Labor School

a reformist trend in pedagogy, the proponents of which advocated the creation of schools that would teach traditional academic subjects, develop the moral, aesthetic, and physical faculties of students, and provide vocational training and guidance. The idea of the labor school was first expounded by representatives of early Utopian socialism (T. More, T. Campanella), who, in their projects for organizing the society of the future, provided for the participation of all its members in productive labor. Hence the need to prepare children in educational institutions for labor and to involve them in labor to the extent warranted by their abilities.

In the 17th century, J. A. Comenius emphasized the need to prepare children for labor while still in school. The English economist J. Bellers worked out a project for a “college of industry, ” which while being a labor association of adults would also function as a model educational institution where children would acquire practical knowledge, useful skills, and a love and respect for labor. J.-J. Rousseau proposed that children be given training in agricultural labor and crafts as part of their education.

Labor schools—labor instruction and the inculcation of values important for work—figured prominently in projects for organizing public education during the period of the French Revolution.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, J. H. Pestalozzi formulated ideas that were to play an important role in the subsequent development of the labor school and the concept of labor training. Pestalozzi held that labor, when combined with physical exercises and games, would have a wholesome effect on a child’s development. He also believed that educational institutions should not limit themselves to developing in children a small, traditional group of skills but rather should see that children experience an all-around development that would facilitate their entry into the economy.

During the first half of the 19th century, the idea of labor training in school attracted the attention of the Utopian socialists R. Owen, C. Fourier, Saint-Simon, and W. Weitling. Of particular interest are the views of Owen, who believed that in a communist society of the future every child would become acquainted during the educational process with the principal types of labor.

Most of the representatives of the reformist trends in bourgeois pedagogy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries considered themselves adherents of the concept of labor schools, although the labor performed by the students of these schools was treated in various ways. Three major directions may be distinguished in the theory of labor schools. Representatives of the first trend saw the labor school essentially as an institution incorporating manual labor into the curriculum as a separate subject; it was believed that the skills acquired and faculties developed from this subject would facilitate the study of other, academic subjects. Thus, manual labor was to constitute both a subject and a principle underlying the entire learning process. Advocates of this trend (manualists) did much to disseminate the idea of pedagogically useful manual labor and to work out teaching methods involving labor; they strove to establish links between manual labor and academic work and thereby to promote a more active learning process.

Advocates of the second trend, the chief exponent of which was the German pedagogue G. Kerschensteiner, also regarded labor in elementary public schools as both a subject and a principle of instruction but saw its value mainly in developing qualities of diligence, integrity, and honesty. Labor schools were thus regarded as an important means of molding an upright citizenry.

The third trend in the labor school movement included representatives of many tendencies in reformist pedagogy (individual pedagogy, pedagogy of personality, pedagogy of action). These reformers interpreted students’ labor in a broader sense and regarded labor schools essentially as institutions encouraging diverse forms of independent cognitive and artistic activity.

Bourgeois pedagogues approached labor schools in the light of elementary public schools, which did not provide a background for higher academic work; the labor in the school’s curriculum was basically of the handicrafts type. In secondary schools, the labor principle was treated as a way of helping the student to think for himself, while labor itself, if introduced at all into the curriculum, was utilized as a means of physical development. It is in this sense that ideas concerning labor schools are today applied in bourgeois countries.

Having created the theory of scientific communism in the mid-19th century, K. Marx and F. Engels devoted considerable attention to the place of education, demonstrating the indissoluble bond between education and the socioeconomic conditions of society. The Marxist doctrines of the harmonious development of the human personality and of the necessity of combining academic instruction with polytechnical and labor training in order to achieve the all-around development of the student have formed the theoretical foundation for the polytechnical labor schools and for socialist pedagogy in general. These ideas were first put into practice in the Soviet labor school built after the October Revolution. The Marxist concept of labor schools requires the recognition by students of labor’s role in the development of society, the development of labor skills and habits, and the acquisition by students of technical arts and knowledge of the applied sciences.