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per se, the development of some special side of the child’s
being, their object and aim.”
It is in the child itself, according to him, that the primary
conditions for realising the ideal are to be found. “We must
listen to the voice of the people,” he says. The more he
learned to know the young minds unfolding under his care,
“listened” to their emotions, and watched the expression of
them in their lives, the warmer grew his love for them, and his
admiration for that simple poetry that surrounds childhood
as an atmosphere. At the same time his faith in the
so-called education of the upper classes, that carries them
farther and farther from the true and natural, waxed weaker
and weaker.
“Are the peasant children to learn from us how to write, or
we from them?” he asks in his paper. He had set a number
of boys of eleven or twelve to write down their thoughts and
observations on different matters, or describe their experiences,
and had made the astonishing discovery that they exhibited,
as he expresses it, “an artistic power to which not even a
Goethe could attain.” This discovery made an overwhelming
impression on Tolstoi. “I was frightened, and at the same
time happy as a treasure-seeker, who on Midsummer Night
has found the St. John’s wort—happy, because I suddenly saw
before me the philosopher’s stone which I had been seeking
for two toilsome years—the art of learning how to express
one’s thoughts; frightened, because this art evokes new wants,
and a whole new world of wishes, which, as I saw at once, did
not correspond to the surroundings in which these children
live.” It was not only a solution of the educational, but also
of the religious question, that Tolstoi believed he had found
in the life of these peasants, from whom in this also we have
more to learn than they from us.
His paradoxes on the uselessness of what is commonly
understood as education, art and science, are not to be taken
as a condemnation of education, art and science in themselves.
In one of his later works he says, “Art is not to disappear, but
to become something else, better and higher.” It is only in
the service of selfishness that they are bad. The best proof
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