The Dusty Legacy

The collective education is an education method which means to educate individual through the collective in the way of nurturing and educating the collective. It used to be a very unique education method of socialism countries. Chinese education has long been influenced by USSR, and has established a very similar tradition of collective education. The collective education theories are those education theories which focus on collective education. The main question of these theories is "How to use collective education?" The collective education theories of USSR are a theoretical system which includes the theories of Krupskaya, Makarenko and Sukhomlinski. However, after the issue of the reform and open policy of China and the establishment of socialist market economy, the collective education and its theories has been forgotten along with the fading of collectivism and collectivism education.In my opinion, the collective education is a most valuable educational theory even under the market economy condition. However, we must first fully understand the content of this theory before we can inherit and renew it. We first take the collective of Makarenko as our research object and find as a most ideal collective it assumes the features of life-like, integrity, purposiveness, subjectivity and sociality. Then we find the psychological basis of collective education: the concept of social instinct, and take the development of children’s social instinct as the thread of understanding the process of collective education in Krupskaya’s theory. In her opinion, children should not only learn to leave a collective life in school, but also learn how to organize this life through school autonomy leading by the Young Pioneers. Learning to leave a collective life is the junior stage of collectivism education, and learning to collective autonomy is the advanced stage of collectivism education.Makarenko has established a highly integrated system of collective education theory from his abundant education experience in his collective. His theory includes the exploration of the structure and function of student collective and the three principle of collective education:the balance of freedom and discipline, the unity of respect and demand, the simultaneous influence of collective and individual.Sukhomlinski, Makarenko’s successor, explored the ways of using collective education in a normal school. Differ from Makarenko, Sukhomlinski started from the collective life and divided the campus collective life into learning, laboring, helping, mutual use of public properties and leisure activities. He set up the collectivism correlation as the aim of all kinds of collective activities and hold to generate and fully take advantage of the conflict of collective benefits and personal interests to achieve the goal of training and nurturing collectivists.As a most powerful method of sociality education, the collective education still meets our educational needs so well that it is much far from being out of date. We should review carefully and inherit this precious legacy and trying to develop and construct our own local collective education theory.