Education has no location, no method and no goal: Lessons from Leo Tolstoy’s Disruptive Pedagogy

Preliminary note: 

This chapter was excerpted and modified from my book Educational Philosophy in Eighteenth Century France: From Nature to Second Nature (2010). The original version of the chapter begins with a review of main ideas put forward by Enlightenment educational thinkers. Below I have skipped over that review and only included the section about Tolstoy, offering just a few paragraphs on the eighteenth century for context.

Exposing the Revolution as Conservative

Although the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy is known as the most classical of classic authors, the ultimate in conventional when it comes to the Western canon, he moonlighted as a radical cultural and social critic and educational innovator. When he took his pen to social, cultural or educational issues his voice was fierce, uncompromising, radical and original. And unlike many educational thinkers, he put his ideas into practice, creating free schools for peasants on his estate.

From an educational point of view, Tolstoy was unique in that he rebelled not only against the moribund educational ideas and practices of his time in Russia (and in this he defined problems in terms that are almost identical to those we are facing today); he also railed against the so-called progressive and ‘radical’ educationists writing in Europe in the same period. Alone among educationists in Russia and Europe during this time, he perceived that even as educationists attempted to tear down old intellectual and physical structures, they were driven to construct a new set of theories, methods and pedagogical certainties that were destined to become rigid, ultimately undermining the very principles on which they were founded: removing freedom, respect and self-determination from the life and learning experience of children. He also vigorously rejected what he saw as the colonialist incursion of Western ideas into Russia and put forward a fierce critique of everything he had witnessed in his extended tour of Western European schools in the mid-19th century – a critique that reads like an indictment of almost all aspects of schooling today.

The 18th Century: An Almost Revolution

Eighteenth century French educationists considered their approaches to education to be progressive, even revolutionary. Like many radical thinkers today, they argued that education is ‘everywhere and all the time’, rather than a process located in one building or learning space and delivered only by teachers. They tried to reintroduce the notion of apprenticeship, recognizing children’s need to learn through direct experience and engagement with the world beyond the classroom. They rejected the idea of children as sinful and rejected the idea that education should physically beat or emotionally stifle that sin. Instead considered children either neutral, malleable and all capable of learning ‘virtue’, or naturally good. They recognised that without respect and free self-expression a child could not blossom emotionally or intellectually, and that humiliation and corporal punishment could stunt the soul. They believed that play, pleasure and ‘effortlessness’ were central to ensuring joyful and effective learning and avoiding emotional or intellectual damage to the psyche. And they considered the impact of learning methods and content on the development of a social conscience and new forms of social interaction (“social contracts”). 

Ultimately, however, despite the (relative to their times) progressive nature of the ideas put forward by Enlightenment thinkers, their pedagogical debates were trapped in a series of internal contradictions and dualities that were exposed as they attempted to reconcile a variety of tensions embedded in the educational debate. (Tolstoy on Education, p. 84. Henceforth TOE).¹

Tolstoy exposed this duality of Enlightenment thinking as illusory. In his re-evaluation of Enlightenment educational goals, he anticipated the most progressive ideas and methods being put forward today, and he redefined the relationship between student and teacher as one based on freedom, respect and equality, fostered not by a one-way transmission of information but a learning process that ensues when the genuine passion of a teacher encountered the self-guided curiosity of a student.

Leo Tolstoy’s Educational Non-Theory

Eighteenth century thinkers were deeply influenced and inspired by new scientific-philosophical ideas that promised to offer precise information about human nature and the learning mind. 

However, while new scientific-philosophical ideas initially inspired thinkers to loosen the rigid structures of education, in the end these same ideas unleashed an irresistible gravitational pull toward the development of new, equally rigid methods and constricting ideas designed to prevent the ‘dangers’ of truly free or equal education. 

