apparent.

Education is a compulsory, forcible action of one person upon another for the purpose of forming a man such as will appear to us to be good; but culture is the free relation of people, having for its basis the need of one man to acquire knowledge, and of the other to impart that which he has acquired. Instruction, Untcrricht, is a means of both culture and education. The difference between education and culture lies only in the compulsion, which education deems itself in the right to exert. Education is culture under restraint. Culture is free.

Education, French education, German Erzichung, are conceptions which are current in Europe; but culture is a concept which exists only in Russia and partly in Germany, where there is an almost exact correspondence in the word Bildztng. But in France and in England this idea and the word do not exist at all. Civilization is enlightenment, instruction is a European conception, untranslatable into Russian, which denotes a wealth of scholastic scientific information, or the transmission of such information, but is not culture, which includes the scientific knowledge, and the arts, and the physical development.

I spoke in my first article on the right of compulsion in matters of education, and have endeavoured to prove that, firstly, compulsion is impossible; secondly, that it brings no results or only sad results; thirdly, that compulsion can have no other basis but arbitrary will. (A Circassian teaches to steal, a Mohammedan to kill the infidels.) Education as a subject of science does not exist. Education is the tendency toward moral despotism raised to a principle. Education is, I shall not say an expression of the bad side of human nature, but a phenomenon which proves the undeveloped condition of human thought, and, therefore, it cannot be put at the base of intelligent human activity, — of science.

Education is the tendency of one man to make another just like himself. (The tendency of a poor man to take the wealth away from the rich man, the feeling of envy in an old man at the sight of fresh and vigorous youth, — the feeling of envy, raised to a principle and theory.) I am convinced that the educator undertakes with such zeal the education of the child, because at the base of this tendency lies his envy of the child’s purity, and his desire to make him like himself, that is, to spoil him.

I know a usurious innkeeper, who has been making money by all kinds of rascalities, and who, in response to my persuasion and flattery to have him send his fine twelve-year-old boy to my school at Yasnaya Polyana, makes his red mug bloom out into a self-satisfied smile and constantly makes one and the same reply: ” That is so, your Serenity, but it is more important for me first to saturate him with my own spirit.” And so he takes him about with him and boasts of the fact that his son has learned to cheat the peasants who sell his father wheat. Who does not know the fathers, educated as yunkers and in military schools, who regard as good only that culture which is saturated with the spirit in which the fathers were educated ? Do not professors in the universities and monks in the seminaries saturate their students with their own spirit in just such a way ?

I do not want to prove that which I have already proved and which is very easy to prove, — that education as a premeditated formation of men according to certain patterns is sterile, unlawful, and impossible. Here I will confine myself to just one question. There are no rights of education. I do not acknowledge such, nor have they been acknowledged nor will they ever be by the young generation under education, which always and everywhere is set against compulsion in education. How are you going to prove this right ? I know nothing and assume nothing, but you acknowledge and assume a new and for us non-existing right for one man to make of others just such men as he pleases. Prove this right by any other argument than by the fact that the abuse of power has always existed. Not you are the plaintiffs, but we,— while you are the defendants.

I have several times been answered orally and in print in reply to the ideas expressed in Ydsnaya Polyana, just as one soothes an unruly child. I was told: ” Of course, to educate in the same manner as they educated in the mediaeval monasteries is bad, but the gymnasia, the universities, are sometliing quite different.” Others told me: ” No doubt it is so, but taking into consideration, and so forth, such and such conditions, we must come to the conclusion that it could not be otherwise.”

Such a mode of retorting seems to me to betray not seriousness, but weakness of mind. The question is put as follows: Has one man the right to educate another ? It will not do to answer, “No, but —” One must say directly, ” Yes,” or ” No.” If ” yes,” then a Jewish synagogue, a sexton’s school, have just as much legal right to exist as all our universities. If ” no,” then your university, as an educational institution, is just as illegal if it is imperfect, and all acknowledge it to be so. I see no middle way, not merely theoretically, but even in practice. I am equally provoked at the gymnasium with its Latin and at a professor of the university with his radicalism and materialism. Neither the gymnasiast nor the student have any freedom of choice. From my own observations even, the results of all these kinds of education are equally freaky to me. Is it not obvious that the courses of instruction in our higher institutions of learning will in the twenty-first century appear as strange and useless to our descendants, as the medicevaltschools appear to us now?

It is so easy to come to tins simple conclusion that if in the history of human knowledge there have been no absolute truths, but mistakes have constantly given way to other mistakes, there is no reason for compelling the younger generation to acquire information which is sure to prove faulty.

I have been told: ” If it has always been that way, then what are you worrying about ? It cannot be otherwise.” I do not see that. If people have always killed each other, it does not follow that it ought always to be that way, and that it is necessary to raise murder to a principle, especially when the causes of these murders have been discovered, and the possibility of avoiding them has been pointed out.

The main thing is, why do you, who acknowledge the universal human right to educate, condemn bad education ? A father condemns it, when he sends his son to the gymnasium ; religion condemns it, looking at the universities; the government, society condemn it. Either you grant everybody the right, or you grant it to nobody. I see no middle. Science must decide the question whether we have the right to educate, or not. Why not tell the truth ? The university does not like the clerical education, saying that there is nothing worse than the seminaries ; the clericals do not like the university culture, saying that there is nothing worse than the universities, and that they are only schools of pride and atheism; parents condemn the universities, and the universities condemn the military schools; the government condemns the universities, and vice versa.

Who is right and who wrong ? Healthy thought in the living, not the dead, people cannot, in view of these questions, busy itself with making pictures for object study; it must perforce get an answer to these questions. It makes no difference whether this thought will be called pedagogy or not. There are two answers : either we must acknowledge the right to be vested in those to whom we stand nearer, or whom we love most, or fear, even as the majority do (I am a priest, and so I consider the seminar)’ better than anything else; I am a soldier, so I prefer the military school; if I am a student, I recognize only the universities: thus we all do, only that we strengthen our bias by more or less ingenious arguments, not noticing that all our opponents do the same); or the right to educate is not to be vested in anybody. I chose this latter way, and I have tried to prove why.

I say that the universities, not only the Russian universities, but those in the whole of Europe, since they are not entirely free, have no other basis than that of arbitrariness, and are as monstrous as the monastic schools. I beg my future critics not to shade down my deductions: either I am talking nonsense, or else the whole pedagogy is at fault, — there is no middle way. Thus, so long as no proof will be given of the right to educate, I shall not recognize it. Still, though I do not recognize the right to educate, I cannot help recognizing the phenomenon itself, the fact of the education, and I must explain it.

Whence comes education and that strange view of our society, that inexplicable contradiction in consequence of which we say that this mother is bad, she has no right to educate her daughter, let us take her away from her mother, this institution is bad, let us destroy it, this institution is good, let us support it ? By dint of what does education exist ?

If such an abnormal condition as the use of force in culture — education — has existed for ages, the causes of this phenomenon must be rooted in human nature. I see these causes: (1) in the family, (2) in religion, (3) in the state, and (4) in society (in the narrower sense, which in our country includes the official circles and the gentry).

