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. Shchetinin left almost no writings of his own; what we have of his living voice today, we have largely because friends and students preserved it. This piece is taken from the first volume of “The School of Academician Shchetinin”, an ongoing multi-volume preservation project by Yuri Viktorovich Koltsov, who worked closely with Shchetinin for seven years. More on Yuri’s work, how to support him, and a video interview with him which we’re publishing soon — at the end of this article. Translated by the Anastasia Foundation.
The Russian word for education — obrazovanie — comes from the word obraz [image, or form].
[Gabriel note: This is the same word Anastasia uses for “image” throughout the Ringing Cedars series.]
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.
From The School of Academician Shchetinin. The School of the 21st Century. The Impossible Is Possible (Vol. 1), compiled and edited by Yuri Viktorovich Koltsov.
Coming Soon: A Conversation with Yuri
This article is one window into Shchetinin’s voice.
Last year, the Anastasia Foundation sat down with Yuri Koltsov for an extended interview — about Shchetinin as a man, the school he built at Tekos, the pedagogical methods that made it extraordinary, and the work Yuri is doing now to keep all of it from being forgotten.
The conversation was recorded between Gabriel in English and Yuri in Russian and is professionally subtitled in English, so nothing is lost in translation.
It is one of the deepest portraits of Shchetinin and his school currently available to English-speaking audiences — a deep, insightful conversation in the company of someone who knew him.
The interview will publish on the Anastasia Foundation YouTube channel in the coming days. To be notified when it goes live, subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on YouTube.
About This Book — and the Friend Who Preserved Shchetinin’s Thoughts
For seven years, Yuri Viktorovich Koltsov worked as a non-staff associate of the Tekos school. He traveled often to the campus and met regularly with Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin.
One day on the school grounds, they fell into conversation. Yuri asked Shchetinin why he didn’t write a sequel to his earlier book, To Embrace the Unembraceable — there were so many people waiting for more.
“I write a book every day — there,” Shchetinin answered, and pointed to the sky.
“Mikhail Petrovich, it’s very hard to read from there. People are used to holding a book in their hands, reading it, taking notes from it…”
“I don’t have time!”
“Then I’ll try to write it,” Yuri said — surprising himself.
Shchetinin looked into his eyes. “Try.” And he walked off toward a group of children.
That was the beginning. Over the years that followed, Yuri recorded everything he could from their conversations, from Shchetinin’s talks with guests and students — as he puts it, “while the trail was still warm.” He gathered interviews, articles, press coverage, photographs. After Shchetinin’s death in 2019, Yuri set about publishing the full compilation.
Like Socrates, like Pythagoras, like the Buddha, Shchetinin left almost no writings of his own — only one book, To Embrace the Unembraceable, and the living memory of those who heard him. What survives of his voice today survives because friends like Yuri sat down to write it.
Volume One of The School of Academician Shchetinin: The School of the 21st Century — The Impossible Is Possible has been published. Volume Two is at the printer. A separate work, Thoughts for Every Day: Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin, has also been recently completed.
Yuri publishes these books on his own initiative, funded by readers who care about Shchetinin’s legacy. As he writes on his website: “These are truly people’s books.” He is a pensioner living in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, working without a team, and he answers every email himself.
If this piece moved you, you can visit Yuri’s site to find the books, read more of what he has gathered, and write to him directly. The site is in Russian; a browser translator will get you most of the way:
- Yuri’s website: shchetinin1.com
- About the school: shchetinin1.com/o-shkole
- Books: shchetinin1.com/about-4
- Articles & open letters: shchetinin1.com/about-8
- Photo and video archives: photos · video
- Write to Yuri: y-ra-98@mail.ru — or through VKontakte
For those who would like to help bring the next volumes to print, the most reliable route is to write to Yuri directly and ask how to contribute.