Similarly, while initially new pedagogical theories inspired a vision of teachers and parents as observer-guides, responsible for creating spaces where children could be free and thrive, over time fears of external influence led to an emphasis on a ‘scientific’ approach to learning. Educational thinkers concluded that both teachers and parents were dangerously unqualified to define or implement the best educational methods and approaches. For if, as theorists came to believe, learning could somehow be decoded and education tailored to accommodate its needs, only ‘specialists’ (philosophically minded thinkers) could devise truly enlightened educational methods and curricula. The job of these specialists would be to devise curricula and learning methods, and impart these to teachers.

Taking a bird’s eye view of both the failing educational traditions and the new educational-philosophical upheavals of his time, Tolstoy’s first counter-revolutionary act was to renounce the very idea of a ‘science of pedagogy’, which at the time appeared to be the symbol of all that is progressive:

We do not recognize the whole philosophy of pedagogy, because we do not recognize the possibility of man’s knowing what it is that man ought to know. (Tolstoy on Education, p. 84. Henceforth TOE). ²

Tolstoy’s apparently simple statement contains a profound observation – the recognition that revolutionary movements, whether political, cultural social or educational, get trapped in their own powerful currents. Tearing down old statues only to replace them with new certainties, and rarely relinquishing the desire to discover a final answer to the nature of human beings or social life. 

In contrast, Tolstoy draws on the evident and yet continually unheeded logic – that if there has never been one final answer in the past, it is unlikely that we, at this very moment, will find a final answer:

Is it not obvious that the courses of study in higher educational institutions will seem to our posterity in the twenty first century just as strange and useless as the medieval schools seem to us now? It is so easy to come to the simple conclusion; if there have been no absolute truths in the history of human knowledge, but one set of errors has continually given place to another, then what basis have we for forcing the younger generation to acquire knowledge which will presumably turn out to be erroneous? (TOE/297).

Adopting a broad view of what it means to institute change, Tolstoy thus rejects all educational theories, including the seemingly progressive ones, on the premise that they fuel the wrongheaded belief that an understanding of human nature can be used to create fixed curricula or educational methods; in other words, that education can be philosophically systematized and scientifically “mechanized” (TOE/74). In contrast to Enlightenment thinkers, Tolstoy is not interested in reconciling nature and nurture in the educational process, forming a new kind of individuality through education, or identifying the roots of the social sense. He identifies only one driving principle of education—freedom. And for Tolstoy, freedom is primarily to be found in the process through which information is transmitted, and in the relationships between the participants in that transmission.

Freedom is the Only Principle

Tolstoy’s ideal of the educational relationship is based on the principle of total freedom. The student must “have the full power to express his dissatisfaction, or at least withdraw from that part of education which does not satisfy his instinct” (TOE/84). Tolstoy does not engage in the struggle of his predecessors to actuate a perfect balance between authority and submission, or to use the teacher-student relationship as a model for a new set of political relations based on consent, liberty and mutual respect. For Tolstoy, there is no need to effectuate a subtle transference of authority from the teacher into the consciousness of the student, because he eliminates all forms of authority and coercion – external and internal – from the pedagogical equation. He defines education as “a free relationship between people which has as its basis the need of the one to acquire knowledge and of the other to impart that which he has already acquired.” (TOE/295). Children are not impeded by physical fetters, have no obligations to attend class, and are not expected to behave according to a certain ideal of character.

It's important to note that by “knowledge,” Tolstoy does not mean mere “information” in the conventional sense of knowledge as a series of academic subjects taught in schools. Rather, he considered that any form of learning that a student might need – skills, wisdom, life experiences, vocational training, farming, academic instruction – is a form of true knowledge. Many of today’s advocates for self-directed education take a similar approach, reclaiming the value of knowledge systems and embodied learning that lie outside, or were demeaned by, Western academic notions of useful and valuable knowledge. Like Tolstoy – who saw learning as something intimately related to a child’s home and community environment, they are reclaiming the knowledge systems that and are found in their families, communities and ancestral cultures.

