DESCRIPTORS:
School principal; best Russian schools; school principal’s daily work; a democratic school; main differences in comparison with regular schools; basic values; universal skills.

SYNOPSIS:
It is easy to be a school principal if you love children, and if you are not afraid of authorities, and if you manage to create a true democratic atmosphere in your school. Teachers concentrate on teaching core knowledge and universal skills. Schools should provide every student with a helpful method to find his or her individual, personal way to use these universal skills.

It is easy to be a school principal only on two conditions: if you love children and if you are not afraid of authorities.

To love children means to trust them, to treat them as equals. When I say, equal, I do not mean equality in knowledge and experience, but rather treating students as equal human beings, whose life is ahead of them, who are smarter than we are, and who are quick-witted. My age allows me to ask a question: “What can I give them for the future?” I am asking this because our common future will be exactly the way our children will make it.  Our mission is to help them think of this future but not build it for them.

It is easy when you are not afraid of authorities.  I mean that if my bosses are slightly frightened of me, then it is only because I know more than they do. I know what a real school means and how teachers and students live and what they feel; I am more knowledgeable in educational laws simply because I was one of their creators; I better understand why many reforms failed only because I was part of at least five or six of them. I can’t say I feel easy with authorities; actually, I feel mostly sorry for any newly appointed school principals. For whatever reason, many of them think that the most important part of their job is to answer all the questions, compose and fulfill all the orders, plans, and instructions coming from above... To do what the authorities say – that’s how they see the principal’s job. I know principals who specially hire a vice-principal responsible for “preparing papers.” These poor women (I don’t know men in this position) have to compose reports on everything; they create plans for every event, which gives a principal a feeling of protection in front of the authorities. Frankly, I don’t quite understand what they do with the rest of their time, but if we encourage every inquiry from authorities, if we pretend that they don’t take us away from our main responsibilities, we will mostly encourage bureaucracy. And this is truly bad.

For example, I receive ten to fifteen inquiries a week with demands to write something or to submit certain information; such demands arrive from different authorities, not only from educational ones. Three-quarters of this correspondence I immediately toss into the wastebasket, while some I answer over the phone. Recently I received a demand from authorities to urgently prepare a plan for my school’s evacuation in case of a war. I called the organizations that sent me this demand and inquired, “Please, tell me from where to expect the war, from the West or from the East?This is critical for composing a plan. If the war starts in the West, then I need to take children to the Yaroslavlregion.[1] But it looks like no one from the West is planning to attack us. If the enemy comes from the East, then it should be China. But they are so far away, and I am not sure they feel likestarting a war against us. But if they do, then I should evacuate the school to the West. If the enemy comes from the South, then we will send the children to the North Pole, and if vice versa, then we will move them to the Black Sea.” In other words, I intentionally make the situation sound silly when I deal with authors of such demands. In response, they warned me that they would call my chief authorities; I promised to do the same but faster, and they finally stepped back. 

As another example, recently I received an order to send a plan of how my school would fulfill an All-Russian program of patriotic education. I am afraid I was the only principal who did not submit this plan. When asked why, I explained that the law “On Education,”[2] though seriously watered-down, still did not presuppose writing different plans for the authorities. I insisted that in accordance with this law, the school should not bear the function of submitting plans, and if the law does not require it, then why should I write it? I must fulfill orders and regulations – this is normal, but I can easily debate drafts of any order or such telephone demands as, “a certain plan is required immediately.” This I should not respond to; this is against the law. Quoting the law, I often hear back, “Why would you even mention the law? Do you know how people treat any law in our country?”  I usually reply, “Yes, I know. But if something is wrong in my activities, you will immediately quote the law to show it to me; that’s why I am using it ahead of time.”

I would sincerely like to tell all school principals, especially young ones, that they should not be frightened and they should fulfill their main mission. Their main mission is to create such conditions in their schools that all children feel comfortable there, that all children receive a good education and their self-esteem grows, and that they come to school every day with a smile. I believe this is the main mission of any school principal. This is also true about teachers and tutors. A teacher should not think of how to save money for her own child’s winter boots immediately before the class where she is going to teach her students eternal values of kindness and humanity. A principal should create situations that will allow every teacher and every student to develop. This is most important in school management.

