Anton Makarenko

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   Makarenko rehabilitated thousands of street children through collective, work and real responsibility, but the system that canonised him kept the demand and lost the respect — and the remaining half is exactly the inheritance Eastern Europe still carries.

   Poemul pedagogic · 1935

   The system kept the demand and lost the respect, and the remaining half was then called tradition.

   After the civil war, Ukraine was full of street children, many with criminal records. Makarenko was given a colony and built there a system based on the collective: mixed detachments with rotating command, a general assembly with real power, genuine productive work — at one point a camera factory. The results were remarkable by any standard, and his formula explicitly ties demand to respect as two faces of one thing. The problem is what became of him. Canonised as the Soviet Union's official pedagogue and exported across the Eastern bloc, Romania included, Makarenko was read selectively: the collective stayed, the discipline stayed, the subordination of the individual stayed; the assembly with real power, the rotating command and the declared respect were lost on the way. What arrived in the Romanian school was authority without reciprocity. The merit of naming this directly belongs to this course: the argument I was beaten and I turned out fine is not a local tradition, it is a residue of a system that kept the cheap half of a pedagogy and threw away the expensive half.

   “As much demand upon the person as possible, and as much respect for them as possible.”

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