Earlier this month, on 8 April, ABC Radio repeated the broadcast of my interview with Richard Fidler for his ‘Conversations’ program. The broadcast can be listened to at:
http://radio.abc.net.au/programitem/pe8DrVlb0D
This broadcast has stimulated renewed interest in Sukhomlynsky’s work, and in our publications: Sukhomlynsky’s My heart I give to children, and Tales from Pavlysh: A world of beauty, and our book about Sukhomlynsky, Each one must shine: The educational legacy of V.A. Sukhomlinsky. (When that work was first published, I spelt Sukhomlynsky’s name as it is transliterated from Russian, as Russian was the language I used to access his work.) For a brief period of time, two of these publications were numbers one and two on Amazon Australia’s ‘movers and shakers’ list, with My heart I give to children reaching number 5 on that site’s best seller list.
While this boost will naturally be fairly short-lived, I have received a number of emails over the past two weeks, which have given me great hope that Sukhomlynsky’s ideas will find acceptance among Australian educators and educators in other English speaking countries. The feedback has been very encouraging, and confirms my belief that Sukhomlynsky’s work has not lost any of its relevance. Indeed, current trends in Australian education, driven largely by a misplaced emphasis on NAPLAN results, have led many educators to feel a need to ‘defend childhood’ from pressures that seek to turn young children into little academics. It is in this context that Sukhomlynsky’s writing, imbued as it is with deep respect for childhood as an important stage in life, can help remind us of what we are in danger of losing, if we persist with our current direction.
An illustration of the difference between Sukhomlynsky’s approach and what is common practice today may be found in the April 2018 edition of Sukhomlinsky News. (I am very indebted to Melbourne student Berta Karaim for translating the main article in this newsletter from Ukrainian, as well as for translating the children’s stories from Russian.) In the main article, Sukhomlynsky writes about the importance of fairy tales in the life of a child, and of how we should allow children to imbue the real world with fairy tale images. Sukhomlynsky read and composed many fairy tales with his young students, and encouraged them to enter into the story, siding with good against evil. This is in stark contrast with a unit of work that is given to many seven year old grade two students in Queensland, in which they are expected to analyse the stereotypes in fairytales, and to compose a fairy tale in which they break the stereotype. Such academic analysis is incompatible with the direct ‘living’ of the fairytale.
Many early childhood educators are concerned about the abandonment of play-based approaches to education in the preparatory year, which is now becoming more and more like grade one used to be. Sukhomlynsky’s writings, especially My heart I give to children, are full of cogent arguments in defence of play, physical activity and artistic creativity in the early childhood years, not only for their intrinsic value, and to facilitate physical and emotional development, but also in order to lay a proper foundation for intellectual development.