“Our village school teachers should be placed on a level that has never been achieved, and can never be achieved, in bourgeois society.

This is a truism that requires no proof.  We must strive toward this by means of systematic, steady and persistent work in raising the spiritual level of the teachers, of training them thoroughly for their really high calling, and, principally, principally, principally, by raising their material level.

“We must systematically increase our work of organizing the village school teachers in order to transform them from the bulwark of the bourgeois system that they still are in all capitalist countries without exception into the bulwark of the Soviet system, in order, through their agency, to win the peasantry away from their alliance with the bourgeoisie and to bring them into alliance with the proletariat.”

(January 2, 1923, Selected Works, IX, 488.)