Main Ideas and Methods of Social Agronomy

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Main Ideas and Methods of Social Agronomy

A.V. Chayanov

Publication: Alexander M. Nikulin, PhD (Economics), Head of the Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Head of the Chayanov Research Center, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences., Moscow

Translation: Irina V. Trotsuk, DSc (Sociology), Senior Researcher, Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Researcher, Chayanov Research Center, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. Moscow

The second part of Chayanov's book Main Ideas and Methods of Social Agronomy consists of chapters presenting the specific features of the Russian social-agronomic work among the peasantry.

In the first chapters (published in the previous issue of the Russian Peasant Studies), Chayanov focused on the strategic and worldview aspects of social agronomy; in the second part, he analyzes tactical directions of social-agronomic work: methods of oral, social-agronomic propaganda; conversations, lectures, courses and agronomic consulting; agricultural exhibitions, demonstration plots, model farms and peasant excursions; agricultural warehouses, rental points and grain-cleaning stations; organizational work of the agronomist; social agronomy and cooperation; the equipment of the agronomic station; registration and evaluation of social-agronomic activities.

In all these chapters, Chayanov shows how creative the work of the social agronomist should be, how many diverse and unexpected challenges he faces when interacting with peasant communities, audiences and households.

The interaction of social agronomy with another influential institution -- agricultural cooperation -- is of particular interest.

Chayanov analyzes in detail the contradictions and distinctions in the work of agronomists and cooperators, in their common tasks of developing and improving the peasant life.

Despite the fact that the book was published a hundred years ago, it is not only of historical interest but presents many valuable answers and practical recommendations for the contemporary agricultural consulting and rural development activists.

Key words: social agronomy, peasants, agricultural education, agrarian reform, agricultural cooperation

Основные идеи и методы работы общественной агрономии (Часть 2)'

Чаянов А.В.

Москва: Московское товарищеское книгоиздательство по вопросам сельскохозяйственной экономии и политики, 1918.

Составитель: Александр Михайлович Никулин, кандидат экономических наук, директор Центра аграрных исследований РАНХиГС при Президенте Российской Федерации; директор Чаяновского исследовательского центра МВШСЭН. Москва

Перевод на английский язык: Ирина Владимировна Троцук, доктор социологических наук, ведущий научный сотрудник Центра аграрных исследований РАНХиГС при Президенте Российской Федерации; сотрудник Чаяновского исследовательского центра МВШСЭН. Москва

Публикуемый здесь перевод окончания книги Чаянова «Основные идеи и методы работы Общественной Агрономии» содержит главы, посвященные различным конкретным особенностям деятельности русского агронома среди крестьянского населения. Если в первых главах своей работы (опубликованной в предыдущем номере журнала «Крестьяноведение» 2020 № 1) Чаянов концентрировался на стратегических и мировоззренческих особенностях общественной агрономии, то во второй части своей книги он основное внимание уделяет разнообразным тактическим направлениям общественно-агрономической деятельности: методы устной, общественно-агрономической пропаганды; беседы, лекции, курсы и агрономическое консультирование; сельскохозяйственные выставки, демонстрационные мероприятия, образцовые фермы и крестьянские экскурсии; сельскохозяйственный склад, пункты проката и зерноочистительные станции; организационная работа агронома; общественная агрономия и кооперация; оборудование агрономической станции; регистрация и учет общественно-агрономических работ. Во всех этих главах и параграфах Чаянов показывает, каким творческим и изобретательным должен быть труд деятеля общественной агрономии, сколько самых разнообразных и неожиданных вопросов часто встает на его пути взаимодействия с крестьянскими обществами, аудиториями и домохозяйствами. Особый интерес здесь вызывает взаимодействие института общественной агрономии с другим влиятельным институтом -- сельскохозяйственной кооперацией. Чаянов подробно анализирует, какие противоречия и какие разделения в сферах деятельности могут быть на путях взаимодействия агронома и кооператора в их общих задачах развития и улучшения крестьянской жизни. Несмотря на то что чаяновская книга опубликована 100 лет назад, она по-прежнему представляет не только исторический интерес, но содержит много ценных мировоззренческих ответов и практических рекомендаций и для современных работников агроконсалтинга и активистов сельского развития.

Ключевые слова: общественная агрономия, крестьяне, сельскохозяйственное образование, аграрная реформа, сельскохозяйственная кооперация

Methods of oral, social-agronomic propaganda

social agronomy chayanov's book

The main weapon of the social agronomist is his words. Live speech is the most important means of changing minds and the only way for extensive social work. The social agronomist spends most of his time on oral, pedagogical work -- talking with groups of peasants in taverns and teahouses -- sometimes at peasant gatherings, cooperative meetings, or “meetings of the agricultural society”; giving lectures; and organizing training courses.

