Anton Makarenko

Anton Semyonovich Makarenko, a Soviet educator, social worker, and writer, shaped educational theory and practice in the Soviet Union more than any other figure. He helped lay the foundations of Soviet pedagogy by developing a system for raising children in self-governing groups and by making productive labor a standard part of schooling. His books were published in many countries.

After the 1917 Revolution, Makarenko set up orphanages that supported themselves, taking in street children—including juvenile delinquents—left homeless by the Russian Civil War. These included the Gorky Colony and, later, the Dzerzhinsky labor commune in Kharkiv, where the FED camera was made. His most famous book, *The Pedagogical Poem* (published in English as *The Road to Life*), is a fictionalized account of the Gorky Colony and became very popular in the USSR. A 1955 Soviet film, also titled *Road to Life*, was based on it. Makarenko died in 1939 under unclear circumstances.

In 1988, UNESCO ranked him among four educators—alongside John Dewey, Georg Kerschensteiner, and Maria Montessori—who defined global educational thinking in the 20th century.

Makarenko was born in Belopolye, in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father, Semyon Grigoryevich, worked as a painter at a railway depot; his mother, Tatyana Mikhaylovna (née Dergachova), was the daughter of a soldier from Mykolaiv. After finishing a four-year college in Kremenchuk in September 1905, he completed a one-year teaching course and, at seventeen, began teaching at a railway college near Kherson, where he stayed from September 1911 to October 1914. In August 1912, he entered the Poltava Teachers' Institute, graduating with a gold medal in July 1917. He then taught at the Poltava Higher Primary School until the end of 1917, moving to Kryukiv that December. He had enrolled in the Poltava Training College in August 1914 but interrupted his studies to join the Russian Army in September 1916; he was demobilized in March 1917 due to poor eyesight and finished the college with honors that same year.

He continued teaching in Poltava and later in Kryukov, where in 1919 he became director of the local college. In 1920, he was asked to lead the Poltava Colony for Young Offenders. A year later, it became the Gorky Colony and drew the attention of Maxim Gorky. In 1923, Makarenko published two articles about the colony, and in 1925 he gave a public report at the All-Ukrainian Conference for orphanage teachers. By the summer of 1925, the colony had 140 pupils—130 boys and 10 girls—and that year a Komsomol organization was established there.

In 1927, Makarenko was put in charge of the Dzerzhinsky labor commune, an orphanage near Kharkov for street children, including those known as the most incorrigible thieves and swindlers. He earned their respect by combining insistence with respect, and school education with productive labor. Criticism of Makarenko began in 1928. In March, his report on the Gorky Colony at the Ukrainian Pedagogical Institute was met with hostility. That September, he was fired from the colony and focused on his work in Kharkiv. On September 3, 1928, he was released from his post at the Gorky Colony. From 1929 to 1936, his work centered on the Dzerzhinsky commune, which had started with 60 educators from the colonies sent there in 1927. A Komsomol organization was set up in the commune on January 15, 1928, and by July 1, 1930, it was fully self-sufficient.

Maxim Gorky highly valued Makarenko’s methods, calling his experiment “amazingly successful” and of “world-wide significance.” They corresponded from July 1925 until Gorky’s death. In 1928, Gorky visited both colonies and was deeply impressed; the following year, in an essay titled “Over the Union of Soviets,” he hailed Makarenko as “the new type of pedagogue.”

Encouraged by Gorky, Makarenko wrote *The Pedagogical Poem* (known in the West as *The Road to Life*), based on true stories of his pupils. He began it in 1925 and published it in 1933–1935. Earlier, in 1932, his first story, “The March of the 30th Year,” was published. In 1934, he became a member of the Soviet Union of Writers. In 1935, he started working for the NKVD in Kyiv as the Chief Assistant of the Labour Colony Department. The next year, he was appointed head of another colony in Brovary, where, according to the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, he turned a disorderly group of pupils into a highly disciplined working collective in under a year.

Accused of criticizing Stalin and supporting the Ukrainian opposition, Makarenko fled Kyiv to avoid arrest and settled in Moscow. He kept writing, publishing *The Book for Parents* in 1937, followed by *Flags on the Battlements* (translated into English as *Learning to Live*).