From this point of view he severely and pitilessly examines the school system. Although his article was written half a century ago, many of his observations have their full value even at the present time.
His trenchant articles did not fail to provoke replies and criticisms in other reviews. To one of these replies, that of Eugene Markoff, Tolstoy wrote a strong and powerful defence, “Progress and Instruction.” Seeing that the principal argument in defence of the present system of education is belief in progress, Tolstoy applies himself to uproot this belief by proving the insignificance and the conventionality of the idea of “progress.” He points out that the greater part of humanity, the hundreds of millions of Eastern people, are quite without this idea.
Tolstoy analysed in his review, Yasnaya Polyana, the Ministerial project of organisation of popular schools, and showed its unfitness for Russian life, based as it was on the American system of school taxes. Altogether, he found that the project was not adaptable to popular needs, and that the regulations of popular instruction proposed in the project represented a drawback to the existence and expansion of free education.
All these educational views were applied by