In his cultural, pedagogical work, the social agronomist is not alone -- zemstvo organizers with education obtained out of school, political propagandists, and cooperative instructors work with him. Thousands of conversations and lectures, hundreds of peasant courses, people's houses, libraries, cooperative meetings, and the Russian rural theater movement prove the pedagogical significance of the current period in the history of the Russian peasantry. Our village was never under such a powerful, educational influence. Certainly, its success will depend mainly on how well its actors are trained for their pedagogical work.

The majority of today's workers -- agronomists, lawyers, natural scientists, economists, and philologists -- have no theoretical training in pedagogy. Therefore, when taking up the task of mass pedagogical work, they are forced to find its methods with great difficulty, by trial and error. The lack of special training dooms them to making unacceptable mistakes, about which we constantly hear. They often take several years to discover the pedagogical Americas that were already known in the days of Jan Amos Komensky. Thus, we have to include the huge pedagogical experience of humankind in the training of future cultural workers of the village.

Someone might object that the lecturer's work is a part art, and that no science can make someone a good lecturer. We agree but still argue that if science cannot make someone a lecturer, it can help him to become a lecturer. If someone is to become an educator, knowledge of the organized experiences of humans would certainly help his work. Knowledge of the key features of the object of pedagogical work, of the methods to influence his mind, memory, and will according to his mental abilities, of the techniques of such influence -- these are the necessary weapons of every agronomist, cooperative organizer, and lecturer.

The need for such training has long been known and recognized. We do not see it in real life primarily because of a lack of relevant works. Most theoretical teachers focus on teaching methods for children and youth rather than on the out-of-school methods for uncultured adults. In the Tula or Yaroslavl Provinces, the psychology of a forty-year-old peasant as an object of pedagogical influence is significantly different from a seven-year-old, American schoolboy. Therefore, pedagogical techniques successfully applied to the latter do not guarantee success when applied to the former. Thus, in addition to теория already collected, and systematized, pedagogical experiences, it is necessary to conduct a special study of our object and use the still unsystematized experience accumulated by the work of agronomists, cooperation instructors, and lecturers of people's universities.

Certainly, this book does not aim to fill the above-mentioned gap in pedagogical work but rather sets a more modest task -- to outline in the most general terms those pedagogical issues, which every lecturer faces when speaking to people and about which the author of this book and his colleagues in the cooperative and agronomic work have repeatedly thought.

The first of these issues is the task of the lecturer in speaking to people. The assessment of the methods and results of his work is possible only if we know its goals and only in terms of their achievement. There are four groups of the numerous tasks of the people's lecturer: first, to provide the audience with new ideas and, thus, to broaden its worldview. In many of the darkest corners of our homeland, this task is the most important. For instance, the cultural workers of the Volyn Province visited villages in which the whole world of the peasants was limited to a radius of five versts (1.06 km). In the regions of commercial seasonal work, this radius is larger, but the peasant's worldview is still very constricted. In such circumstances, the lecturer has to enrich the peasant's worldview not only with new representations related to his course -- separators, chemical analysis, artificial fertilizers, consumer shops, secretaries, accounting books, etc. -- but also with many general cultural, geographical, and natural-historical representations.

The second task of the lecturer, which is much more complex, is to explain new concepts and systematize the old ones for the peasant audience. The first part of this task -- the presentation of the concepts still unknown in the village (cooperation, production credit, Raiffeisen principles, chemical processes, and elements, etc.) -- is very complex. Nevertheless, it does not face the obstacles of the second part of the task, which is the rational organization of the traditional concepts.

The peasant's thinking is empirical in nature, a common example of which is folk omens, such as “red sunset means windy tomorrow”, “on St. George's Day take your cattle to pasture”, etc. The peasant's mind mechanically connects two representations or concepts as constantly related without rationalizing or explaining their relationship, and uses it as an empirically established law. In the same way, there is a historically established, empirical relationship of some concepts that make up the peasant worldview -- “women are long of hair and short of brains”, “it's a sin to plow on a Holy Day”, etc. Different peasant representations and concepts are connected by the elementary empirical relationships-statements. The entire, centuries-old life of a peasant consists of everyday skills and a rigid collection of disconnected statements that lack flexibility and cannot be logically systematized.

The people's lecturers have the honorary task of rationalizing this experience, making it flexible and changeable, and transferring the peasant from the path of empirical thinking to the path of logical thinking. In other words, the lecturer is to radically change the entire organization of peasant thinking by replacing everyday experience with logical reasoning.

