Fables for Children, Stories for Children, Natural Science Stories, Popular Education, Decembrists, Moral TalesTolstoy, Leo, graf
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Fables for Children, Stories for Children, Natural Science Stories, Popular Education, Decembrists, Moral Tales
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Russian literature -- Translations into English
As for the methods of instruction the consequences were that not one
method of instruction was adopted or rejected because it was liked or
not, but only because it was accepted or not by the pupils without
compulsion. But in addition to the good results which were always
obtained without fail from the application of my method by myself and by
everybody else (more than twenty teachers), who taught according to my
method ("without fail" I say for the reason that not once did we have a
pupil who did not learn the rudiments), besides these results, the
application of the principles of which I have spoken had the effect that
during these fifteen years all the various modifications, to which my
method was subjected, not only did not remove it from the needs of the
masses, but, on the contrary, brought it nearer and nearer to them. The
masses, at least in our parts, know the method itself and discuss it,
and prefer it to the church method, which I cannot say of the sound
method. In the schools which are conducted according to my method the
teacher cannot remain motionless in his knowledge, such as he is and
must be with the method of sounds. If a teacher according to the new
German fashion wants to go ahead and perfect himself, he has to follow
the pedagogical literature, that is, to read all those new inventions
about the conversations about the suslik and about the transposition of
the squares. I do not think that that can promote his personal
education. On the contrary, in my school, where the subjects of
instruction, language and mathematics, demand positive knowledge, every
teacher, in advancing his pupils, feels the need of learning himself,
which was constantly the case with all the teachers I had.
Besides, the methods of instruction themselves, which are not settled
once for all, but always strive to be as easy and as simple as possible,
are modified and improved from the indications which the teacher
discovers in the relations of the learners to his instruction.
The very opposite to this I see in what, unfortunately, takes place in
the schools of the German pattern, which of late have been introduced in
our country in an artificial manner. The failure to recognize that
before deciding what to teach and how to teach we must solve the
question how we can find that out has led the pedagogues to a complete
disagreement with reality, and the abyss which fifteen years ago was
felt to exist between theory and practice has now reached the farthest
limits. Now that the masses are on all sides begging for education,
while pedagogy has more than ever passed to personal fancies, this
discord has reached incredible proportions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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