We shall try to explain as briefly as possible wherein the essence of 
these methods consists and in what manner Soviet authority has tried to 
make use of them, so as to educate perfect Communists. 
The Dalton Plan is a method which admits of individual, independent 
study of separate questions or of certain parts of a subject without any 
systematic preparation, unconnected with the general program of the secon- 
dary school. The aim of this method (an aim which can be attained 
only if a certain level of intelligence exists) is to communicate no know- 
tedge, but to accustom the student to acquire knowledge independently in 
any sphere he desires: to teach him to extract it by himself from books 
and other sources. This method ought never to be applied in the case of 
young children; older ones can use it only when a certain fundamental 
amount of knowledge has already been acquired. 
[n a very interesting book by a Soviet author, “The Diary” of a certain 
Kostia Riabtzeff (he is a pupil of a second grade school) we find the 
following words: “The Dalton Plan is being introduced into our school. 
This is a system thanks to which the teachers will have nothing to do, and 
the pupils will have to find out everything by themselves. Our school 
Jesks will be replaced by long tables, the classrooms will be named “labora- 
tories”.” And a little farther he goes on to say: “The Dalton Plan is 
worth nothing. We all, both the teachers and the pupils, understand nothing. 
\ll the fellows say that Dalton must have been a Lord, one of the bour- 
geois, thal it was he who invented this plan. During one month we must 
read a whole heap of books, write ten reports, and draw the outlines of 
3 diagrams; and besides that we must be able to speak about all we have 
read and written.” 
The only practical result of this plan, which has been applied only as 
an experiment in England and in U.S. A., has been in the U.S.S.R. to 
overburden the children with tasks they can neither understand nor fulfil, 
and to muddle definitely the brains of teachers who were quite unprepared 
for this kind of work. 
The Complex Method was and is being introduced with great insistence 
and obstinacy. The Bolshevic pedagogues love to demonstrate it to their 
European guests. They maintain that it is the “new word” in pedagogical 
science which they have proclaimed*). 
| According to the definition of the Soviet Authors the complex system 
is the study of all concrete phenomena taken from actual life and grouped 
*) There is in reality nothing new in this system: it has often been applied both 
in Russia and in Europe in so-called “object lessons” and in the teaching of foreign 
languages. 
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