SOME CURRENT ISSUES IN ENHANCING THE ROLE OF AESTHETIC EDUCATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

A. P. BARONAS

(Presented by the scientific seminar of the Department of Scientific Communism)

The transition of society to socialism, expanding and qualitatively changing the sphere of a person’s aesthetic relations, has the most favorable effect on the role of aesthetic education in higher education. However, sufficient prerequisites and conditions for effective, comprehensive, and all-embracing aesthetic education in higher education, as in society as a whole, are not created all at once, but gradually, in the contradictory process of overcoming a number of objective and subjective difficulties. For example, in the first stage of the development of Soviet society, because of Russia’s economic, socio-political, and cultural backwardness, the main factors limiting the possibilities of aesthetic education were objective difficulties. Nevertheless, proceeding from the Leninist plan of the cultural revolution, the Soviet state attached exceptionally great significance to the aesthetic education of the rising generation, including students. This may be judged from the content and meaning of the first document on the school adopted by the Soviet government in 1918. In it, in particular, it is emphasized that “aesthetic subjects... are by no means something secondary, a luxury of life... In general, by aesthetic education one should understand not the teaching of some simplified art, but the systematic development of the organs of the senses and of creative abilities, which broadens the capacity to enjoy beauty and to create it.”¹ The practical implementation of these tasks already in the first decade and a half of the development of Soviet society contributed to the formation of thousands of highly educated and cultured specialists.

At the second stage of socialist construction in our country, the chief factors holding back the development of aesthetic education in higher education became subjective difficulties. The violations, connected with the personality cult of I. V. Stalin, of the Leninist principles for carrying out the cultural revolution in our country had a negative effect also on the role of aesthetic education in higher education. Its aims were narrowed and simplified. This led to the fact that aesthetic education, as a rule, was subordinated and became merely a means of ideological-political

education. In the technical higher educational institution it was even more restricted and was carried out, for the most part, through amateur artistic activity.

The decisions of the Twentieth and subsequent Congresses of the CPSU, the restoration of the Leninist norms and principles of the Party’s cultural policy, the adoption of the CPSU Program, and the unfolding of communist construction in our country had the most favorable effect on the development of the theory and practice of aesthetic education and education in the higher educational institution. Within a short period, significant results were achieved in a number of pedagogical higher educational institutions and in individual universities. As for technical higher educational institutions, in most of them aesthetic education as a system is still at the initial stage of development. Thus, to this day, the elective course in aesthetics is not taught in all higher educational institutions, although the decision to introduce it in technical higher educational institutions was adopted as early as 1957. The situation is still worse with the introduction of the very important courses in technical and production aesthetics. Attempts to make up for the lag in the aesthetic education of students by creating an integral educational program designed for the entire period of study have not yet yielded any appreciable results. The explanation for this should be sought not only in the fact that until recently, in pedagogical higher educational institutions and universities, aesthetic education developed under the influence of the needs of the school, while in technical higher educational institutions it developed only by virtue of internal needs and the very modest influences of production, but also in the fact that in technical higher educational institutions the objectified negative consequences of the previous state of aesthetic education in the higher educational institution are still felt more strongly (a shortage of specialists, the absence of a sufficient theoretical and practical foundation, etc.), which cannot be eliminated quickly. Moreover, the traditional subjective attitudes—the underestimation of the role of aesthetic education in the technical higher educational institution—are not overcome at once.

At the same time, one must not forget that, at the present stage of our country’s development as well, there still remain causes that give rise to objective and subjective difficulties in carrying out the normal process of the aesthetic education of students.

The first, most general cause producing a negative influence both on the process and on the results of aesthetic education in the higher educational institution is the substantial contradictoriness of various aspects of socialist reality, but especially the shortcomings and costs in the development of socialism. Student youth is one of the most emotionally sensitive groups of society. Since all social phenomena are evaluated aesthetically, even some natural costs and mistakes in the development of socialism may be perceived as something alien and anti-aesthetic. The return to the scientific Leninist principles of managing society removes painful contradictions.