These two key tasks are not the most important ones. Informing the peasant audience about new ideas and concepts and systematizing the centuries-old, peasant experience allow the peasants to stay completely passive. However, if we seek the revival of the Russian village, the most valuable path for the peasant audience is the active and deedful perception of the foundations of the new culture. We have to raise a number of urgent pressing questions and draw the attention and will of our listeners to them.

Moreover, these questions should not be rhetorical, should not be determined by the construction of our lecture, but should be clear for our listeners. These questions should interest the listener; in his soul, there should be a persistent thought -- “How can we really solve this question?” Without such a thought in the listener's soul, our lecture loses two-thirds of its meaning, because our main task is not to inform the population of as many new ideas and facts as possible, but to wake up the initiative of the population and direct it to the right path.

It would be a miserable utopia to think that the reform of the Russian economic and cultural foundations can be implemented by creating recipes and by having agronomists or cooperative instructors instruct all peasant economies individually. We play the role of the fermentation enzyme that sets in motion powerful spontaneous forces. Only the self-active peasantry can implement the economic reforms that we dream about.

This ultimate goal of our work determines the fourth task of our lecturer -- to give his audience an emotional impetus, to share with his audience the social energy inherent in the powerful stream of the Russian revival. Without such an emotional impulse, our lectures are just curious stories about how the German peasant sowed clover or how profitably the Danish peasants sold eggs in cooperation, but such lectures would lack the necessary feature of the social progress engine.

Thus, the lecturer of the people's audience faces four groups of tasks: 1) to broaden the listeners' horizon of thinking and enrich it with new ideas; 2) to create a series of new concepts in the minds of listeners and organize all their empirical experience; 3) to pose a number of questions to the audience; and 4) to give listeners an emotional impulse to awaken their initiative.

When starting to achieve these tasks, the thoughtful lecturer has to think about an issue that requires very careful consideration. In10 addition to the concepts from the peasant worldview and experience, upon which we can build our lectures, there are many concepts and теория ideas that contradict contemporary science and ethics -- for instance, the well-known idea of the chariot of Elijah-the-Prophet as the generator of heavenly thunder. Should we fight these false concepts and try to erase them from the peasant consciousness, or should we accept the amorphous and fragmented nature of such outlooks and ignore those false ideas when developing a scientific worldview in the peasant mind? The latter is the only acceptable path for the lecturer. If he starts a debate about the centuries-old images and concepts, he often does not have enough authority to refute them, but, in the attempt, he revives these false images and ideas in the listener's mind. Moreover, we cannot answer the straightforward question: does a drill-seeder or the chariot of Elijah-the-Prophet rumble in the thunderclouds?

It seems that the task of the Russian revival is to enrich the peasant thinking with a contemporary, scientific worldview without breaking the centuries-old epic: in the practical world, the chariot of Eli- jah-the-Prophet must give way to the electric charge, but outside the practical life, it should become a legend and take a place of honor in peasant everyday life.

When identifying how to solve the above-set tasks, we first have to consider the object of our influence -- the peasant audience -- in a pedagogical perspective, because its nature and features are the starting point for developing our training courses. People's lectures should be based on the ideas and concepts of the listener. When starting his course, every lecturer should mobilize all elements of the peasant experience that he needs and use them as a basis for new ideas and representations. If the lecturer forgets this basic rule, he risks losing firm ground and speaking incomprehensibly to his audience.

However, despite the fact that all the above has long been recognized by all representatives of out-of-school education, there is still no detailed analysis of the adult-peasant audience as a pedagogical object. Nevertheless, it is obvious, that this audience is fundamentally different from both children and students. In many ways, the soul of a child is a blank sheet for the teacher. It has few representations and almost no concepts or general ideas, which allows the teacher to choose the circle of representations and ideas that will become the content of this young soul and set the sequence of their perception. In other words, the teacher is free in his pedagogical plans.

The situation is different when the educator meets an already grown adult. He has limited freedom, and, in his pedagogical work, he should proceed from his student's type of thinking. In one of his conversations with agronomic students, V.A. Kilchevsky compared student and peasant audiences and identified their difference. He concluded that the student audience is exceptionally full of general ideas and concepts and, to the same extent, lacks specific representations, whereas the peasant audience, on the contrary, is full of practical ideas and has almost no abstract concepts.

Such a difference determined two completely different pedagogical tasks for these one-sided worldviews with different types of one-sidedness. According to one of the greatest thinkers of the 19th century, “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.” These words describe the difference in our pedagogical tasks: in one case, we have to help the blind to see; in the other case, we have to fill the emptiness of abstract representations with specific content.

