Anton Makarenko

For the Ukrainian football player, see Anton Makarenko (footballer).

Anton Semyonovich Makarenko
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Born	Антон Семенович Макаренко (1888-01-13)13 January 1888 Bilopillia, Russian Empire
Died	Golitsyno, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Occupation	Educator, writer
Language	Russian
Ethnicity	Ukrainian
Citizenship	Russian Empire, Soviet
Subject	Educational theory, Pedagogy, Correctional education

Anton Semyonovich Makarenko (Russian: Анто́н Семёнович Мака́ренко, Ukrainian: Анто́н Семе́нович Макаре́нко, 13 January 1888 – 1 April 1939) was a Russian and Soviet educator, social worker and writer, the most influential educational theorist in the Soviet Union who promoted democratic ideas and principles in educational theory and practice. As one of the founders of Soviet pedagogy, he elaborated the theory and methodology of upbringing in self-governing child collectives and introduced the concept of productive labor into the educational system. Makarenko is often reckoned among the world's great educators, and his books have been published in many countries.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution he established self-supporting orphanages for street children — including juvenile delinquents — left orphaned by the Russian Civil War. Among these establishments were the Gorky Colony and later the Dzerzhinsky labor commune in Kharkiv, where the FED camera was produced. Makarenko wrote several books, of which The Pedagogical Poem (Педагогическая поэма), a fictionalized story of the Gorky Colony, was especially popular in the USSR. In 1955 a movie with English title Road to Life was produced.

Biography

Anton Semyonovich Makarenko was born in Bilopillia, Kharkov Governorate, to Semyon Grigorievich Makarenko, who worked at the Kharkov railway depot as a painter, and Tatyana Mikhaylovna (née Dergachova), daughter of a soldier from Mykolaiv.

In September 1905, having graduated from a four-year college in Kremenchug, Makarenko took a one-year teachers' course and at the age of seventeen, began teaching at a railway college at Dolinskaya station near Kherson where he worked from September 1911 till October 1914. In August 1914 he enrolled into the Poltava Training College but had to interrupt his education and in September 1916 joined the Russian army which he was demobilized from in March 1917, due to poor vision. The same year he graduated the college with honours and went on to work as a teacher in Poltava and later Kryukov where, in 1919, he became the local college's director.

In 1920 Anton Makarenko was invited to head the Poltava Colony for Young Offenders. A year later it became the Gorky Colony and soon attracted the attention of Maxim Gorky himself. In 1923 Makarenko published two articles on the Gorky Colony (in Golos Truda newspaper and Novimy Stezhkami magazine) and two years later made a public report at the All-Ukrainian Conference for the orphanage teachers.

File:Макаренко Антон.JPG

Makarenko in the late 1920s

In 1927 Makarenko was appointed as the head of the Dzerzhinsky labour commune, an orphanage for street children near Kharkov, where the most incorrigible thieves and swindlers were known to be put into rehabilitation. Makarenko succeeded in gaining their respect, combining in his method insistence and respect, school education and productive labor. Yet, 1928 saw the wave of criticism aimed at Makarenko started. In March 1928 his report at the Ukrainian Pedagogical institute concerning his work in the Gorky Colony received hostile treatment. In September of that year he was fired from the Gorky Colony, and had to concentrate on his work in Kharkov.

Makarenko's methods were highly appreciated by Maxim Gorky who believed that his "amazingly successful educational experiment [was] of world-wide significance," as he insisted in one of his letters. The correspondence between the two started in July 1925 and continued until Gorky's death. In 1928 the famous writer visited the two colonies and left much impressed; next year in an essay called "Over the Union of Soviets" he hailed Makarenko as "the new type of pedagogue."

Encouraged by Gorky, whom he admired, Makarenko wrote the The Pedagogical Poem (better known in the West under its English title, Road to Life) based on the true stories of his pupils from the orphanage for street children, which he started in 1925 and published in 1933-1935. Before that, in 1932, Makarenko's first story, "The March of the 30th Year", came out. In 1934 he became a member of the Soviet Union of Writers.