A second cause, undermining confidence in the lofty goals of aesthetic education, is often the imperfection of the aesthetic conditions of students’ life, study, and everyday existence. One may speak at length about the aesthetic education of students, even hold aesthetic events, but if due attention is not paid to the aesthetic improvement of student microdistricts, then the results of aesthetic education will be negligible and, in certain cases, may be negative, for objectively there exists a dialectical interconnection between aesthetic consciousness and aesthetic being in the narrow sense of the word (the conditions of life, study, everyday existence, etc.). And if there arises

a rupture due to the sharp lag of the aesthetic conditions of life behind their real possibilities for development, then this will have the most pernicious effect on the level of aesthetic consciousness, on aesthetic views, evaluations, etc. To the same extent, naturally, the lag in the aesthetic development of the individual because of the weakness of aesthetic education is also dangerous, as compared with aesthetic being in both the broad and the narrow sense. The great work being done to improve the living conditions of students—for example, at Tomsk higher educational institutions—already in many ways creates favorable conditions for exerting fruitful aesthetic influence on an ever larger mass of students. Although much still remains to be done, especially in the aesthetic design of classrooms and living quarters.

The third reason making it difficult to carry out the purposeful aesthetic development of the student’s personality is that, under the conditions of modern means of communication, the student increasingly encounters an abundance of diverse and aesthetically unequal information. This may lead either to so-called “oversaturation,” when the student, not having time to assimilate the information deeply enough, spoils his aesthetic taste, becomes a snob, or to the student’s losing Marxist-Leninist bearings in aesthetic judgments and falling under the influence of bourgeois aesthetics. Since in the future the amount of varied aesthetic information with which the student will in one way or another have to come into contact will increase, the above-mentioned difficulty can be overcome only by forming a conscious immunity against aesthetic “omnivorousness,” that is, by forming a scientifically grounded and deeply consciously held Marxist-Leninist aesthetic worldview.

And it can be achieved only on the basis of an integral, scientifically grounded system of aesthetic education in the higher educational institution, tested in practice. Such a system of education has so far been poorly developed. D. Braginets is right in emphasizing that “the creation of a single purposeful system of aesthetic education for students is a problem so complex that it can be solved only by the joint efforts of many higher-education collectives.”² Therefore today, although in large cities many aesthetic events are held in most higher educational institutions (collective visits to the cinema, theaters, museums, attendance at performances by artists, musicians, etc., etc.), the result is still not a systematized aesthetic education. This constitutes the fourth reason giving rise to substantial costs both in the very process of aesthetic education and in obtaining final results. To this may also be attributed the difficulties caused by the complexity and contradictory character of the process of aesthetic perception and influence. As is known, any differences—social, national, age-related; differences in psychological makeup; differences in the level of a person’s general culture and intellect, etc.—directly or indirectly affect the character of aesthetic perception, generate a diversity of aesthetic tastes, evaluations, and so on, and create the illusion of their absolute subjectivity (hence one of the arguments for the assertion: there is no disputing about tastes). Although in reality there exists only great relative subjectivity of aesthetic perception, as compared, for example, with ethical perception, nevertheless this cannot but complicate the process of aesthetic education. Because the pro—

² D. Braginets, “Aesthetic Education as a System,” Vestnik vysshei shkoly, 1970, No. 8, p. 63.

the process of aesthetic education is, in many respects, a process of aesthetic interaction in which the relatively subjective aesthetic views and tastes of the educator, coming into contact and often colliding with the still more subjective aesthetic notions of the person being educated, must lead, first, to the pupil’s liking what the educator likes and, second, to the development in the pupil of independence of aesthetic perception and awareness, but already on a scientific basis, gradually growing into deeply conscious Marxist-Leninist aesthetic convictions. At the same time, attention must be paid to the fact that the process of aesthetic education is complex in itself, for, as L. Zelenov notes, it is realized at least through three spheres: the emotional-sensuous sphere (aesthetic feelings, needs), the intellectual-logical sphere (aesthetic consciousness, thinking, etc.), and the sphere of forming definite aesthetic ideals; it may be carried out at different levels and passes through several stages.^3 In order to remove the difficulties named, it is necessary to make the fullest use of the data of philosophy, psychology, and other related sciences.