It would be strange for the lecturer to a peasant audience to develop his course as a series of syllogisms based on some general idea absent in the minds of his listeners. Certainly, the more relevant way for argumentation would be an analysis of specific examples and a purely inductive approach to the general idea.

Besides the above-mentioned features of the peasant audience common to all its listeners, we should take into account its typical diversity. This is not a student audience made homogenous by monotonous preparation of the secondary school and by selection procedures of the higher education; this is not a children's audience homogenous due to the lack of life experience. This is an audience that consists of both old peasants hardened by the three-field agricultural life, foster-children of the zemstvo school, and experienced city industrialists, literate and illiterate, who either read newspapers every day or never read a line, etc. It is impossible to identify an “average listener” to whom to adapt your presentation, because this audience consists of separate groups that differ by readiness to listen to your words.

The experienced lecturer takes this fact into account and acts differently depending on his goals. When the task is wide, mass propaganda, he focuses on the least prepared group and either bores the more informed and well-read listeners or carries them away with an interesting form of presentation. When the course focuses on a few trained workers, the lecturer ignores the least prepared groups. Many lecturers develop their courses for all groups -- repeat each section of the program twice or thrice with varying degrees of popularity and completeness; if the lecturer is experienced and talented, this method gives good results. However, we recommend, whenever possible, to divide listeners into groups according to their level of knowledge and training and to give lectures to each group separately.

In general terms, these are our tasks and the object of our influence. What pedagogical techniques should we use to enrich this object with ideas, concepts, and representations that make up the content of our courses? Certainly, pedagogy does not provide us with any universal method of giving lectures. The individuality of the lecturer, the nature of the data presented, the task of the lecturer, and, finally, the type of audience determine the choices and changes of pedagogical techniques.

Therefore, when studying how to present different issues, first we have to abandon the idea of finding a universal recipe and limit our task to the critical consideration of the existing methods for organizing courses. The most famous among them is Herbart's scheme -- “formal steps in teaching”: 1) preparation, 2) presentation, 3) association, 4) generalization, and 5) application.

As a first step -- preparation -- the lecturer reminds the audience about already known facts, he mobilizes the listeners' experience, which he needs, and connects this experience with his presentation, i.e., he prepares the basis for his lecture. The preparation step should be sufficient for the listener to remember the whole set of ideas and concepts necessary for understanding the further presentation. This step should not be too long so as not to tire the listener nor waste a significant part of his attention necessary for further and more important sections of the course. The American psychologist-educator Dewey compared the audience's holding up the process for a long time at the preparation step with a jumper who takes such a long run that he can hardly jump over the hurdle.

At the second step -- presentation -- our task is to enrich the audience's experience with new ideas and data. We have to be extremely choosy and economical when selecting them so as not to overload our lecture with unnecessary content, which is, unfortunately, very typical for beginning lecturers. Human memory, attention, and perceptive ability are very limited, and their overload rusts and hinders the understanding of ideas and data. For instance, lecturers make a huge mistake when they press the semester course on soil science at the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy into a two-hour peasant lecture. The amount of information presented should be both necessary and sufficient; unfortunately, only the lecturer's personal experience can provide him with a sense of proportion in giving lectures.

At the third step -- association -- we systematize information, compare it with the previous experience and eliminate particularities of the examples considered. This gradually leads to the fourth step -- generalization of the new and old experiences of the audience and recognition of some new concepts. Thus, according to Herbart, in the first part of the scheme, the lecturer first approaches the solution of two tasks set in the introduction in a purely inductive way. Having enriched the minds of his listeners with new concepts, the lecturer has to fix them and make them effective elements of peasant thinking, which is achieved by relating them to the rest of the peasant world and by describing their application in some cases. The fifth step -- application -- is purely deductive in nature and completes the scheme of “formal steps in teaching”.

Thus, the full scheme of “formal steps in teaching” is mainly inductive: the lecturer mobilizes his experience and accepts some new ideas; then he generalizes this systematized and concentrated information to identify the necessary concepts and generalized conclusions. There can be (and it is often used) a completely opposite, purely deductive type of the course. At the preparation step, the lecturer reminds the audience of some general concepts and ideas, then, by a series of reasoning, he puts them into a desired form and makes some deductive conclusions that make up the subject of his course.

Two examples will be enough to prove the difference. For instance, when developing a general course on cooperation, the inductive method of presentation allows the identification of needs and hopes of the peasant economy. Then a description of the types of cooperatives, their work, and benefits of cooperation illustrates all the above with specific examples. To compare cooperative institutions with capitalist enterprises, identify the Raiffeisen and Rochdale principles and conclude by the main cooperative ideas, tasks of cooperation, its significance for social life, and its future.