The first cause is due to the fact that the parents, whoever they be, wish to make their children such as they are themselves, or, at least, such as they should like to be. This tendency is so natural that one cannot be provoked at it. So long as the right of each individual to free development has not yet entered into the consciousness of all the parents, nothing else can be expected. Besides, the parents will, more than anybody else, be dependent on what will become of their sons; consequently their tendency to educate them in their fashion may be called natural, if not just.

The second cause which produces the phenomenon of education is religion. As long as a man — Mohammedan, Jew, or Christian — believes firmly that a man who does not recognize his teaching cannot be saved, and for ever loses his soul, he cannot help wishing, even though by force, to convert and educate ever)7 child in his tenets.

I repeat: religion is the only lawful and sensible basis of education.

The third and most essential cause of education is contained in the need which the government has of educating such people as it can employ for certain purposes. On the basis of this need are founded the military schools, the schools of law, engineering, and others. If there were no servants of the government, there would be no government; if there were no government, there would be no state. Consequently, this cause, too, finds its unquestionable justification.

The fourth cause, finally, lies in the need of society, of that society which with us is represented by the gentry, the officialdom, and partly by the merchant class. This society needs helpers, abettors, and accomplices.

It is remarkable, — I beg the reader for clearness’ sake to pay special attention to the following circumstance, — it is remarkable that in science and literature we continually meet with attacks made upon the compulsion of domestic education (they say the parents corrupt their children, — whereas it seems so natural for the parents to wish to make their children like themselves), and upon religious education (it seems it was but a year ago that all Europe groaned for a Jew boy who had been brought up by a Christian, whereas there is nothing more lawful than the desire to give the boy, who has fallen into my hands, the means of eternal salvation in the one religion in which I believe), and attacks upon the education of officials and officers; but how is a government, which is necessary for all of us, not to educate its servants for its own sake and for ours ? Yet one does not hear any attacks directed against the education of society. Privileged society, with its university, is always right, and yet it educates the students in conceptions contrary to those of the masses, and has no other justification than pride. Why is that so ? I think it is so, because we do not hear the voice of him who attacks us; we do not hear it, because it does not speak in print and down from the professor’s chair; But it is the mighty voice of the people, which one must listen to carefully in order to hear it.

Take any public institution of our time and of our society, — from the popular school and the home for poor children to the female boarding-school, to the gymnasia and the universities, — in all of these institutions you will find one incomprehensible phenomenon which does not startle anybody. The parents, beginning with the peasants and burghers, and ending with the merchants and the gentry, complain that their children are educated in ideas foreign to their circle. The merchants and gentlefolk of the old style say: “We do not want universities and gymnasia which will make atheists and freethinkers of our children.” The peasants and merchants do not want any schools, homes, or boarding-schools, because they do not want their children to become “ white-hands” and scribes, instead of ploughmen.

All this time all the educators, without exception, from the popular schools to the liigher institutions of learning, are concerned only about bringing up the children under their charge in such a way as not to resemble their parents. Some educators naively declare themselves to be, some, without declaring it, consider themselves to be, samples of what their pupils ought to be, and their pupils’ parents they regard as samples of that rudeness, ignorance, and vice which they are not to be.

The lady teacher, a freaky creature, contorted by life, who places the whole perfection of human nature in the art of bowing, putting on a collar, and in speaking French, will inform you confidentially that she is a martyr to her duties; that all her educational efforts are lost in vain on account of the impossibility of completely removing the children from the influence of their parents; that her charges, who had already begun to forget Ilussian and to speak poor French, who had begun to forget their friendships with the cooks and their associations with the kitchen, and their running about barefoot, and who, thank God, had learned all about Alexander the Great and about Guadeloupe, upon meeting their home folk,— alas! — forget all that and acquire anew their trivial habits. This teacher will, without being embarrassed by the presence of her pupils, speak in derision of their mothers or ri general of all women who belong to their circle, considering it her special merit, by means of ironical remarks upon the former circle of the pupils, to change their view and ideas.

I do not mention those artificial material surroundings which must entirely change the whole view of the pupils. At home all the comforts of life, the water, the cakes, good food, the well-prepared dinner, the cleanliness and comfort of the house, — all that depended on the labours and cares of the mother and of the whole family. The more labour and care, the more comforts; the less labour and care, the less comfort. It is a simple thing, but, I dare think, it is more instructive than French and Alexander the Great. In the public education this constant vital reward for labour is removed to such an extent that, no matter whether the pupil will think of it or not, her dinner will be neither better nor worse, her pillow-slips will be neither cleaner nor more soiled, the floors will be waxed neither better nor worse; she has not even her own little cell, her corner, which she may fix up as she pleases, or not; nor has she a chance to make something for herself out of ribbons and odd pieces.

” Well, who would strike a prostrate person,” nine-tenths of my readers will say, ” so what sense is there in talking about the boarding-schools?” and so forth. No, they are not prostrate, they are up and about, leaning safely on the right of education. The boarding-schools are no way more monstrous than the gymnasia and the universities. At the base of all of them lies one and the same principle, which is, the right, delegated to one man, or to a small group of men, to make of other people anything tfiey please. The boarding-schools are not prostrate, — thousands of them exist, and will exist, because they have the same right to furnish culture as the educational gymnasia and universities. The only difference is, if any, that we do not for some reason recognize the family’s right to educate as they please, — we tear the child away from her corrupt mother and place her in a home, where a corrupt lady teacher will straighten her out.

We do not recognize the right of a religion to educate; we exclaim against the seminaries and monastic schools; we do not recognize the state’s right to educate; we are dissatisfied with the military schools, with the schools of law, and so forth; but we lack the courage to deny the legality of the institutions in which society, that is, not the masses, but the higher society, claim the right to educate as they please, — the boarding-schools for girls, and the universities. The universities ? Yes, the universities. I will take the liberty of analyzing also this temple of wisdom. From my point of view it has not advanced one step beyond the boarding-school; more than that, in it lies the root of evil, — the despotism of society, against which no hand has yet been raised.

Just as the boarding-school has decided that there is no salvation without the instrument called a piano, and without the French language, even so one wiseacre, or a company of such wiseacres (I do not care if by this company will be understood the representatives of European science, from which we supposedly have borrowed the organization of our universities, — in any case this company of wiseacres will be very insignificant in comparison with that mass of students for whom the university is organized in the future), have established a university for the study of positively all sciences in their highest, their very highest development, and, you must not forget it, have established such institutions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Kiev, Dorpat, Kharkov, and to-morrow will establish some more in Saratov and in Nikoldev; wherever they please, they will establish an institution for the study of all the sciences in their highest development. I doubt if these wiseacres have thought out the organization of such an institution.

The boarding-school teacher has an easier task: she has a model — herself. But here the models are too varied and too complex. But let us suppose that such an organization is thought out; let us suppose, which is less probable, that we possess people for these institutions. Let us look at the activity of such an institution and at its results. I have already spoken of the impossibility of proving the programme of any institution of learning, much less of a university, as of one which prepares not for any other institution, but directly for life. I will only repeat — in which all unbiassed people must necessarily agree with me — that there is no possibility of proving the necessity of subdividing the department of study.

