In the years before he wrote War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy founded and ran a school on his estate at Yasanya Polyana. Brimming with progressive and sometimes radical ideas on schooling, Tolstoy undertook to teach the peasant children many subjects-including imaginative writing-and wrote about what he learned. This is a book for anyone who cares about education.

How do we know what we should teach? And how should we go about teaching it? These deceptively simple questions about education perplexed Tolstoy. Before writing his famous novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy opened an experimental school on his estate to try and answer them. His experiences there incited his life-long inquiry into the meaning and purpose of religion, literature, art and life itself. In this text, Daniel Moulin tells the story of the course of Tolstoy's educational thought, and how it relates to Tolstoy's fiction and other writings. It begins with his experience of being a child and adolescent, incorporates his travels in Europe, the experimental school, his literature, and his views on art, philosophy, and spirituality. Throughout, the relevance and impact of Tolstoy's thinking on education are translated into applicable theory for today's education students.

Includes Tolstoy's major writings on the education of children. For several years Tolstoy devoted his time to running a school for children, founded on the principle that children must be free to determine their own education.

'Yasnaya Polyana School' is a publication written by Leo Tolstoy about the school for peasant children that he opened at his home. He delineates the curriculum, the schedule, and the number of classes held, while also including anecdotes such as a fight between two of the pupils and a thieving student.