The third chapter of Nearing;s investigation of early Soviet educational practices.

‘III. Pre-School Educational Work’ by Scott Nearing from Education in Soviet Russia. International Publishers, New York. 1926.

III. PRE-SCHOOL EDUCATIONAL WORK.

Educational authorities in the Soviet Union are responsible for the child after it reaches the age of three. Up to that time, it is under the boards of health. As compulsory education does not begin until the age of eight, there is a gap of five very important years for which the educational authorities must make some provision. Their work in this direction is ordinarily referred to as “pre-school education.”

Soviet educators have not yet been able to devote much time to pre-school education, as they have been concentrating their energies on the first four years of the elementary school, on the higher technical education and on the liquidation of illiteracy. The field is still in a sketchy and theoretical stage. No comment on Soviet education would be complete, however, without some reference to pre-school educational activity.

One of the first efforts toward pre-school education in pre-revolutionary Russia was a Moscow settlement, organized in 1905 under the direction of Mrs. Schlager and Alexander Zelenko. During the reaction that followed the 1905 Revolution, the settlement was closed by the authorities, and was later permitted to re-open only on condition that it should exclude adults and confine its work to children.

A kindergarten, modeled on western lines, had been opened in the settlement, and during the summer the children were taken to a country camp. In 1911 this summer work took the form of a small colony, just outside of Moscow in the Kaluga district. Since 1919 this whole plant has been under the Educational Department of the Russian Republic. It is called the First Experimental Station, and includes the kindergarten in Moscow, two elementary schools in Moscow, a teachers’ training centre in Moscow, and in the country four kindergartens, fifteen elementary schools, two secondary schools, people’s houses, village libraries, and a teacher’s training centre, all located in villages near Moscow. The whole plant is under the direction of Stanislav Schatsky, a member of the State Council of Education.

Mrs. Schlager still directs the work of the Moscow kindergarten connected with this experimental plant. During the past two years she has been organizing a series of branch kindergartens and playrooms in the large apartment houses of her neighborhood. Her plan is to have a small playground in the yard of each apartment house, and to have one or two rooms in each apartment house set aside for educational work with small children. These rooms will have a simple equipment and will afford recreational opportunities to the young children of that house. Thus each group of living quarters would have a place where pre-school work could be carried on by trained teachers and nurses.

The plan also includes the organization of the mothers connected with each of these kindergartens, so that the pre-school work will not only free a portion of the mothers from the necessity of taking care of their small children all day, but it will be a centre for the community education of parents.

The central, or parent kindergarten, with its very complete equipment would be used at some time during the day by the children from all of these kindergarten “primitives” as Mrs. Schlager calls them. Instead of 65 children using this central kindergarten, as they do at present, the new plan would make it available for about 300 children in the course of a day.

Coupled with this move for organized kindergarten work there is an active campaign for neighborhood playgrounds. I visited some of these playgrounds in Moscow. They were equipped very much like playgrounds in the United States. All are under the supervision of the educational authorities, and they are designed primarily for the use of small children.

The largest kindergarten plan that I saw in the Soviet Union was that of the Trekhgornaia Textile Factory in Moscow. It consisted of nine separate units, all under the general direction of the culture sub-section of the workers’ factory committee. About 450 children were accommodated in these nine plants.

Each of the kindergartens was organized in a former private house. The money for their support came from the “culture fund” provided by the factory administration for the use of the factory committee. The educational side of the work was supervised by the department of education. Three interests were therefore represented in these kindergartens: the interests of the workers who elect the factory committee; the interests of the factory that provides the funds; the interests of the educational authorities that provide educational direction.

This factory is a state enterprise–a part of the state textile industry. Like every factory (or other employer) in the Soviet Union, the administration at Trekhgornaia signs a collective agreement with its workers. Among the most important provisions of this agreement are the clauses providing that certain funds shall be paid from the receipts of the factory to cover the costs of cultural activities among the workers. Thus while the factory provides the money for this cultural work, the factory committee, on behalf of the workers, directs its expenditure.

These nine kindergartens accommodated only the children of persons who worked in the Trekhgornaia factory. They were open from eight in the morning till six at night, so that working mothers could have their small children taken care of during their entire working day (eight hours).

Kindergarten work was carried on as in other well equipped kindergartens. Each plant had its outdoor as well as its indoor play place. There were excellently equipped classrooms with from 20 to 25 children in a class. Each child had an individual towel, hung on an  individual peg, and marked by a picture, or some other design, drawn by the child to designate his property. The children were also well provided with handkerchiefs.

