1918–1970
Vasyl Sukhomlynskyi
Humanist educator
No publisher wanted his main book; later it came out in 25 languages. Vasyl Sukhomlynskyi headed the village school in Pavlysh for more than twenty years and put the child’s personality at the center of schooling.
Key accomplishments
- Director of the Pavlysh secondary school (1948–1970)
- The book I Give My Heart to Children (1969), awarded the State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR (1974)
- The works The Spiritual World of the Schoolchild, The Unique Human Being and others
- Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (1968)
The book that came out in Germany first
No publisher wanted Vasyl Sukhomlynskyi’s I Give My Heart to Children. It came out in Ukraine in 1969 only because it had been published in East Germany a year earlier. The book went on to win the State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR and was published abroad in 25 languages.
A teacher who went through the war
Sukhomlynskyi was born in 1918 in the village of Vasylivka in today’s Kirovohrad region, into a peasant family. He began teaching in the 1930s while studying by correspondence at the Poltava Pedagogical Institute. In the war he was a company political officer and in February 1942 was seriously wounded near Rzhev. Until 1944 he headed a school in Udmurtia, then returned to the Kirovohrad region to run the district education department.
The school in Pavlysh
From 1948 until the end of his life Sukhomlynskyi was director of the secondary school in the settlement of Pavlysh. Here, in an ordinary village school, he developed his ideas. In The Spiritual World of the Schoolchild, The Unique Human Being and other books he put the child’s personality at the center of teaching and upbringing, a subject the official pedagogy of the time did not touch.
In 1967 the newspaper Uchitelskaya Gazeta accused him of “abstract humanism” and “petty-bourgeois individualism”. According to the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, these attacks were political in nature. Sukhomlynskyi died in Pavlysh on 2 September 1970. A memorial museum dedicated to him works there, and the State Scientific and Pedagogical Library of Ukraine bears his name.
Why it matters today
Sukhomlynskyi showed that a school can raise dignified, free and kind people by respecting the uniqueness of every child. His legacy has been recognized around the world.
