Page:Education and Art in Soviet Russia (1919).djvu/40

 lines of the economic system of the present-day family institution. The contemporary middle bourgeois family of a city teaches a child, even from earliest infancy, to use paid services, the services of the domestic servants, the number of whom depends on the wealth of the parents. Nurses, maid servants, dishwashers, porters, and all other kinds of domestic servants train the mind of the children, from the very cradle, to the stability and the righteousness of an order of life in which the exploitation of other people's work is considered the necessary and natural addition to the comforts of existence. The children, after leaving such a home environment for the school, find here the same ranks of servants performing almost the same duties as in the family circle. The porters undressing the children and keeping their coats and dresses, men servants and nurses cleaning the rooms, scrubbers looking after the cleanliness of the floors, couriers running on errands, janitors and stokers—all these people, who are working in the school, appear to the children to be the same necessary addition to the comforts of school life as the corresponding persons outside of the school. Hence, the children very naturally acquire the idea of the "common," "base" labor which is the lot of the "lower" classes of humanity, doomed by forces unknown to the child to be the natural and eternal slaves of his will and that of other privileged people. In this manner the school system has nursed in its pupils a contempt for physical work and a scornful relation towards the mass of working people, on whom the bourgeois order has imposed all the hardship of this work. The bourgeois school makes of its pupils privileged idlers, people unable to work, and, very often, even exploiters. Heroic spiritual efforts were necessary later, a gigantic internal struggle, and a sharp revolution of viewpoints and habits of mind, in order to rid oneself from this poisonous inoculation of the school and to overcome the immunity resulting from it. And in fact, only after a kind of psychical "illness," could a man brought up in the school of the past absolve himself from inherited ideas and attain a healthy balance and a healthy, sound view of the life surrounding him.

On the other hand, the school servants themselves, put in such a situation, developed and strengthened in themselves a feeling of injury and bitterness because of their fate and, as a natural consequence thereof, an unfriendly feeling towards the pupils of the school, to these "gentlefolk's children" and favorites of