Anton Makarenko

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.

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 at 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 English 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 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

Criticism of Makarenko's ideas were raised by Soviet educators and Russian dissidents both before and after the fall of Soviet communism. The humanist educator Vasyl Sukhomlynsky ventured in an unpublished manuscript, “Our Good Family” (1967), against "Makarenko’s false statement that the main objective of Soviet moral and character education is found in the collective." Vladimir Sirotin (Karkov 1960 - Moscow 201?) described Makarenko as "the bard of punitive pedagogy" whose ideas were contrary to democratic freedoms and human rights including the natural rights of child and parents. Makarenko's system has been faulted for giving the child collective too much power over the individual child.