Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/212

198 three such adults in the school, and one of them still continues to come.

The adults act in school just as if they were at a fire; the instant one has finished writing he instantly lays the pen down, and while he is doing so, he grasps a book with his other hand, and begins to read standing; as soon as you take a book from him he grabs his slate; and when you take that from him he is entirely lost.

We had this autumn a laboring man who took care of the stoves and studied at the same time. In two weeks he learned to read and write, but this was not study: it was an illness, a fit of intoxication! As he would go carrying a load of wood through the class-room, he would stop, and with the wood in his arms would bend down over a lad's head, and, spelling s-k-a, ska, would go to his place.

When he failed to do that, then he would look at the children with envy, almost with anger. When he was at liberty, then there was no restraining him; he would devour his book, repeating b-a, ba, r-i, ri, and so on, and when he was in this condition he was deprived of all power of comprehending anything else.

When the adults had to sing or draw or hear a story from history or watch experiments, then it was evident that they yielded to a cruel necessity, and, like the famished when torn from their food, they only waited eagerly the moment when they could betake themselves to their a b c book. Remaining faithful to my principle, I never compelled the boy to learn the alphabet when he did not want to, or the adult to learn physics or drawing when he preferred the alphabet. Each selected what he wanted.

As a rule such adults as had studied before have not as yet found their place in the Y. P. school, and their learning goes hard; there is something unnatural and painful in their relations to the school. The Sunday-schools which I have seen present the same phenomena as regards adults, and therefore all data about the successful voluntary instruction of adults would be for us most useful and valuable.