The book “Manual Labor — An Essential Element of Education”, published in Saint Petersburg in 1879, was written by the publicist and public figure Sergey Nikolayevich Krivenko.

His childhood and youth were closely connected with the Voronezh region. He spent his early years in Borisoglebsk and the village of Nikolskoye-Kabanye — his father’s family estate. In 1865, Sergey Krivenko graduated from the Mikhailovsky Voronezh Cadet Corps.

Krivenko belonged to the first generation of Russian Narodniks. The foundation for his beliefs was laid in the 1860s, marked by great changes in the public life of Russia. This brought him closer to many writers who represented the Narodnik movement in literature, including Alexander Ivanovich Ertel. The two met in Saint Petersburg in the early 1880s.

Sergey Krivenko’s first articles were printed in the Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti (Saint Petersburg Gazette) newspaper when he was about 20 years old, but his career as a writer and a publicist was truly influenced by his lasting collaboration with the editors of the Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) magazine.

Two of Krivenko’s articles published in the magazine are particularly noteworthy: “Manual Labor — An Essential Element of Education” and “A Few Remarks on Spencer’s Essay on Education”. In 1879, they were republished as a separate book.

Back in the 1860s, Krivenko began to explore the topic of manual labor and its role in bringing up the new generation. He believed that the contemporary education system had a devastating effect on the health of students and listed among its shortcomings the excessive mental stress during classes and the prolonged motionless sitting in a stuffy room. According to the scholar, the solution to the problem was to expand the curriculum with manual labor sessions as an essential element of “proper spiritual development and mental activity” of students. To implement this idea in real life, it was necessary to introduce learning and practice classes or allocate special areas for work at schools.

Delving deeper into the topic, Krivenko pointed out that manual labor was not popular among educated Russian people, as it was associated with heavy labor inflicted on common people. He believed that changing the status of labor in society would lead to important and useful changes, “My country will achieve tremendous material power, gain freedom and reach a mental peak the world has never seen before.”