This is the second article from Sukhomlynsky’s 100 Pieces of Advice for Teachers.

2. About Health and the Richness of a Teacher’s Spiritual Life. A few words about the Joy of Work
I remember a farewell party for a teacher who was retiring. The teacher who invited me to the party was relatively young. She began work at the age of twenty, and on the day she retired she was only forty-five years old. We all wondered why Anastasia Grigorievna was retiring. We thought it strange that she did not want to work a single extra day. She retired on the day she completed twenty-five years of service at the school. All our questions were answered by Anastasia Grigorievna herself in her farewell speech to the gathering of young teachers. ‘Dear friends,’ she said, ‘I am retiring because I do not love my work at school. I did not find satisfaction in my work. It gave me no joy. This has been a great misfortune, the tragedy of my life. Each day I have looked forward to the end of lessons, so I could escape from the noise and be by myself. You are surprised that a woman of forty-five would retire, while still enjoying excellent health. But I do not enjoy good health. It has been overtaxed by work that gave me no joy. I have serious heart problems. I advise you young teachers to search your hearts. If your work gives you no joy, give up teaching, and find your true place in life. Find work that you love. Otherwise your years of work will become a hell on earth.’
Dear friend, let us reflect on this sad story. Our health, our mood, the richness of our spiritual lives, the joy of creative work, satisfaction from work that we love—all these things are interconnected and interdependent. Most important of all is our health and our strength of spirit. How necessary health is for a teacher, and what a tragedy it is if illness imperceptibly takes over our lives and catches us unawares. It is not uncommon for a teacher to reach forty-five or forty-seven and find that they are completely spent. They have reached the peak of pedagogical wisdom, uncovered the mysteries of the art and science of education, and developed educational convictions, but they have no energy left to keep going. A teacher with twenty-five years’ experience, who had begun work at the age of sixteen wrote to me: ‘I do not want to reach forty-five as an honoured committee member, as a spent force. How can we work in a way that does not overtax our health? We need our health in order to work and be creative. I cannot imagine happiness without work.’
I have had conversations with about four hundred teachers aged forty-five to fifty. When we talked about health many complained that their hearts were playing up. Disturbances of the circulatory and nervous systems, heart problems, these can creep up on a teacher, and not only limit, but often put an end to their creative work, forcing them into an early retirement. We need to work in such a way that at sixty we are still healthy and enjoying life. It is hard to imagine something more tragic for a teacher than to feel at the height of their intellectual powers and full of ideas, but physically powerless.
But how can we look after our heart and nerves? We cannot turn away from anything that demands emotional involvement, and cultivate indifference. Here we need to consider the special conditions under which we work. Our work involves heart and nerves. Every day and every hour we are required to expend an enormous amount of psychological energy. Our work places us in constantly changing circumstances that lead to both heightened arousal and inhibition. For this reason the ability to manage our own responses, to exercise self-control, is one of the most essential skills on which both our success as teachers and our health depend. An inability to manage our own daily and hourly emotional reactions, to manage the situations that confront us, is the main factor that leads to overtaxing of our hearts and wear and tear on our nervous systems.
But how can we develop this ability? First of all, we need to understand our own health, to understand the peculiarities of our own nervous system and heart. The nervous system of any human being is by its very nature very flexible, and a teacher needs to develop this flexibility to the level of mastery over their emotions. I have developed this ability in myself by not allowing the seeds of negative thinking to grow, whether it be gloominess, exaggerating others’ faults, or imagining that children are intentionally trying to undermine our work. This is difficult to express in words, but one common weakness of educational practice is expecting from children what can only reasonably be expected of an adult, and turning children into either cold logicians, or indifferent repositories of truths and teachings. I