I discovered today, August 22, 2024 Leo Tolstoy (1828-1908), the short lived educator. Born into the old Russian nobility, he never went to school. Instead his family provided him with a long line of tutors on his family estate Yasnaya Polyana, 120 miles south of Moscow.
His mother, Princess Mariya Tolstaya died when he was two. His father, Count Nikolai Ilych Tolstoy, when he was nine. He became an aristocratic orphan raised by his relatives. Described by his teachers at Kazan University as "both unable and unwilling to learn". It is not surprising that he left school without completing his studies.
What captured my imagination today is learning that Tolstoy was so interested in public education that he penned educational notebooks and opened 13 experimental schools for the children of Russia's peasants who in 1861 had been emancipated from serfdom. Though short lived his experiments lead directly to A. S. Neill's Summerhill School.
So how did an aristocrat become an educational advocate for peasant children?
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