The Other Russia

Lecture two

Schooling in English in translation to Russian is “shkolenie”, in the Russian language there is the word “schooled”. And all this linguistic nest does not mean “learning” at all and even does not mean “education”, but means “training”. “Training” is exactly what it is and if in the Russian version the foreign “school” that changed into “shkola” does not remind of anything daily, then in English every time that it is employed, unequivocally and in no uncertain terms it cries about “training”. It is worth mentioning that the same “schooling” is mentioned also in relation to the training of horses and dogs.

Going back to the real meaning of the word it is easier to understand the essence of the institution proper. Education, training in school comes before the acquisition of knowledge. The goal of schooling is to break the natural instincts of the human being, to break his natural aggression, to suppress it totally. It is not without reason that in all without exception countries, schools always used corporate punishments still some half a hundred years back. School is intended as a repressive institution. It has to be put in the same rank after a coma, before the prison. It is a misunderstanding that school is put in the same rank as libraries and museums and teachers are written a coma after the doctors, they should be put before the supervisors and the top dogs. The fact that school like many governmental institutions has become decrepit, changed, became covered with boring dust should not hide its repressive character. Even today’s crumbling school is doing its job.

After eleven years of an exhausting mind drill, memory loading with unneeded trash of superfluous knowledge, the predominant majority of individuals leave the school desks with a broken will, with smoothed individual particularities, with stamped as a rule talent and tired! The school assembly line of training furnishes the society with toothless little animals, languid and intentionally frozen in their development. They were forcibly filled with unneeded knowledge like the bag of a vacuum cleaner is filled with trash and dust. This senseless knowledge, especially those given in Russian schools will never serve the poor little animals. Once I tried to count what served me in my life from the knowledge that I received in school. It came out to be contemptibly little. Foreign language and geography. Not even literature because all the most powerful books I read them outside of school, despite it, and the majority of books, I read them in English or in French. And these languages I learned them by myself! School did not give me the knowledge of languages. And I learned geography out of interest, myself, not with a schoolbook.

School is needed to society for suppression. It was created for that. It is a governmental institution. And this is why not only it is not guiltless but also just as guilty as courts and prisons in the suppression of man. I recall the ten years I spent behind the school desk with the horror of losing ten of maybe the most perfect, sunny days of my life! Who will give them back to me! To bring an action against the god damned government? Give me back my sunny years! The skirts of the uniform dresses of the girls of my class glistened behind as much as our pants. Six-eight hours of fidgeting on the hard school banks in an uncomfortable position, curving the skeleton, in an age when one should run, jump, shout! Fingers with blisters from the pen. Ugly, bad smelling teachers. The mathematics teacher stank piss when she bended above us. We grimaced and turned away. The physics teacher had a foul breath when, leaning on the desk, bending above us he explained what was calculated wrong in the copybook, which little problem.

Early in the morning, choking on my fried egg, in complete mind numbness I came out, roamed, I recall the dark streets of the town and saw how were walking, staggering on the mud or the ice, the same unfortunate students. To me it was still close to school, near (though we had impracticable mud in spring and fall), but there were kids who did it by foot, plus by tramway, then by autobus. In eighth grade a new form master appeared: Yakov Lvovich Kaprov. Well he beat the students, calling them to the physical cabinet and locking the door. In actual fact all the real hooligans left school for colonies and streets still in 6-7 grades. He beat pretty normal kids, they came out with broken noses. Me, he did not beat me, my father was an officer. But even if we had a sweet form master, what would this have changed? This ten years each of us gave them to the government, did his time. Give me back my sunny years!

School does not teach what one needs for life. They don’t teach at school how to speak with people, how to recognize a false person, how to deal with people, how to command them, how to beat off an attack. What is life, how close will death come, how to meet life pains, what to do if your girl left? School does not answer all these questions. Instead it develops in you secondary instincts of obedience: everybody gets up when the teacher comes in. It teaches you base tricks: knowing the weakness of the teacher one can get a good mark. And it teaches obedience, obedience.

