The Product of CircumstancesTowards a Materialist and Situated PedagogyMarlon Miguel*

Poem and (Anti)theory: Circumstances and Materialism

I would like to begin by outlining the context in which Makarenko worked. At the end of 1920, he was invited to head a juvenile colony by the Public Education Department in Ukraine, which was called the Gorky Colony.1313The name was given only sometime after its creation and was inspired by the readings of Maxim Gorky that took place in the Colony. When the kids discovered that the life of Gorky had been similar to theirs, they took him as a sort of model for their own lives: ‘They were stunned by the story, suddenly struck by the idea: “So Gorky was like us! I say, that’s fine!” This idea moved them profoundly and joyfully. Maxim Gorky’s life seemed to become part of our life. Various episodes in it provided us with examples for comparison, a fund of nicknames, a background for debate, and a scale for the measurement of human values’ (Makarenko, The Road to Life, I, pp. 135–56). Here Makarenko is not so far from a principle that was fundamental for Paulo Freire’s pedagogy: to associate the conquering of words with the conquering of the world — i.e. the re-appropriation of one’s own history and the transformation of the world goes through an acquisition of a certain language. In practical terms, for Freire, in order to learn a word, one must learn its historical, cultural, and political dimensions. Freire associated the educational process with the construction of a political consciousness that would help the pupil to free themselves from oppression and become agents of their own history: ‘There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world […]. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it’ (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 87–88). Situated six kilometres from Poltava, the colony was to receive children and adolescents — many of them orphans — for social re-education. The context was tough: the revolution had taken place and the civil war had just finished in the region, leaving people in very miserable conditions. The Public Education Department conceived of Makarenko’s task not only as the re-education of these ‘young offenders’ but also as an experiment to educate the ‘new man’ in new ways. The young people sent to the colony were more or less dangerous, often very violent people who had committed infractions such as theft, robbery, and organized crime. The first pages of The Pedagogical Poem describe the complete distress of Makarenko before the student body. They were resistant to any pedagogical process and, in addition, the material conditions were hardly favourable: the colony simply possessed an unheated, abandoned hangar, which was falling apart. They had neither clothes nor shoes for the kids, nor enough food to feed everyone.

In this wretched state Makarenko was helpless, and he felt that the ‘pedagogical science’ he acquired reading books (Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Natorp, Blonsky, etc.) offered ‘no method, no means, no logic — nothing’1414Makarenko, The Road to Life, i, p. 179. to help him deal with the context. In this situation, he decided not to follow any pre-conceived theory, dogma, or received ideas, and instead to take what I would call a materialist stance, that is, he learnt from daily practices to build his store of hands-on experience, and invented solutions according to what the circumstances gave, presented to him, or demanded.

Indeed, the recurrence of the word ‘circumstance’ (Обстоятельство) in The Pedagogical Poem is very striking. Makarenko claimed that every important invention concerning the Colony came from the observation of a certain set of circumstances. His usage of the word — just like with Marx and Engels — certainly mirrored the historical, economic, and social conditions; however, in contrast to their thought, Makarenko referred to a far smaller scale, namely to the singular conditions of the Colony or the kids’ trajectories, in sum, the actual situation he found himself in. Hence, Makarenko’s use of the word referred to a singular position in time and space; it was meant to be attentive, present, and alert to what was happening — to reflect his stance right there, right in the middle of the experience, at each moment. Interestingly, the word employed by the author, Обстоятельство, is built in exactly the same way as the German word used by Marx: Umstand. ‘Об’ is for ‘Um’, ‘Circum’ (accusative form of circus, ‘circle’, ‘ring’, ‘around’), as стояте for ‘stand’/‘stehen’, ‘stance’, ‘standing’, coming undoubtedly from the Latin stantia.1515It seems, indeed, that the Russian word was ‘fabricated’: it is a loan translation, a calque, deriving from the German and French words. And this etymology precisely reflects the attitude that the educator, following Makarenko’s opinions, should have: to stand in the middle of the situation and to learn, immanently, what to do from it. Finally, if we remain on the grounds of etymology and follow the sequence of metaphors emanating from this word, we may remark upon the interesting way Makarenko found to work on the transmission of his thought, that is, through the form of stanzas. He prefers to write not a doctrine, a theory, a manual, or a kind of reproducible knowledge, but rather a description of his experiences in an immanent literary form — The Pedagogical Poem, written between 1925 and 1935, and describing his thirteen years of work at the Gorky Colony, is precisely a literary work, a prose poetry.

