Anton Makarenko

Anton Semyonovich Makarenko (1888 to 1939) was a Soviet educator, social worker and writer, regarded as one of the founders of Soviet pedagogy. Born in Belopolye in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, he trained as a teacher, taught at a railway college and at the Poltava Higher Primary School, and in 1920 was invited to head the Poltava Colony for Young Offenders, which became the Gorky Colony. After the Revolution and the Civil War he built self-supporting orphanages for street children, among them the Gorky Colony and later the Dzerzhinsky labour commune near Kharkiv, combining respect for each young person with school education and productive labour. His theory of upbringing in self-governing child collectives, set out partly in the semi-fictional The Pedagogical Poem (published in English as The Road to Life), made him the most influential educational theorist in the Soviet Union, and in 1988 UNESCO ranked him among four educators who shaped the pedagogical thinking of the twentieth century. His emphasis on the collective is also debated: critics have called his approach punitive and faulted it for giving the group too much power over the individual child.