This course could be organized in a completely different way based on the deductive method of presentation. First, we have to remind the listeners about ideas of solidarity, mutual assistance, and community by appealing to their knowledge and life experience, and explain the role of these ideas in different aspects of social life and in the peasant economic life. Then we should describe the benefits of mutual assistance and joint efforts in various areas of the economy together with the specific types of cooperatives. Their organizational foundations (Rochdale and Raiffeisen principles) should be deduced from the requirements of the basic ideas of solidarity and equality. We should conclude by presenting some examples of the meaning of cooperatives for meeting the needs of the peasant economy.

Another example is teaching cooperative bookkeeping. With the deductive method, the lecturer presents the ideas of economic accounting to emphasize their importance for cooperation and to explain the basics of double accounting and its features determined by the cooperative requirements. Then, to prove all the above, the lecturer explains that it is based on the analysis of the main book of accounting and its balance. This should be followed by a description of auxiliary books and, finally, by an explanation of separate notes on the phenomena under study.

The course based on the inductive method of presentation is organized differently. First, the lecturer considers some economic operations of the cooperative, identifies their key features that require registration and describes the auxiliary books needed for it. After making sure that the listeners have learned the nature and method of preparing auxiliary books, the lecturer copies all records to the main book to check the balance and calculate profitability. When analyzing the already studied data, he explains the accounting system under consideration, compares it with other systems, and concludes by emphasizing the importance of proper accounting and the very idea of accounting in economic life. When comparing both methods as applied to the peasant audience, we give preference to the inductive method of presentation. This is because, according to the deductive method, the lecturer starts from general concepts and ideas, which are often missing in the minds of his listeners. Moreover, peasant thinking is traditionally very specific; therefore, it very slowly perceives logical reasoning and lags behind the course of deductions of the intelligent lecturer who is used to quick logical thinking gained in his profession and training.

Peasants lack a habit of logical reasoning and abstract ideas. This has been determined by the general rule that the peasant audience follows more easily the lecturer who proceeds from representations to concepts rather than from concepts to representations. Therefore, we prefer the inductive method for the peasant audience, whereas the widespread use of deductive representations for the more highly educated audience is absolutely right and saves much time.

Critics of both methods argue that they require tremendous and active listeners' attention for they do not provide any incentive for attention or interest in the subject. For the peasant audience, this critical remark is of particular importance. When the peasant not used to mental work listens to a long presentation, comparison, and generalization or deductive construction of the general ideas, he often does not understand the logic of the presentation, becomes distracted, and turns a deaf ear to many important points of the “concentrated information”.

Once I visited a lecture organized according to Herbart's full scheme: after the practical conclusion of the lecturer (“application”), the listeners demanded that he repeat the middle part of the lecture for they had not listened to it at all and did not understand its meaning, but, at the end of the lecture, they realized how important the middle part was. The critics suggest to change the logical structure of the presentation according to its aims, i.e., to begin with a clear and accurate explanation of its practical meaning and tasks, to continue with a list of issues that will be considered, and, having drawn the attention of the audience, to proceed to the gradual solution of the tasks. Certainly, the solution of the tasks can be both inductive and deductive.

In addition to the above-mentioned logical types of the course's program, lecturers often choose other types of presentation which are based not on the logical development of discussion but on other forms of connecting different aspects of the training program. One of the typical examples is a very common historical presentation, i.e., the presentation of scientific knowledge as a description of the history of science. For instance, according to one basic, biological law, individual development reproduces the development of the whole species in all its phases. Proponents of the historical method apply this law to spiritual development and argue that for every person the easiest way to learn contemporary, scientific knowledge is to study it in the exact sequence of its historical development.

The detailed reconstruction of the history of science for presenting its foundations is often used in higher education for courses in philosophy, the natural sciences, and other disciplines, because this method has obvious advantages. It contributes to the understanding of concepts by analyzing their origins in a specific historical period, which facilitates the further use of these concepts. On the other hand, by the logical analysis of every era of scientific data and findings, the lecturer repeatedly considers the same subjects and deepens their analysis, thus, taking full advantage of the concentric teaching method.

We can recommend this method for the peasant cooperative courses too, although its meaning for a peasant audience is somewhat different from a student audience. In peasant courses, a general course on cooperation can have the following program: the beginnings of cooperation among people and animals; cooperative initiatives before the early 19th century; a history of Rochdale pioneers; development of cooperation in England; Raiffeisen and Schulze-Delitzsch; a history of cooperation in Germany; unions of cooperators in Western Europe; the power of the contemporary cooperative movement in Russia. Such a method of presentation broadens peasant horizons with new, historical and geographical representations, and lectures take the form of a curious and interesting story.