The Pedagogical Poem can be read as a kind of anti-theory. However, Makarenko nevertheless presents a horizon or a guiding principle on top of which the whole experience can be built: the creation of what he calls a ‘real collectivity’. This means that the educator must be attentive to the ‘embryos’ or the ‘sprouts’ of the collectivity, which are often unpredictable, but may appear all of a sudden and should be saved, ‘cherished at all costs’ — these embryos constitute the most ‘important circumstances’ that have to be taken into consideration and analysed during the pedagogical process.1616Cf. Makarenko, The Road to Life, i, Chap. 8, a chapter named precisely ‘Character and Culture’.

Collectivity and Social Glue

The collectivity is the target of a doubly circular movement. On the one hand, it is the task of the educator to educate the children and adolescents so that they learn to act collectively. This learning is not so much that of reason, but rather the learning of a (new) model of sensibility, of a certain sense of the collective. This sensibility refers to the perception and observation of the surroundings, of the ‘milieu’ (среда, another important word in Makarenko’s work), and also relates to the series of prefixes ‘um’/‘Об’/‘circum’.

This capacity to perceive what is around you, this capacity to perceive what cannot be seen, what is made in the other rooms, to perceive the tonality of life, this capacity of orientation. […] The real Soviet citizen must be able to sense what happens around him with all his nerves, almost unconsciously.1717Anton Semyonovich Makarenko apud Irène Lézine, A. S. Makarenko, Pédagogue Soviétique (1888–1939) (Paris: PUF, 1954), p. 39, my translation.

In this extract one can also perceive an echo of Marx and Engel’s insistence in The Holy Family, which I outlined earlier, on the ‘world of senses’ and the necessity of rearranging the empirical world so that humans’ become aware of themselves. Makarenko, however, gives an even greater insistence on the development of the subject’s sensibility and perception, and on their capacity to perceive beyond the limits of their individual space.

On the other hand, and this is the second crucial point, it is not so much the educator who is responsible for educating but rather the juvenile collectivity itself that will (re)educate the children:

The task of the educator is not at all to educate. It is repugnant to good sense to think that a dozen cultivated individuals gathered by chance at the Gorky colony would be able to educate one hundred and thirty delinquents. […] It is not the educator who educates, but the milieu.1818Anton Semyonovich Makarenko, ‘La Colonie de Poltava dite Colonel Gorki (1925)’, in L’Éducation dans les Collectivités d’Enfants (Paris: CEMEA, Les Éditions du Scarabée, 1956), p. 57, my translation.

The collectivity is thus the product of a long process which is based on this double progressive movement: Firstly, the formation of a type of sensibility (and thus of habits, customs, rituals, and traditions) that goes beyond one’s individual perspective and that allows for the progressive production of the social glue tying these individuals together. Secondly, thanks to the daily collective activities, there is an improvement of this same sensibility and the capacity of the individuals to relate to each other. To claim that it is the milieu that educates means that the real process through which one is educated is correlated to the tensions inside the collective activities and the way they are resolved. That is why Makarenko was often accused of placing the collectivity at the centre of his pedagogy and not the (individual) child, of not following the ‘reign of psychology’ but rather that of work.