One Moscow school principal asked me once, “Don’t you argue with girls who wear earrings and whose dress code is such that it leaves their navels uncovered?” I thought to myself, in my school, even boys wear earrings, and still I am not fighting with them. I answered her, “Tell me, please, do you have any other problems in your school? Or the only problem left is a naked navel, and nothing else? Are all your students talented, moral, and well taught? But if they are not, then, turn your attention to other issues, and when you solve all of them, start worrying about navels, chains, earrings, or something else.”

This is why, my answer to the question, “Is it easy to be a school principal?” is always affirmative – but only if conditions for students allow them to feel good in your school, and when you, yourself, are not afraid of any authorities.

My work is not easy, which means I am not less tired or spend less time working. I can stay at the school building until 10:00 PM. Our school is always open and it is usually overcrowded with students.  When I return home, I feel tired, like a deflated balloon. But what is important is that most of the time I am satisfied because I am doing my favorite job. If one suffers from one’s job, then it can never become one’s favorite.

I often contradict those teachers who keep saying, “Students should know that all work is hard.” I believe that students should study with a smile, should study easily, and only after, when they graduate and start working, then let them understand that work is hard. Work is both hard and joyful, because you have chosen it yourself, because it gives you satisfaction.   I will ever remember the situation during my first year as a principal when one boy was practically pleading for a certificate of completion for the eighth grade.[3] Then he added,“You know, after I get this certificate, I will take all my schoolbooks into the yard and burn them, because I hated all of them so much during my eight years.” I thought to myself, “Is this a result you are planning to have together with your colleagues? Do you want it to be really this hard for every child?!”

I started my teaching career in a boarding school with Grigory Krever as a school principal. (I was truly lucky as both of them, the school principal and his deputy, were former front-line soldiers, and I consider both of them my main teachers of pedagogy, at least, my teachers in terms of the attitude to my main professional activities; it was they who taught me to never be afraid of anything.) I remember Grigory coming from the local educational authorities’ office and commenting, “The lady there was so angry with me, she got so red-in-the-face and even stamped her feet. Was she trying to frighten me?!” A man who spent five years fighting in trenches would hardly ever be afraid of any authority. Coming from a meeting at the local Education Department, he would say, “I got another reprimand but our students will have new clothes….”

When I was a young man, I was a student in GITIS[4] and my mentor was Nikolay Ohklopkov.[5] My friends kept asking me whether I regretted leaving behind my theatrical past to become a teacher instead of being a theater director. My answer was always, “No, I don’t regret it.” Everything that I wanted to have, I have in my school. Being a school principal means I combine several roles: one of the playwright(with a few co-authors), another as the directorbecause I am staging my play, and one more as anactorbecause I am playing in this play. Most of my students would always remember their school principal playing a pirate or Carlson[6] who persuades them not to attend school. In my school I perform all roles and even more. That’s why I don’t regret anything, and I can tell you, I adore my work.

Long ago I had a serious position, that of a senior research fellow at the Russian Academy of Education, and I also conducted a seminar about a collective of children of different ages for the teachers of my current school. Once, after their principal left the school, these teachers called me on the phone and invited me to become their principal. I thought a little and decided to agree – they might not offer a second time, and it happens so rarely that teachers themselves invite a principal. That’s how I began working there, though, of course, I didn’t start from scratch. I already had enough educational experience. Since that time I have been a principal here for twenty-three years, and my total educational experience is forty-two years.  At the beginning of my career I had a number of ideas of how to change a school but I managed to keep these ideas to myself by giving teachers some time to feel free and be responsible for their actions.

In our school we changed the class duration. Instead of the regular forty-five minutes, we switched to a set of two thirty-five-minute periods taught together by one teacher with a short break in between. I decided to do it not only because the last five to ten minutes of a standard class are usually a complete waste of time (no one is listening to anyone, and the teacher is just trying to explain a new homework assignment) but also because I wanted to prevent teachers from using standard class plans, which they could easily get from their professional journals. I knew that they would not be able to adapt those standard plans, originally created for a class of forty-five minutes, to a new class set of two times thirty-five. In that new situation every teacher was supposed to become “an author” of his or her own class. Together with teachers we started to look for the so-called core knowledge, which every school subject had and which should become a mandatory part of teaching every subject. Some things were left behind but this allowed saving a little time and bringing new knowledge, which is usually not taught at schools. As a result of our joint work, we wrote and published a book about this core knowledge, entitled “School of Self-Identification. Step 1.”[7]

