Balint Vazsonyi survived the Nazi occupation of Hungry, followed by living behind the Iron Curtain, to arrive in America and witness the same strain of communist ideologies that had tenured in European universities and seeped into American culture. He authored 'America's 30 Years War', affirming Makarenko's influence; "The term 'politically correct' first came to my attention through the writings of Anton S. Makarenko, Lenin's expert on education. Adolf Hitler preferred the version, socially correct." Anton Makarenko left a legacy that matches John Dewey in scope and consequence, manifested today in critical theory. Robert S. Cohen (1923-2017) selected Makarenko as his consultant in absentia for the Yearbook, resurrecting his words from the grave to present the Marxist Philosophy of Education. He could not do otherwise, either at UNESCO's urging or Cohen's faith in communist pedagogy. Cohen considered Makarenko's 3 Volume 'The Road to Life' as the "essential quarry" of Marxist education. Five pages of Cohen's essay was dedicated to Makarenko's fundamental Marxist pejoratives, a path for Neo-Marxist thought in beating a sickle into a UNESCO plow shear. Cohen claimed no communist card party affiliation, but wished to make perfectly clear his admiration for Marxist doctrine as essential to education. Makarenko's voice from the past confirms what Krasovitskij's voice left at home in the Ukraine.
"We must teach the worker discipline", he demanded. "We must develop in him the sense of duty and the sense of honor. He must feel his own obligations toward his class. He must be able to subordinate himself to a comrade and he must be able to give orders to a comrade. He must know how to be courteous, severe, kind, and pitiless, depending on the circumstance of his life struggle. If the collective punishes him, he must respect both the collective and the punishment."
How to be 'courteous, severe, kind and pitiless' and do not do unto your comrade, what you would not be willing to accept as a consequence yourself. Truly this is Makarenko's 'maxim of respect'. A lesson to demonstrate this is described in The Road to Life. The boys participated in a game called Thief and Informer, each player taking on the role of either a thief, informer, investigator, judge or executioner. Using a lash, the informer would hit the hand of each player, not knowing who drew the theft card and in the process received a lash for a wrong guess. When the thief was identified, the executioner would then exact the sentence as a number of lashes, hot or cold. Makarenko stated it was an "alteration of suffering and revenge and retired most times with a swollen hand." A collective of gang members needn't be re-educated. They practice the game of suffering and revenge.
"A good deal of the attention paid to the training of character is wrongly directed to my mind", wrote Makarenko. "It is usually concentrated on the unruly element. This, of course is necessary, but it by no means exhaust the problem, the timid and modest, the little, gentle Jesuses, the column dodgers, the wasters, the idlers, and the dreamers usually evade its influence. Yet these characteristics are in fact as harmful as any.”
Ah! Those gentle Jesuses filled with myths and nonsense are as much 'morally defective' as the delinquents that made up the colony's youth. No less, those timid and modest types need reforming. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, author and survivor of The Gulag Archipelago, testified that Makarenko organized rehabilitation colonies for juvenile delinquents. "From the twenties on, the obliging term, social ally came to be widely used. That was Makarenko's contention too: these (thieves) could be reformed. According to Makarenko, the origin of the crime lay solely in the counterrevolutionary underground. Those were the ones who couldn't be reformed – engineers, priests, Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks." The ministration of discipline proposed by Makarenko cannot be achieved using conventional parenting or teaching skills, which may suppress the natural course of developing a healthy strong Nietzschean will, a will that respects and fears a collective. Makarenko's pedagogical discipline prepared him to answer the Soviet Ministry's call; "We need our own man. You must create him." Makarenko's 'kollektiv' was comprised of a healthy dose of peer-pressure strategies, self-reflection of individuals constrained within group identification and a helping of humiliation from fellow comrades.