Makarenko’s main antagonist throughout The Pedagogical Poem is the Public Education Department and its abstract pedagogical science. What he wants to emphasize is that there should be no knowledge or moral principle that precedes the solution of the problems emerging from the pedagogical situation. That is why he strategically makes use of different methods without transforming them into pedagogical axioms. For example, sometimes Makarenko describes the use of military strategies and even of disciplinary methods (such as the organization of the children in lines and ‘detachments’, or the practice of gymnastics); at other times, to the reader’s surprise, he may even beat a child and become very authoritarian. However, and this constitutes the crucial point, he does not defend any of these attitudes as principles; on the contrary, he even claims that violence should be avoided at all costs, as it is, in the end, not really useful to create a collective culture. If he describes these moments, it is to show that they may appear as reactions to certain circumstances and show the incapacity of the educator — in this case, himself — to deal with the pupils. Indeed, the absolute non-moralistic tone of The Pedagogical Poem is very striking, as its narrative follows the flow of human affects and expresses the perseverance to understand and try to deal with them.

To Sunder the Covenants of Fate: The Critique of Characterology

This non-moralistic tone is constantly present in Makarenko’s text, which also demands, in turn, a non-moralistic reading. His tone is deeply connected to his refusal of a psychological, behavioural, and characterological approach to educating children. In the colony, common phrases such as ‘delinquent’ and ‘morally handicapped’ were, for example, banned from the everyday vocabulary — instead, they used the plural noun ‘colonists’. This does not mean, however, that these terms disappeared in his text; on the contrary, he made use of them to subvert or satirize them.

Furthermore, he applies the idea of an active forgetting of the children’s past: ‘I considered that the principal method for the re-education of delinquents should be based upon a complete ignoring of the past, especially past crimes’.1919Makarenko, The Road to Life, i, p. 383. Some lines later, the text follows: ‘The usual pedagogical logic at that time aped medicine, adopting the sage adage: “In order to cure a disease, it must first be known.” This logic sometimes seduced even me, not to mention my colleagues and the Department of Public Education […]. As far back as 1922 I had asked the Commission not to send me any more personal records. We quite sincerely ceased to interest ourselves in the past offences of our charges, and with such success that the latter soon began to forget them themselves’ (ibid., pp. 383–84). Makarenko, going against the ideology of his time, de-naturalized delinquency and detached it from a medical status that had the tendency to essentialize and classify children according to an innate character or personality. He further radicalized this position — fighting, as he claimed, against his ‘own instincts’ — by choosing not to even read the children’s records as they were sent to the Colony. To correlate an act (stealing, fighting, drinking, betting) to a character fault would mean not taking into consideration the hard and miserable circumstances in which these kids and adolescents grew up. That is why Makarenko minimized these acts so much and instead emphasized that the Colony would be precisely the place to create another set of habits. In this same sense, Makarenko’s text rarely describes what the intimate and internal personality of his pupils was supposed to be; he prefers to describe, their abilities, techniques, physical aspects, tones of voice, style, the pace of their walk and speech rhythms, etc. This does not mean that Makarenko does not create descriptive categories in the Colony, but that they are operational and mobile ones that are used to describe the situation in which individuals find themselves and not to essentialize them.

This question of forgetting the past, which was so active in the Colony, is reminiscent of an Althusserian phrase that could very well be a definition of materialism: ne plus se raconter d’histoires.2020‘Never to tell myself stories, which is the only “definition” of materialism I have ever subscribed to’ (Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A memoire (New York: New Press, 1993), p. 169). This definition was inspired by Althusser’s readings of Lucretius and a new pact of the nature capable of ‘sundering the covenants of fate’.2121Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. by William Ellery Leonard (New York: Dover, 2008), i, p. 18. With it, Althusser pointed to the impossibility of giving a closed, definitive, essential, and determined meaning to things, bodies, and individuals. To put it even more strongly, he highlighted the impossibility of locking an individual into their past determinations. This does not entail a total freedom of things or a refusal of necessity — quite the contrary, in fact — but it does emphasize the ever-possible reconfiguration of things through encounters.2222Cf. Louis Althusser, ‘Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre’, in his Écrits Philosophiques et Politiques, ed. by François Matheron, 2 vols (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994–95), i (1994), pp. 539–79.

