International children’s Week

Pravda, July 24-30, 1923

Krupskaya

The Executive Committee of the Young Communist International has fixed the Third International Children’s Week for July 24-30. The children’s movement in Russia is in its infancy and the Children’s Week, there- fore, is being used to propagandize it.

Some comrades may question the necessity for a children’s movement or a children’s organization. “Let them grow up,” they may say, “become more mature, and they will join the Young Communist League. What do they understand now? Let them play and go to school.”

The Young Pioneer movement—that is the way the children’s communist organization calls itself—is open to all boys and girls of eleven and over.

The Young Pioneer organization instills in its members collective instincts and accustoms them to share joy and grief, teaches them to make the interests of the collective their own, to regard themselves as members of the collective. It develops collective habits, i.e., the ability to work and act collectively and in an organized manner by subordinating their will to the will of the collective, displaying their initiative through the collective and teaching them to respect the opinion of the collective. Lastly, it enhances children’s communist consciousness by helping them to realize that they are members of the working class, which is fighting for mankind’s happiness, members of the huge army of the international proletariat.

The very formation of these tasks proves that the sooner children and drawn into this movement, the better. Very often one hears workers’ children say, “We never see Father; he works in the day and goes to meetings in the evening.” Mother, too, either works or is too busy with household chores or the baby. And so, workers’ children are left to themselves—they either stay at home without seeing anything or indulge in pranks from sheer boredom or fall under the influence of street urchins. The children’s organization will afford them many happy moments, promote their activity and give them food for thought.

A Young Pioneer organization, naturally, should not be run like an adult one. It would be bad indeed if it were a carbon copy of one. But it must be imbued with the spirit of communism.

First of all, it should afford entertainment. Chorus signing, games, swimming, outings, campfire talks, visits to factories, participation in proletarian holidays—all that will leave an indelible impression and give children an excellent picture of an organization, a collective. Participation in proletarian holidays and visits to workers’ clubs, factories and meetings will make for closer ties between children and the working class, and these ties should be encouraged in every possible way. Young Pioneers should be patronized by women’s departments, party organizations and trade unions, which should do everything to enhance class solidarity among children.

During the children’s movement week, workers’ organizations should take charge of Young Pioneers, arrange excursions for them and acquaint them with their work. Specially chosen men and women workers should tell them of their own childhood, of the struggle they had to wage. In brief, the working class should “adopt” the Young Pioneers for the duration of the International Children’s Week.

Children are children. That is why the Young Pioneer organization concentrates so much attention on games, for games, after all, are absolutely necessary for children’s physique. They develop physical strength, make children’s hands stronger, their bodies more flexible, their eyes sharper; they develop their ingenuity, resourcefulness and initiative. More, they promote children’s organizational capacity, self-control, endurance, ability to gauge the situation, and so on. There are, of course, good games and bad. There are games that make children cruel and rude, fan hatred for other nations, affect children’s nervous system, arouse gambling instincts and vanity. And there are games that are highly educational, that strengthen children’s willpower, develop their feeling of justice and teach them to help people in need. There are games that make beasts out of children and there are games that make them Communists. It is this last task that the Young Pioneer organization undertakes to fulfill. And here they are assisted by the Young Communist League.

But it is not only games that the Young Pioneers indulge in. The children of today have seen and heard too much and they desire to participate in the struggle for human happiness, for the new life. Perhaps their part in this will not be very big: collecting medicinal herbs, clearing up and planting flowers in the gardens in front of factories, sewing clothes for creches, delivering invitations to meetings, decorating workers’ clubs, etc. But these collective tasks will make a Young Pioneer realize that he is a useful member of society and will stimulate him to other creative activity. 

Soviet institutions should show attention to Young Pioneers and give them opportunities to be useful.

The children’s movement is of special value for the school, for it develops habits which can help to promote children’s “self-government,” creates possibilities for applying new teaching methods and heightens children’s interest in studies and their thirst for knowledge. Progressive teachers should hail the Young Pioneer organization. During the International Children’s Week the schools should throw their doors wide open to Young Pioneers. The latter should wholeheartedly help teachers build up a new school and form the core of this school.