always try not fuel agitation, not to suppress it, but to release it. What is necessary for this to happen, how do we avoid the constant need to restrain oneself? The most sweeping measure is to direct the energy of the whole class, including the teacher, into an activity that requires psychological unity, collective creativity, the full concentration of each and every member, and an exchange of ideas. Experience has convinced me that such collective activity weakens the ‘springs’ that a teacher often has to compress in order to inhibit arousal and not allow irritation to be openly expressed. If we do not weaken these springs, if we clutch our heart in a fist as they say, it will be overtaxed, irritated, and unsettled, unable to monitor the emotional hazards that arise in our work if our feelings run wild or if we have to repress them.
I went into the forest with my class. We have a little boy named Yurko, lively, mischievous, mercurial, snub-nosed with blue eyes and freckles. While the other children were gathered in a clearing, listening to my instructions—where we were going next, and how not to get lost in the forest—Yurko ran off into some trees, hid in a gulley, and started calling out so we could all hear him… At first it may seem that the child is doing this with the evil intention of disrupting our walk through the forest. But, I tell myself, we should not exaggerate a child’s intentions. Yurko is just a little boy, in grade two, and his intention is not so far-reaching. I will not get upset, angry or irritable, but will turn this into an interesting game. Children, let us be very quiet and hide from Yurko. Instead of us looking for him, he will have to look for us. Quietly, so the grass does not rustle beneath our feet, we make our way to a cave I know and hide in it. The children are in raptures as they look around their hide-away. Yurko calls out a few more times, and then falls silent. Then we hear him in another spot, imitating the call of an oriole. He is approaching the spot where we were sitting. He calls out again, and now I can hear concern in his voice. He has reached the clearing. Now his is no longer imitating bird calls, but calling to us: ‘Where are you? Answer me!’
Instead of forcing yourself to suppress your irritation, find an activity that will throw a totally different light on the thing that is irritating you and leading you to suppress your feelings. Find a funny side to what is irritating you and you will become the master of your class’s thoughts and feelings.
The second way to release feelings of agitation and irritation is to exercise a sense of humour. The most tense situation, which can sometimes lead to a lengthy period of irritation, can be diffused if you have a sense of humour. Children love and respect a teacher who is cheerful, and does not get down or despair, if for no other reason than that they are a cheerful bunch, with a sense of humour. They have a way of seeing something funny in every act and everything that happens in life. The ability to make fun of the negative in a good-humoured way, without malice, and to support and encourage the positive with a joke, is an important quality in a good teacher and a in good class of students.
The lack of a sense of humour in a teacher creates a wall of mutual misunderstanding: the teacher does not understand the students and the students do not understand the teacher. An awareness that children do not understand you is irritating, and that irritation is a state from which a teacher often cannot find a way out. Believe me, my dear colleague, at least half of the conflicts that eat away at a school and poison the life of the students arise from such mutual misunderstanding.
A teacher’s work is consists of alternating periods of great intellectual effort and of relative calm. Many years of experience has convinced me that a teacher’s heart and nerves require prolonged periods of rest from giving, from the expenditure of nervous and spiritual energy. This energy needs to be replenished. A necessary condition for this replenishment is the sensible use of rest time. Appropriate rest, especially during the summer and winter, develops and strengthens the compensatory capacity of the nervous system, assists the development of stamina, composure, and the ability to mentally control emotional impulses. Many experienced teachers, who have worked in schools for thirty or forty years, tell me that they have been assisted in the development of stamina and self-control by prolonged communion with nature, during which physical effort is combined with thought and observation.
At the same time it is necessary to economise the expenditure of nervous energy during our daily work. That is an important way of ensuring we have a healthy heart and healthy spirit.

