We have already pointed out above that Rousseau and Tolstoy equally understood freedom and coercion as facts of education. The child is already free, free from nature, his freedom is a ready-made fact, only stifled by another similar fact of arbitrary human coercion. It is enough to abolish this latter, and freedom will rise, shine with its own light. Hence the negative concept of freedom as the absence of coercion: the abolition of coercion means the triumph of freedom. Hence the very alternative: freedom and coercion really exclude each other, cannot exist together.
On the other hand, coercion was also understood by both of our thinkers too narrowly and superficially. The coercion that takes place in «positive education» and in school discipline is in fact only a part of that broad coercion that embraces the unstable and ready to obey the environment temperament of the child with a dense ring of influences surrounding him. Therefore, coercion, the true root of which should be sought not outside the child, but in himself, can again be destroyed only by cultivating in a person an inner strength that can withstand any coercion, and not by simply abolishing coercion, of necessity always partial.
Precisely because coercion can really be abolished only by the most gradually growing human personality, freedom is not a fact, but a goal, not a given, in the task of education. And if so, then the very alternative of free or forced education falls, and freedom and coercion turn out to be not opposite, but mutually penetrating principles. Education cannot but be coercive, because of the inalienability of coercion, which we spoke about above. Coercion is a fact of life, created not by people, but by the nature of man, who is born not free, contrary to the word of Rousseau, but a slave of coercion. A person is born a slave of the reality around him, and liberation from the power of being is only a task of life and, in particular, education.
If, therefore, we recognize coercion as a fact of education, it is not because we want coercion or consider it impossible to do without it, but because we want to abolish it in all its forms and not only in those particular forms that we thought to abolish. Rousseau and Tolstoy. Even if Emile could be isolated not only from culture, but also from Jean-Jacques himself, he would not be a free man, but a slave to the nature around him. Precisely because we understand coercion more broadly, we see it where Rousseau and Tolstoy did not see it, we proceed from it as from an inevitable fact, not created by people around us and not able to be canceled by them. We are more enemies of coercion than Rousseau and Tolstoy, and that is precisely why we proceed from coercion, which must be destroyed by the very personality of a person brought up to freedom. To permeate coercion, this inevitable fact of education, with freedom as its essential goal — this is the true task of education. Freedom as a task does not exclude, but presupposes the fact of coercion. Precisely because the elimination of coercion is the essential goal of education, coercion is the starting point of the educational process. To show how each act of coercion can and must be permeated with freedom, in which only coercion acquires its true pedagogical meaning, will form the subject of further exposition.
What, then, do we stand for «forced education»? Does this mean that criticism of a “positive”, premature upbringing and a school that violates the personality of a child is futile, and we have nothing to learn from Rousseau and Tolstoy? Of course not. The ideal of free education in its critical part is unfading, pedagogical thought has been updated and will be forever updated by it, and we began by presenting this ideal not for the sake of criticism, which is always easy, but because. we are convinced that this ideal must be passed through. A teacher who has not experienced the charm of this ideal, who, without having thought it through to the end, in advance, like an old man, already knows all its shortcomings, is not a true teacher. After Rousseau and Tolstoy, it is no longer possible to stand for compulsory education, and it is impossible not to see all the lies of coercion divorced from freedom. Forced by natural necessity, education must be free according to the task carried out in it.