Page:Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky - Self-Education of the Workers.djvu/6

 knowledge. Our students must feel themselves part and parcel of the work of the community. The young girls and boys must prepare themselves to become big producers. Moreover, we must never lose sight of the fact that the chief aim of education is the knowledge of the various forms of human culture, which, in its turn, includes all forms of mental and manual activity. The artistic and physical education must be the fitting completion of the technical. There must be educational freedom and freedom in the school. We must preserve our ancient monuments, since these are to us the witnesses of the old Russian civilisation, but, at the same time, we hope to see the birth of an art completely in touch with the emotions of the modern world: of an art that will lead us to further conquests for liberty.

Comrade Oulianov began by observing that, since the Bolshevik revolution, there has arisen in the people an immense desire for education, but ignorance, the dreadful result of the old régime, cannot disappear in a day. A vast number of persons, already engaged in production, cannot return to school; hence the pressing need of a post-scholastic education.

We must cover the country, she explains, with a multitude of elementary schools for adults, for the illiterate, and for the semi-illiterate. In Soviet Russia ignorance must disappear. We ask evervbody's assistance in this great work. Knowledge and science, just like property, must not be the privilege of the few, but accessible to all. It is the common duty of everybody to impart knowledge to others.

The essential thing to be remembered is that we must teach people how to make use of books. The student—let us call him the post-scholastic, the evening, or the artisan student—must know how to use the dictionary and he must always have it handy by him; likewise, books of reference, encyclopedias, etc. We must not only give him a key to open the door, but we must tell him where that door leads to.

Under the old régime, the intellectuals amongst the workers and peasants were chiefly interested in abstract sciences, since they opened to them new horizons. Those, on the contrary, who aimed at bettering their position were interested solely in the practice of science. The effect of the revolution has been that practical science is of interest now, even to the most politically advanced of our workers. In order to organise production in an efficient manner, to put in the right direction the great peasant communities, good technical education is necessary. The workers and the peasants have learned that without scientific knowledge they will never be able to control the economic life of the nation. Therefore the whole character of professional education must be changed. Formerly it aimed at giving to the worker a purely mechanical proficiency; now it must give him a larger view of his trade, and of its importance