Vasyl Sukhomlynsky, the Great Ukrainian Teacher Who Gave His Heart to Children

Vasyl Sukhomlynsky’s intellect, kind heart and immense love of children made him a brilliant teacher and one of Ukraine’s hundred most famous persons.

He was a school principal in a remote village, but the fame of his name spread across and beyond Ukraine and his valuable pedagogical experience is now taught to students at colleges and universities and actively used by teachers in this and other countries. His works have been published in dozens of languages in as many as 26 million copies.

One of prestigious schools in Kyiv, the Vasyl Sukhomlynsky Ukrainian Lyceum, has a museum with exhibits collected, arranged and decorated by the teachers and students. A lot of photographs and original documents were contributed by his daughter.

Entering the museum, the first thing you see is a big portrait of a handsome man in his forties with a high forehead and slight wrinkles around his kind eyes.

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Vasyl Sukhomlynsky was born on Sept. 28, 1918, in a small village in what is now the Kirovograd region, central Ukraine.

He had two younger brothers and a sister. His father was a skillful plowman, carpenter, wheelwright and maker of musical instruments.

His mother worked hard all her life on a farm and then in a kolkhoz, and inculcated industriousness in all of her children.

His grandfather showed him the beauty of nature and the value of labor, and taught him to learn from books and wise men.

When Vasyl was 10, he made a sopilka (Ukrainian reed pipe) to play folk tunes that he learned from his mother and loved so much. Later he learned to play other folk instruments and enjoyed the hobby all his life. “My mother revealed to me the priceless treasure and beauty of Ukrainian folk songs. She opened my eyes, ears, and heart to this beauty,” Sukhomlynsky wrote years later.

He also liked drawing and painting, but buying paper, brushes, pencils and other stationery was a big problem at that time, especially in the countryside. One could only get them in exchange for medicinal plants.

For a glassful of acacia seeds he would get two copybooks, and he would walk as far as 25 miles to the nearest town to buy paints and brushes.

Vasyl was a diligent and bright student and had an enviable memory. It was enough for him to read a textbook paragraph once to memorize every word of it, so it took him no time to do his daily home assignments, but he never idled his spare time: he liked instead to play musical instruments and read books. Besides, he had to help his parents about the house.

Fresh from school at 17, Sukhomlynsky started teaching Ukrainian language and literature to junior school students, and a year later he was admitted to the Poltava Pedagogical Institute. The two years he spent there were filled with lectures and practical classes, theatrical shows and literary discussions, great teachers and romantic experiences. He described those two years as the happiest in his life. In the photographs dated 1936 and 1937 he looks serious and ambitious, yet his eyes are kind and wistful…

At 20, the young graduate knew that his vocation was to teach children and that the village school was where he belonged, but when Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, he volunteered for the front.

In January 1942, Lt. Sukhomlynsky was heavily wounded in action near the Russian town of Rzhev. Field hospital surgeons saved his arm from amputation and removed six shell fragments from his body. The seventh fragment got stuck so deep and close to the heart that they thought it best to leave it as it was…

After four months in hospitals, he was discharged from military service and appointed principal of a village school in the remote Russian province of Udmurtia in southwestern Siberia.

When his native Kirovograd region was liberated from the Nazis in late 1943, Sukhomlynsky returned there to head the district department of public education. The job was all dull paperwork while he longed for teaching, for direct communication with children. He showered the regional authorities with requests to appoint him a village school principal until he finally got the appointment in 1948. The destination was the village of Pavlysh where he worked for 22 years until he died in 1970.

Leading a staff of intelligent and committed teachers, Sukhomlynsky made the small village school famous in Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union, but it took him 10 years to prove the virtue and value of his teaching philosophy and methods.

Sukhomlynsky’s emphasis on humanism and raising an intelligent and cultured personality through an individual approach to each student went against the grain of the Soviet educational system based on and directed by the communist ideology where the basic principle was “one for all,” i.e. the common over the individual.

In the totalitarian system, an individual was just a tiny part in a huge machine working for one utopian goal: a happy communist future for the whole planet. In that ocean of red banners and communist slogans, few schools like Sukhomlynsky’s stood out like green islets of humanism.

The communist authorities disapproved of his approaches and methods and censured him for such a gross deviation from the mainstream. That must have been why Sukhomlynsky stayed in the shadows for 10 years. He was even denied registration of his doctorate thesis with the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and his books and other works were published in very limited circulation.

But finally, in 1958, he was officially recognized. He received high awards and distinctions and his works were published. All-in-all, he wrote 41 monographs and brochures, more than 600 articles and 1,200 short stories for children. Most of his stories are in junior school textbooks. He was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, the highest civilian award in the USSR, and was elected correspondent member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.

School principals and teachers came in scores from far and wide to Pavlysh to borrow the unique experience, and every time they asked Sukhomlynsky what methods or connections he had used to earn his school such a high reputation he gave a simple answer: all it takes is love and respect for every little personality.

Symbolically, the title of his best-known book is Giving My Heart to Children. This and other books by the great teacher and enlightener are also displayed in the museum. Here are some lines from the book:

“School must above all educate a dignified, intelligent and noble personality with inculcated norms of kindheartedness. School is where children must learn the ABCs of wisdom and learn that joys of life are earned by hard work. We create the dearest of values on earth – a human individual, not a turner, tractor driver, technician or astronaut. We create a human who might become a turner, academician or statesman. One can learn to be an engineer in five years. Learning to be human takes a lifetime.”

Sukhomlynsky always said that a teacher should see and cherish the unique spiritual world in every child and that having learned how bread is grown and earned, one would never encroach on the values created by another.

He called the school orchard “the main classroom” where classes took place in any weather and in every season. It was where children learned to love their school, their native land, their mother tongue, and the culture of their nation.

Sukhomlynsky wrote: “School is where one is not only taught to write, read, count, and think. It is where one is taught to live. School is the cradle and abode of culture.

“You are not just a traveler who comes to drink from this source. You are a bee that carries its drop of honey to the beehive of your nation’s culture. And you, too, must put in your drop to replenish this beehive of culture and hand it down to the next generation.

“Your attitude to school from your first step over its threshold to your last breath shows how noble, cultured and patriotic you are. School stays in everyone’s memory for a lifetime as the original source of our culture, knowledge, and civility.

“Be grateful to your first teacher! Let school be sacred to you! Hand this attitude down to your children and grandchildren!” 

Sukhomlynsky taught children to look deep into nature and see the wonder in every usual thing.

“Man became human when he saw the fathomless depth of the crystal sky, the thin threads of rain on a gloomy day, the chocolate cones on emerald fir-trees, the little violet clouds over lilac bushes, the blue haze of the steppe, the golden sea of wheat, the yellow shoe on the foot of a bee after its first April flight to honey meadows, the heavy clusters of red berries on viburnum bushes… Man has beheld this beauty for hundreds and thousands of years. Learn to see this beauty, too! Cherish it! Protect it!”