Whether one speaks of encounters or circumstances, what is at stake in this excellent case study is the need to free the miserable kids from the inevitable fate that was determined for them by tribunals, social re-education centres, and prison, where they were repeatedly labelled ‘young offenders’, ‘delinquents’, ‘morally handicapped’, and ‘hereditary bums’.2323Once again, Makarenko struggles with the pseudo-scientific literature that tried to create a systematic characterological classification. ‘Several efforts have been made in learned works to draw up a satisfactory system for the classification of human characteristics [character], and the greatest pains taken to allot an “amoral” and “defective” place for the waifs’ (Makarenko, The Road to Life, iii, p. 105). Certainly, there is a rhetorical aspect to Makarenko ‘forgetting of the past’ — for it is less a question of a denial of the past than an attempt to fight against the prescribed fate assigned by the medical and socio-juridical apparatuses. Indeed, part of the pedagogical process was to reconnect past memories and experiences with something new. In this sense, it is interesting to see, for example, how Makarenko acknowledges the kids’ dexterity, what skills they learned in the streets (theft, for example), which could then be translated and used productively in the Colony. This translation became possible through new circumstances, activities, and work.2424Here the forgetting of the past meets another element, which is the praise of the movement and of the constant change of circumstances seen as fundamental to the collectivity: ‘I thought of the strength of the colonists’ collective, and suddenly I realized what was wrong. Why, of course — how could I have taken so long to discover it? It had all come about because we were at a standstill. A standstill can never be allowed in the life of a collective. […] The universal law of general development was only just beginning to show its true strength. The forms ruling the existence of a free human collective implied progress [or movement forward]. The forms ruling death — a standstill’ (ibid., ii, p. 278). As we are going to see, the theatre, which became an important activity of the Colony, was also a place where the kids, playing with life and death both joyfully and with hatred, reconnected to and re-translated their past memories.

The Organization of the Collectivity

This leads to the question of the organization of the Colony which I will briefly present before moving on to my conclusion. First of all, there was an emphatic steering away from the practices of other juvenile re-education centres of the time in which Makarenko insisted on the importance of the Colony’s contact with the external world. The colony was meant to be a more or less open space without enclosures or violent surveillance. This led to two important consequences: if they wanted to, the colonists could leave the colony, but in this case they needed to assume responsibility for going back to their past lives of thievery, street life, etc.; furthermore, instead of removing the youths from society, the contact with the external world — such as villages, cities, and farms in the vicinity as well as local commerce and workshops — was a crucial, common dimension of the re-education process. Not only did the colonists regularly deal with the external world in matters concerning the Colony, but people from the outside could also come to the public events taking place at the Colony such as festivities and weekly theatre presentations.

Secondly, Makarenko, echoing Marx’s polytechnic education, proposed a combination of work and education. This was not only a principle per se but an essential need for survival. With almost no financial support and miserable beginnings, the colony was forced to develop its own economy. Its first main activity, therefore, was agriculture to produce what to eat. Later on, however, they held many workshops (engine workshops, for example), music and particularly theatre activities, etc. The Dzerzhinsky Commune, which Makarenko would also run, and which is described in the third part of The Pedagogical Poem, became famous for its massive production of FED cameras, which were similar to the Leica ones.