Education is Not a Space but a Process, and a Relationship

Tolstoy’s view of educational freedom is further influenced by, and set in opposition to, the broadened definition of education offered by Enlightenment theorists. Like many of the latter – all of whom learned from John Locke that children are affected by each impression that strikes their senses and thus are continually in the process of being educated – he extends the boundaries of education beyond the space of the school to embrace “the sum of all the influences which develop a human being, and give him or her a broader outlook on the world and new information” (TOE/294). 

Tolstoy, however, is one of the only theorists who align theory with practice in these matters. While most Enlightenment pedagogues formulated complex theories about educational freedom, in the end, all (including and perhaps especially Rousseau) were afraid to allow their students actually to experience this freedom. Instead, they devised elaborate schemes to protect children from the negative influences and false impressions coming from “outside.” In contrast, Tolstoy is willing to risk a free encounter between children and life-education. He abandons the Enlightenment’s hope that education can sanitize children’s youth, or eliminate danger from their lives, control what they learn, see and experience. He neither believes that society can be instantly perfected, nor that individuals can be formed separately from society as it is, and he is therefore unafraid of the effect of the “real world” on children. As a result Tolstoy does not attempt, as Enlightenment theorists do, to control educational influenced by drawing all of life into the space of the school or the classroom; instead, he defines education outside both the school and the classroom, and encourages children to go in search of instruction. A physical space in which people gather is only an occasional setting in which learning takes place, not the condition of its existence. Education is not a place or a time, but a process, and a relationship.

The Unconscious Education of the Home

One of the reasons Tolstoy rethinks freedom in this way is that he takes “education of the people” (by which he means the peasants), rather than the elite, as his starting point. Rather than putting into question (as did many of his more traditional contemporaries) whether the people “need” or are capable of benefitting from education, he asks whether the people need or want the kind of education offered them by the elites. 

His basic assumption is that all individuals naturally yearn for education and are capable of learning at or up to any “level” as defined by traditional education. The peasants resist schooling, he argues, only because it is imposed from the outside, by authorities that try to imprint upon them a set of cultural values that are irrelevant to their lives, disrespectful of their lived experience and innate knowledge, and dislocating. He thus not only condemns the domination of education by the state; he also points to the subtle interference of society (by which he means the gentry), which claims to be offering a progressive ideal of education while in fact using higher education as a vehicle through which to present its very limited and self-image and intellectual and cultural life as universal, and project it “down” onto the people.

According to Tolstoy, schools thus not only ignore children’s families and social/cultural backgrounds; they also set themselves in direct opposition to them, breaking down the crucial links that tie children to their past and their communities. In the place of these genuine ties, educators offer individuals a mass of useless information that leaves them socially uprooted and culturally homeless: they are ripped from their families and learn to disrespect the values of their cultures and homes, and yet never feel they fully belong to the social class that has decided what they are to learn and how. Tolstoy argues that this process presents the most dangerous threat to educational freedom, because it de-legitimizes other forms of life-education in the minds of the people. Tolstoy re-validates the “unconscious education” (TOE/75) that children receive in their home. He points to the communication between mother and child as the model of an ideal educational relationship, because it is mutual, reciprocal, and levelling. Most importantly, it is driven by the natural law of education, forward movement: although the mother adapts her language to the understanding of the child, in fact she does not descend to his or her level but rather encourages the child to rise to hers. There is no deliberate coercion involved in this communication, but rather a natural movement from one stage of development to the next. ⁴

Individuality and Identity

Tolstoy’s concept of individuality is also in stark contrast to those of Enlightenment theorists. He is utterly unmoved by the hot topics of Enlightenment theory – self-mastery, natural sociability, or education as citizen-formation. Because he considers the development of human character to be beyond the jurisdiction of education, ⁴ he defines individuality according to each child’s particular nature, as well as his or her community, social class, or profession. Further, Tolstoy does not focus solely on the impact of education on the individual. He questions its influence on the individual’s family and community. Rather than lament the inconveniences to society of the peasants leaving the fields for colleges, as did many theorists of the time, he calls attention to the personal tragedies that take place in families and communities when individuals are drawn out of their world by the lure of the university and the values of society, and return disdainful, often ashamed of their parents and their former lifestyle; and yet unable to fully integrate into a new world that never fully accepts them. Tolstoy claims he has no agenda with regards to the development of a particular social identity, linked to the political or cultural mores of his time; instead, he aims to offer each child the kinds of educational opportunities that are relevant for them as individuals, or within their families or communities.