But the most important: those milligrams of actual knowledge that it gives you can be received in a few years, in three years! Why then do they deform the children, oblige them to sit like idiotic dolls in the closed air of the class a supplementary seven years? To totally break off the instincts. So that he gets used to insults and if the retarded teacher, a tramp in torn stockings yells to you: “Moron!” that you don’t hit her in the face but stand still, bending your head. All these years are necessary to solidly break your will, hitting on it every day like with a cub, like with a crowbar.

If somebody was indeed left with good memories about school, they are not about the school itself, but about the two-three interesting guys met there, pretty girls, the first love is remembered there, that is personal stuff.

So when you see a picket or a meeting of teachers, all these aunties the size of a hippopotamus in torn fur-coats, do not pity them, the civil servants who don’t receive their salaries. The same government functionaries like prison supervisors or cops in gray armyaks – they are the employees of a repressive apparatus. (And then, what a nonsense, how come a woman should educate men? It is unnatural.)

One should see the world as it is, that is right. It is extremely important to see the world right. Teachers are not teachers of the normal seeing – they are employees of the governmental apparatus of education. In truth there is a small handful of teachers in the world. To find oneself a teacher is an arduous task. Those who teach at schools cannot be called teachers. It is a sacrilege. Teachers are a small handful. Happy is he who has found his teacher.

School teachers are workers of the negative. Of course it is not their individual fault, they were broken once and now they are obediently (for a small price!) fill the memory and the brains of their young victims with a stuffing of chewed knowledge: algebra, physics, chemistry, geometry, literature, history – all mixed together. The general nullity of the teachers, their low intellectual level, the fact that they do not rise above the general philistine level of development, speak for themselves, they are not the best people of our society. Tired and broken they practice ventriloquism according to the program. It is extremely rare for them to understand their students or to foresee them. It is sufficient to say that in the school report card in Russian literature I got a “three”. Still I was reading avidly, writing poetry non-stop from fifteen years old and a “three’ was obviously too little for me. But we did not like each other: the teacher and me. I could not put her a “three”, she could. I hope she is alive and at least once a week still and again ascertains her stupidity.

Right after the enthronement of the Soviet Power the revolutionary-Bolsheviks freely experimented with school to the utmost. Judging by “The SHKID Republic” there were teachers’ elections, school self-government. The future was planned to be interesting. They understood that if they wanted to cultivate a new man they also needed new schools. But it is one thing to contest the power in a revolutionary outburst. Another thing is to seize the power and to use it. To break at the same time many government institutions is an extremely arduous occupation. And a dangerous one too – you will break the old school and while you are building the new one there will not be any.

This is why the new school did not happen. They removed God’s Law and the letter “yat” replacing it by Pakrovsky’s history and materialism for students. The experiments of Makarenko and “The SHKID Republic” petered out. Everything was quietly returning on its circles. During the Great Patriotic War appeared the phenomenon of factory schools. After the war, I.V. Stalin having reconciliated himself with the Church and preoccupied by the strengthening of the government (Even before that he had returned officers and the shoulder-straps) began to rerun the classical education. The separate education of sexes was introduced, school uniform, belts and caps, paid education for the three senior classes and even Latin and Greek – dead languages. This imperial fashion did not last long, approximately from 1947 to 1955. And even it was not introduced everywhere, there were schools left with mixed education and without caps and belts. (They also tried to introduce a uniform for students.) During Khrushchev’s thaw the Stalinist attempt to resurrect an imperial school faded away. To the “democratic” and americanist Khrush it possibly looked as an out of place classicism. Just as “architectural extravagances” – they were starting to be really fought against: against the Stalinist imperial style of buildings of the MID, the hotel “Ukraine” and others. Meanwhile Latin, belts and caps were from the same set of imperialicity, together with the “architectural extravagances”. Khrush desperately needed a labor force for factories and plants and tractor drivers to upturn the soil, so school was made to last eight years. Workers and peasants were needed, so they were hastily fabricated in the eight-year schools.

