Last Steps: the Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy by Jay Parini

Author:Jay Parini
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141959542
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

LETTER ON EDUCATION* [1902]

DEAR S.,

I was very glad to have a serious conversation with X. about the education of children. What he and I quite agree about, but what is only negative, is that children should be taught as little as possible.† That children should grow up without having learnt certain subjects is not nearly so bad as what happens to nearly all children, especially those whose education is directed by mothers who do not know the subjects their children learn – viz., they get educational indigestion and come to detest education. A child, or a man, can learn when he has an appetite for what he studies. Without appetite, instruction is an evil – a terrible evil causing people to become mentally crippled. For Heaven’s sake, dear S., if you do not quite agree with me, take my word for it, that were it not a matter of such enormous importance I would not write to you about it. Above all, believe your husband, who sees the thing quite reasonably.

But then comes the customary reply: If children are not taught, how are they to be occupied? Are they to play knuckle-bones with the village children, and learn all sorts of stupidities and nastiness? With our squirely way of life, this reply has some reasonable ground. But is it really necessary to accustom children to a squirely way of life, and to make them feel that all their requirements are satisfied by someone, somehow, without their having to take any part in the work? I think the first condition of a good education is that the child should know that all he uses does not fall from heaven ready-made, but is produced by other people’s labour. To understand that all he lives on comes from the labour of other people who neither know nor love him is too much for a child (God grant he may understand it when he is grown up); but to understand that the chamber-pot he uses is emptied and wiped, without any pleasure, by a nurse or a housemaid, and that the boots and goloshes he always puts on clean are cleaned in the same way – not out of love for him, but for some other reason quite unintelligible to him – is something he can and should understand, and of which he should be ashamed. If he is not ashamed and if he continues to use them, that is the very worst commencement of an education, and leaves the deepest traces for his whole life. To avoid that, however, is very simple, and is just what (to use poetic language), standing on the threshold of the grave, I beseech you to do for your children. Let them do all they can for themselves: carry out their own slops, fill their own jugs, wash up, arrange their rooms, clean their boots and clothes, lay the table, etc. Believe me that, unimportant as these things may seem, they are a hundred times more important for your children’s happiness than a knowledge of French, or of history, etc.

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