And, finally, the fifth reason—one of the most subjective but substantial—consists in the fact that among some administrators and teachers of higher educational institutions there still persists the conviction that in a higher educational institution one can do without systematic aesthetic education, which is desirable but, under modern conditions, is an optional luxury. This attitude is passed on to some students, or reinforces an indifference to the world of beauty already formed earlier, because at school they did not receive the minimum that is called a systematic elementary aesthetic education. Or perhaps their spiritual world was impoverished even earlier by those scientific workers, ardent “physicists,” who, as A. Pepelyshev notes, forbid their children to listen to and read fairy tales... so that they do not grow up as softies, but learn from childhood to think realistically and act rationalistically.^4 In our opinion, the pedagogical experiment known in the literature as the Nikitins’ family experience is alarming first of all precisely because, in essence, the aesthetic element is excluded from it. And a system of education that does not develop emotional-figurative thinking cannot form rich thinking. A large amount of knowledge without the capacity to think deeply, independently, and creatively, at best brings a person closer to the computer. It brings him closer, but does not even raise him to the level of the computer.

A softened form of “technicism” and of underestimating the role of aesthetic education in the formation of the modern specialist of the highest qualification is represented by the widespread arguments that a minimal aesthetic development of students can be achieved through traditional and spontaneous forms of aesthetic influence (fiction, cinema, etc.), or that already today the majority of graduates of higher educational institutions are sufficiently aesthetically prepared, since they have “good, healthy artistic tastes and sympathies.”^6 And only a small group of students is aesthetically insufficiently developed, which, as the author of the article notes, “has attested

^3 L. Zelenov. The Process of Aesthetic Reflection. Moscow, 1969, pp. 51–52.
^4 A. Pepelyshev. Profession and Beauty. — Sibirskie ogni, 1969, No. 3, p. 138.
^5 T. Snegireva. Caution: Childhood. — Literaturnaya gazeta, 1970, January 14, p. 13.
^6 In the collection: Aesthetics and School. Moscow, 1968, p. 5.

admiration for such a low-grade film as The Magnificent Seven and for far from the best examples of poetry.”^7 It is clear that with such an approach the requirements for the aesthetic preparation of the graduate are lowered, and the goals and meaning of aesthetic education in the higher educational institution today are understood in a simplified way.

The materials of sociological studies that have been conducted illustrate quite convincingly the obvious fact that there are serious flaws in the aesthetic education of graduates, especially of natural-science departments and technical higher educational institutions. As A. Kulagin notes, relying on the results of a study, they usually do not have stable and deep aesthetic views. “There are serious grounds for supposing that the existing gap between sensory perception, an interest in art, and a low level of knowledge of its theory and laws leads to instability in evaluations, to the absence of serious enthusiasms for one or another kind of art, and of a need to engage in artistic amateur activity and artistic-creative activity.

On the other hand, the absence of sufficient aesthetic education leads to a narrowness of cultural horizons, and for some—to an emotionally impoverished life.”^8 Even in pedagogical higher educational institutions, where aesthetic education is increasingly becoming a purposeful and all-embracing process, there still remains a portion of students who are aesthetically misoriented.

Of course, even today some graduates of a technical higher educational institution, such as, for example, some graduates of the Leningrad Institute of Precise Mechanics and Optics, “finding themselves in the most remote corners of the country, are able to create around themselves ‘oases of culture.’”^9 But this is, at best, one-tenth of the graduates—those who, actively engaging in various kinds of aesthetic activity, develop in themselves the need and the ability to bring and to create beauty in all spheres of their life activity. Even after ceasing, for one reason or another, to propagate the beautiful before a broad audience, these people find happiness and joy in contact with art within the circle of friends and relatives.^10