Enlightenment, Instruction and Training

Finally, Tolstoy conflates two terms popular in the work of Enlightenment thinkers – enlightenment and instruction – and applies both to all individuals. He believes that instruction (useful education, or vocational training) is the fundamental driving force behind pedagogical action. All individuals should have the opportunity to learn things that are useful to them in their lives, and to choose freely what they believe to be useful. However, instruction is not linked to pure “utility,” as it was for some late Enlightenment theorists, where it ultimately became emblematic of a form of education that above all was aimed to satisfy the needs of society and the state. ⁵ In the spirit of Rousseau, Tolstoy defines that which is useful only in terms of the needs of the individual. He unleashes a fiery rage against what he calls “training,” which he defines mercilessly in the following terms:

Training is one man’s urge to make another the same as himself… I am convinced that the only reason why a trainer can set about the training of a child with such ardour is that behind the urge lies envy of the child’s purity and the desire to make him like the trainer himself, i.e., more corrupt.

Training is the urge to moral despotism erected into a principle…. A phenomenon which proves the underdeveloped state of human thought and cannot therefore be established as the basis of a rational human activity, of science…The coercive, forcible action of one person upon another with the object of educating the sort of person who seems good to us. (TOE/295-6)

In contract, Tolstoy believes that:

Education is a free relationship between people which has as its basis the need of the one to acquire knowledge and of the other to impart that which he has already acquired…Training is forcible education. Education is free. (TOE/295)

As for enlightenment, Tolstoy considers that all children have a natural urge to intellectual, moral, and artistic consciousness, which must be allowed to blossom in the learning process. He does not place limits on the ability of any social group of people to grasp and benefit from any aspect of education. He believes peasants can both understand and compose literature, if they are merely allowed to think as narrators, because all children’s natural artistic consciousness can be released (in his schools his methods for releasing children’s narrative talents were wonderfully inventive); and because elites can benefit from skill building and professional training, if they are released from their obsession with status. Finally, although Tolstoy recognizes that there is something deeply individualistic about how each child comes to intellectual or artistic consciousness, he also is convinced that learning and enlightenment take place in a social environment, and do not require children to be isolated.

The Contradictions at the Heart of Educational Innovation

Tolstoy’s educational essays are prescient and visionary. They align remarkably with today’s discussion among advocates for self-directed learning, not only because of what he argued for, but what he warned against. In particular, his ideas echo those in the SDE community who are challenging the tendency of Western forms of unschooling to focus almost exclusively on the freedom of individual children rather than the need for new social spaces where young people have the chance to experiment with new ways of relating to and caring for each other, their communities and the planet.

Tolstoy’s greatest contribution was to recognize that there is something inherently self-contradictory about the very nature of educational innovation and educational reform. On the one hand, pedagogical thinkers aim to liberate individuals by discovering, and then accommodating, their “natural” needs. On the other hand, by assuming that they can discover these “natural needs” (and thus crack the code of human nature and learning), they are compelled to fix the methods by which they aim to accommodate them. As a result, they inadvertently stifle the process of further discovery by limiting human beings’ freedom to express themselves as they develop and change over time.

Tolstoy aims to put an end to this cycle by insisting that “the sole method of education is experience” (TOE/85). Rather than identifying one method of education, he sees methods changing constantly according to the time and place in which education occurs. He embraces the arbitrary and unpredictable nature of the mind and human development and holds uncertainty, open-endedness, self-discovery, and experience to be at the core of the educational process. He suggests that the most progressive feature of education is its potential continually to transform itself, offering information, skills and experiences to individuals and groups according to their changing needs, and changing understanding of these needs within the context of the society and the time period in which they live. 