Both the boarding-school teacher and the university regard it as the first condition of admitting people to the participation in the culture that they be detached from the circle to which they originally belonged. The university, as a general rule, admits only students who have passed a seven years’ apprenticeship at a gymnasium, and who have lived in large cities. A small proportion of special students pass the same gymnasium course with the aid of private teachers, instead of the gymnasium.

Before entering the gymnasium, a pupil has to pass through a course of instruction at a county and popular school.

I will try, by leaving aside all learned references to history and all ingenious comparisons with the state of affairs in European countries, to speak simply of what is taking place under our eyes in Russia.

I hope that all will agree with me that the purpose of our educational institutions consists chiefly in the dissemination of culture among all classes, and not in the conservation of culture in some one class which has taken exclusive possession of it, that is, that we are not so much concerned about the culture of the son of some nabob or dignitary (these will find their culture. in a European, if not in a Russian, institution), as that we should give culture to the son of an innkeeper, of a merchant of the third guild, of a burgher, of a priest, of a former manorial servant, and so forth. I leave out the peasant, for that would be an entirely unrealizable dream. In short, the aim of the university is the dissemination of culture among the greatest possible number of men.

Let us take, for example, the son of a small town merchant or a small yeoman. At first the boy is sent to school to learn the rudiments. This instruction, as is well known, consists in the memorizing of incomprehensible Slavic words, which lasts, as is well known, three or four years. The information taken away from such instruction proves inapplicable to life; the moral habits, taken away from there, consist in disrespect for his elders and teachers, sometimes in the theft of books, and so forth, and, above all, in idleness and indolence.

It seems to me that it is superfluous to prove that a school in which it takes three years to learn that which could be acquired in three months is a school of idleness and indolence. A child who is compelled to sit motionless at his book for the period of six hours, studying the whole day that winch he ought to learn in half an hour, is artificially trained in the most complete and most baneful idleness.

Upon the children’s returning from such a school, nine-tenths of the parents, especially the mothers, find them partially spoilt, physically enfeebled, and alienated; but the necessity of making successful men of the world of them urges the parents to send them on, to the county school. In this institution the acquisition of habits of idleness, deceit, hypocrisy, and the physical deterioration continue with greater vigour. In the county school one sometimes sees healthy faces, in the gymnasium rarely, in the university hardly ever. In the county school the subjects of instruction are even less applicable to life than in the first. Here begin Alexander the Great and Guadeloupe, and what purports to be an explanation of the phenomena of Nature, which give the pupil nothing but false pride and contempt for his parents, in which he is supported by the example of Ins teachers. Who does not know those pupils who have an utter contempt for the whole mass of uneducated people on the ground that they have heard from the teacher that the earth is round, and that the air consists of hydrogen and oxygen!

After the county school, that foolish mother, whom the writers of novels have so pleasantly ridiculed, worries still more about her physically and morally changed child. There follows the course in the gymnasium, with the same artifices of examinations and compulsion, which evolve hypocrisy, deceit, and idleness, and the son of a merchant or of a petty yeoman, who does not know where to find a workman or clerk, studies by rote French or Latin grammar, the history of Luther, and, in a language not familiarly his own, makes vain endeavours to write a composition on the advantages of a representative mode of government. In addition to all this totally inapplicable wisdom, he learns to make debts, to cheat, to extort money from his parents, to commit debauches, and so forth, acquiring sciences which will receive their final development in the university. Here, in the gymnasium, we see the final alienation from home.

Enlightened teachers endeavour to raise him above his natural surroundings, and for this purpose have him read Byelmski, Macaulay, Lewes, and so forth, not because he may have an exclusive bent for something in particular, but in order to develop him, as they call it. And the gymnasiast, on the basis of dim conceptions and of words corresponding to them, — progress, liberalism, materialism, historical evolution, etc., — looks with contempt and hostility at his past. The aim of the instructors is attained, but the parents, especially the mother, with still greater misgivings and sadness look at their emaciated, self-confident and self-satisfied Vanya, speaking a strange language, thinking with a strange mind, smoking cigarettes, and drinking wine. ” The deed is done, and there are others like him,” think his parents; ” no doubt that is the way it ought to be,” and Vanya is sent to the university. The parents dare not tell themselves that they were mistaken.

In the university, as was said before, you will rarely see a healthy, fresh face, and you will not see one who looks with respect, or even without respect, if only calmly, at the circle from which he has emanated, and in which he will have to live; he looks at it with contempt, loathing, and supercilious compassion. Thus he looks at the people of his circle and at his relatives, and even thus he looks at the activity which ought to be his according to his social standing. Only three careers exclusively present themselves to him surrounded by a golden aureole: the learned, the literary, and the official.

Among the subjects of instruction there is not one which is applicable to life, and they are taught in precisely the same manner in which the psalter and Obo-ddvski’s geography are studied. I exclude only the experimental subjects, such as chemistry, physiolog}’, anatomy, and even astronomy, where the students are compelled to work; all the other subjects, such as philosophy, history, law, philology, are learned by rote, with the only purpose in view that of being able to answer questions at the examinations, whatever the examinations be, for promotion or final, — it makes no difference which.

I see the haughty contempt of the professors as they read these lines. They will not even honour me with an expression of their anger, and will not descend from the height of their grandeur in order to prove to a writer of stories that he does not understand anything in this important and mysterious business. I know that, but that does not by any means stop me from pointing out the deductions of reason and of observation.

I cannot with the professors recognize the mystery of culture, invisibly performed on the students, independently from the form and the contents of the lectures of the professors. I recognize nothing of the kind, just as I do not recognize the mysterious, unexplained cultural influence of the classical education, which they no longer deem it necessary to discuss. No matter how many universally recognized wiseacres and respectable people may affirm that for the development of a man nothing is more useful than the study of Latin grammar, and Greek and Latin verses in the original, when it is possible to read them in translation, I will not believe it, just as I cannot believe that it is good for a man’s development to stand three hours on one foot. That has to be proved by something more than experience.

By experience everything imaginable may be proved. The reader of the psalter proves by experience that the best method for teaching reading is to make one study the psalter; the shoemaker says that the best way to learn his art is to make the boys for two years fetch water, chop wood, and so forth. In this manner you may prove anything you please. I say all this so that the defenders of the university may not tell me of the historical meaning, of the mysterious cultural influence, of the common bond of the governmental educational institutions, that they may not adduce to me as an example the universities of Oxford and Heidelberg, but that they may allow me to discuss the matter according to good common sense, and that they themselves may do so.

All I know is that when I enter the university at the age of from sixteen to eighteen years, the circle of my knowledge is already defined for me, as it was in the department which I entered, and it is defined quite arbitrarily. I come to any one of the lectures prescribed for me by the department, and I am supposed not only to hear all the professor is lecturing about, but even to commit it to memory, if not word for word, at least sentence for sentence. If I do not learn it all, the professor will not give me the necessary diploma at the final or at the biennial examinations. I do not speak of the abuses which are repeated a hundred times. In order to receive this diploma, I must have certain habits which the professor approves of: I must either always be sitting on the first bench and take down notes, or I must have a frightened or a merry look at the examination, or I must share the professor’s opinions, or I must regularly attend his evenings at home (these are not my suppositions, but the opinions of the students, which one may hear at any university). While listening to the professor’s lecture, I may differ from his view, I may, on the basis of my readings in regard to this subject, find that the professor’s lectures are bad, — I still must listen to them or, at least, memorize them.