In 1935 Makarenko started working the NKVD in Kiev as the Chief Assistant of the Labor Colony Department. In 1936 he was appointed the head of another colony, in Brovary, and in less than a year turned an unruly bunch of pupils into a highly disciplined working collective.

Accused of being critical towards Stalin and supporting of the Ukrainian opposition, Makarenko had to flee Kiev in order to avoid the arrest and settled in Moscow where he lived "under special supervision." He continued writing, and in 1937 his acclaimed "The Book for Parents" came out, followed by Flags on the Battlements (translated into Engish as Learning to Live) in 1938, a sequel to Road to Life. In February 1939 he received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, a high-profile Soviet award.

Anton Semyonovich Makarenko died of heart failure in a wagon of a suburban train at the Golitsyno railway station of the of the Moscow Railway's Smolensk line, aged 51. He was buried in Moscow, at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Legacy

Although there was some opposition by the authorities at the early stages of Makarenko's "experiments", the Soviet establishment eventually came to hail his colonies as a grand success in communist education and rehabilitation. Among his key ideas were "as much exigence towards the person as possible and as much respect for him as possible", the use of positive peer pressure on the individual by the collective, and institutionalized self-government and self-management of that collective.

Makarenko was one of the first Soviet educators to urge that the activities of various educational institutions — i.e., the school, the family, clubs, public organizations, production collectives and the community existing at the place of residence — should be integrated.

Criticism

Like most things Soviet, Makarenko's ideas came under heavy criticism after the fall of communism. His system has been accused of many of the same supposed faults as Soviet Communism in general, such as giving the child collective too much power over the individual child.

Works

File:Makarenko chess 1.svg

Makarenko chess, a chess variant developed by him during the 1920s.

• Electronic archive of works of A.S. Makarenko
• "Posh" (1932; play)
• "March of the 30th year" (1932)
• "FD — 1" (1932; sketch)
• "The pedagogical poem" (1925–1935).
• "The pedagogical poem" (with испр. замеч. typographical errors, with the restored letter "yo", there was a table of contents)
• "The pedagogical poem" (the first unabridged edition of 2003, science edition, сост. and the comment of S.S.Nevskaya, is published in a network in 2010 according to the solution of hands. TsVR of. A.S. Makarenko (pdf))
• "The book for parents" (1937; art and theoretical composition)
• "Honour" (1937 — 1938; story)
• "Flags on towers" (1938)
• "Flags on towers" (on бумажн. prod. correct. many typographical errors, восст. the letter "yo", there was a table of contents and so forth)
• "Technique of the organization of educational process"
• "Lectures about education of children"

See also

• Orphans in the Soviet Union
• Pitești prison
• Krantz, Helga I. Reeducation of Juvenile Delinquents. Albuquerque, NM. Century University. 1993.

External links

• Synopsis of Makarenko's book "Road to Life (Pedagogicheskaia poema)
• A profile of Makarenko by Soviet educator G. N. Filonov, published by UNESCO
• Text of "The Road to Life (An Epic of Education)" and "Lectures to Parents" (translated into English)
• Full text of «Pedagogicheskaia poema» (“Road to Life”), without editors deletions, was first published in Moscow, 2003 by Svetlana Nevskaya (Pedagogic museum of A.S.Makarenko). From May 2010 this book accessible via net with permission of A.S.M. Ped. museum administration. It’s late his translation to English and other languages (Rus).
• Makarenko.edu.ru Web-site dedicated to the life, work and creative heritage of A. S. (Russian)
• Critics by Vasily Sukhomlinsky
• A monster of pedagogy
• Nicola Siciliani de Cumis, Dewey, Makarenko and the “Pedagogical Poem” between analogies and differences – cultureducazione.it