Tolstoy took a sword to the heart of what appeared to be an educational revolution during the eighteenth century in Europe, revealing the conservatism concealed in its innermost heart. Rejecting the seemingly progressive theories of his predecessors and their fixation with methods, he stripped students and teachers of their roles, and refused to assign education a location, method or goal. 

Endnotes

1. Enlightenment pedagogical debates illuminate and inform the tensions and oppositions in Enlightenment thought between 1) freedom and constraint, 2) individuality and socialization, 3) enlightenment and instruction, 4) nature and habit and 5) the art and science of education. These oppositions will not be new to students of the Enlightenment. What is extraordinary about them is the way they are manifested in educational philosophy as theorists attempt to move beyond the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ (what is freedom, what is the goal of social life or why should it be thus) to the ‘how’ (how are these goals to be achieved), forcing an encounter between ideas and their potential for implementation. For more on the background issues, see Natasha Gill, Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment: From Nature to Second Nature (Ashgate: 2010). Back to text

2. Quotes are taken from Tolstoy on Education: Tolstoy’s Educational Writings, 1861-1862 (Fairleigh Dickenson University Press: 1982). Henceforth TOE. Back to text

3. The full quote on this is:
“Education in the most general sense, including upbringing, is in our belief that activity of man which has as its basis the demand for equality and the immutable law that education must move forward. A mother teaches her child to speak only so that they can understand one another; instinctively the mother tries to come down to his view of things, to his language, but the law of forward movement in education does not permit her to come down to him, but obliges him to rise to her knowledge. The same relationship exists between writer and reader, between school and the pupil, between government and voluntary societies and the people. The activity of the educator, as of the person being educated, has one and the same objective. The task of the science of education is simply the study of the conditions in which these two tendencies come together into one common aim, and to indicate which conditions hinder this coming together.” Although he rarely admits his intellectual debts, Tolstoy’s concept of unconscious education is deeply indebted to Enlightenment theories of learning and natural order, which presage our own understanding of the nature of the mind, and which are based on sensationist principles, especially those of Etienne-Gabriel Morelly and Claude Cesar Chesneau Dumarsais. See Dumarsais, Claude Cesar Chesneau (an VII) Oeuvres complète de Du Marsais (Paris, n.p.), vol. 1. Morelly, Etienne-Gabriel (1743) Essai sur l’esprit humain, ou principes naturels de l’éducation (Paris, Jean-Baptiste Delespine) and (1745) Essai sur le coeur humain, ou principes naturels de l’éducation (Paris, Jean-Baptiste Delespine). Back to text

4. Tolstoy’s view of “moral education” was influenced by his spiritual/religious beliefs that instruction can do nothing to instill morality because “the consciousness of good and evil is latent in all mankind” (TOE/84). In his view, there was only one aspect to moral education:“The element of moral training, however, lies in the teaching of the knowledge, in the teacher’s love of his subjects and in his loving communication of it, in the teacher’s relationship to the pupil.” (TOE/324). Back to text

5. Initially, the Enlightenment ideal of “utility” in education was progressive, focusing on the usefulness of learning in terms of how various educational methods or tools fit the developmental needs of a child at each point in its growth; or aligned with the professional and human needs of the young adult student. Over time, however, the idea of useful or practical education was co-opted by social and political thinkers, who were focused almost exclusively on the way in which education could serve the needs of the state. Thus, what was “useful” was any form of learning that instilled a sense of national loyalty, citizenship, or understanding of the “social contract”; or produced the kinds of workers and professionals most needed by the state at the time. We face a similar confluence of ideas and attitudes today, with the new focus on projects, entrepreneurship, and useful learning as progressive ideas focused on adapting education to the needs and passions of individual students. However, this can also become a fixation on “practice” that inadvertently re-establishes a theory-practice or academic-vocational divide, or outcome-driven results rather than learning that is intrinsically motivated and exploratory. Back to text