For the lecturer, such a program implies a chronological sequence of presentation, and the narrative form of lectures means less stress than logical proofs and the above-mentioned types of presentation. However, the lecturer must remember that his task is still to describe the foundations of the cooperative movement with the historical method of presentation rather than to inform his listeners about the historical development of the contemporary cooperative movement. Therefore, the lecturer should not overload his course with historical details and comparisons unnecessary for understanding the basic principles of the cooperative movement. Another limitation of the historical method is its weakness in organizing the peasant experience and in teaching logical thinking to the peasant audience.

All the above-mentioned teaching methods are based on a positive presentation of the subject, i.e., on describing and assessing its inherent features. An opposite method presents the subject by identifying its differences from other important subjects. “B is not A due to the following difference, but B is not C due to the following difference.” In a general course on cooperation, this method would determine the following program: the differences between cooperative and forced unions (state and local government); the differences between the cooperative as a union of economically-individual members and the communist community; the differences of the cooperative from other freely organized economic unions, such as partnerships on shares, joint-stock companies, etc.

This method of presentation sorts the necessary concepts by their selection and division into parts. If there is skillful practical implementation, this method ensures great clarity and understandabili- ty of the concepts presented to the listeners. However, we would not recommend this method to the beginning lecturer, because, in a boring presentation, the statement “B is not A” can lose the part “not”, which would make it “B is A” in the perception and memory of the listener.

I remember from my childhood a book Demonstrative Inconsistencies that showed a cow at the top of a spruce, a man cutting down the branch on which he is sitting, a water-carrier with two sieves on a rocker, and so on. I do not know the benefits of this book for other children, but for many years I could not get rid of false associations that unconsciously became a part of my memory. The same can happen with listeners to a course based on the negative method (denial).

These are five types of presentation designed for the conscious perception of the subject. However, the consciousness of perception cannot be considered a necessary part of teaching. Pedagogical practice has methods for the purely mechanical introduction of concepts and ideas into the mind of listeners. A direct statement made with sufficient conviction and repeated many times often achieves greater results than a complex system of arguments and evidence.

It is believed that Napoleon said, “Repetition is the best evidence”, which is fairly true, especially for an audience that is empirically minded and unable to think logically. This method is the basis of many demagogical tricks and of the power of short political slogans; thus, it would be a mistake for the lecturer not to use such a powerful pedagogical weapon for the people's audience. Such a dogmatic method of presentation is especially relevant for the first stages of cooperative propaganda., However, the principle of repetition can and should be applied within all methods of presentation, and it is the basis of the most advanced “concentric teaching method”. Its main idea is that when the lecturer starts the presentation of the subject, he first describes it in the most general terms and then presents it again in more detail. Finally, having prepared listeners with two presentations and having introduced into their minds some very important concepts, the lecturer proceeds to the last detailed presentation.

A gradual presentation, repetition, and diversity of the analysis allow the concentric teaching method to ensure the most profound and conscious perception. At the final step, the audience is well prepared and understands the relative importance of each part of the course. In 1913, at the old-believers' agricultural courses at the Rogozhsky cemetery, I tried to organize my general course on cooperation on the basis of the concentric method by arranging the course in the following three stages: 1) a general presentation of the foundations of cooperation by the inductive method; 2) a more detailed presentation of the basic principles of the cooperative movement by the historical method; and 3) a detailed description of the organizational forms of various types of cooperation by the deductive method. The most important issue in organizing a course on the basis of the concentric method is a different presentation or grouping of the data at each stage, because simple repetition of the already presented information, albeit in an expanded form, would be extremely boring for the audience and would significantly reduce its attention.

These are the most important types of lecture programs. The description of the concentric method shows that it allows a mixed type of presentation: the lecturer divides the course into sections and presents each by the most relevant method. However, regardless of the method chosen for the program, this very choice constitutes only the first preparatory part of work: having developed a logical program, we should still think about forms of its pedagogical implementation.

The development of the program depends not only on lectures but also on the lecturer's knowledge and skills. He has to select data according to the program, sort them, systematize them, arrange them in the required sequence and choose the form of their oral presentation. It is not enough to structure the lecture; it has to be staged perfectly. The latter circumstance is especially important, because the logical structure does not exhaust the possibilities of the lecturer. When he mounts the rostrum, the lecturer has to remember that his audience is not a mechanical perceiving apparatus; it is something alive and constantly changing. Moreover, the audience's attention is very fragile and quickly wanes. At the beginning of the lecture, it is completely different from at its end; therefore, the lecturer should monitor the state of attention, refresh it, and arrange his presentation according to the expected changes in the audience's attention.