During this week, between July 24 and 30, we should lay a solid foundation for the children’s movement in the RSFSR.

The young pioneer Movement as A pedagogical problem

uChiTeLskaYa gazeLa, No. 15, April 8, 1927

We have said time and again that the school and the Young Pioneer movement pursue one and the same aim: to bring children up as fighters for and builders of a new system. The goal of the Young Pioneer movement is to bring up a new youth which will achieve socialist, communist construction. To build socialism does not mean to raise labor productivity or develop the economy. A highly developed social economy is only a basis, a foundation that ensures general welfare. The main points of socialist construction are reorganization of the entire social fabric, establishment of a new social order and development of new relationships among people. The life we want to build must not only be plentiful but also happy.

In the case of adults, we have to reeducate them in the spirit of social- ism; in the case of the younger generation, we have to educate them in that spirit. What does that imply? Vladimir Ilyich had a very simple definition of this spirit. Speaking at a non-Party conference of workers and Red Army men, he said: “In the oldz days people said: ‘Each for himself and God for all,’ and look how much grief that brought them. We shall say: ‘One for all, and somehow we shall get along all right without God.’”

Although these words were not uttered in connection with education, I think they give a clear idea of how we should tackle the educational problem in our day. We should bring up our children as collectivists. How is that to be done? Here we have a serious pedagogical problem.

Under the bourgeoisie, workers’ children and the children of the landowners and capitalists are brought up differently. The bourgeoisie tries to make obedient slaves out of the workers’ children and leaders out of the children of the landowners and capitalists. In the case of the first, it tries to kill their individuality and personality; all its educational methods are aimed at depriving children of their individuality, at making them passive; and if these methods fail with certain children, the bourgeoisie pushes them to the front, opposes them to others, converts them into loyal servants of its own. In the case of the children of the ruling classes, the meth- ods of education are quite different. The bourgeoisie brings them up as individualists who oppose the masses and brings them up as individualists who oppose the masses and the collective, and teaches them to lord it over the masses.

The Soviet system of education aims at developing every child’s ability, activity, consciousness, personality and individuality. That is why our educational methods differ from those in bourgeois public schools, and they are radically different from the methods employed in the education of bourgeois children. The bourgeoisie tries to bring up its children as individualists who set their ego above all else, who oppose the masses. Communist education employs other methods. We are for the all-round development of our children—we want to make them strong physically and morally, teach them to be collectivists and not individualists, bring them up not to oppose the collective but on the contrary to constitute its force and raise it to a new level. We believe that a child’s personality can be best and most fully developed only in a collective. For the collective does not destroy a child’s personality, and it improves the quality and content of education.

In this respect, the Young Pioneer movement can do much. What path should it take in educational work? First, the Young Pioneer should be given an opportunity to share other children’s experiences. A child who has no brothers or sisters and who is zealously protected by his mother from “harmful influences” will never be a collectivist.

The Young Pioneer organization should see to it that their members have every opportunity to share one another’s experiences. That does not mean that they should be “entertained,” that they should have special shows and matinees arranged for them. The thing is not to entertain them, but to make their organization’s activities lively and emotional. There are cases, for instance, when the Pioneer leader is late for the rally and the Young Pioneers lounge about waiting for him and when he does appear, he discusses with them such boring things as smoking and discipline, or holds a political study class. Such organizations invariably disintegrate.

The ability to organize chorus singing, interesting and clever games, collective reading, etc., is a very important factor in uniting children, while the joys and woes they share bring them still closer together. There should be less formality and more content. It is important, too, to choose the right games, for some games hamper the development of collectivist instincts, divide children instead of uniting them. Another important thing is what books the children read: individualistic rot or really valuable works.

The second factor making for unity is close friendship, knowledge of how each lives and studies, and mutual assistance. The one who knows more should help the backward in his homework, the one who eats well should share his food with the one who does not, the one who has not got to do any household chores should help the one who has. There should be well-organized comradely mutual aid within the Young Pioneer organizations.