There was another important aspect to this work. Teachers have become authors of their own classes and authors of their work on the whole. It is not easy to “free” a teacher, as all of them have, what is called now, their “inner censors.” This censor is the reaction to the objective circumstances of their work – teachers are used to working like this. They are used to being reprimanded, they know that if they plan to give an “open class,” then it should never be spontaneous; they should rehearse it with their students. Teachers are used to writing different papers that have nothing to do with real life…. In other words, to free a teacher for creative activities is a serious and difficult task for a school principal. When I started doing it, in 1986-87, twenty teachers left our school; they left because they didn’t share the school concept, which I worked out together with other teachers and students. That was a concept of developing a free and democratic school. The group that left school didn’t like our concept, and before they left I suggested that they write their own concept of school development, which they did.  When we discussed it at our Big Council meeting, their concept was not accepted. The majority voted against it, and those teachers got very angry. They kept saying, “You brought together teachers and students to vote but it’s obvious that there are always more students than teachers.” Then I inquired whether they previously voted for the idea of having our Big Council decide all-important issues, and they did, but they thought it was kind of a game that the principal had invented. “I don’t play such games,” I said…. I still have good relations with these teachers but I also think that if you introduce real, not artificial, innovations in school, then teachers will react on the basis of their motives, attitudes, and values, and in such situations conflicts until the final break are very possible. If you plan for innovations, you need to have a strong and united school team. Those who left were good people. I didn’t push them out, but they couldn’t accept new ideas and they didn’t believe in them, so they left.

A democratic school is an active model of a democratic society. I mean “a society” and not the state, as the state has its prisons and its army.

The inner essence of any school is expressed through its basic values. Here is what we possess and what we are trying to reach:

• People establish themselves at the expense of others and they self-determine at their own expense.
• Children and teachers are equal in their rights as school citizens.
• A student has the right to decide what, when, and with what teacher he is going to study.
• School education is not only for socializing purposes; it is also for developing the individuality of every student.
• An educational process does not mean only classes; it also includes field trips, creative games, projects, free educational space, and main creative activities.
• Our main result is not a sum of knowledge in certain subjects but individual, universal skills.
• The school’s main body is our Big Council, consisting of both teachers and students.
• A student is not an object of teaching; a student is not just a participant of the process but a subject of education.
• Interaction of senior and junior students and their mutual work is critical for everyone’s personal development.
• Everyone cares about creating a democratic, tolerant lifestyle.[8]

The primary idea of our school is to teach universal skills. This is a totally different approach to the contents of teaching. I wouldn’t call the skills that we teach competencies – they are more. They can be defined as ways of action, which are useful for anyone in any life situation, not only in teaching or in abstract. But these skills should also be personally colored. For example, there is such a universal skill as an algorithm. Many people believe that it is possible to teach an algorithm of comparison but we learned that this is not true. One day we informed our seventh graders that they would start learning an algorithm of comparison in every class. The idea came from a book on methods and was passed in its original format to our teachers and students. Very soon there came negative responses from different students, who complained that they didn’t do comparisons like this. Then we realized that universal skills are more complicated than competencies, which are ”in fashion” today. Schools should provide every student with a helpful method to find his or her individual, personal way to use this skill. But how can we do it?

Teachers are qualified, at their best, to develop skills within their subject area, although this is already an achievement since there are many teachers who don’t even know what subject area skills they should develop. It is less complicated for teachers of mathematics compared to teachers of literature. When asked, they start by saying some common words like, a graduate should leave school with some type of a world outlook. It is clear that a graduate should leave, but what should he or she be able to do? This is again not easy. Teachers usually follow teaching programs, and everything that is written there they consider subject area skills. Of course, this is a mistake – one can grasp knowledge without possessing skills. As strange as it sounds, many teachers of mathematics cannot solve problems. I don’t mean problems in mathematics, I mean analyzing any phenomenon as a problem, where one can isolate an unknown, and base a decision on a certain axiom to make this unknown clear. That’s what many teachers are unable to do.