The kindergarten served three meals per day: a breakfast consisting of tea and bread and butter (the usual Russian breakfast); a two course dinner at noon—a meat soup, meat and one or two vegetables, with bread; a tea at four o’clock, consisting of bread, with butter and tea, and some preserved fruit. (Milk is scarce in Moscow. Children do not get it ordinarily.) After the noon dinner, the children took a two hour nap. The beds were ranged in sleeping rooms, where the children had individual cots, marked as the towels had been.

These kindergartens were operated six days per week. The cost to the parents, including the meals, was two rubles per child per month. This fee was, of course, quite nominal. A ruble is about 52 cents.

The object of this kindergarten work was to provide a normal play space, a good diet, an opportunity for rest, a chance for association, and freedom for mothers of young children. One member of the factory committee, who had this work in charge, showed me the day-nursery and the kindergartens connected with the factory, explained the purpose of the work, and then apologized for the meagreness of what was being done.

“We have had no chance to get things really going,” he said. “We have not been able to build any new buildings suited to these purposes, nor even to make the needed improvements on the old buildings that we are compelled to. We suffer with the rest of Moscow from a building shortage. We are hampered by this lack of space and also by a lack of knowledge as to how these things can best be done. We are compelled to feel our way and to learn as we go.”

This was the most ambitious and extensive kindergarten plant that I saw in the Soviet Union. Many other factories had smaller plants. The movement for day-nurseries, kindergartens and play-grounds under the direction of factory committees is developing rapidly, and the support of such institutions is commonly regarded as a legitimate charge against the receipts of an industry. The general theory underlying this practice is that each industry should provide for its own workers. That provision does not stop with wages, as it does in the United States, but it extends to education, housing, food, and many other items.

Another aspect of pre-school education is the development of a new children’s literature. The Russian children, like the children of every other country, have had a literature built upon folk-lore, upon the doings of fairies, princes and knights. Most of this material is quite unrelated to the present age, and a great deal of it laughably false and silly. Still, in the western countries it is printed and re-printed because it pays. Educators in the Soviet Union have started a movement to build a literature for children that is grounded in reality, and that will stand the test of science as well as that of art.

Under the Scientific Pedagogical Section of the Russian State Council of Education there is a commission on children’s literature. This commission has, among its members, writers of children’s literature, experts on psychology and pedagogy, and representatives of the publishing houses that handle the publication of literature for children. A survey has been made of the entire field of children’s literature, and an effort is now being made to provide a literature that is at the same time interesting and instructive. I saw some of the books that had been turned out under the direction of this commission. The art work (drawing and color) in many of them was of a very high order. The educational material was not so good. It is difficult to create a body of child literature that has sufficient dramatic appeal and that is at the same time modern in its point of view, and written with a scientific background. The attempt is as ambitious as it is novel, and it is being made with as much enthusiasm as are the other experiments under the departments of education.

There are other aspects of pre-school work that are being planned and tried out: singing and music; excursions to museums and other points of interest; storytelling; children’s departments in libraries; hand-work; periods of sojourn in the country. Much of this work is being organized by a commission on extra-mural education, working under the Russian State Council of Education. Similar activities are being carried on in the Ukraine.

The purpose of these efforts is to fill the period from three to eight years. The educational authorities hope to provide: a good diet; rest and normal recreation; glimpses of art; trips into the various fields of nature; contact with music and drama; a knowledge of the practical, work-a-day world, and the more familiar social institutions of the society in which the child is growing up. All of this knowledge is to come to the child through the five senses, without taxing the reason. Manual work, esthetic work, visual work, an opportunity for observation and for association are relied upon to give a superficial idea of the world that will be studied in detail when the child enters the school.

Education in Soviet Russia by Scott Nearing. International Publishers, New York. 1926.

Education in Soviet Russia by Scott Nearing. International Publishers, New York. 1926.

Foreword, I A Dark Educational Past, II The Soviet Educational Structure, III Pre-School Educational Work, IV Social Education—The Labor School, V Professional Schools (High Schools), VI Higher Educational Institutions, a. Higher Technical Schools (Colleges), b. Universities, c. Institutes, VII Experiments With Subject-Matter—The Course of Study, VIII Experiments With Methods of Instruction, IX Organization Among the Pupils, X The Organization of Educational Workers, XI Higher Education For Workers, XII Unifying Education, XIII Socializing Culture.

International Publishers was formed in 1923 for the purpose of translating and disseminating international Marxist texts and headed by Alexander Trachtenberg. It quickly outgrew that mission to be the main book publisher, while Workers Library continued to be the pamphlet publisher of the Communist Party.

PDF of later edition of book: https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.123754/2015.123754.Education-In-Soviet-Russia.pdf