Also, the lecturer should remember that the speed of his speech often exceeds the speed of the people's audience perception, and that the audience's perception ability can be accelerated and deepened by including visual illustrations or special techniques of verbal presentation in the oral lecture. If the lecturer takes into account all these psychological aspects, he can use some techniques to quadruple his pedagogical impact.

We have already mentioned the meaning of repetition -- one of the most favorite and developed techniques of oratorical eloquence. In addition to the simple repetition of word-for-word or repetition of the same phrase, which are important for the lecturer, there is also another very common type of repetition: after introducing an idea, the lecturer repeats it in a slightly different combination of words, representations, and concepts. Such a masked repetition does not annoy the audience, it enhances perception and plays for time of the subject perception, which is especially important for the peasant audience;

therefore, this type of repetition is one of the favorite techniques of the spiritual eloquence that prevails in the people's audience.

One of the most skillful forms of this technique is a quotation that strengthens an idea by the authority of the cited author. Another type of the technique is repetition of what was just said written in chalk on the blackboard -- final conclusions, names of the authors cited, historical names, dates, or some numbers.

Analogy is also a form of this technique, and it often affects the people's audience more effectively than any logical proof. It is much easier for the peasant whose thinking is not flexible and who is not used to logical reasoning, to identify the issue under consideration as related to some other issue, with similar elements that have already been solved by ordinary everyday skills, than to develop long argumentation. In general, logical evidence plays a completely different role for the peasant audience than for higher education and literature. With peasants, one has to be extremely economical so as not to overload the lecture, because the number and exhaustive completeness of the argument are less important than its strength. Therefore, the lecturer should choose two or three most convincing arguments that would be better preserved in the peasant memory than ten or twenty arguments of equal value but more boring for the audience.

It goes without saying that the sequence of arguments should ensure the constant increase in the power of argumentation; therefore, it is of no use to present weaker arguments after the stronger ones. Despite the desirability of saving arguments, their duration should be sufficient for the peasant audience to perceive them, i.e., being very convincing but too short in argumentation can be missed by the slowly perceiving peasant mind. Moreover, for the peasant audience, the power of evidence depends mainly on the emotional side of the lecture. Thus, the people's lecturer should appeal not only to the minds but also to the hearts of his listeners.

This is especially important for the cooperative lecturer. By calling for cooperation and emphasizing its necessity and usefulness, the lecturer has to enrich his audience with the powerful social energy inherent in the cooperative movement. In the souls of his listeners he has to light sparks of the great flame of the creative social activity that can lead to the revival of the Russian countryside.

However, we should always remember a sense of proportion to avoid excessive pathos and blatancy, for true pathos is a great movement of the soul, which cannot be falsified. If there is no great emotional uplift in the lecturer's soul or if he tries to imitate it, we will have only a loud lecture instead of the emotional stress of the entire audience.

Finally, we have to consider the visual staging of lectures, or, simply put, the use of visual aids by lecturers. There are many misconceptions about visual aids, so we have to somewhat annoyingly and constantly repeat that visualization of teaching is not only posters, pictures, and other manuals but different pedagogical means for enhancing understanding and aural perception by parallel perception by other senses. Therefore, the use of visual aids should correspond to the method of presentation chosen by the lecturer for the specific audience. For schoolchildren, we use one group of visual teaching methods; in the peasant classroom, another group; in higher education institutions, a quite different group.

Pedagogy distinguishes three forms of visualization. First, natural visualization -- when the teacher considers the subject and demonstrates it to the audience: the botanist illustrates his lecture with live plants, the physicist shows experiments, the geologist makes tours with his students to study the exposed surface, etc. Second, artificial visualization -- when for demonstration the teacher does not use not the subject but its picture, model, scheme, etc. There are different levels of schematization: in some cases, we present all details of the subject in its picture; in other cases, we emphasize only the most important aspects and omit all insignificant details. The third type of visualization is when the lecturer illustrates his presentation not with some visual aids but by recalling from the listeners' memory their well-known images and ideas.

All three types of visualization should be used strictly according to the type of audience. The more illiterate and less prepared for abstract thinking, the closer to the naturalness the “visual aids” should be. The level of schematization can be increased only with the development of the audience's abstract thinking to enhance the impact of what is said. The ability to choose visual aids according to the type of the audience is the essence of visual presentation.

