Pedagogical articles Author:Leo Tolstoy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A PROJECT OF A GENERAL PLAN FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF POPULAR SCHOOLS The other day I read the Project of a General Plan for the Establishment of Popular Schoo... more »ls. That reading produced upon me an effect such as a man must experience when he receives the sudden news that the young grove, which he has known and loved so much, and which he has seen growing up under his eyes, is to be changed into a park, by cutting out here, clearing off and lopping there, by pulling out young shoots by the root and laying out pebble walks in their place. The general idea of the Project is this: Considering it necessary to disseminate popular instruction, and surmising that the education of the masses has not yet begun and that it is hostile toward its future education; surmising that the statute of the year 1828, prohibiting persons not specially entitled to do so from opening schools and teaching, is still in force; surmising that the masses will never consider their own education without compulsionfrom without, or that, having undertaken it, they will not be able to carry it on, — the government imposes on the people a new, the largest of all the existing taxes, the school tax, and entrusts the officials of the ministry with the management of all the newly opened schools, that is, the appointment of teachers and choice of programmes and manuals. The government, in consideration of the new levy, puts itself under obligation before the people of finding and appointing fifty thousand teachers and of founding at least fifty thousand schools. However, the government has constantly felt its inadequacy in managing the existing parochial and county schools. All know that there are no teachers, and nobody dissents from that view. This idea, so strange in all the barrenness of its expression to any ...« less