Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/185

Rh again it is necessary to lug benches and tables from one room into another, and the racket is terrible! But still, as soon as the teacher is ready, the scholars are ready also, and any one who delays the beginning of the class is disciplined by the scholars themselves.

I must defend myself. In giving this description of the Y. P. school, I have no intention of presenting a model of what is requisite and necessary for a school, but simply a description of the actual state of the school. I take it such descriptions have their utility. If I succeed in the following pages in clearly presenting a history of the development of the school, then the reader will clearly comprehend why the character of the school was formed as it was, why I consider such an order of things advantageous, and why it would have been an utter impossibility for me to have changed it, even if I had wished to do so.

The school had a free development from principles established in it by teacher and pupils. Notwithstanding all the weight of the master's authority, the pupil always had the right not to attend the school and not to obey the teacher. The teacher had the prerogative not to admit a pupil, and the power of exerting all the force of his influence on the majority of the pupils, on the society which was always forming among the scholars.

The farther the students advanced, the wider grew the scope of the instruction, and the more imperative became the demand for order. In consequence of this, in the normal and unconstrained development of a school, the more cultivated the pupils are, the more capable of order they will become, the more strongly they themselves will feel the necessity of order, and the more powerfully the teacher's influence on them in this respect will be felt. In the Y. P. school from its