And yet, we repeat, these people are isolated cases that do not solve the problem. And it consists not only in the weakness and passivity of the aesthetic preparation of the greater part of students, but also in the fact that many of them, trying independently to overcome their lag in aesthetic development (studies show that a large part of a student’s free time is used for the development and satisfaction of aesthetic abilities and needs), seize, without appropriate purposeful influence, often not upon the principal achievements of contemporary aesthetic culture, but upon its “foam,” its waste products, which an aesthetically insufficiently prepared person may perceive as the very essence of the achievements of the contemporary development of aesthetics, literature, art, and so on. Today we should be no less concerned by the fact that a certain portion of students does not even notice its own aesthetic underdevelopment, the anti-aesthetic character of its way of life, and that many teachers themselves are aesthetically poorly “shod,” and therefore cannot sufficiently—

^7 In the collection: Aesthetics and the School. Moscow, 1968, p. 5.
^8 In the collection: Youth, Its Interests, Aspirations, Ideals. Moscow, 1969, pp. 356–357.
^9 A. Nuikin. “Students, Diploma, Intelligentsia.” — Pravda, 1967, December 21, p. 2.
^10 M. Cherednichenko. “Song in a Circle.” — Komsomolskaya Pravda, 1970, February 1, p. 3.

...to exert any substantial influence on the formation of a high aesthetic culture among the student body.

The costs of such a state of aesthetic education in a higher educational institution, for the full-fledged training of specialists, citizens, and individuals, are enormous. But if it is not changed—that is, if the role of aesthetic education in higher education is not noticeably raised—the damage will grow, because under contemporary conditions of scientific-technical and social progress in society, the need for and necessity of such aesthetic upbringing and education in higher education in general (and in technical higher education in particular) are objectively increasing. They should not act as a supplement to the educational and instructional processes, but should be an important component of them. In order to make this a reality, not only great practical efforts are needed, but also further theoretical elaboration of questions characterizing the increasing role of aesthetic education as applied to the needs of the higher-education system of upbringing and instruction.

In this respect, it is first of all important to investigate and systematize those questions whose scientific understanding can help to define correctly the role of aesthetic upbringing and education in higher education as one of the necessary factors in the formation of highly educated specialists.

The first such question is the question of what place the aesthetic principle occupies in the life of contemporary society in general and in the life of the student body in particular.

All authors who study this question acknowledge that, as social, scientific-technical, and cultural progress advances, the aesthetic principle occupies an ever greater place in the life activity of all social groups of socialist society.

However, some authors persistently connect this ever broader and deeper penetration of the aesthetic, in all the diversity of its manifestations and properties, only with the single category of “beauty.”² While agreeing with them that beauty is increasingly entering our life, we are inclined to adhere to the following point of view: first, the aesthetic is by no means exhausted by beauty, but manifests itself in a diversity of properties that evoke both positive and negative aesthetic feelings and experiences (satisfaction or disappointment, enjoyment or suffering, etc.); second, aesthetic feelings and experiences arise only as a result of the interaction of certain properties of any concrete aesthetically perceived object or phenomenon, which acts as its “substantive form,”³ and the aesthetic development of the subject (“the wealth of subjective human sensuousness”).⁴ Therefore, the more the aesthetically perfected material and spiritual world of a given society corresponds to the “objectively unfolded wealth of the human being,”⁵ the more capable people are of human (aesthetic.—A. B.) enjoyments.

Such a methodological approach makes it possible both to grasp the full complexity and contradictoriness of the “entry” of the aesthetic into various spheres of human life activity and to understand the increa—

the ever-increasing vital importance of aesthetic upbringing and education.

