This article is excerpted from the book The School of Academician Shchetinin. The School of the 21st Century. The Impossible Is Possible. Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin (1944–2019) was the founder and director of the renowned forest lyceum at Tekos, in Russia’s Krasnodar region — a school described at length by Vladimir Megre in Book 3 of the Ringing Cedars series, The Space of Love. Translated by the Anastasia Foundation.
The Russian word for education — obrazovanie — comes from the word obraz [image, or form].
Obraz is what is given from on high. It is not invented in the bustle of daily life. The faces of saints, in the Russian language, are called obraza [icons].
And so we can truly call obrazovanny — educated, literally bearing the image — only a person who is pure and unblemished.
And bezobrazny — which in modern Russian means ugly or disgraceful, but which literally means image-less — is the one who is dirty, who has stained the image within with earthly trifles.
A child carries the Universe within himself. His pure soul, given to him from the Heavens, is from the very beginning ready to comprehend everything — on Earth and in the Cosmos — and to be formed in the image of God. If only it is awakened, and tuned to the wavelength of independent cognition.
School could do this. But it does precisely the opposite. School posts a Maria Ivanovna [the archetypal Russian schoolteacher — a generic stand-in like “Mrs. Smith”] over the child, and she obligates him: think as I think, memorize what I command, act as I insist.
The child is compelled to absorb what is already known and to resemble someone else.
Nothing human is alien to him any longer [the famous humanist credo of Terence — that to become human is to embrace all that is human] — but with that, the possibility of finding his own Divine image is lost. And so the world receives one more bezobraznaya — image-less — personality, and the bezobraziya [disgraces, image-lessnesses] in the world multiply.
A classroom at Shchetinin’s Tekos Lyceum
Our Lyceum at Tekos
Our lyceum [a Russian-style specialized secondary school] in Tekos helps a child become educated. That is — to find his image. We think alongside him, we walk beside him, but we do not interfere with his soul’s searching, with the way it expresses itself in this and in that.
What is more, we, the teachers, often find ourselves learning something from the child — marveling at his discoveries and abilities, ones unknown to us.
The Architecture of the Word
Obraza — the faces of saints.
Bez-obrazny — ugly — and bez-Obrazny — without-image — are the same word, heard with the stress in two different places.
Both mean: not beautiful, not pure. And so movement toward beauty, toward perfection, toward holiness — this is what obrazovanie, education, truly is.
The word itself, broken into its three syllables, tells us what it carries:
- ОБ — a reflection of truth, of the creative origin; an open movement to meet truth, harmony, unity.
- РА — in the flow of time, in the logic of the self-development of the Universal organism of life.
- АЗ — the spiritual origin of Man, made manifest. [Az is the first letter of the Old Slavic alphabet — and the Old Slavic word for I.]
At the same time, ОБРАЗ is obraza — an icon.
The concept of obrazovanie also carries several meanings. On the one hand, it implies the acquiring of systematized knowledge and skills — instruction, enlightenment. On the other, in its broadest sense, the word means creation, organization, representation.
Thus obrazovanie — education — is the process of creating an image at once ideal and yet living and current. It is a reflection — or rather, a thought of the spiritual origin, which is itself a creating, generating force.
What Education Truly Is
Education is the entering into a state of full, absolute interaction with the entire world.
Education is a state of co-creation with that world, in the image and likeness of all that Is.
Education is the process of creating Everything — a constant spiral, forever at the edge of the unreachability of what has been reached, resulting always in relation to the meaning of Everything.
Education is movement toward the highest, toward the Ideal. One must constantly perfect oneself — must be in a state that yields the Ideal.