Thirdly, the different activities were organized according to ‘detachments’,2525The word is associated rather with self-management and guerrilla than with verticalized and militarized principles. ‘The word “detachment” was an expression used in that period when the waves of revolution had not as yet been diverted into the orderly ranks of regiments and divisions. Guerrilla warfare, especially in the Ukraine, where it was so long-drawn-out, was carried on exclusively by detachments’ (ibid., i, p. 348). that is, a certain number of kids (girls and boys mixed) were allocated a certain function (planting beetroots, searching for firewood in the forest, cleaning spaces, the staging of theatre plays, etc.). Each detachment had a ‘commander’, who was someone without privileges but who was very skilled in a specific function and therefore responsible for the discipline of the group, the tools they used, and for the quality of the service they provided. Besides these detachments with a definitive role, there were also ‘mixed detachments’, which were temporary and included people from other detachments for a provisional and precise task. A detachment always had a commander even if it only had two people in it. Finally, there was a ‘soviet of commanders’ that would take and discuss the decisions concerning important affairs of the Colony, as well as the election and renewal of the commanders. These elections were accompanied by long discussions and debates. The soviet of commanders was guided by the aspiration that each colonist should be a commander of a mixed detachment at least once.

With this system of detachments, Makarenko aimed at creating an ‘extremely intricate chain of subordination in the colony, in which it was impossible for individual members to become unduly conspicuous, or to predominate in the collective’.2626Ibid., p. 357. The development of the detachment system points towards the structuring of the collectivity according to organizational self-management and polytechnic principles. Besides the system of detachments, a collective popular tribunal was also created to judge problems in the Colony such as theft.

Among the many inventions described by Makarenko, I find the theatre practice developed at the Colony especially interesting. After around the third year of its existence, theatre became a central activity, with the staging of around forty plays per winter in a hangar transformed into a stage and an auditorium for six hundred people that included the local population living near the Colony. There were several mixed detachments that saw to different functions such as acting, wardrobe requirements, heating, scenery, lighting-, sound-, and stage-effects, cleaning, operating the stage curtains, etc. The kids performed all these different activities and Makarenko played the role of the director and prompter. Since they usually had one week to prepare a play of sometimes four or five acts, it was impossible to learn all the text by heart. Thus, the emphasis was on directing how to move oneself in the space, which gestures to use, etc. Makarenko writes that he ‘attributed great importance to the theatre, since through its agency the colonists’ way of speaking was greatly improved, and their horizons broadened’.2727Ibid., ii, p. 82.

Indeed, the theatre appears to have offered a perfect set of circumstances in which the juvenile collective had to find solutions to staging complex plays in a very short time. The tensions that emerged and the object of the debates inside the collective constituted a crucial part of the pedagogical process. Moreover, it provided an opportunity of practicing the different tasks of subordination, command, and the development of techniques, without which the final result (i.e. the play) would have been impossible. Finally, the theatre process also educated the sensibility related to the perception of space, the movement of bodies and the coordination of gestures — essential elements in the creation of the collectivity.2828Here I should mention another experiment of this period concerning theatre, which seems even more radical: Asja Lācis and the infantine proletarian theatre. In 1918, Lācis started to work with war orphans in Orel and thought that theatre could be a way to ‘awaken’ them. She divided the group of children into several sections (painting and drawing, music, technical construction (of props, buildings, figures, animals, etc.), rhythm and gymnastics, diction, and improvisation). According to Lācis, whereas bourgeois education is geared toward individual development and the final product (the play itself), communist education aims at a ‘collective aesthetic form’, it insists on the process and the situation as the main pedagogical tools and on the development of the collective rather than of each individual. Finally, the pedagogical process should emphasize the observation and the learning both of the educator and the pupils. ‘Our starting point for both educators and those who were to be educated was observation. The children observed objects, the relations of objects and people to one another, and their changeability. The educators watched the children to see what they accomplished and how far they could productively apply their skills. Observation was not only practiced and developed through drawing, painting, and music inside the studio but also outside of it. Early in the morning, and again in the evening, we went outside with the children and made them aware of how colours changed through distance and time of day, how different the sounds and noises were in the morning and evening, and how silence can sing’ (Asja Lācis, ‘A Memoir’, South as State of Mind, 9 [Documenta 14#4] ([2017]) <https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/> [accessed 12 September 2020]).