Stanislav Shatsky

Who was Stanislav Shatsky?

Stanislav Shatskii was an important humanistic educator, writer, and educational administrator in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union.

Shatskii established a number of experimental and progressive educational institutions between 1905 and 1934. A member of the Russian intelligentsia, Shatskii imported many of the values of late tsarist educational experimentation into early Soviet approaches to creating a communist school and constructing 'a new Soviet person'.

His work as a communist educator complicates our understanding of communist education. 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. For Shatskii, true communist education was the release of the individual from the strictures of the capitalist system. The importance of his work is only recently being recognized as many of his publications were suppressed by Stalin and the Soviet educational orthodoxy that sought to ensure that all 'communist education' had a class-based element. He deserves a place in Russian pedagogy with Anton Makarenko and Lev Vygotsky.