The third factor is collective studies, reading, excursions, wall news- papers, diaries, etc., etc. Here it is especially important not to divide children into active Young Pioneers who do everything, and are therefore over- burdened, and passive who are not allowed to do anything. The problem of collective endeavor, correct division of labor, properly distributed tasks, the combination of children’s personal interests with the aims of the collective—all that should be solved.

The fourth factor is the same problem, only in respect to labor: combination of skillful individual labor with collective labor, development of individual and collective habits in labor, proper coordination of labor, assessment of the work done, mutual control, cooperation in all the spheres of economic activity.

The fifth factor is voluntary discipline within the organization. “A Great Beginning,” Lenin’s article on the communist Subotnik's, in which he counterposes compulsory discipline under capitalism to voluntary and conscious socialist discipline, tells us how to approach the question of discipline and punishment in school and the Young Pioneer organization.

And, lastly, social work and application of the knowledge and habits acquired through collective work for the good of all. The question of choosing social work. The voluntary and conscious character of this choice, collective decisions, collective planning, correct appraisal of capability and capacity. The greater part of Vladimir Ilyich’s speech at the Third Congress of the Young Communist League was devoted to social work, to socially useful labor.

This question is closely connected with the question of how adult workers, men and women, should help in the collective education and self-education of children, as well as with the question of relations between the school and the Young Pioneer movement.

The above-mentioned questions touch upon a number of problems of vast importance, and the leaders of the Young Pioneer movement and pedagogues should deal with them.

our children need books that Would bring them up as genuine internationalists

LiTeraTurnaYa gazeTa, October 17, 1933

I recall one of my visits to a Swiss school. The prospectus said it had a children’s library of its own. I sat through a lesson and when it was over, I asked the teacher to take me to the library.

“We have none,” she replied. “And we don’t really need it. It is enough for the children to study well what is in the textbooks. Look at the beautiful vellum paper they are printed on and the splendid illustrations.”

So spoke the teacher of this school in a quiet backwater district of Switzerland.

A year later I saw Paris and its bubbling life. School children there were supplied with a great many books, all of them impregnated with petit-bourgeois mentality, with the idealization of the wealthy. That was in 1908-09. I wrote of it in my time. There are no “quiet backwater” districts in the world now. A drowning man catches at the straw. Moribund capitalism is catching at the growing generation, trying by every possible means—children’s books included—to befuddle the youth. These books are written skillfully and simply; they are thrilling and at the same time delusory. Our textbooks this year are not bad, but apart from putting out more or less good textbooks, we are opening school libraries and seeing to it that our children read more. We are in desperate need of really good children’s books, of books imbued with the spirit of communism, of books written excitingly, simply and at the same time truthfully.

They must be written. And they must be written not only for children who play a big part in all our activities and who evoke the admiration of visitors from abroad, but for rank-and-file school children as well. We must, in fact, pay more attention to the latter than to the activists. Do we know these rank-and-file school children? I am afraid not. We forget that they represent a generation that has never seen a tsarist policeman or a capitalist, that does not know exploitation. It has no real idea of class contradictions, no idea of class struggle, of working-class struggle against the capitalists. The adults of today knew in their childhood the meaning of such words as “boss,” “laborer,” “exploiter” and “exploited,” and for that reason it just does not occur to them that many of present-day children do not know these words, that to many of them they are nothing but abstract concepts. And sometimes even an excellent pupil, wearing the red tie of a Young Pioneer, may blurt out such nonsense that an adult will find it hard to believe that he does not know such elementary things. The child of today knows a great deal of what the children of yesterday never knew, and yet often he does not know anything of what children from countryside and city, workers’ children, knew in their early years. The teacher does not suspect that and the Young Pioneer leader does not notice it. Being ignorant of such elementary things, children interpret what they are told in their own, often very strange, way. Children must read more. We must have more books about the capitalist past, books written truthfully, thrillingly, capable of arousing hatred for the old system. But it should be described truthfully, it should be pictured as it was, in all its complexity, and at the same time as concretely as possible. There should be more books of this sort. We must have children’s books with vivid, lifelike descriptions of the struggle now going on in the capitalist countries. Here is what a German comrade told me when he recently visited the USSR: “I have spoken with your Young Pioneers and they have absolutely no idea of how our Young Pioneers live, of the difficult struggle they have to wage! No idea whatever!”

