Stanislav Shatsky
Shatskii, unlike those who would follow him, denied the primacy of politics and class struggle in the creation of a new communist man.
He also resisted indoctrinational techniques, instead preferring to demonstrate to pupils the relevance and importance of a reasoned approach to life.
Placing these ideas in a Marxist framework, Shatskii hoped that a communist education – founded on the principles of cooperation and self-motivation – would release the child's innate potential and help him develop into a well-rounded human being.
Specifically modelled on the Chicago-based Hull House, where Shatskii's collaborator, architect Alexander Zelenko had lived for a year, the Settlement was a complex of children's clubs and informal classes.
At the center of the Settlement was the Zelenko-designed Communal Club for working children, opened in 1907 in Moscow's blue-collar North End (Vadkovsky Lane, 5) and funded by industrialist Nikolay Vtorov.
The Club was a part of a larger drive to set up a cultural and social center in remote working class district of Moscow (Miusskaya Square project).
The first of its kind in the Imperial Russia, the loose arrangement of institutions in the Settlement attracted intellectuals and businessmen who shared Shatskii's view that education was a non-violent path to healing the sores of a divided tsarist society.
After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Shatskii's initial opposition to Soviet power faded as Soviet authorities adopted many of values and ideas of educational progressivism into their educational approach (see Declaration on the United Labor School in W. Rosenburg, Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution, 1984).
Divided into Moscow and Kaluga sections, this organization was vast, employing hundreds of teachers, incorporating village and city schools, libraries, children's clubs, reading huts, and demanding a large amount of resources from the government.
His meteoric rise to power suggested the importance of the Russian educational intelligentsia to early Soviet governance.
Shatskii's First Experimental Station would be closed down by Soviet power in 1932 as part of the Stalinist shift to a more ideological approach to education.
Furthermore, an annual conference in Obninsk, Russia (not far from Shatskii's Kaluga-based schools of the First Experimental Station) is convened in his honor.
Finally, in the west, Shatskii has been the subject of recent articles in the Slavonic and East European Review (October, 2004), the Journal of the Oxford University History Society (2005), and the History of Education (see below) Shatskii drew a great deal on American Educational progressivism, particularly John Dewey.
During the Soviet period, Shatskii would be influenced by Marxism, blending his own liberational, progressive educational ideas with Marx's materialist approach.
"Breaching Cultural Worlds with the Village School: Educational Visions, Local Initiative, and Rural Experience at S.T.
