Upbringing

UPBRINGING, a special branch of human activity, which, according to Marx, has as its goal the formation of the "general nature of man in such a direction that the latter acquires skill and experience in a certain branch of labor, becomes the owner of developed and at the same time specific labor force". Thus, "upbringing is the process by which society adapts future generations to its needs and conditions" (Lunacharsky). Depending on the essential diversity of these needs and conditions in different epochs of the development of human society, and at any given moment in different strata of the class society, the ultimate goals of Upbringing and its methods change very significantly. The goal, content, and forms of Upbringing are determined by the social structure, the ideology of the epoch, and the economy; for this reason, educational systems, which replace one another, have been regulated since ancient times by the ruling classes in the interests of the latter. In modern society, which divides people into two hostile camps, a class system of upbringing is inevitably created. In capitalist countries, the youth of the ruling classes is prepared for leadership and management, domination and enjoyment of the benefits of life, while the youth of the propertyless classes is prepared for labor and obedience. In the country of the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, the ultimate goal of Upbringing is the preparation of a labor and fighting generation, maximally adapted to the continuation and completion of the tasks of socialist construction; but in both cases, the bodies administering the matter of upbringing strive to place the child in conditions favorable for the strengthening and development of precisely those endowments which correspond to the pre-set goal, and for the inhibition or suppression of those which do not correspond to this goal. The essence of this process (the development of some endowments and the inhibition of the development of others) follows from the position that the developing organism is formed under the influence of endogenous and exogenous factors. The first group includes hereditary endowments laid down in the germ plasm and determining the genotype (see); the second group of factors (exogenous) determines the manifestation of all other paratypic properties of man. It represents a complex complex of the most diverse elements of the external environment, both material and social (i.e., based on human relationships). The significance of exogenous factors is extremely great due to the great plasticity of the child's organism, which easily changes its structure and easily adapts its response reactions to stimuli received from the external environment. Conditioned-reflex sets (see Reflexology) are distinguished especially by great plasticity; their character depends on the state of the cerebral cortex, i.e., the organ of relatively recent phylogenetic origin. The selection of external factors acting on the child, or, in other words, the "organization of the child's external environment," constitutes the essence of the educational system. Some authors treat Upbringing as the sum of intentional prolonged influences on the child's organism; others understand Upbringing as the entire sum of influences (to which the child is subjected), i.e., intentional and accidental, conscious and unconscious, direct and indirect, in other words, influences to which the child is subjected in all aspects of his life—at home (in the family), at school, on the street, in the cinema, in the theater, in organized society of comrades, and in a randomly formed company of children, etc. A systematically organized system of Upbringing strives to gradually and consistently eliminate accidental and unregulated elements of the external environment; this represents an extraordinary difficulty, almost impossible outside a system of complete socialization of the matter of Upbringing in the country. In capitalist society this is hardly achievable at all, since the principle of family Upbringing stands firm there due to the need to protect against the disintegration and decay of the petty-bourgeois way of life of the family as the basic cell of the economy and as the cradle of the ideology of ownership. In the USSR, naturally, the general course of the educational system is directed towards gradually approaching a as complete, exhaustive coverage as possible of children's contingents by Soviet educational institutions, both in terms of age groupings and in terms of the amount of time which the child or adolescent is under the direct influence and observation of these institutions. But even in a child's institution, the complete absence of accidental influences is not guaranteed, since the relationships between the child and the external environment are very complex and far from being studied to the end. An entire branch of knowledge and of practical activity based on this knowledge, called pedagogy, has, over a number of centuries, accumulated and systematized empirical experience in the matter of Upbringing, striving to place a scientific basis under it. A number of brilliant thinkers-pedagogues (Comenius, Pestalozzi, etc.) accumulated a colossal baggage of observations and practical conclusions from them, which are used by modern pedagogy. But the scientific basis of old pedagogy, based on dualistic psychology, proved unsuitable for the school placed on Marxist principles. A truly scientific justification of the methods of social Upbringing takes its beginning only in relatively recent times, with the emergence of a new branch of knowledge—pedology (see), which received the most significant development in the USSR as a scientific discipline synthesizing the most valuable scientific material on the relationships of the growing human personality with the surrounding environment, drawing this material both from general biology and reflexology, and from hygiene and clinic. The sociological essence of Upbringing follows both from the above-mentioned goal-setting (adaptation to the performance of social functions) and from the position that social relationships are the dominant factor forming the human personality: being an integral part of society and unable to exist outside it, man from the very first moment outside the womb (and even before this moment arrives) becomes in the closest dependence on the people surrounding him. The period of maturation for entering independent labor life, i.e., the period of Upbringing, is the longer, the more complex the social relationships in a given society. And the content of the upbringing process depends on the essence and principles of these relationships. In bourgeois society they are based on competition and rivalry; man is viewed as an isolated personality; the tasks of individualistic Upbringing come to the fore. In socialist society, on the soil of solidarity and collective resolution of questions, the principles of collectivist Upbringing gain predominance from the very early age; hence co-education (joint Upbringing of boys and girls), the implementation of the principle of self-activity, labor activity, organizational nature of children, unity of the labor school, etc. The biological essence of Upbringing follows from human nature, which is a complex result of a long process of phylogenetic development. Man, as a biological individual, stands in an isolated position in many respects; for example, a) he is deprived of many natural defensive means; b) he is born less finished in his development compared to newborns of all other animals, but c) he possesses, in comparison with other animals, an extremely strongly developed nervous-brain apparatus and the mental abilities associated with it, thanks to which he not only (like animals) adapts to the conditions of the surrounding nature, but adapts it to his needs; he modifies nature due to the possibility of applying tools of production and ensures the satisfaction of all his vital needs in the presence of labor. The relative biological helplessness of the child, the duration of the period of Upbringing, the colossal volume of skills necessary for a person to enter the labor collective as a full-fledged member, determine the need for a) careful accounting of age forces, so as not to violate the correctness of biological processes of the organism through reckless overload; b) finding the most favorable conditions of the surrounding environment and organizing it; c) the earliest possible beginning of the child's Upbringing. The main guiding principles of the practical construction of the "polytechnical labor" Upbringing of the labor masses were indicated by Karl Marx and are being carried out in our country, gradually taking shape into the system of the "Soviet unified labor school". In it, the principle of the activity of students in the field of labor and research is combined with the principle of studying labor as the basis of social relationships. Alongside the Soviet school, the system of extracurricular upbringing is being carried out in the form of organizing the children's and youth movement (pioneers, Komsomol), as well as in the form of work with parents. The main scientific institutions developing questions of upbringing in the USSR: pedagogical faculties of certain universities, the Academy of Communist Education in Moscow, the State Scientific Institute for the Protection of Maternity and Infancy of the Narkomzdrav, the Institute of Methods of School Work in Moscow, institutes of physical culture in Moscow and Leningrad, the Institute of the Brain in Leningrad, the Pedagogical Institute named after...

Herzen in Leningrad and others. The participation and role of physicians, following from the essence of their professional tasks, in the matter of Upbringing are very significant (see Hygiene of Upbringing, Protection of Motherhood and Infancy).