Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1862
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
Possibly the cause of this is our severance from the people, the enforced culture of the upper classes; and time only may help this trouble by giving birth, not to a chrestomathy, but a complete transition literature consisting of all the books now extant, and organically taking its place in a course of graded reading.
Maybe it is a fact that the common people do not comprehend, and do not wish to comprehend, our literary language, because there is nothing in it for them to comprehend, because our whole literature does not suit them at all, and they will work out their own literature. Finally, the last supposition, which seems to us more plausible than the rest, consists in this: that the apparent fault lies not in the nature of the thing, but in our insistence on the notion that the object of teaching language is to raise pupils to the degree of knowing the literary language, and, above all, in making rapid progress in the attainment of this end. It may very possibly be that the graded reading of which we dream will come of itself, and that the knowledge of the literary language will, in its own good time, reach every pupil, as we are all the time seeing it do among people who read in turn, without comprehending, the psalter, novels, and lawpapers, and by this route manage somehow to attain to a knowledge of the language of books.
Yet by this hypothesis it is incomprehensible to us why all books seem to the people so bad and so contrary to their taste; and the question arises what ought schools to do in the meantime? For we cannot at all admit that, having decided in our minds that a knowledge of the literary language is useful, it would be possible by means of compulsory explanations, lessons, and repetitions to teach the people the literary language against their will as they are taught French. We must confess that more than once we have attempted this in the course of the last two months, and we have always encountered insuperable repugnance, which showed the falsity of the course adopted.
In these experiments I merely convinced myself that the explanations of the meaning of a word or of a paragraph are perfectly out of the question even for a talented teacher, to say nothing of the explanations which teachers of mediocre abilities like altogether too well, as that "an assembly is a certain small synedrion," and the like. In explaining any word whatever as, for example, the word vpechatleniye, "impression" you substitute, in place of the word explained, another just as incomprehensible, or a whole list of words the connection of which is just as incomprehensible as the word itself. Almost always the word itself is not incomprehensible, but the pupil has no comprehension of what is expressed by the word. The word is always at his service when the idea is there. Moreover, the relation of the word to the thought and the formation of new ideas is such a complicated, mysterious, and delicate process of the mind, that all interference with it seems like a brutal incoherent force arresting the process of development.
It is easy to say understand. Why can't all comprehend, and yet how many different things may be understood by different persons reading from the same book? The pupil, though he fail to understand two or three words in a sentence, may comprehend the delicate shades of thought or its relation to what went before. You, the teacher, insist on one side of the concept, but the pupil does not require what you wish to explain to him. Sometimes he has understood, only he cannot make it plain to you that he has, while at the same time he vaguely surmises and absorbs something entirely different, and yet something quite useful and valuable for him. You insist on his explaining himself, but since he must use words to explain the impression which words produce on him, he is either silent, or else he begins to talk nonsense, or lies, or deceives himself, trying to find something to satisfy you, or he invents some non-existent difficulty and struggles under it; the general impression produced by a book, the poetic sense which helps him to obtain a notion of it, is driven in and hidden.
We were reading Gogol's "Vii," repeating each paragraph in our own words. Everything went well till we reached the third page, on which is the following paragraph:
"All these learned people, the seminary as well as the college, which cherished a sort of inherited feud, were absolutely devoid of means for satisfying their hunger, and moreover were unusually voracious, so that to reckon how many galuskas [21] each one of them would eat at a dinner would have been a perfectly impossible task, and therefore the generous offerings of opulent benefactors never sufficed."
TEACHER: Well, what have you read?
Almost all these pupils were very well developed children.
THE BEST PUPIL: In the college the people were all voracious eaters, were poor, and at dinner ate galushkas.
TEACHER: What else?
PUPIL (a mischievous boy with a good memory, speaking whatever comes into his head): An impossible theory they sacrificed their benefactors.
TEACHER (with vexation}'. Think what you are saying. That is not right. What was an impossibility?
Silence.
TEACHER: Read it again.
They read it. One pupil with a good memory added a few more words which he had retained. The seminaries fed by opulent benefactors could not suffice.
No one could make any sense out of it. They began to talk absolute nonsense. The teacher insisted:
TEACHER: What is an impossibility?
He wanted them to tell him that it was an impossibility to count the dumplings.
A PUPIL: A college is an impossibility.
ANOTHER PUPIL: Very poor is impossible.
They read it again. As if they were hunting for a needle they tried to find the word the teacher wanted, they hit on everything except the word count, and they at last fell into despair.
I the teacher did not give up, and after great labor got them to analyze the whole sentence; but they understood it much less clearly than when the first pupil read it.
However, there was really nothing to understand. The carelessly constructed and involved sentence conveyed no meaning to the reader, other than that at once perceived: "The poor and hungry people ate dumplings," and that was all the author really had to say.
I was concerned only about the form, which was bad, and in bothering about this I spoiled the whole class during the entire after-dinner hour, beat down and destroyed a quantity of intellectual blossoms just beginning to put forth.
Another time I struggled in just the same wrong and disgusting way on the elucidation of the word arudiye, "instrument," and just as ineffectually.
On that same day, in the drawing-class, the pupil Ch - protested because the teacher insisted on his inscribing on his copy-book the title Romashka's Drawings. He declared:
"We ourselves draw in copy-books, but only Romashka designed the figures, and so we should write, not the drawings, but the work of Romashka."
How the distinction of these ideas came into his head remains for me a mystery which it is best not to try to solve, but in exactly the same way it is a mystery how participles and subordinate clauses sometimes though rarely are introduced into their compositions.
It is necessary to give a pupil the opportunity of acquiring new ideas and words from the general sense of the discourse. If he hears or reads an incomprehensible word in one sentence which he understands, another time finds the same in another sentence, he begins to get a vague notion of it, and finally the time comes when he feels the necessity of using this word; when once he has used it both the word and the concept become his property. And there are a thousand other ways. But consciously to give a pupil new ideas and new forms, I am convinced, is just as impossible, just as idle, as to teach a child to walk by the laws of equilibrium.
Every such attempt, instead of aiding, drives away the pupil from the proposed end, just as a man's rough hand, which, wishing to help a flower to unfold, should break it all around and then try to roll back its petals.