A teacher is valued or not according to the energy he displays in anti-
religious education. He receives rewards, if he is successful in eradicating
all traces of religious feeling from the heart of a child.
A fourth and very important factor of the moral perversion of our
boys and girls are the party organizations, which act parallel to the school.
The children are invited to take part in these organizations. (They are
salled “October Offsprings — Octiabriata””). The innocent, feeble child's
soul is thus drawn into the vortex of active political struggle; the children
are poisoned for all their lives by the tactics of this struggle. The older
boys are grouped into “pioneers” — somewhat like the boy scouts. When
16 years old, the school boy or girl can become a member of the
‘Comsomol’”’ which is the direct path to become member of the Com-
munistic party. The Comsomol is a complicated political organization,
possessing its own strict status and very definite aims both in its work
within the schools and outside them. It is of immense, fatal importance for
the future not only of Russia, but of all European States.
The position of the teacher in the school is extremely difficult and
degrading: the work is insufferably hard, they are constantly ordered to
do things that insult them and run counter to their inward convictions.
But still more unbearable does it grow, because there exists in every school
2 committee of pupils which not only has the right to interfere in the
system of instruction, but can even exercise control over the behaviour of
the teachers. These committees generally consist of “Comsomoltzy” or are
directed by them. Every member who enters this organization is obliged to
work for the party, i. e. he must observe and report to authorities regarding
the political fidelity of his comrades, teachers, parents, and acquaintances;
thus every deviation from loyalty to the Soviet regime will be denounced*).
[t is easy to imagine what a chasm between comrades, between the teachers
and the pupils, between the parents and the children, such an educational
system produces. How morally degrading must this systematic spying and
treason be for the children and for the youth. Besides this, the political
*) In the tale of Marianna Jachontoff “Walja Chabarowa”, printed in No. 6 of
April 1928 of the journal “The Young Guards”, a communistic news-paper, as all
sthers in Russia, there is glorified the heroic exploit of a 1f-years aged girl Walja
Chabarowa. She knows from a chat of her mother with a friend of her late father,
hat this friend is an adversary of the Bolshevist Government and that he is pursued
by the Bolshevics. Walja immediately denounces him to the “Cheka” and conducts
‘he Chekists herself to the home of her mother, where she shows them all places;
where the friend of her late father can hide himself, and so she helped them to
ake him into custody. The author is delighted with this deed of the girl, and
qualifies it as the limit of the “remodelling of the human material”, wishing that
“all boys and girls of the U.S. S.R. may take a leaf out of the book of this girl and
amulate her”. Editor.