Once in my school I was observing a class given by the teacher who followed the ideas of the so-called ”teaching oriented towards development”[9]; the class was full of visiting school principals, and the teacher offered them the chance to solve a problem that was meant to be a task for children. Many principals failed to solve it only because they substituted a question and/or a problem’s condition with something else. As an illustration, read the text below which I also often use:

There is a tribe that lives in the forest. Its members are called  “small figures.” Each of them has a separate house, which is quite standard with everything necessary inside, even a phone. But these tribe members have one common and very specific feature. For them to feel full and not hungry, they just need to compare themselves. For example, one “small figure” meets another, they stand back-to-back, compare themselves and they are no longer hungry. But once there was a terrible snowstorm, their village was covered with snow and the “small figures” cannot compare themselves, as they were unable to leave their houses. What could they do? How might we help them compare themselves and feel full?

As a solution, many school principals suggested to send a bulldozer to clean the roads, or to bring a helicopter and melt the snow from the air, etc. When the principals suggested this, they didn’t understand that they tried to substitute the task, because the task was to find a measure that would allow them to compare themselves without physically standing next to each other. The answer is simple: everyone has a phone at home and houses are standard which means that their door jambs are tentatively the same; so everyone can measure oneself against his or her door jamb, call a neighbor, and determine who is taller. Instead of suggesting this, school principals tried to substitute the idea of this problem with something else, totally alien.

Parents of our students usually demand, “Give my child (children) everything that is necessary. Give them general education. Give them knowledge. Give them….” But a school is not a cafeteria where everything is given and everything is accepted. We discuss everything, even possible connections with colleges but we do not discuss the meaning of the term “general education.” Here comes another interconnected problem: how to find the way when a child will want to take what is imposed on him or her? How to create such a situation when they want to take, how to interest them? A child’s normal reaction is “Why do I need it?” Watching boys play football, I admire their open faces, their ability to organize a team, their quick reaction during the game, etc. When I watch the same boys in the classroom where they have to sit and listen, I see totally different people - there they are monkeys, slaves - but in the sports ground they are alive, they are real. I believe if we loved children more, if we accepted their right for being equal with us, then we would have had a community of school citizens. (Suggesting this, I don’t mean that in my school everything is perfect.) If we, as adults, are living in the present, then why do we expect children to “prepare” for life and not just live it now too? I love the following quotation from one of Marshak’s poems:

There was once a proverb,
Children don’t live but prepare to live.
But I doubt that those who don’t live in their childhood,
Will ever be in any demand.

That’s why we are trying to construct a life together with children/students. To live their lives with them – this is one of the school’s goals. This is real joy for every teacher and it is the reason that allows me to say, being a school principal is easy.

COMMENTARY 1:

The first time I walked into Alexander Tubelsky's School No. 734 in Moscow, I knew I was in a different sort of place.  I was already fairly familiar with Russian (then still Soviet) schools, had met a good many principals, seen pupils and teachers working away in classrooms.  Everything always seemed quite serious, subdued, sometimes even a bit depressed.  Occasionally there was a splash of color on a classroom wall or in a corridor, or an expression of passion for their subject from a teacher, but mostly the schools seemed efficient institutions, industrial places where small people were turned into good citizens.

Tubelsky's school was decidedly not an industrial kind of place.  The entry hallway was decorated with a huge carved wooden house-front in the traditional Old Russian style.  Both kids and teachers seemed to talk more and smile more, and not only that, but they talked with each other, not only with their peers. 

As Tubelsky showed me around the school, we were passed in the hallway by several groups of pupils (maybe 3rd-4th graders) dressed in elaborate costumes, as if ready for an Imperial Ball from the era of Tsar Alexander I.  The boys wore tall Hussar hats and had toy swords at their sides; the girls had on long ball gowns with their hair pulled up into the 19th century "chignon" style.  I was more than a little surprised, but Alexander Naumovich greeted them all, and congratulated them on their ball, which was to take place later that day.

This was, of course, the essence of Tubelsky as school principal:  He was the "director" not only of the school, but also of a fully-featured stage production in which all the teachers, pupils, even parents, and of course, he himself, were the actors.  He speaks about this in the article presented here, but what doesn't really come through (either in his words or in my description of what I remember about his school) was how completely easy and real it was for him to work in this way – there was nothing remotely forced or artificial about it.  If, in another school, a principal had tried to do this, it would have seemed, literally, "staged" and therefore artificial; with Tubelsky, it was all completely and unselfconsciously natural.  It was so because that's who Tubelsky himself was  -- an actor, and a very good one.

