We awaited Ushinskii's lectures with great impatience. Though instruction had not yet officially begun, we conceived the idea of asking him to lecture about something anyway. At the time of which I speak, he was especially overloaded with work and with numerous responsibilities connected with reforming the Institute. Nevertheless he responded with enthusiasm to our request, declaring that it just happened that he did have a free hour and could proceed to lecture forthwith. Although at this time there were only a few persons in the class, he said that he would give his opening lecture on pedagogy.

He began it by pointing out all the banality, all the nonentity, all the harm, all the moral poverty of our expectations and vain aspirations for wealth, finery, splendid balls, and worldly amusements.

You are duty bound," he said, "to kindle in your hearts, not dreams of worldly vanity (which are the desires of empty, pitiful creatures) but a pure flame, an unquenchable, inextinguishable thirst for the acquisition of knowledge. First and foremost, you must develop in yourselves a love for work. Without this your lives will be neither worthy of respect nor happy. Work elevates your mind, ennobles your heart and vividly demonstrates to you all the illusiveness of your dreams. It will give you the strength to forget sorrow, terrible bereavement, deprivations, and adversities, which so lavishly strew the path of life of every human being. It will bring you pure delight, moral contentment, and the consciousness that you do not live in the world in vain. Everything in life can deceive you. All dreams can be proven empty illusions. Only intellectual labor -- and it alone -- never betrays anyone. If you surrender yourself to it, it is always beneficial to you and to others. By constantly broadening your intellectual horizon, little by little more and more new interests in life will open to you. Such work will compel you to love it more and more, and not for the sake of egotistical enjoyment and worldly pleasures....

Constant intellectual work develops in your soul the purest, highest love for your fellow man, and only such love provides honest, noble, and true happiness. And for this everyone can and should strive, if he is not a phrasemaker and a windbag, if he does not have a flabby nature, if in his breast there beats a human heart, capable of loving something other than himself. Everyone can achieve this greatest happiness on earth. Therefore every person can be the blacksmith of his own happiness.

From this impassioned and elated paean to work, Ushinskii passed on to a definition of maternal love and what it should be. Love for its offspring exists in the heart of every animal. Wild animals like the bear and the wolf protect their cubs at the peril of their own lives, often dying in the struggle with the enemy. They feed them at their own breasts, warm them with their own bodies, and throw dry grass and leaves into their lairs so that they may have a softer place to sleep. Is it possible that woman, a rational creature, is like the wild animal and concerned only about the physical well-being and preservation of the life of her child? In addition to the natural concern lodged in her heart by mother nature, of which she is instinctively conscious, a woman adds love. She considers this human, but in the vast majority of cases it should be called make believe, since it is the product of petty vanity. In this connection, he brought in the example of mothers who resort to every means to dress their children beautifully, to make them more attractive: they play with them, as a child with a toy. Already from an early age education must develop in a child the need to work. It must instill the desire for education and self-education, and subsequently inspire the idea of an obligation to enlighten the simple people. You are here, receive an education, exist, have a good time, and indulge in your own dreams by the grace of your slaves, your serfs. Meanwhile they work for you indefatigably (like machines or beasts of burden), without getting enough to eat and drink, and submerged in darkness, ignorance, and poverty.

All these ideas have now become common knowledge. They seeped into the flesh and blood of educated people long ago. But at that time (1860), on the eve of the liberation of the peasants, they were new to Russian women in general. They were even newer to us Institute students, who up to that time had not heard one intelligent word. We had been contaminated by banal aspirations, which Ushinskii destroyed mercilessly....