It is indispensable to explain to children the profound significance

of the slogan “Workers of All Countries, Unite!” One cannot be a real champion of the working-class cause if one does not understand this slogan, if one does not grasp its significance. This slogan is a guide to action, an earnest of the victory of the working class the world over. It must be thoroughly understood by children. And once they do, they will know what fascism is, why it is afraid of worldwide worker unity.

Teachers of social science often strive to give children as many “facts” as possible and overburden their memory with facts of transient or, at best, illustrative nature. They give their pupils low marks if they stumble over details, but it simply does not occur to them to check—if only in connection with the International Children’s Week—whether the children know the fundamentals. The only guarantee that children will not acquire chauvinistic ideas is a perfect understanding of the slogan “Workers of All Countries, Unite!”

At the roll call, the Young Pioneer leader carefully sees to it that the children remember all the International Children’s Week slogans, but it never strikes him that some littler girl may interpret them in her own way because she does not understand their essence. And yet the “International Nickel” requires a lot of explanatory work if it is not to become simple charity. There is a lot of explanatory work to be done to make children understand what they must speak about at the International Children’s Congresses, which pass very merrily, but at which some orators forget to speak of the struggle wages by the international proletariat.

We need books which will imbue children with the necessary internationalist ideas. Never mind the form. Let it be a fairytale. Only let it be a truthful fairytale, without any sympathetic lament for suffering children, one teaching them to respect youngsters fighting against the dark forces of fascism, respect parents who, though afraid for their children, tell them to go ahead and fight, one training our children to become courageous champions of freedom. That is the main thing. We need books that would speak with children seriously, without resorting to baby talk. Fairytales often describe far more serious things than some sweet little stories “for children.” The question is not one of form, but of content.

All-round development of children

vozhaTY Magazine, No. 6, 1937

We often go into the extremes. At first people said that political consciousness should be developed in children almost from their infancy. These people spoke to children of serious things, of things they did not understand, and wanted to make them Communists even before they went to school. That was wrong. But we should neither “baby” them too much nor consider them dull. We should tell them a lot, broaden their horizons, help them to become social workers. We feed them too much with fairytales when life is often more interesting. And we must not forget that there are fairytales and fairytales.

There are fascinating fairytales that vividly describe people’s char- acters and human relations, and there are fairytales that befog children’s minds and prevent them from correctly understanding the environment. Life forces children to be attentive to many things and here we cannot lay down our arms. Bourgeois governments try to impregnate children with bourgeois politics and with religion, inculcate hatred for other nations. They do it quite skillfully, being well experienced in deceiving children. The Catholic Church and the bourgeoisie have lots of experience in this respect.

We have to awaken children’s consciousness, and the book has to help us in that. It is indispensable to have more and better children’s libraries. But that is not all. What is important is what the children are to read. What is important is to select the right books. Now, when we face the problem of raising the cultural level of the countryside to that of the city, it is especially important for village children to have the necessary books, for village schools to have enough children’s books, for us to have really good literature—one that children will really appreciate and understand, one that will broaden their outlook.

Children like Young Pioneer activity; they thrive on it. One day, at the time when we were conducting a contest among village libraries, I wrote children a letter about libraries. And I was quite surprised when collective farmers and state-farm workers told me that children were the most active propagandists of libraries. But there are times when children overdo things. I once received a letter from a boy who wrote that he spent every free moment to read to collective farmers, and that they were saying: “Oh, how about letting us rest a little?”