In the universities there exists a dogma which is not promulgated by the professors: it is the dogma of the professor’s papal infallibility. Moreover, the culture is imparted to the student by the professor precisely as is done with all priests, secretly, in the cell, and with a demand for reverential respect from the uninitiated and from the students. As soon as a professor is appointed, he begins to lecture, and though he be naturally dull, and duller during the performance of his duties, though he may have fallen entirely behind science, though he have an unworthy character, — he continues to read as long as he lives, and the students have no means of expressing their satisfaction or discontent. Moreover, that which the professor lectures upon remains a secret to all but the students. It may be this is due to my ignorance, but I do not know of any manuals composed from the lectures of a professor. If there have existed such courses, the proportion of them will be about one in the hundred.

What is that? A professor lectures on a science in a higher cultural institution, — let us say the history of Russian law, or civil law, — consequently he knows this science in its highest development, consequently he has been able to combine all the different views held in respect to this science, or to select one of them, the most modern, and to prove why it is so; why, then, does he deprive us, and all of Europe, of the fruits of his wisdom, and why does he impart them only to the students who attend his lectures ? Does he not know that there are good publishers who pay good sums for good books, that there exists a literary criticism, which appreciates literary productions, and that it would be far more convenient for the students to read Iris book at home, lying on the bed, than to write out his lectures ? If the science is changed and made fuller each year, then there may appear each year new supplementary articles. Literature and society would be grateful to him. Why do not the professors print their courses ?

I should like to ascribe this to an indifference to literary success, but, to my misfortune, I see that these same high priests of science do not refuse to write a light political article, one that often does not touch upon their subject. I am afraid that the mystery of our university instruction is due to the fact that ninety out of every one hundred courses would not, if they were printed, stand our undeveloped literary criticism. Why is it absolutely necessary to lecture ? Why can’t the students be given a good book, their own or somebody else’s, one or two, or ten good books ?

The condition of university instruction, that the professor must lecture and that his lectures must be absolutely something of his own, belongs to the dogmas of university practice, in which I do not believe, and which it is impossible to prove. ” The oral transmission impresses the minds better, and so forth,” I shall be told; all that is not true. I know myself and many others, who are not an exception but form the common rule, and who understand nothing when told orally, but who comprehend well only when they quietly read a book at home. The oral transmission would only then have a meaning if the students had a right to oppose, and the lecture were a conversation, and not a lesson. Only then we, the public, would have no right to demand of the professors that they should publish those manuals from which they for thirty years in succession have been teaching our children and brothers. But as matters now are, the reading of lectures is only an amusing ceremony which has no meaning, particularly amusing on account of the solemnity with which it is performed.

I am not on the lookout for means to mend the universities ; I do not say that, by giving the students the privilege of retorting at the lectures, it would be possible to invest the university instruction with some meaning. So far as I know the professors and students, I think that in such a case the students would act like schoolboys and would be given to liberal commonplaces, while the professors would not be able coolly to carry on the discussion, without having recourse to force, and matters would only be worse. But from that, I think, it does not at all follow that the students must by all means be silent and that the professors have the right to say what they please; from this only follows that the whole structure of the university is placed on a false foundation.

I can understand a university, corresponding to its name and its fundamental idea, — as a collection of men for the purpose of their mutual culture. Such universities, unknown to us, spring up and exist in various comers of Russia; in the universities themselves, in the student circles, people come together, read, discuss, until at last the rule establishes itself when to meet and how to discuss. That is a real university. But our universities, in spite of all the empty prattle about the seeming liberalism of their structure, are institutions which by their organization in no way differ from female boarding-schools and military academies. As the military schools train officers, as the schools of law train officials, so the universities train officials and men of university culture. (This is, as all know, a special rank, a calling, almost a caste.)

The late university occurrences find an explanation in the simplest manner possible: the students were permitted to let the collars of their shirts protrude, and to wear their uniforms unbuttoned, and they were no longer to be punished for non-attendance at lectures, whereupon the whole structure came very near to its fall. To mend matters, there is this means: incarcerate them again for non-attendance at lectures, and enforce again the wearing of uniforms. It would be better still, following the example set by the English institutions, to punish them for unsatisfactory progress and for misbehaviour, and, above all, to limit the number of students to the number of men required. This would be consistent, and, under such an arrangement, the universities will give us just the men it gave us before.

The universities, as establishments for the education of members of society, in the sense of the higher official circles, are reasonable; but the moment men wanted to make of them institutions for the culture of the whole Russian society, they proved worthless. I positively cannot understand on what ground uniforms and discipline are recognized as necessary in the military schools, while in the universities, where the instruction is just the same, with examinations, compulsion, and programmes, and without the student’s right to retort and keep away from lectures, — why in the universities they speak of freedom and imagine that they can get along without the means employed at the military schools. Let not the example of the German universities confuse us! We cannot take an example from the German universities: with them every custom, every law is sacred, and with us, happily or unhappily, it is the other way.

The whole trouble, both in the matters of university instruction and of culture in general, is caused mainly by people who do not reflect, but who submit to the ideas of the age, and who thus imagine that it is possible to serve two masters at once. Those are the same men who reply to my thoughts expressed before as follows: ” It is true, the time has passed when children are beaten for their studies and when things are learned by rote,— that is all very true; but you must admit that it is sometimes impossible to get along without the rod, and that the children must be compelled to memorize. You are right, but why go to extremes ?” and so forth, and so forth.

You would think that these people reflect charmingly, but it is even they who have become the enemies of truth and freedom. They seem to be agreeing with you in order, having taken possession of your thought, to change and cut and lop it according to their fashion. They do not admit at all that freedom is necessary; they only say so because they are afraid not to bow before the idol of our age. They only, like officials, praise the governor to his face, as long as he has the power in his hands. How many thousand times I prefer my friend the priest, who says directly that there is no reason for reflection as long as people are liable to die unfortunate, without knowing the divine law, and that, therefore, all means must be employed in order to teach the child the divine law, — to save him. He says that compulsion is necessary, that teaching is teaching, and not playing. With him I can debate, but with the gentlemen who serve both despotism and liberty, never.

It is these very gentlemen who breed that peculiar condition of the universities under which we now live, and in which one needs that special art of diplomacy, when, according to Figaro, it is not known who is cheating and who is cheated. The students deceive their parents and instructors; the instructors deceive the parents, the students, and the government, and so forth, in all possible combinations and permutations. We are told that it must be so; we are told: ” You, the uninitiated, don’t stick your nose into our business, for here a special art and special information are needed, — this is a historical evolution.” And yet the affair seems so simple.

Some want to teach and others want to learn. Let them teach as much as they can, and let them learn as much as they will.

I remember, during the very heat of Kostomarov’s university project, I defended the project in the presence of a professor. With what inimitable, profound seriousness, almost in a whisper, impressively and confidentially, the professor said to me : ” Do you know what that project is ? It is not the project of a new university, it is the project of doing away with universities,” and he looked with an expression of terror at me. ” What of it ? That would be a good thing,” I said, ” because the universities are bad.” The professor would not discuss any further with me, although he had not been able to prove to me that universities were good, just as nobody else is able to prove it.