At the same time, a view that identifies the aesthetic with the beautiful easily leads to one-sided and simplified conclusions in understanding how rich and complex the human aesthetic world is at the present stage of development of socialist society, and how much richer and more complex it must become in the near future. An example of such a one-sided approach is the reasoning and the conclusion reached by one author when, attempting to substantiate the generally correct premise that “communism and beauty are inseparable,” he has the heroine of L. M. Leonov’s novel The Russian Forest express the following thought: “communism is called upon to eradicate pain, evil, and untruth… and, consequently, communism, besides everything else, is perfect beauty in everything.”^15 If this reasoning is justified and understandable in the mouth of the romantic heroine of a novel, it is naive and undialectical in a strictly scientific respect. All the more so because it leads to an overly narrow definition of the aims and meaning of aesthetic education, which is understood only as the development of a sense of beauty, a need for beauty, and so on.^16

And, of course, such reasoning is used as a pretext for distorting the Marxist-Leninist teaching on communism by apologists of bourgeois society, who try to present communism as a saccharine, naive utopia, as a social system in which “there will be no grief, there will be nothing that would darken the joy of existence.”^17

In order to understand the actual correlation among the various manifestations of the aesthetic in real life, it is enough to trace their dialectic through the example of the interrelation of any opposites of this kind. Of interest in this respect is the reasoning of L. Grafova. “If alchemists had ever invented,” she writes, “an ‘elixir of happiness,’ one of its constituent elements would certainly have been drops of grief. In happiness, as in life itself, the bad and the good alternate. This is natural, and perhaps even necessary. Otherwise how could we feel that we are happy?”^17 Indeed, if one imagines that society will someday attain such a stage of development that everything will bear the stamp of perfect beauty (read: completed, absolute beauty.—A. V.), then beauty itself, having absorbed into itself all the richness of the manifestations of man’s aesthetic relation to the world of material and spiritual phenomena, will lose its meaning, disappear, and the aesthetic development of society will come to a halt. To avoid such curiosities, it is necessary not to reduce the qualitative richness of the aesthetic in our life to beauty alone, but to consider it in all the diversity of its manifestations—this is, first of all.

Secondly, the process of change in the interrelation among the individual properties of the aesthetic must be considered dialectically and historically; that is, one must see that under the conditions of socialism and communism the share of the aesthetically positive (the beautiful, the sublime, and so on) constantly and on an increasing scale grows, while the share of the aesthetically negative (the ugly, the base, and so on), although it is steadily decreasing, does not disappear finally so long as society continues to progress.

^15 Aesthetic Education. Moscow, “Vysshaya shkola,” 1968, p. 9.
^16 A. Ovcharenko. “Communism—Man—Art.” Moskva, 1970, No. 6, p. 204.
^17 L. Grafova. “Are You Happy?” Komsomolskaya Pravda, 1969, March 14.

There can be no doubt that already at the present stage of our country’s development, both in the life of the entire Soviet people and, in particular, in the life and activity of Soviet students, the objective properties of our reality that evoke positive aesthetic feelings and experiences far surpass that which still darkens aesthetic feelings and experiences.

Proceeding from what has been said above, one may assert that as society develops, its aesthetic perfection also objectively takes place. However, it is achieved not by reducing the aesthetic properties of reality and bringing them down to a single category—beauty—but by the manifestation of an ever greater number of aesthetic properties of reality and by the increasing complexity of their interrelations. This makes the world around us, on the one hand, aesthetically ever richer and more all-embracing, which stimulates the aesthetic development of the personality; on the other hand, it makes it ever more aesthetically contradictory, which complicates the spontaneous process of the personality’s aesthetic development.

In this connection, and with regard to the higher educational institution, there is a growing need to provide such aesthetic upbringing and education of the student’s personality as would not only correspond, at the very least, to the level of the aesthetic culture achieved by society, thereby facilitating the successful assimilation of accumulated aesthetic values, but would also strive, insofar as possible, to surpass this level in some respect. This gives the given personality the possibility of realistically participating in the aesthetic transformation and improvement of the world surrounding him.

Another important question, without a scientific understanding of which it is impossible to clarify the meaning and significance of aesthetic education in the higher educational institution, consists in correctly determining the place of the aesthetic principle in the formation of a creative attitude toward labor (for student labor, both educational and scientific-research labor, as the scientific and technological revolution unfolds under socialism, must be characterized by an ever greater creative potential). Although, on the whole, in Soviet literature the questions of the aesthetics of labor (especially the problems of technical and production aesthetics) are studied comprehensively, it seems to us that substantial disagreements remain in the understanding of what interrelation and interdependence between the creative and the aesthetic in labor is decisive.

