3. The role of labour and production work in the process of education

Makarenko assigned a special place in the life of the educational collective to labour, combined with instruction in the fundamentals of science and a broad socio-political and moral education. His basic ideas regarding labour education may be summarized as follows:

Labour becomes an effective means of communist education only when it forms a part of the general educational process; at the same time, this has no meaning unless all children and adolescents are involved in types of socially useful work suited to their age [6, p. 23].

There must be a combination of such types of work as: compulsory participation in self-help and productive labour organized on the most modern technical basis possible; selectively performed creative technical work; and unpaid work for the common good. Only when all the above types of work are combined in the educational process do children and adolescents acquire the whole range of attitudes that permit a balanced, genuinely free development of the personality.

The pupils’ labour collective and its constituent bodies and representatives must to an ever-increasing degree be given the role of responsible organizers of their own labour activity, and a decisive role in matters of profit distribution and wages, in the use of a wide range of material and moral incentives, and in the organization of consumption [1, p. 70].

Nowadays, the ‘number one problem’ is how to provide pupils in general schools with labour training and education for life, to teach them how to make an informed choice of a career that will suit their individual inclinations and abilities and also match the demands of society. In such circumstances, this part of Makarenko’s legacy is assuming an extremely important role, both as regards the practical side of schoolchildren’s labour associations and, in particular, we suggest, as regards the organization of the corresponding educational research.

To Makarenko, production work was important in education and character formation as well as for personal development, and it became the centerpiece of his system. Makarenko admitted that it may be unusual for this type of work to lead to advanced qualifications, but it forces students to be proficient in basic academic skills, organizational issues, and work processes. His assumption was that people must always be taught good work habits, and production work leads to a better work ethic and skills such as dedication, pride, exactness, attention to detail, conscientiousness, and reliability as well as the development of soft skills such as teamwork and supervisory skills, applied math, organizational skills, creativity, and critical thinking [5, p. 67].

Work must also allow students to develop their creative impulses. People want to be creative workers, and educators are called upon to teach and enable such creative work. Makarenko asserted that all students have the basic desire to please others, to do well, and to improve themselves and that work plus classroom learning leads to a desire to want to learn more. This willingness translates into creativity and proactive behavior at work, which in turn makes people happier, more productive, and ready to accept challenges. In this context then, Makarenko was clearly in line with Lenin’s discussion of the importance of creativity and joy in work [2, p. 312].

As real learning takes place through the full inclusion in the work process, students must immediately be integrated into the production cycle of a real enterprise to become acquainted with the demands of work. It is important for creativity that students be involved in research and development and be given limited power to decide how to execute their tasks – simply performing repetitive production tasks, as important as it may be to do those without complaining, runs counter to a desire to develop qualified workers [3, p. 219]. Students then expand their knowledge, develop mastery in certain skills, find an occupational niche for themselves, develop a positive and creative attitude toward work, and acquire both access to and a desire to engage in further education.