All men are human, even professors. Not one labourer will say that we must destroy the factory where he earns a piece of bread, and he will say so not from conviction, but unconsciously. Those gentlemen who are concerned about a greater freedom of the universities resemble a man who, having brought up some young nightingales and concluding that they need freedom, lets them out of the cage and gives them freedom at the end of cords attached to their feet, and then wonders why the nightingales are not doing any better on the cord, but only break their legs and die.

No one has ever thought of establishing universities based on the needs of the people. That was impossible because the needs of the people have remained unknown. The universities were founded to answer certain needs, partly of the government and partly of higher society, and for the universities was established all that preparatory ladder of educational institutions which has nothing in common with the needs of the people. The government needed officials, doctors, jurists, teachers, and the universities were founded in order to train these. Now higher society needs liberals of a certain pattern, and the universities train these. The only blunder is that the masses do not need these liberals at all.

It is generally said that the defects of the universities are due to the defects in the lower institutions. I affirm the opposite: the defects of the popular, especially the county, schools, are mainly due to the false exigencies of the universities.

Let us now take a glance at the practice in the universities. Out of fifty students who compose the audience, ten men in the first two rows of seats have note-books and are taking down notes; of these ten, six keep notes in order to find favour with the professor, from a feeling of subserviency worked out by the lower school and by the gymnasium; the other four take notes from a sincere desire to write down the whole course, which they abandon at the fourth lecture, until only one-fifteenth or one-twentieth of the whole number continue to write down the lectures.

It is very difficult not to miss a lecture. The student consults the manual, and it naturally occurs to him that it is useless to write out the lectures when the same result may be obtained from a manual or from the notes of somebody else. In mathematics, and for all that in any other subject, as every teacher must know, not one student is able all the time to follow the deductions and conclusions of the teacher, however precise, clear, and interesting the teacher may try to be. Very frequently there happens a moment of dulness or absent-mindedness with the student: he ought to ask a question, why, for what purpose, what preceded it; the connection is lost, but the professor goes on. The chief care of the students (I am now speaking only of the very best) is to get notes or a manual, from which it would be possible to prepare for the examinations.

The majority go to lectures either because they have nothing else to do, or because they have not yet grown tired of them, or to please the professor, or, in rare cases, because it is the right thing to do, when one professor in a hundred becomes popular and it is a kind of mental dandyism with the students to attend his lectures. From the point of view of the students, the lectures nearly always are an empty formality, necessary only for the sake of the examinations. The majority of students do not study their subjects during the whole time they are given, but instead busy themselves with other subjects, the programme of which is determined by the circle with which the students fall in. The lectures are looked upon in the same way in which soldiers look upon military exercises, while an examination is to them a parade, a dull necessity.

The programme which circles have laid down of late is not varied ; it generally consists of the following: of the reading and re-reading of old articles by Byelfnski and of new ones by Chernysh6vski, Antonovich, Pisarev, and so forth; then, of the reading of new books which are enjoying great popularity in Europe, without any connection or any relation to the subjects which they study, such as Lewes, Buckle, and so on. But their chief occupation is the reading of prohibited books and the copying of these, such as Feuerbach, Moleschott, Buchner, and especially Gertsen and Ogarev. Books are copied, not according to their worth, but in proportion to their degree of prohibition. I have seen in students’ rooms heaps of copied books, incomparably more voluminous than would be the whole four years’ course of instruction, and among these copy-books fat books of the most abominable of Pushkin’s poems and of the most insipid and most colourless of Rylydev’s poems. Other occupations are meetings at which are discussed the most varied and most important subjects, such as the independence of Little Russia, the dissemination of the rudiments among the masses, the playing of some prank in common on a professor or on the inspector, which is called demanding explanations, the union of the two circles, the aristocratic and the plebeian, and so forth. All that is sometimes ridiculous, but often dear, touching, and poetical, such as idle youth frequently is.

The tiling is, that in these occupations lose themselves young men, sons of petty landowners or of merchants of the third guild, whom the parents have sent away to make helpers of them, one, to make his small estate productive, the other, to help him carry on his business more regularly and more profitably. In these circles the following opinions prevail about the professors: one is very stupid, though a worker; another has fallen behind in his science, though an able man; a third is not quite honest and allows only those to pass who fulfil certain demands of his; a fourth is the laughing-stock of the human race, who, for thirty years in succession, has been reading his notes which are written in an abominable language,— and happy is the university which, to fifty professors, has at least one who is respected and beloved by the students.

Formerly, when there were annual examinations, there took place each year, not exactly a study of the subject, but at least a cramming from notes before the examinations. Now such cramming takes place twice: in passing from the second to the third year, and at the final examination. The lot which was then cast four times during university life is now cast twice.

As long as there exist examinations under the present procedure, whether pass examinations or finals, there must necessarily exist the senseless cramming, and the lottery, and the personal likes and dislikes, and the arbitrariness of the professor, and the cheating of the students. I do not know what the founders of the universities felt about the examinations, but as common sense tells me, and as I have experienced it more than once, and as many, many people have agreed with me, — examinations cannot serve as a measure of knowledge, but only as a field for rank arbitrariness on the side of the professors, and of rank deception on the side of the students.

I had to pass examinations three times in my life: the first year I was not promoted from the first course to the second by the professor of Russian history, who had shortly before that had a quarrel with my family, although I had not missed one lecture and knew Russian history; also for number one1 in German, given me by the same professor, although I knew German incomparably better than all the students of our course. In the following year I received five in Russian history, because, having had a dispute with a fellow student as to who had a better memory, we had learned one question each by heart, and I received at the examination the very question I had memorized, which, as I well remember, was the biography of Mazeppa. That was in the year 1845. In 1848 I went to my candidate’s examination in the St. Petersburg University, knowing literally nothing, and having prepared myself but one week before the examinations. I did not sleep for nights, and received candidate’s marks in civil and criminal law, having prepared each subject not longer than a week. In tins year 1862, I know students who have graduated by preparing their subjects just one week before the examinations. I know also of cases, for this year, where seniors have falsified tickets; I know of one professor who gave a student three instead of five because the student allowed himself to smile. The professor remarked to him: ” We may smile, but you must not,” and put down three.

I hope that nobody will regard the adduced cases as exceptions. Any one who knows the universities knows *One is the lowest, and five the highest mark.

that the cases adduced form the rule, and not the exception, and that it cannot be otherwise. If there is anybody who doubts it, we will mention millions of cases. There will be found protesters against the Ministry of Public Instruction who will sign their names, as there have been protesters against the Ministry of Internal Affairs and of Justice. What happened in 1848, and in 1862, will also happen in 1872, as long as the organization remains the same. The abolishment of the uniforms and of annual examinations does not further this freedom one hair’s breadth; these are only new patches on an old garment, which only tear the old cloth. No man putteth new wine into old bottles.

I flatter myself with the hope that even the defenders of the university will say: “That is so, or partly true. But you forget that there are students who follow the lectures with love and who do not need examinations at all, and, what is most important, you forget the cultural influence of the universities.”