Some authors assign the decisive role in the emergence of a creative attitude toward labor to the aesthetic development of the personality. “An aesthetically developed person,” writes, for example, L. V. Sokhan, “in any type of labor strives for perfection, and this gives him aesthetic pleasure.”^18

Other authors believe that favorable social conditions serve as the chief source of a creative attitude toward labor. “All labor free from exploitation,” emphasizes A. Pepelyshev, “is creative labor and includes aesthetic principles.”^19

A third group maintains that “any labor becomes beautiful, creative, if a person... is in love with his work.”^20

The authors’ viewpoints cited above reflect actually existing interdependencies between the aesthetic and creative principles—

^18 L. V. Sokhan. The Spiritual Progress of the Personality and Communism. Kiev, 1966, p. 235.

^19 A. Pepelyshev. “Profession and Beauty.” Siberian Lights, 1969, No. 3, p. 138.

^20 In the collection: Problems of Aesthetic Education and Modernity. Moscow, 1963, p. 74.

principles in the labor process, but they do not grasp the main point: what the stable, determining interconnection between them is. In our view, creative labor and aesthetic enjoyment are mutually conditioned. They arise and develop in parallel. And yet, even when other favorable conditions are present (social conditions, industriousness, and so on), creative labor and aesthetic enjoyment begin to function steadily only when the process and results of labor become aesthetically attractive and significant.

Of course, even labor that is aesthetically unattractive—that is, labor that is difficult, monotonous, and so forth—may, in situations of high revolutionary and patriotic upsurge, pour forth into a creative impulse and evoke profound aesthetic experiences. V. Mayakovsky wrote beautifully about this in his poem “Good!” (the chapter on the Communists at the voluntary Saturday work day). This is manifested to some extent in the student construction brigades of our own day.

At the same time, under the conditions of developed socialism and in the period of expanded communist construction, when socio-political and production relations attain a high level of development and are characterized aesthetically as ever more perfected, they indirectly play the role of an important source of creativity and aesthetic enjoyment in labor.

Since “labor becomes from generation to generation more varied, more perfect, more many-sided,”⁶ and therefore also aesthetically more attractive (under the conditions of the contemporary scientific and technological revolution this process is accelerating), the level of a person’s aesthetic development is of still greater importance for the formation of a creative attitude toward labor. In an aesthetically undeveloped person, even the richest gamut of aesthetic properties of labor will never evoke profound aesthetic feelings and experiences, although it may stimulate his aesthetic development. Only an aesthetically developed person is capable of feeling all the joy and charm of creative and aesthetically perfected labor.

Thus, creative labor appears and functions steadily only as the result of the interaction of the aesthetic attractiveness of labor, the aesthetic development of the individual, social conditions, industriousness, and so on. At the same time, it must be remembered that the aesthetic conditions of labor and the aesthetic development of the personality always determine the limit beyond which neither social conditions nor industriousness can lead to creativity in labor as a stable and prolonged process.

Therefore, with regard to our students, for whom increasingly favorable aesthetic conditions of labor are now being created and who are being drawn ever more actively both into study and directly into productive labor, one may say that, in order to realize the potential creative possibilities of their labor, what they lack first of all is aesthetic culture. And this, as is known, is achieved by creating a scientifically grounded system of aesthetic upbringing and education in the higher educational institution.

Moreover, today’s student—the future engineer and scholar—stands on the front flank of scientific and technological progress, which is increasingly being transformed into a direct productive force of our society; therefore it is important to study all the factors of the development and activ—

…of the realization of a creative communist attitude toward scientific cognition as one of the specific forms of labor.

In our opinion, the main factor in the growing role of aesthetic education in the higher educational institution in this respect is that, under present-day conditions of the scientific and technological revolution, the demands placed on the high-quality training of highly qualified specialists are increasing; in connection with this, the role of the aesthetic principle is also growing—a principle which, in the unanimous opinion of Soviet researchers, plays an increasingly important role in the scientific cognition of the world, in mastering and transforming it. Although, on the whole, the problem of the growing role of the aesthetic principle in scientific research has been resolved positively, there is still no clarity in defining the place of the aesthetic moment in scientific cognition.

