Fables for Children, Stories for Children, Natural Science Stories, Popular Education, Decembrists, Moral TalesTolstoy, Leo, graf
General
Fables for Children, Stories for Children, Natural Science Stories, Popular Education, Decembrists, Moral Tales
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Russian literature -- Translations into English
What, then, is to be done? How are the County Councils to act in order
that this business may not be a plaything and a pastime, but shall have
a future? Let them conform with the needs of the masses, and, so far as
possible, cheapen and free the forms of the school, and afford the
Communes the greatest possible power in the establishment of the
schools.
For this it is necessary that the County Councils shall entirely abandon
the distribution of the taxes to the schools and the distribution of the
schools according to localities, but shall leave this distribution to
the peasants themselves. The determination of the pay to the teacher,
the hiring, purchase, or building of the house, the choice of place and
of the teacher himself,--all that ought to be left to the peasants. The
County Council, that is, the school council, should only demand that the
Communes inform it where and on what foundations schools have been
established, not in order that, upon learning the facts, it shall
prohibit them, as is done now, but in order that, learning about the
conditions under which the school exists, it may add (if the conditions
are in conformity with the demands of the council) from its County
Council's sums, for the support of the school newly founded, a certain,
definite part of what the school costs the Commune: a half, a third, a
fourth, according to the quality of the school and the means and wishes
of the County Council. Thus, for example, a village of twenty souls
hires a transient man at two roubles a month to teach the children. The
school council, that is, a person authorized by it, of whom I shall
speak later, upon receiving that information, invites the transient to
come to him, asks him what he knows and how he teaches, and, if the
transient is the least bit educated and does not represent anything
harmful, apportions to him the amount determined upon by the County
Council, one-half, one-third, or one-fourth, in precisely the same way
the school council proceeds in reference to a clerical person hired by
the Commune at five roubles per month, or in reference to a teacher
hired at fifteen roubles per month. Of course, that is the way the
school council acts in reference to the teachers hired by the Communes
themselves; but if the Communes turn to the school council, the latter
recommends to them teachers under the same conditions. But in doing so
the County Council must not forget that there should not be merely
teachers at two hundred roubles; the school council should be an
employment agency for teachers of every description and of every price,
from one rouble to thirty roubles a month. On buildings the school
council ought not to spend or add anything, because they are one of the
most unproductive items of expense. But the County Council ought not to
disdain, as it now does, teachers at two, three, four, five roubles per
month and locations in smoky huts or by rotation from farm to farm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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