Sukhomlynsky received hundreds of letters from teachers throughout the Soviet Union, asking for advice. In response to these letters, Sukhomlynsky wrote 100 Pieces of Advice for Teachers. We will translate a selection of these 100 articles, and post them on this website, starting with the first piece of advice, which relates to young people choosing a vocation:

1. What is a teacher’s vocation, and how is it formed?

Like any qualified, purposeful, planned and systematic work, the education of human beings is a profession, an area of specialisation. But it is a special profession, unlike any other. It is distinguished by a number of specific characteristics and qualities:

a) We are dealing with the most complex, priceless and dear thing in life—with human beings. Their lives, their health, intellects, characters and wills, their civic and intellectual identities, their positions and roles in life, and their happiness, depend on our ability, skill, artistry and wisdom.

b) The final result of educational work will not be visible today or tomorrow, but only after a very significant passage of time. What you have done and said, the influence you have had on a child, sometimes only becomes evident after five years or ten years.

c) A child is subject to the influences of many people and life phenomena, including their mother and father, their school friends, the so-called ‘street environment’, books read and films viewed unbeknown to you, a completely unforeseen encounter with someone who exerts a powerful influence on a young soul, and so on. These influences on children can be positive and negative. There are difficult and oppressive family situations that leave an indelible mark on a person for the rest of their lives. A school’s mission, our joint task dear colleague, is to fight for every human being, to overcome the negative influences and to encourage the positive influences. For this to happen, it is essential that the teacher’s personality should have the brightest, most effective and beneficial influence on a student’s personality. Dmitry Pisarev wrote: ‘Human nature is so rich, powerful, and elastic, that it can preserve its freshness and its beauty, even in the midst of the most oppressive and ugly environment.’ But human nature can only fully reveal itself when a child has an intelligent, skilful and wise educator.

d) Our work addresses subtle aspects of the spiritual life of the developing personality—intelligence, feeling, will, conviction, self-consciousness. One may influence these spheres only through like action, through intelligence, feeling, will, conviction, self-consciousness. The most important means for influencing the spiritual world of the pupil are the teacher’s word, the beauty of the surrounding world and of art, the creation of circumstances in which feelings find their most striking expression—human relationships covering the whole emotional gamut.

e) One of the most important features of our creative work as teachers is that what we are working with—children—are forever changing, forever new, different today from what they were yesterday. We are responsible for the formative years of a human being, and that is a special incomparable responsibility.

Such are the characteristics of educational work. What then constitutes a vocation for it? What objective criteria are necessary for it, and how can we prepare for, establish, develop and refine that vocation?

It is a fundamental spiritual requirement of any human being to communicate with other people. In this we find joy and fulfilment. But in some people, as a result of various circumstances, this requirement is little developed, while in others it is a personality trait that dominates all the others. There are some people who ‘by nature’ are unsociable, withdrawn, uncommunicative, who prefer solitude or the companionship of a narrow circle of friends. (‘Nature’ of course has nothing to do with it. The decisive factor is upbringing, especially in early childhood.) If socialising with a large group of people gives you a headache, if you would rather work alone, or with two or three other people, than with a large group of colleagues, then do not choose teaching as a profession.

The teaching profession equates to a study of human nature, a constant, never-ending effort to enter into the complex inner worlds of other people. A remarkable trait—the ability to constantly discover new attributes in another human being, to experience the wonder of discovering those new attributes, to see a human being in the making—is one of the roots from which a vocation for teaching grows. Its foundation is laid through the efforts of elders—fathers, mothers, teachers—who educate a child in the spirit of love for others and human respect.

You begin to dream of becoming a teacher. Run a check and test yourself. If you are in the final two years at school, ask the Communist Youth League committee to appoint you as leader of a Pioneer troop or a group of Little Octobrists. [Note: Pioneers were like Scouts, and Little Octobrists were like Cub Scouts, with each class of school students forming a troop.] In front of you are forty youngsters—at first glance they seem very similar to each other even in their external features, but by the third, fourth or fifth day, after several walks to forest and field, you become convinced that each child is a world in themselves, unique and never to be repeated. If this world reveals itself to you, if you sense the individuality within each child, if the joys and sorrows of each child find a response in your heart, in your thoughts, cares and concerns—then you may confidently choose as your profession the noble work of a teacher and you will find in it the joy of creativity. For creativity in our work (I will return to this later) is first and foremost the process of coming to know, of discovering a human being, of experiencing wonder at the many facets and inexhaustibility of human nature.

If, on the other hand, those forty children seem depressingly the same to you, if you have trouble remembering their faces and names, if each pair of children’s eyes does not tell you something deeply personal and unique, if you cannot recognise a child’s voice ringing out in the depths of the yard, and what they are expressing in that shout, cannot recognise it after a week or a month, then think seven times, as they say, and then decide if you are suited to teaching. Because there is not a single educational rule, not a single truth, that is absolutely equally applicable to all children. Because in practice education is knowledge and skills, developed to a point of mastery, and then raised to the level of an art. Because to educate a human being is first and foremost to know their soul, to see and feel their individual world.

‘If I had the power, I would cut out the tongue of anyone who says that people are incorrigible.’ These words by the great thinker Abai Qunanbaiuli sunk deep into my soul. They burn before me in fiery letters every time I think about the vocation of a teacher, when I have to talk with young teachers about their joys and sorrows, their successes and failures. Limitless faith in human beings, in their fundamental goodness, that is what should live in your soul if you are thinking of devoting your life to the noble work of teaching. Not faith in some abstract human being that does not exist in nature, but in our soviet children, developing in a socialist society.