In selecting books for school libraries it is important to take into consideration children’s interests, the level of their development. And once a library has been established, children must be allowed freedom of choice. I certainly get indignant when I hear people say children of such-and- such age should read such-and-such books. Children should not be babied too much. They should be allowed a certain degree of freedom of choice, an opportunity to display their initiative. When children plan something, they show a great deal of initiative, learn to organize themselves, and that enhances their discipline. And they should be given the kind of work they find attractive and interesting.

It is necessary to take into consideration the level of children’s development. I recently saw a stage version of a fairytale. There were many interesting things in it: the blooming of a rosebush, etc. But the story, in my opinion, was too complicated for the tots who knew nothing of boyars, tsars’ emissaries or the tsars of olden times. And so they did not understand the story. As for children of 11 or 12, they did not find the fairytale interesting at all.

We have somehow come to think that knowledge can be acquired only from books. But we do not know how to follow life, how to watch and study it, how to live in a new way, neither we nor the Young Pioneer leaders or teachers. Yet there are excursions and games that can teach us what life is. In our extra school work we should take advantage of outings, etc., to study nature, people and life. We do not teach that, and our circles are more often than not either of sports or theatrical character.

Then we consider that the aim of a literary, natural science or history circle is to promote education. We are accustomed to thinking that each circle should have an instructor to tell children everything they should know. We think that all the latter have to do is open their mouths, like nestlings, and swallow what they are being given. We just cannot imagine a circle without an instructor when what we need is more initiative on the part of the children.

Unfortunately, we do not pay enough attention to children’s interests and their demands. And that is something Young Pioneer leaders and teachers should know. Pedologists are rightly criticized for their indifferent, formal treatment of children, for labeling them capable and incapable pupils, for not thinking of helping in their development and upbringing.

We shall never achieve success in our work if we do not know children’s demands, if we do not know what a child of such-and-such age is interested in, if we do not know how he interprets the things around him.

We talk a lot about palaces of culture. I got terribly angry when I learned that the premises of the Association of Old Bolsheviks had been turned into a palace for exceptionally talented children. In our country such children are pampered. One day, in this palace, I met a girl with her teacher. I waved to her. And the teacher turned to me and said: “This one is an exceptionally talented girl.” We shall spoil all the children if we tell them they are talented. I remember a talk I had with Vladimir Ilyich. I told him of a remarkable boy whom the parents took to concerts. He said the boy should be taken away from his parents, for they would be the death of him. Ilyich’s prediction came true. The mother took the boy abroad, exhibited him as a talented child, and the whole thing ended with the boy dying of brain fever. Of course, things do not always end so tragically, but the example is instructive.

We should not impress on talented children that they are extraordinary, or give them privileges. We should see to it that they get all-round education. That will not harm them. On the contrary, when they grow up it will help them to choose a profession that suits them in every way. Deciding for a girl that she will be a ballerina or for a boy that he will be an engineer is a bad thing.

We should show solicitude to all the children and give them every- thing we possibly can.

Extra school work is extremely important, for it helps to bring up children properly and creates the conditions necessary for their all-round development. We should encourage their initiative, help them in their creative work, guide them, channel their interests in the right direction. Parents often pamper children, permit them to go to cinemas and theaters too often. The cinema excites children. Just watch them, and you will notice that very frequently after a picture, they speak rudely to their mothers or pick on their classmates. Children should be shown films they understand, films they can enjoy, films that broaden their horizons. Watching adult films, children often do not grasp the meaning, yet they try to imitate the actors. I was told that after seeing a nose being unscrewed in a Chaplin film, children took a screwdriver and tried to do it too. What is important to understand is that they should understand the meaning, that we should channel their thoughts in the right direction.

We should extend the network of children’s technical circles, organize excursions to factories, power plants, etc. Every palace of culture should have workrooms where children can do what they like.

Children should be brought up so that they continue the job begun by their fathers. Vladimir Ilyich wanted to children to achieve what their fathers had started. He used to say that our children would learn to fight still better and that they would win.

Pay more attention to giving children the necessary training, developing their character, encouraging their desire to be useful, bringing them up as social workers and collectivists. Take good care of their all-round development…