September 2: In memory of teacher Vasily Sukhomlinsky
On September 2, 1970, in the Kirovohrad region of Ukraine, 51-year-old Vasyl Sukhomlynsky—an innovative educator, children's writer, and the author of a humanistic education system—died. He passed away on the second day of the new school year, and his final work was the school's plan for that year.
The goal of school is to cultivate inquisitive, creative, and searching minds. I imagine childhood as a school of thought, and teachers as people who carefully shape the bodies and spiritual worlds of their students.
A peasant's son who became a teacher at 17
He was born in the Kherson province in 1918 to a poor peasant family. His father, a carpenter and joiner, held leadership positions in the village during the Soviet era. His mother, a housewife and seamstress.
He graduated from a workers' faculty. From the age of 17, he worked as a schoolteacher. At 20, he received a diploma from the Poltava Pedagogical Institute. He taught Ukrainian language and literature in a secondary school.
War, injury and death of the family
In 1941, at the age of 22, he volunteered for the front. He was seriously wounded near Moscow and spent four months in the hospital. Doctors were unable to remove some of the shell fragments from his chest.
After demobilization, he was sent to work as a principal in an Udmurt school—his homeland was occupied, and he had no contact with his family. He only learned that his wife and young son had been tortured by the Nazis in 1944, when he was able to return to his hometown.
After the war, he married a second time. He raised a son and daughter, but grieved the loss of his loved ones for the rest of his life.
The fact that I've done so much and written so much is not due to some mysterious reasons, but to grief. For three years in a row, I woke up at two in the morning and never went back to bed.
Teacher Vasily Sukhomlinsky and Pavlysh school
The author of monographs and over 600 articles on pedagogy, as well as 1200 children's stories and fairy tales, combined his literary work with teaching.
In the post-war years, he headed the district education department. From 1948 until his death, he headed Pavlysh Secondary School, near Kremenchuk. Soon after the appointment of a new director, the school became known throughout the Soviet Union.
The school operated in a fundamentally new way: it was inclusive at its core, and children could freely move between clubs and classes, choosing what was most interesting.
"School of Joy": Open-Air Lessons
Lessons were often held outdoors, with students pottering in the garden and studying wildlife. They were not only successful—easily admitted to Moscow universities—but also healthy.
The learning process was seen as a joyful endeavor. The school principal personally worked with six-year-olds, leading a preparatory "School of Joy." Failures were not given in the lower grades.
If a teacher sees a two and a one as a whip with which to spur a lazy horse, and a four and a five as a carrot, then soon the children will hate both the carrot and the stick.
For a child to study well, he needs to study well.
This formula is called "Sukhomlinsky's paradox." His ideas—psychological and pedagogical consultations, ethics and psychology lessons, and a parenting school—were later incorporated into teaching practice.
"We need a fight, not a sermon": bullying in the press
In the 1960s, his system was criticized in the all-Union newspaper "Uchitelskaya Gazeta," accusing it of "anarchism" and attempts to steer Soviet schools away from the party line.
Makarenko, who had died by then, was cited as an example. Sukhomlinsky, however, pointed out that he had developed his methods for juvenile delinquents and street children, whereas a regular school for home-schooled children was not a labor colony. In his article "We Need Struggle, Not Preaching," party educator Boris Likhachev accused Sukhomlinsky of "substituting biblical preaching and the ideas of bourgeois individualism for struggle":
Instead of the concrete and clear program set out in the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism, a vague concept called humanity is introduced
Sukhomlinsky responded, but this answer was not published during his lifetime:
This accusation astonished me. It turns out that humanity is something alien to the communist ideal and communist education.
September Again
He died at 51, on the second day of the new school year. Metal fragments from a shell were located close to his heart, and any stress could have caused them to move. According to one theory, bullying played a role.
What was the most important thing in my life? I answer without hesitation: my love for my children.
Sukhomlinsky's final work was a school plan for the new academic year. The day before, he wrote in his diary:
It's September again. The bell rings. The kids are going to school, and I'm leaving this life.