No, I forget neither the one nor the other: about the first, the independently working students, I will say that for them there is no need of universities with their organization, — they need only appliances, a library, — not lectures to listen to, but conversations with men who can guide them. But even for that minority the universities will not furnish information corresponding to their circle, if they do not wish to become litterateurs or professors; the main thing is that even this minority is subject to the influence which is called cultural, but which I call the corrupting influence of the universities.

The second retort about the cultural influence of the universities belongs to the number of those which are based on faith and first must be proved. Who has proved, and how has it been proved, that the universities have that cultural influence, and whence springs that mysterious cultural influence ? There is no communion with the professors, — there is not that confidence and love which spring from it; there is, in the majority of cases, nothing but fear and suspicion. The students will learn nothing new from the professors which they could not as well find out from books. The cultural influence, then, lies in the communion of the young men occupied with the same subjects, I suppose. Doubtless so; but they are for the most part occupied, not with science, as you presume, but with cramming for examinations, cheating the professors, acting the liberals, and all such things as will take possession of young men who are torn away from their surround- . ings, their family, and who are artificially connected by the spirit of fellowship, raised to a principle and carried to a point of self-contentment, of self-sufficiency.

I am not speaking of the exceptions, of the students living with their families, for they are less subject to the cultural, that is, the corrupting influence of students’ life ; nor do I speak of those rare exceptions, where men have since childhood been devoted to science, who, being constantly at work, arc also only partially subjected to that influence. Indeed, people are being trained for life, for work; every work demands not only familiarity with it, but also order, regularity, and, above all, the ability to live and get along with men. See how the son of a peasant learns to become a farmer, how the sexton’s son, reading in the choir, learns to be a sexton, how the son of a Kirgiz cattle-keeper becomes a herder: he enters very early into direct relations with life, with Nature, and with men ; he learns early, while working, to be productive, and he learns, being secure on the material side of life, that is, secure as regards a piece of bread, his wearing apparel, his lodging. Now look at a student, who is torn away from home, from the family, cast into a strange city, full of temptations for his youth, without means of support (because the parents provide only the necessary means, while all go out to pass their time well), in a circle of companions who by their society only intensify his defects, without guides, without an aim, having pushed off from the old and having not yet landed at the new. Such, with rare exceptions, is the position of a student. From this results that which alone can result: officials, fit only for the government; or professional officials, or literary officials, fit for society ; or people aimlessly torn away from their former surroundings, with a spoiled youth, and finding no place for themselves in life, so-called people with university culture, — advanced, that is, irritable, sickly liberals.

The university is our first and our chief educational institution. It is the first to arrogate to itself the right of education, and it is the first, so far as the results, which it obtains, indicate, to prove the illegality and impossibility of education. Only from the social point of view is it possible to justify the fruits of the university. The university trains not such men as humanity needs, but such as corrupt society needs.

The course is ended. I presuppose my imaginary alumnus as one of the best in every respect. He comes back to his home : all are strangers to him, — his father, his mother, his relatives. He shares neither their faith, nor their desires, and he prays not to their God, but to other idols. His parents are deceived, and the son frequently wishes to unite with them into one family, but he no longer can do that. What I say is not an empty phrase, not a fancy. I know very many students who, after returning to their families, were at odds with their families in nearly all their convictions, about marriage, about honour, about commerce. But the deed is done, and the parents console themselves with the thought that such is now the age ; that the present education is such that their son will make a career for himself somewhere else, if not in his former surroundings; that he will find his livelihood and means to help them; and that he will be happy in his own way.

Unfortunately, in nine cases out of ten, the parents are again mistaken. Having graduated, their son does not know where to lay down his head. A strange thing it is ! The information which he has acquired is of no use to anybody, — no one gives anything for it. Their only application is in literature and in pedagogy, that is, in the science dealing with the education of just such useless men as he is.

Now, this is strange: culture is so rare in Russia, so it ought to be expensive and highly esteemed. In. reality, the very opposite takes place. We need machinists, for we have few of them, and we send to all of Europe for machinists and pay them good wages; why, then, do people with a university education say (and there are but few cultured people among us) that they are needed, whereas we not only do not appreciate them, but they even can find no place for themselves ? Why does a man who has finished his apprenticeship with a carpenter, stone-mason, or stucco-worker, get at once from fifteen to seventeen roubles, if he is a workman, and twenty-five roubles a month, if he is a master mechanic, a boss, while a student is glad if he gets ten (I except literature and officialdom, but speak only of what a student can get in a practical activity) ? Why do landed proprietors, who have land left that must be made productive, pay from three hundred to five hundred roubles to peasant farmers, when they will not pay even two hundred roubles to agricultural students and natural science graduates ? And why do peasant, and not student bosses control thousands of workmen at the railroads ? Why is it that if a student gets a place with a good salary, he gets it not for what knowledge he has acquired in the university, but for what he has learned later ? Why do law students become officers and mathematicians and natural science students officials ? Why does a ploughman, after living a year in sufficiency, bring home from fifty to sixty roubles, while a student leaves after a year’s existence, a debt of one hundred roubles ? Why do the masses pay a popular school-teacher eight, nine, ten roubles a month, whether he be a sexton, or a student? Why does a merchant employ as a clerk, take as a son-in-law into his house, not a student, but a peasant lad?

Because, I shall be told, society does not yet know how to appreciate education; because a student teacher will not cheat workmen and enslave them by advance payments; because a student merchant will not give wrong measures and weights; because the fruits of culture are not so palpable as the fruits of routine and ignorance.

This may be so, I shall reply, only experience has taught me the opposite. A student does not know how to manage an affair, neither honestly, nor dishonestly, or if he does know how, he manages it in conformity with his nature, with that general structure of his moral habits, which life, independently of school, has evolved in him. I know an equal number of honest students and of other people, and vice versa. But let us even suppose that the university training develops the feeling of justice in man, and that, in consequence of this, uneducated people prefer uneducated men to students and value them higher than students. Let us suppose that that is so. Why, then, can we, so-called cultured people and men of means, the gentry, the litterateurs, the professors, make no other use of the students than in government service ? I leave out the government service on the ground that the remuneration in that service cannot be taken as a measure of deserts or of knowledge.

Everybody knows that a student, an ex-officer, a landed proprietor who has squandered his estate, a foreigner, and so forth, travels to the capital, the moment he for some reason must earn a livelihood, and, according to his connections and the influence brought to bear, receives a place in the administration, or, if he does not receive it, he regards himself as insulted. It is for that reason that I do not speak of the remuneration in the service; but I ask why does that same professor, who has imparted that culture to the students, give fifteen roubles a month to his janitor, or twenty roubles to a carpenter, while to the student who comes to him he says that he is very sorry, that he cannot give him a place, that all he can do is to try for him among the officials, or he offers him a ten-rouble place as copyist or proof-reader of the work winch he happens to be publishing ; that is, he offers him a place in which there is to be applied the knowledge which he has taken away from the county school, — the ability to write ? There are no places where the knowledge of Roman law, Greek literature, and integral calculus may be applied, and there can be none.