The title of this brief piece contains the frightening word "post-modern."  It's a faddish word in American and Western European intellectual circles, and has probably as many meanings as the number of people who use it.  But there are a few underlying meanings that seem common.  Among these are an "ironic stance" towards the world, a position of not taking established patterns as being too significant or too worthy of emulation.  As Tubelsky's comments here make clear, he was always defiantly eager to point out the stupidities of educational bureaucracy, and not willing to assume that existing patterns were valuable just because they were existing.  His position towards the surrounding world of educational practice was that one should make one's own decisions, define one's own path, and find out what made sense, not on the basis of prior accepted patterns, but rather through daily wrestling with important questions, central issues.  That's how he encouraged his teachers to act, and it is very much what he wanted from his students – that they should figure out for themselves, individually and together, how to live their lives in ways that made sense.

After that initial visit (it took place in 1990), I returned to School No. 734 several times.  When I spent some time in Russia on a sabbatical leave from my University in the Spring of 1994, I took my daughter (then age 8) with me, and she spent 6 weeks enrolled in Tubelsky's school, an experience that she still remembers vividly and talks about with animation.  She loved her teacher, and joined eagerly in the activities of her class and in the year's closing ceremonies in May (replete with various costumes).  All I can say, on the basis of that personal experience, is that Tubelsky's school worked exactly as he described it in the accompanying article – not always perfectly or smoothly, but always with passion, depth, and real concern for the human beings who gathered there each day. 

I made other trips to Russia, and visited Tubelsky's school several more times.  At one meeting, he introduced me as "an American scholar, a friend of our school, and one of our parents!"  That comment made me very proud.

At the conclusion of the time I spent in Russia in 1994, and clearly still very much under the influence of School No. 734 and its principal, I wrote this in my journal:

If schools matter, they matter because they are places where adults can show the next generation what it means to be a humane person, to live as such in company with others, and to learn something about the world around.  All else, all political posturing and justification by economic argument, all pleas for new or different ways of teaching, all arguments over content, are so distant as to be inconsequential.

Alexander Naumovich Tubelsky was indeed a school principal who made these most essential qualities of school life seem to appear magically, and easily, out of the organized work of a group of caring, attentive human beings.

Stephen T. Kerr
Professor, College of Education
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, USA.

COMMENTARY 2:

At first glance it may seem that Mr. Tubelsky is speaking to us "tongue in cheek" when he tells us that what makes being a Principal easy is love of children and not being afraid of authority. After all, neither of these two qualities is likely to appear in the curriculum for advanced degrees in educational administration. Nor are they likely to be part of any governmental licensing requirements. His own obvious love of children is evident throughout his essay and, shouldn't it be the "sine qua non" characteristic for all teachers and school administrators. His distain for the never ending and often contradictory bureaucratic demands from above is also understandable. And in more recent years at least here in the U.S., the emphasis on testing may be impeding the creativity and diverse talents of teachers. 

However, his model of a "democratic school" seems to me to both unrealistic and impractical. For example, in the U.S., at least in big city schools, his example of revising in concert with the teachers, the schedules would be difficult to implement in light of contractual obligation, if nothing else. His call for teachers to be "authors" too may fly in the face of the standardization required in most schools. I realize that my objection here is exactly the type of circumstance that Mr. Tubelsky is denouncing, but solutions must be workable in an environment with many competing constituencies. 

Another area of concern are the statements that: "children and teachers are equal in their rights as school citizens..." And "a student has the right to decide what, when, and with what teacher he is going to study." This is true to some degree at the college level, but even there certain boundaries have to be in place to avoid chaos. Even more importantly, he seems to have excluded parents. And in recent years there is at least some research that suggests that full development of the brain doesn't happen until the early 20's, making decision making at much earlier ages very problematic.

The most powerful image and what we all should take away from Mr. Tubelsky's career and essay is his desire that we create a school environment for all that resembles the joy and excitement he notices when he watches the boys playing football.

James Faranda, retired government administrator
and former teacher and guidance counselor.