Vasilij Suchomlinski’s Views on Education

Abstract

The October revolution 1917 resulted in the creation of a new educational system. New proposals in the field of education had to implement the overarching goal formulated by the Bolsheviks – the creation of „the new Soviet man”. In the Soviet Union, the child was considered to be the subject of pedagogical interactions, passive and plastic object. Vasily Sukhomlinsky (1918–1970) attempted to counteract these tendencies. His educational system was focused on the need for subjective treatment of the child, on the need for creation of the humanity and goodness in it. Sukhomlinsky’s education system based on a love of children and young people. In the education work of his school the transmission of moral values o f a socialist society was particularly important. Harmonious personality of the young man was to be shaped by education by the beauty, by the word, and education through labor. It should be noted that Sukhomlinsky’s system was the process of education that connected the basic areas of the child’s world, the most important socializing environments: home, school and community. Sukhomlinsky was looking for a new way for the Soviet pedagogy, dominated by the communist ideology. Instead of ideology he saw the child and its real needs.