Page:Education and Art in Soviet Russia (1919).djvu/42

 into a mechanical productive work having a very great educational value, too, but it may become a source for the education and mental development of the children. Yet the leader-pedagogue will necessarily be compelled to have by his side a helper not from the ranks of the pupils. The moral and mental development of this helper must correspond to the indicated tasks of work in school. Another instance. If a nurse is necessary for the care of the children in the younger age group, the role of such nurse should be at the same time an educational one, and such nurse should be fully aware of her responsibility before society and should clearly understand the importance of her duties. The work of a nurse, a floor-scrubber, a stoker, etc., if it should prove impossible to do without their help, should be to some extent an expert work, a work which has a pedagogical foundation. Under such circumstances the word "servants" will assume in the school an entirely different meaning: the school servants will become, in fact, the lower pedagogical personnel corresponding, as regards its value in school, to the value of a surgeon's assistants and nurses at the time of operations.

If we should turn to the present realities of life, we would, indeed, find such conditions nowhere in school. The moral and intellectual level of the school servants very often does not correspond to their task and is, one may state it, directly inverse to the level of the luxuriousness of the school environment. This is not the fault, of course, of the staff of the lower servants. For obvious reasons, the responsibility for this is also in this case directly inverse to the educational level of the school directors and is the result of the former economic order of life.

To what extent the leading circles ignored up to the time of the November revolution, the problem of the school servants, is manifest if only from the circumstance that the school registers did not even take cognizance of the numerical force of the lower servants.

Even if we omit the question of guilt, the problem still remains and it is left to the Soviet school policy to perform this task. And when, with this policy in view, one reviews the ranks of the former school personnel, one can hardly find any personal points of support for a further movement. For that matter, however, a straight and honorable road is clearly indicated, along which not only will the movement not meet any obstacles,