Thus, in the majority of cases, the son returning from the university to his father does not justify the hopes of the parents, and, in order that he may not become a burden to the family, he is obliged to accept a place in which all the knowledge he needs is the ability to write, and in which he enters into competition with all the Russians who know the rudiments. The only advantage he has is his rank, which does him good only in service, where connections and other conditions are more effective ; another advantage is his liberalism, which is not applicable to anything. It seems to me that the percentage of men who occupy places with good remuneration outside the government service is exceedingly small. Trustworthy statistical data about the activity of graduates would be an important material for the science of culture, and, I am convinced, would mathematically prove the truth which I am trying to elucidate from a priori reasoning and from data at hand, — the truth that people with a university education are of little use, and that they direct their chief activity to literature and pedagogy ; that is, to repeating that eternal circle of culture and to creating just such useless people for actual life.

But I have not foreseen one retort, or rather one source of retorts, which naturally will arise with the majority of my readers: Why does this same highest culture, which turns out to be so fruitful in Europe, become so inapplicable with us ? The European societies are more cultured than ours, why, then, cannot Russian society travel along the same path which the European societies have traversed ?

This retort would be insuperable, if it were proved, first, that the path over which the European nations have travelled, is the best; secondly, that all humanity travel over the same path; and thirdly, that culture is being grafted upon our people. The whole East has been educated by entirely different paths than the European humanity. If it were proved that a young animal, a wolf or dog, had been brought up on meat and had in this manner received its full development, should I have the right to conclude that, in order to bring up a young horse or a rabbit, I must feed it on meat, in which way alone I can procure its full development ? Could I finally conclude from these opposite experiments that, in order to bring up a bear cub, I must feed it on meat or oats ? Experience would show me that a bear needs both. Even though I may think that it is more natural for meat to form flesh, and though my previous experiments confirm my supposition, I cannot continue giving the colt meat to eat, if he throws it up every time, and if his organism will not assimilate the food.

The same takes place with the European culture, both in form and contents, when it is transferred to our soil. The organism of the Russian people does not assimilate it; and yet, there must be some other food which will support its organism, for it lives. This food does not seem food for us, just as grass is no food for a carnivorous animal; in the meantime the historico-physiological process is taking place, and that food, unacknowledged though it be by us, is assimilated by the people, and the immense animal is getting stronger and growing up.

Making a r£sumd of all said above, we arrive at the following conclusions:

(1) Culture and education are two distinct conceptions.

(2) Culture is free, and, therefore, legal and just; education is compulsory, and, therefore, illegal and unjust; it cannot be justified by reason, and, consequently, cannot form the subject of pedagogy.

(3) Education, as a phenomenon, has its origin: (a) in the family, (b) in faith, (c) in the government, (d) in society.

(4) The domestic, religious, and governmental bases of education are natural and find their justification in necessity ; but the social education has no other foundation than the pride of human reason, and thus bears the most baneful fruits, such as the universities and university culture.

Now, having in part explained our view on education and culture, and having defined the limits of both, we may reply to the questions put by Mr. Glydbov in the periodical Education (No. 5, of 1862), — the first questions that naturally must arise during a serious reflection on the matter of culture.

(1) ‘What shall a school be if it is not to take part in the business of education ?

(2) What is meant by non-intcrfcrence of the school in matters of education ?

And (3) Is it possible to separate education from instruction, especially from primary instruction, when the educational clement is brought to bear on the youthful minds even in the higher schools ?

(We have already pointed out that the form of the higher institutions of learning, where the educational element is present, by no means serves us as a model. We deny the plan of the higher institutions of learning as much as that of the lower, and we see in it the beginning of all evil.)

In order to answer the questions put to us, we will only transpose them : (1) What is meant by noninterference of the school in education ? (2) Is such a noninterference possible ? (3) What must the school be, if it is not to interfere in education ?

To avoid misunderstandings, I must first explain what I mean by the word ” school,” which I used in the same sense in my first article. By the word ” school” I understand not the house in which the instruction is given, not the teachers, not the pupils, not a certain tendency of instruction, but, in the general sense, the conscious activity of him who gives culture upon those who receive it, that is, one part of culture, in whatever way this activity may find its expression: the teaching of the regulations to a recruit is a school; public lectures are a school; a course in a Mohammedan institution of learning is a school; the collections of a museum and free access to them for those who wish to see them are a school

I reply to the first question. The noninterference of the school in matters of culture means the noninterference of the school in the culture [formation] of beliefs, the convictions, and the character of him who receives that culture. This noninterference is obtained by granting the person under culture the full freedom to avail himself of the teaching which answers his need, which he wants, and to avail himself of it to the extent to which he needs and wants it, and to avoid the teaching which he does not need and which he does not want.

Public lectures, museums are the best examples of schools -without interference in education. Universities are examples of schools with interference in matters of education. In these institutions the students are confined to certain limits by a definite course, a programme, a code of selected studies, by the exigencies of the examinations, and by the grant of rights, based chiefly on these examinations, or, more correctly, by the deprivation of rights in case of non-compliance with certain prescribed conditions. (A senior taking his examinations threatened with one of the most terrible punishments, — with the loss of his ten or twelve years of labour in the gymnasium and in the university, and with the loss of all the advantages in view of which he bore privations for the period of twelve years.)

In these institutions everything is so arranged that the student, being threatened with punishments, is obliged in receiving his culture to adopt that educational element and to assimilate those beliefs, those convictions, and that character, which the founders of the institution want. The compulsory educational element, which consists in the exclusive choice of one circle of sciences and in the threat of punishment, is as strong and as patent to the serious observer, as in that other institution with corporal punishment, which superficial observers oppose to the universities.

Public lectures, whose number is on the continuous increase in Europe and in America, on the contrary, not only do not confine one to a certain circle of knowledge, not only do not demand attention under threat of punishment, but expect from the students certain sacrifices, by which they prove, in contradistinction to the first, the complete freedom of choice and of the basis on which they are reared. That is what is meant by interference and noninterference of school in education.

If I am told that such noninterference, which is possible for the higher institutions and for grown-up people, is not possible for the lower schools and for minors, because we have no example for it in the shape of public lectures for children, and so forth, I will answer that if we are not going to understand the word ” school ” in the narrowest sense, but will accept it with the above-mentioned definition, we shall find for the lower stages of knowledge and for the lower ages many influences of liberal culture without interference in education, corresponding to the higher institutions and to the public lectures. Such is the acquisition of the art of reading from a friend or a brother; such are popular games of children, of the cultural value of which we intend writing a special article; such are public spectacles, panoramas, and so forth; such are pictures and books; such are fairy-tales and songs; such are work and, last, the experiments of the school at Yasnaya Polyana.

The answer to the first question gives a partial answer to the second: is such a noninterference possible ? We cannot prove this possibility theoretically. The one thing which confirms such a possibility is the observation which proves that people entirely uneducated, that is, who are subject only to the free cultural influences, the men of the people are fresher, more vigorous, more powerful, more independent, juster, humaner, and, above all, more useful than men no matter how educated. But it may be that even this statement need be proved to many.

I shall have to say a great deal about these proofs at a later time. Here I will adduce one fact. Why does the race of educated people not perfect itself zoologically ? A race of thoroughbred animals keeps improving; the race of educated people grows worse and weaker. Take at haphazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people, and compare them in anything you please: in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality, — and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of uneducated generations, and this superiority will be the greater, the lower the age, and vice versa. It is terrible to say this, on account of the conclusions to which it leads us, but it is true. A final proof of the possibility of noninterference in the lower schools, for people, to whom personal experience and an inner feeling tell nothing in favour of such an opinion, can be obtained only by means of a conscientious study of all those free influences by means of which the masses get their culture, by an all-round discussion of the question, and by a long series of experiments and reports upon it.