Thus, for example, M. Volkenstein, while noting that “the scientist’s creativity is not only rational, but also emotional,” at the same time asserts that “aesthetics has no relation to science-cognition.”^22 One cannot agree with this. In our view, A. Pepelyshev is considerably closer to the truth when he asserts that the essence of an object must be known not only through abstract thought, “but also figuratively, visually, that is, by artistic means.”^23 Another aspect of the organic connection between aesthetics and science-cognition is traced by A. Kulagin. “Developed in the process of communion with the beautiful, with the world of art,” he writes, “the capacities for associative thinking, intuition, and such aspects of sensory perception as the sense of harmony, symmetry, and so on, will in one way or another affect the effectiveness of the professional activity of the scientist, engineer, and technician.”^24 In addition, as numerous facts show, the aesthetic quality, purposiveness, and so forth of the results of scientific research are an important direct factor in determining the degree of correctness of the solution to a scientific and technical problem. The growing role of the aesthetic principle as a criterion of truth also follows from the fact, as K. Marx noted, that “man knows how to produce according to the measure of any species, and everywhere he knows how to apply the appropriate measure to the object; therefore man also forms matter according to the laws of beauty.”^25 Hence an important task of the higher educational institution is to teach the student to know, master, and transform “matter also according to the laws of beauty.”

From all that has been said above it follows that the rapid development of science and technology not only does not exclude the aesthetic element, but increasingly needs it as a stimulus to creativity, a means of cognition, and a criterion of truth.

In this sense one may agree with the following hypotheses that have been put forward. First, that “the artistic interests of a scientist are the broader, the broader the range of topics of his scientific research.”^26 Second, that among researchers and engineers “who display capacities for creative thinking, there should be a more clearly expressed need for more subtle works of art, rich in broad associations. A young specialist who has received a good aesthetic education, who possesses refined artistic taste and a high culture of behavior, will more easily enter into scientific, administrative—

^22 M. Volkenstein. The Science of People. — Novyi mir, 1969, No. 11, p. 195.
^23 A. Pepelyshev. Profession and Beauty. — Sibirskie ogni, 1969, No. 3, p. 138.
^24 In the collection: Youth, Its Interests, Aspirations, Ideals. Moscow, 1969, p. 355.
^25 K. Marx and F. Engels on Art. Vol. I, Moscow, 1967, p. 142.
^26 M. Volkenstein. The Science of People. — Novyi mir, 1969, No. 11, p. 194.

managerial work, and the results of his work, other things being equal, will be more effective.”⁷

In the Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU it was noted that “the number of scientific workers in the country increased 1.4 times over the five-year period and now amounts to about 930 thousand people,” and that “it is important that in every scientific collective” there should exist a genuinely creative atmosphere for improving scientific-research work.⁸ The development of both general and professional aesthetic upbringing and education in the higher educational institution can become an essential factor in increasing the effectiveness of the scientific-research work of Soviet scholars.

An important goal of higher educational institutions is also the development, in future specialists, of the abilities and skills of organizers of production and educators of the collective. It may be asserted that one of the most important general conditions for the effectiveness of organizational and educational work is the degree of all-round and harmonious development of the leaders themselves, which is achieved, to a significant extent, through systematic aesthetic upbringing and education. However, as the materials of sociological studies show, as the student advances to the senior years, “in the sphere of aesthetic activity there is a tendency toward one-sided development of the personality.” In addition, “physicists,” in comparison with “lyricists,” are one and a half to two times less involved in art.⁹ Deficiencies in the all-round and harmonious training of students will be reflected in the most harmful way in the quality with which, in the future, they perform their functions as leaders and educators of the collective, because the authority and effectiveness of organizational and educational measures are inseparably connected both with the general culture, erudition, and intellect of the leader, and with his ability, in a certain sense, to act as an ideal. Hence the need to achieve such a situation in the higher educational institution in which the diploma would guarantee not only a minimum of professional knowledge and skills in organizational and educational activity, but also a high cultural level, refinement, moral beauty, and so forth.

