Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Whereas in France, where the decimal system of measures and money is a matter of daily life, even those workers who have received the plainest elementary education are quite familiar with decimals.

The pupils lose at that full two years, and when they come later on to problems in mechanics and physics, schoolboys and schoolgirls spend most of their time in endless calculations which only fatigue them and inspire in them a dislike of…

In this country, the United States and Russia, instead of accepting the decimal system, which is the system of our numeration, they still torture the children by making them learn a system of weights and measures which ought to have been…

In most schools even arithmetic is taught in the abstract way, and mere rules are stuffed into the poor little heads.

The very beginnings of science are taught on the same pernicious system.

Superficiality, parrot-like repetition, slavishness and inertia of mind are the results of our method of education.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, how geometry suddenly acquired for me a new meaning, and how this new meaning facilitated all ulterior studies.

Through the eyes and the hand to the brain”--this is the true principle of economy of time in teaching.

They will forget which auxiliary lines to draw, and they never have been taught to discover the proofs by themselves.

Therefore, nine boys out of ten, if asked to prove an elementary theorem two years after having left the school, will be unable to do it, unless mathematics is their speciality.

In geometry, time is foolishly wasted by using a method which merely consists in committing geometry to memory.

Take, for instance, mathematics, which every one ought to know, because it is the basis of all subsequent education, and which so few really learn in our schools.

Most of them despise manual work and prefer sending their children to the study of Roman history, or of Franklin’s teachings about saving money, to seeing them at a work which is good for the “lower classes only.” They thus do their best…

But the parents either stupidly paralyse that passion, or do not know how to utilise it.

On the other side, we all know how children like to make toys themselves, how they gladly imitate the work of full-grown people if they see them at work in the workshop or the building-yard.

Complicated problems of arithmetic, which so much harassed us in our boyhood, are easily solved by children seven and eight years old if they are put in the shape of interesting puzzles.

The children who have made the squares of the theorem of Pythagoras out of pieces of coloured cardboard, will not look at the theorem, when it comes in geometry, as on a mere instrument of torture devised by the teachers; and the less so…

German teachers have shown how the very plays of children can be made instrumental in conveying to the childish mind some concrete knowledge in both geometry and mathematics.

It is evident that the years of childhood ought not to be spent so uselessly as they are now.

Hence the over-pressure in schools, and hence, also, the urgent necessity of totally revising both the subjects and the methods of teaching, according to the new wants and to the examples already given here and there, by separate schools…

Our present methods of teaching originate from a time when the accomplishments required from an educated person were extremely limited; and they have been maintained, notwithstanding the immense increase of knowledge which must be conveyed…

Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible.

Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education.

And it has shown also what can be obtained, without over-pressure, if a rational economy of the scholar’s time is always kept in view, and theory goes hand in hand with practice.

But we must recognise that the Moscow experiment--not to speak of hundreds of other partial experiments--has perfectly well proved the possibility of combining a scientific education of a very high standard with the education which is…