What, then, must the school be if it is not to interfere in matters of education ? A school is, as said above, the conscious activity of him who gives culture upon those who receive it. How is he to act in order not to transgress the limits of culture, that is, of freedom ?

I reply: the school must have one aim, — the transmission of information, of knowledge, without attempting to pass over into the moral territory of convictions, beliefs, and character; its aim is to be nothing but science, and not the results of its influence upon human personality. The school must not try to foresee the consequences produced by science, but, in transmitting it, must leave full freedom for its application. The school must not regard any one science, nor a whole code of sciences, as necessary, but must transmit that information which it possesses, leaving the students the right to acquire it or not.

The structure and the programme of the school must be based not on theoretical speculations, not on the conviction held in regard to the necessity of such and such sciences, but on the mere possibilities, that is, the knowledge of the teachers.

I will explain it by an example.

I want to establish an institution of learning. I form no programme which is based on my theoretical conceptions, and on the basis of this programme look about for teachers, but I propose to all people who feel that they are called to furnish information to lecture or teach such subjects as they know best. Of course, my former experience will guide me in the selection of these lessons, that is, we shall not try to offer subjects such as nobody wants to listen to, — in a Russian village we will not teach Spanish, or astrology, or geography, just as a merchant will not open shops of surgical instruments or of crinolines in this village.

We may foresee a demand for what we offer; but our final judge will be only experience, and we do not think we have the right to open a single shop, in which we are to sell tar with this condition, that to every ten pounds of tar every purchaser must buy a pound of ginger or of pomatum. We do not trouble ourselves about the use to which our wares will be put by the purchasers, believing that they know what they want, and that we have enough to do to discover their needs and to provide for them.

It is quite possible that there will turn up one teacher of zoology, one teacher of mediaeval history, one of religion, and one of the art of printing. If these teachers will know how to make their lessons interesting, these lessons will be useful, in spite of their seeming incompatibility and accidentalness. I do not believe in the possibility of a theoretically established, harmonious code of sciences, but that every science, being the subject of free instruction, harmonizes with all the others into one code of knowledge for each man.

I shall be told that in such an accidentalness of programme there may enter useless, even injurious, sciences into the course, and that many sciences could not be given because the students would not be sufficiently prepared for them.

To this I will reply that, in the first place, there are no injurious and no useless sciences for anybody, and that we have, as an assurance of that, the common sense and the needs of the students, who, the instruction being free, will not admit useless and injurious sciences, if there were such; that, in the second place, prepared pupils are wanted only for a poor teacher, but that for a good teacher it is easier to begin algebra or analytical geometry with a pupil who does not know arithmetic than with a pupil who knows it poorly, and that it is easier to lecture on mediaeval history to students who have not studied ancient history. I do not believe that a professor, who in a university lectures on differential and integral calculus, or on the history of the Russian civil law, and who cannot teach arithmetic, or Russian history in a primary school, — I do not believe that he can be a good professor. I see no use and no merit in good instruction in one part of a subject, and even no possibility of giving it. Above all, I am convinced that the supply will always correspond to the demand, and that at each stage of science there will be found a sufficient number of both students and teachers.

But how, I shall be told, can a person who teaches culture help wishing to produce a certain educational influence by means of Ins instruction ? This tendency is most natural; it is a natural exigency in the transmission of knowledge from him who offers culture to him who receives it. This tendency only imparts strength to the instructor to occupy himself with his subject, — it gives him that degree of enthusiasm which is necessary for him. It is impossible to deny this tendency, and it has never occurred to me to deny it; its existence so much more cogently proves to me the necessity of freedom in the matter of instruction.

Л man who loves and teaches history cannot be prohibited from endeavouring to impart to his students that historical conception which he himself possesses, which he regards as useful and absolutely necessary for a man’s development; a teacher cannot be prohibited from imparting that method in the study of mathematics or natural science which he considers the best; on the contrary, this prevision of the educational purpose encourages the teacher. The thing is that the educational element of science shall not be imparted by compulsion. I cannot carefully enough direct the reader’s attention to this circumstance.

The educational element, let us say in mathematics or in history, is only then imparted to the students when the teacher is passionately fond of his subject and when he knows it well; only then his love is communicated to the students and has an educational influence upon them. In the contrary case, that is, when it has been decided somewhere that such and such a subject has an educational value, and one is instructed to teach, and the others to listen to it, the teaching accomplishes the very opposite results, that is, it not only does not educate scientifically, but also makes the science loathsome.

It is said that science has in itself an educational element (erziehliges Element); that is true and not true, and in this very statement lies the fundamental error of the existing paradoxical view on education. Science is science and has nothing in itself. The educational element lies in the teaching of the sciences, in the teacher’s love for his science, and in the love with which it is imparted, — in the teacher’s relation to his students. If you zoish to educate the student by science, love your science and know it, and the students will love both you and the science, and you will educate them ; but if you yourself do not love it, the science will have no educational influence, no matter how much you may compel them to learn it. Here again there is tthe one measure, the one salvation, the same freedom for the students to listen or not to listen to the teacher, to imbibe or not to imbibe his educational influence, that is, for them to decide whether he knows and loves his science.

Well, what, then, will the school be with the noninterference in education ?

An all-sided and most varied conscious activity directed by one man on another; for the purpose of transmitting knowledge, without compelling the student by direct force or diplomatically to avail himself of that which we want him to avail himself of. The school will, perhaps, not be a school as we understand it, — with benches, blackboards, a teacher’s or professor’s platform, — it may be a panorama, a theatre, a library, a museum, a conversation ; the code of the sciences, the programme, will probably everywhere be different. (I know only my experiment: the school at Yasnaya Polyana, with its subdivision of subjects, which I have described, in the course of half a year completely changed, partly at the request of the pupils and their parents, partly on account of the insufficient information held by the teachers, and assumed other forms.)

” What are we to do then ? Shall there, really, be no county schools, no gymnasia, no chairs of the history of Boman law ? What will become of humanity ?” I hear.

There certainly shall be none, if the pupils do not need them, and you are not able to make them good.

” But children do not always know what they need; children are mistaken,” and so forth, I hear.

I will not enter into this discussion. This discussion would lead us to the question: Is man’s nature right before the tribunal of man ? and so forth. I do not know that it is, and do not take that stand; all I say is that if we can know what to teach, you must not keep me from teaching Russian children by force French, mediaeval genealogy, and the art of stealing. I can prove everything as you do.

« So there will be no gymnasia and no Latin ? Then, what am I going to do ? ” I again hear.

Don’t be afraid ! There will be Latin and rhetoric, and they will exist another hundred years, simply because the medicine is bought, so we must drink it (as a patient said).

I doubt whether the thought, which I have expressed, perhaps, indistinctly, awkwardly, inconclusively, will become the common possession in another hundred years; it is not likely that within a hundred years will die those ready-made institutions, schools, gymnasia, universities, and that within that time will grow up freely formed institutions, having for their basis the freedom of the learning generation.