All the qualities of a harmoniously and all-round developed personality are required by the graduate of a higher educational institution also in order to become a full-fledged member of society, of a collective, of a family, and so on. In this respect the highest goal of the higher educational institution consists in developing all the abilities and qualities of the student’s personality, including the aesthetic ones, as an end in itself. But this must become the end in itself of the development of the personality itself as well, for, as K. Marx notes, “the vocation, purpose, task of every person is to develop all his abilities in an all-round way.”¹⁰

Indeed, as communist construction unfolds in our country, the necessity and possibility of forming an aesthetically developed personality becomes ever more evident and at the same time a real goal, especially in the higher educational institution, for the ideal of a rich and integral developed personality is unthinkable without all-round developed aesthetic needs and abilities, which, as is rightly noted

L. V. Sokhan, “develop not only the artistic richness of the individual, but also develop and enrich the personality as a whole, for they have an effect on the intellectual, emotional-volitional, and physical development of the personality; they enrich both the sphere of a person’s thoughts and that of his feelings.”^31 Without doubt, the influence of a high aesthetic culture on the formation of communist morality and the ideological commitment of the personality is even more significant. Conversely, the neglect of aesthetic education in the higher educational institution, and the low aesthetic culture of students, even today remain among the essential causes of the emergence among graduates of higher educational institutions of people who are not only emotionally callous, but also amoral, apolitical, and so on—that is, of those types of people who should not exist in our society. It is therefore so important that students themselves cultivate within themselves an active attitude toward aesthetic culture, toward the world of art, and toward the aesthetics of human relations.

On the basis of all that has been said above, it may be asserted that the aesthetic education of students during the period of society’s transition from socialism to communism must become one of the most effective means of forming highly educated specialist cadres—well-rounded and harmoniously developed personalities. Indeed, by touching, permeating, and merging with all spheres of human life activity, a person’s aesthetic development becomes the condition that most fully promotes the labor, scientific, moral, and other progress of the individual and of society as a whole.

But in order for a person’s aesthetic abilities and needs to fulfill this function, they themselves must be developed to the utmost. The creation of the scientific-technical and material base of communism; the creation of favorable aesthetic conditions for students’ life, study, research work, and everyday existence; the development of their aesthetic activity and independence; the creation of highly artistic and highly ideological works of art and literature that skillfully propagate the lofty humanistic and universal ideals of communism; and the creation and introduction of a coherent and scientifically grounded system of aesthetic upbringing and education—all this, in turn, becomes the most important conditions and factors in the formation of an aesthetically richly developed personality of the communist future, the tendencies of which must clearly manifest themselves already now, and first of all in the system of higher education and upbringing.

^31 L. V. Sokhan, The Spiritual Progress of the Personality and Communism. Kiev, 1966, p. 233.

1. Directives of the CPSU(b) and Decrees of the Soviet Government on Public Education, 1917–1947. Moscow, Publishing House of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR, 1957, pp. 266–267. ↩

2. In the collection: Problems of Aesthetic Education and Modernity. Moscow, 1963, pp. 76–77. ↩

3. M. Kagan. Lectures on Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics. Leningrad State University Press, 1971, pp. 97–103. ↩

4. K. Marx and F. Engels, On Art. Vol. 1, Moscow, 1967, p. 127. ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 293. ↩

7. In the collection: Youth, Its Interests, Aspirations, Ideals. Moscow, “Molodaya Gvardiya,” 1969, p. 355. ↩

8. L. I. Brezhnev. Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU. — Pravda, 1971, March 31, p. 8. ↩

9. B. Rubin, Yu. Kolesnikov. The Student Through the Eyes of a Sociologist. Publishing House of Rostov University, 1968, p. 137. ↩

10. K. Marx, F. Engels. Collected Works. Vol. 3, p. 282. ↩