Besides these general recommendations, visual aids should be relevant for some particular tasks. Let us set aside all other visual aids and consider in more detail the theoretical foundations of the composition and use of wall paintings or posters. This type of visual aids can be divided into four groups with special tasks and, accordingly, with special requirements. The first group consists of lecture pictures and tables, i.e., graphic images that are accompanied by verbal presentation and illustrate the lecture. This group of visual aids needs no printed text. The second group consists of traditional posters, i.e., visual aids that aim to influence the audience with a purely visual image accompanied by a concisely-styled text. The third group consists of leaflets and posters that try to affect the audience by their text. Verbal presentation is partly illustrated by drawings or paintings, i.e., leaflets that are a kind of a popular brochure unfolded on the wall, and there can be no illustrations. Finally, the fourth group stands somewhat apart from the ones mentioned above and consists of different wall reference tables, such as percent tables, tables for calculating the fat content of milk, etc.

This classification proves that the tasks of each group of visual aids are extremely different; posters from one group can rarely achieve the goals of the other group, which determines different assessment criteria for each group according to its specific tasks. In the first group, теория the picture does not have a self-sufficient value; both in its content and image it is determined by the lecture it illustrates, and it cannot be considered separately from the lecture. Thus, the emphasis is on the living word, and we are to consider the meaning of the lecture table only together with other visual aids used by the lecturer.

Let us set aside the demonstration of objects in kind and their simplified models due only to their significant size and focus on ordinary poster images: screen, projection lamp, picture-table, and schematic drawings by the lecturer on the board. From this list, the most powerful and vivid impression would be made by the vague picture; however, it has a number of shortcomings, the most obvious of which is its extreme transience. As a rule, the lecturer familiar with his illustrations quickly recalls the image on the screen and proceeds to the next after a few explanations. However, the listener sees the picture on the screen for the first time and needs more time to consider it carefully before proceeding to its analysis. Yet, at this very moment the lecturer finishes his explanations and removes the picture from the screen; the same happens to the second, third, and fourth picture. Thus, the attention of the listener is divided between an almost impossible perception of visual images and attempts to follow the words of the lecturer, which leaves only fragmentary representations in the audience's memory.

To avoid this, the lecturer who uses vague pictures must keep each of them on the screen for at least three minutes to spend some time on a brief description of the picture. Only after making sure that the audience has perceived the picture, should he proceed to its analysis. The perception is more complete with the table-picture that the audience can see before the lecture, during it, during the break, and after the lecture, because every listener can consider the picture several times. Therefore, it is necessary to illustrate the most important ideas of the presentation with lecture-pictures or, even better, to duplicate them on the screen.

The power of the light image is greater compared to the printed table, and it increases with naturalness (natural visualization), whereas its advantages are negligible for abstract schemes. Another disadvantage of the light image is the impossibility for parallel, simultaneous consideration and comparison of several images, which is possible with wall paintings. Finally, in the dark, the ordinary projection lights do not allow listeners to copy pictures, which has great pedagogical value.

Wall tables have such disadvantages as low brightness and lack of necessary materials on the market, which limits the choice and forces the lecturer to make this kind of visual aid himself. In most cases, the latter circumstance limits the variety of wall tables to schemes, diagrams, and cartograms. Here the light image is not superior to the wall lecture-table, and it mainly competes with the schematic drawing of the lecturer on the blackboard.

Hand drawing in chalk (provided the lecturer is skillful) has a number of advantages: 1) it appears in a certain sequence that often corresponds to the line of reasoning, which facilitates its understanding; 2) drawing takes time and, thus, ensures the duration of perception; 3) the low speed of drawing in chalk provides enough time for copying in pencil. However, these advantages are valuable only if there are few such drawings, they are quite simple, and do not require much time; otherwise the lecturer's drawing would minimize the narrative part of the lecture and extremely tire the audience. Therefore, the experienced lecturer uses drawing only for the most important parts of the lecture and demonstrates the prepared-in-- advance tables or light images for all other parts.

The same applies to the numeric content of lectures. Only those indicators for which absolute value is of great importance and a few most important numeric comparisons that should be copied by the audience should be written on the board. All the rest should be demonstrated with the prepared-in-advance tables, diagrams, and cartograms.

This combination of demonstration methods gives the best result.

To conclude our essay on the lecture visual aids, we have to warn their developers against overloading images with excessive content. If possible, they should divide their content into elementary components and provide each with a special image rather than distract or overload the listeners' attention by combining many illustrations in one drawing.

Among other types of visual aids that are not related to the methods of presentation, we will now focus on the poster, for all lecturers use it in one form or another. The theory of the poster as a complex visual aid has not yet been developed. Unlike the lecture picture based on the living word, the poster is a separate entity and independently solves a number of pedagogical tasks. First, it has to attract the attention of a person passing-by. It must inform him of a number of facts (representations) in the most clear form, combine these facts into a system that constitutes a certain position, provide evidence for this position, and, finally, affect the viewer emotionally and awaken his activity related to the position. The author of the poster has to carefully select elements for the poster that would solve these very difficult tasks most successfully.