Finally they came out with the present awkward school. Maybe they did not came out with it on purpose because the quality of the government elite – the rulers of the nation – was constantly decreasing and it is unlikely that Khrushchev and even less so Brezhnev were capable of reflecting about education, not speaking about estimating the relative qualities of education systems. After the genius of Lenin (Actually he did not leave any project of a new education. As far as I know.) and the perfect practician Stalin came the dumbheads. Dumbheads don’t have projects.

Returning to Stalin’s attempt of the Restauration of the classical education I will note once again that it was realized in the late period before his death when Stalin had come to imperialicity, having rejected the heritage of the 1917 revolution. It is unknown what he himself thought about his school but a hedgehog can understand that the new man could not have come out of a school where were taught Latin and Russian history, composed by the German Miller and other Germans on orders of the German dynasty of the Romanovs. The learned tsars’ history and obediently counted the revolutionary time from the invented date of the birth of Christ! So what was to happen? Of course not a new but a decrepit man! So with this kind of school they normally got the recreation of the ancient society.

(We needed more and more revolutionary spirit! My reproach to the revolution of 1917 is that it was not enough radical. It did not kill the ancient world but just muffled it for a time. But this will be discussed elsewhere…)

The school that exists, the sadist repressive governmental institution oriented at the suppression and the total deformation of the proper human essence has to be destroyed. Otherwise our society is condemned to recreate itself in the repulsive form in which it is today. There will always be serf-like ignorant pensioners, always will be butcher-like cops, always criminals will be recreated, always Gogol’s functionaries will appear, monumental archaic aunties-judges. Generation after generation. While the formation of these repellent creatures already begins on the school desk. Society fills up the kid a whole 11 years to death, until he has become a semi-fabricated product, a preparation for the above-enumerated types. This assembly line has to be disconnected. This is what we will do when we will come to power.

Every education should be a lot shorter. Five years are sufficient to receive a perfect average education. And the education has to be totally different.

Children today have an abnormally long childhood. The modern world has become a lot faster, information on television, information on the radio, all this makes possible a far more early possibility of knowing the world still outside of school. Apart from school. And our system of education was created in the West in the XIX century, has come to us from the West. We have to start earlier and to teach shorter.

We have to begin from five years old and to teach for no more than five years.

The teacher in the middle school has to be only one. It has to be a man, he has to have an artistic (painter, poet, writer) and military experience. No algebra, trigonometry, mathematics, physics and other abstract, never useful disciplines will be taught to the children. For the conservation and the transmission of such abstract knowledge there are scientists, it is their job. (There will be only a few scientists and the special knowledge will be limited to some small higher educational establishments.)

So as it begins to walk the child leaves his mother and comes to live in the House of Youth. The House is necessarily located in a picturesque environment with beautiful nature, outside of the city. The teacher is a master as it was already mentioned, – alone, he is necessarily a man. In case of necessity teachers of foreign languages are also enlisted but they do not bear the title of “master”. To help the master there will also be two instructors, no less then three, depending on the quantity of children in the House of Youth. Their function is to help the Master. There will be the following disciplines in the program:

History: With the account of “The New Chronology” of Fomenko / Nosovsky and the discoveries of Lev Gumilev.

Manuals will have to be elaborated.

Geography and knowledge of other countries, ethnography.

Foreign languages (western and eastern ones – more of eastern ones).

Weapons and military training. The teaching is not giving in classrooms. The skills of shooting, handling a grenade thrower, a mine thrower, driving and shooting from armored carriers, etc.

The art of public-speaking, poetry, composition and exposition.

Historical personalities; Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini and personalities of culture: Nietzsche, Pazolini, Dostoevski, etc.

The secrets of life. Human knowledge: the secrets of sex, the art of dealing with people, how to recognize a false person, how to react to an insult, to a failure in life, to the death of a friend, to the betraying of a woman.

Martial arts: combat, box, kung fu, real teaching of a hard fight.

Using a typewriter, Internet.

Only in exceptional cases will the teaching take place in classrooms. The details of the new educational system have to be elaborated in the future. The basic principle: the teacher, the Master with a capital letter, man of experience and knowledge will personally teach the group of students. Like the eastern teacher of wisdom and martial arts.