Chapter 7
Recitations and Examinations
Bible
history and Russian history were both taught in the Yasnaia school. The teacher
reads or tells his story from memory and then asks questions, to which the
children answer all together. If this produces too much disorder, he puts the
question to a single pupil, and if he cannot answer, the rest help him out. This
system was the gradual growth of experience, and it worked very well whether
there were thirty children present or only five. The master does not allow the
noise to become overwhelming, but guides, so far as it may be necessary, the
torrent of happy animation and excited rivalry.
A new master was shocked
by the uproar, and almost suffocated by the crowd of children climbing over his
back and on his lap, and he put a stop to it, but by so doing he completely
spoiled the class. To enable them to understand, says Tolstoy, children need to
come close to those who are talking, and to seize the slightest change of face
and of gesture. The new master made them sit on benches and answer each in turn.
The boy who was questioned stammered, ashamed and confused, and the teacher,
with a kindly expression and a smile, encouraged him by saying --
"Well, then ... and
after that? ... good, very good," as is the wont of schoolmaster.
But Tolstoy soon became
convinced that nothing was worse for a child than to have to answer alone in
this way, and nothing more harmful than the relations of superior and
subordinate which it produced between master and pupil. "Nothing is more
revolting to me," he says, "than this spectacle of a man who torments a child
without having the slightest right to do it. The teacher knows well enough that
the pupil is suffering from having to stand blushing and perspiring before him,
and he finds it disagreeable himself, but he has a rule -- a pupil must learn to
speak alone."
But why must he learn to
recite alone? "Nobody knows," unless indeed it is to be able to show off before
visitors. And visitors Tolstoy regards as thorough-going nuisances. They had
only one effect upon him, and that was to satisfy him that set exercises and
answers and examinations were relics of the superstitions of the Middle Ages.
Either they went away convinced that the scholars knew what they did not know,
and the teacher had succeeded in fooling them, or else they thought that they
did not know what they knew perfectly well. It would be as sensible, he claims,
to examine a man of forty in his knowledge of geography as to examine a man of
ten. You have to live for months with a person to find out what he knows. And
where examinations are made a feature of education they become an end in
themselves, and the student no longer really learns philosophy or history, but
he learns the altogether distinct art of answering examination questions, a
totally useless branch of study.
Tolstoy made the
experiment in history of questioning the class separately. Most of them soon
tired of this. The boldest alone went on answering, and the timid ones held
their peace, burst into tears, and were marked zero. The new teacher was
disgusted with the results, and noted in his class-book that this, that, and the
other boy were stupid and worse. "I cannot get a word out of Savine," he
entered.
Savine was a
rosy-cheeked boy with soft eyes and long lashes, the son of a farm-hand. He wore
a blouse and trousers and his father's boots. His pretty and attractive face
struck Tolstoy at once, especially as he won the first place in the arithmetic
class, both by his ability to calculate and by his merry enthusiasm. He also
read and wrote fairly well. But as soon as he was questioned, "he drops his head
on one side, tears come to his eyes, and he evidently longs to sink through the
floor." It is a real martyrdom for him. "Is it the fear which his former teacher
inspired in him (he had studied with a priest)? Is it self-distrust, pride, his
false position among children whom he considers inferior to himself, the dislike
of seeing himself in this one matter behind all the rest, and of appearing at a
disadvantage to his teacher? Has this little soul been hurt by some unlucky word
of the master? Is it for all these reasons together? God knows, but this
shyness, even if of itself it is not a good trait, is certainly closely bound up
with all that is best in his boyish soul. To obliterate it with the aid of a
ruler -- material or moral -- you may do it, but at the risk of obliterating at
the same time other precious qualities without which you cannot lead him far on
the right road."
Tolstoy persuaded the
new teacher to let the children desert the benches and climb where they pleased,
and the class began at once to improve. And he soon saw entered in the journal
some flattering remarks regarding the same Savine.
Maeterlinck has spoken
recently of the "spirit of the bee-hive." Forty years ago Tolstoy wrote very
much the same way of the "spirit of the school." "There is," he tells us, "in a
school, something undefined, which is almost entirely independent of the
master's control, something absolutely unknown to the science of pedagogy, and
which constitutes notwithstanding the very foundation of success in teaching --
it is the spirit of the school. The master has indeed a negative influence upon
it, for unless he abstains from certain things, he may destroy it. This spirit
increases in proportion as the master allows the pupils to think for themselves,
and with the number of pupils, and it decreases in proportion as the lessons and
hours are lengthened. It communicates itself from child to child and to the
teacher himself, and shows itself in the sound of the voice, in looks, in
gestures, in rivalries -- something very palpable, necessary and precious, and
which consequently every master ought to cherish. It is a spirit of ardour which
is as necessary to intellectual nourishment as the saliva is to digestion. It
cannot be artificially produced, but it springs into life of itself. It is the
teacher's duty to find some useful object for this spirit to spend itself upon,
and not to try to quench it. You ask one boy a question, but another wishes to
answer it. He bends towards you and looks at you with all his might. He can
hardly keep back the words. Ask him, and he will answer with passion, and what
he says will be fixed forever on his memory. But if you keep him in that state
of tension for half an hour without letting him overflow, he will let it out in
pinching his neighbour."
Tolstoy tested his
classes in the following way. He would go out and leave the school to itself,
after it had been going on for a time in the usual disorder. When he returned he
would listen at the door and find the children still engaged at their studies,
reciting to each other and correcting each other, more quietly than when he was
there; while in an old-fashioned school, if the teacher leaves, and orders the
pupils to continue their studies alone, they will begin sky-larking as soon as
he is out of hearing. The reaction is certain. A new pupil at the Yasnaia school
was pretty sure to remain silent for a month or more, but gradually he began to
recite with the rest and to take his natural place, absorbing what he heard.
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