The cornerstone of the teaching profession is a deep faith that every child can be successfully educated. I do not believe that there are incorrigible children, adolescents or young men and women. We have before us a young person who is just discovering the world, and it is in our power to make sure that nothing crushes, cripples or kills the goodness, kindness and humaneness in that little person. For this reason any person who dedicates their lives to educating human beings must be patient with children’s weaknesses, which, if we examine them very carefully and reflect on them, turn out to be insignificant, and not worthy of rage, indignation or punishment. Do not think that I am advocating tolerance of any behaviour, an abstract tolerance that requires a teacher to put up with anything, and ‘bear their cross’. I am talking about something completely different, of the wisdom that allows an older person—a mother, father or teacher—to understand with mind and heart the subtle motives and causes that give rise to children’s misbehaviour; to understand with mind and heart the childish nature of this misbehaviour. Not to place children on the same level as ourselves, and not to have the same expectations of them that we have of adults, but at the same time, not to be childish ourselves, not to descend to the level of the child, but to understand the complexity of children’s behaviour and their relations with each other.

If every childish prank arouses irritation and an accelerated heart rate, if it seems to you that those children have reached the limit, and you need to do something extreme and take emergency measures, weigh seven times to see if you should be a teacher. You cannot educate properly if you are in constant conflict with children. The ability to calm conflict first and foremost through an understanding of the fact that you are dealing with children—this ability grows from a deep root that supports a teaching vocation—from understanding with mind and heart that a child is a constantly changing creature.

There is another trait without which, in my opinion, a teaching vocation is impossible. I would call this trait a harmony of heart and mind. There is probably no other profession other than education and medicine that demands such heartfelt involvement. You may have more than forty pupils. If you are teaching in senior classes you may have a hundred or a hundred and fifty students. And you have to give each one a little of your heart. You have to find room in your heart for each one’s joys and sorrows. Empathy, heartfelt concern for others—this is the flesh and blood of the teaching profession. A teacher cannot be a cold indifferent person. Cold calculation, meticulous consideration of everything that has happened, and a fear of not fully observing all the relevant regulations, arouse mistrust in children. Children dislike teachers who are too calculating and will never bare their hearts to them.

In all circumstances act on the first impulse of your heart—it is always the noblest. But at the same time teachers need to regulate their heartfelt impulses with reason, and not let their emotions get out of control. This is especially true when you have to make decisions concerning mistaken, impulsive and just plain wrong behaviour by your students.

A teacher’s art and skill is in their ability to combine heartfelt empathy and wisdom.

Sometimes you need to delay taking a decision, and allow your feelings to subside. Each time I have to talk with a student about behaviour that expresses complex, conflicting motives, I put off the discussion for several days. I assure you, my respected colleagues, that the emotional impact of your words, when you address the mind and heart of your student, will be greater for the wait, because in these cases your feeling will be ennobled by the wisdom of your reflections. And your reflections, your words, will reach the depths of your student’s heart, because they will be enlivened and saturated with the emotion of your heart. This ability, the ability to attune yourself for a heartfelt conversation with a student, especially with an adolescent, is an exceptionally important part of your educational toolkit, which every teacher has to put together. We have to educate this ability within ourselves, to create it, perfect it and refine it, making it more subtle and effective.

Developing this ability, it is essential to enter into a child’s soul, to understand what they live for, how they view the world, what the people surrounding them mean to them.

My dear colleague, to become a real educator, you have to pass through a school of empathy, over a lengthy period to apprehend with your heart everything that your pupil lives for, thinks about, finds joy in and is concerned about. This is one of the subtlest aspects in our educational work. If you persistently work at it, you will be a genuine master.

For many years I have maintained a website about the holistic Ukrainian educator Vasyl Sukhomlynsky. Recently this has been hosted by EJR Language Service Pty. Ltd., a small Australian family company (run by myself and my wife) that works with texts in English, Japanese and Russian. Now we are moving the pages about Sukhomlynsky to a dedicated site called ‘The Holistic Educator’. This will happen gradually over the coming days and weeks.

As well as providing information about Sukhomlynsky, I hope that this new site can provide more general information about holistic approaches to education, and present examples of holistic education from around the world.

Watch this space!