Anton Semyonovitch Makarenko(1888-1939), who was little known in the non-communist countries, occupies an important place in the history of Soviet education. From an obscuere post as director of a Ukrainian colony of juvenile delinquents, he rose to national celebrity both as an educator and as a writer. Not long before his death he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for outstanding literary achievement ; and the following year the Party Central Committee commemorated his services to Soviet education. Makarenko's writings have since inspired a larger number of articles, doctoral theses, and books in the USSR. Nearly all textbooks now used in Russian teachers colleges contain references to and appreciations of his works, and there is hardly a Soviet teacher today who is unfamiliar with it. An institute devoted to research on Makarenko has been established at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Some of his work forms part of Soviet export to the countries of eastern and central Europe whose educational systems have become replicas of the Soviet education. These facts are sufficient to show the official standing of Makarenko's work and to suggest its importance in contemporary Soviet educational theory. This study proceeds directly to an analysis of Makarenko's philosophy. Of central importance is the concept of education in and for the collectivism. The first requirement of communist morality, as he conceived it, was to make every individual a participant in the youth collective so that his feelings, his aspirations, and his conduct would become representative of it. In Makarenko's view the collective provided the individual with nothing less than a character and a role to play in the socialist society. Third, the successful guidance of moral growth requires teachers who have learned how to use education as a practical science. What he really wanted was to engineer personality formation: what means to employ to obtain the desired results, how to guage emotional reactions to certain measures, and how to convert individual energies into socially desirable works. Fourth, attention may be called to Makarenko's sense of the mean. This is as much an aesthetic as a moral component of his thought, and manifest itself in various ways. Children should be neither the recipients of blind affection nor the object of harsh oppression, but should learn to feel the firmness of reasonable authority. Discipline is preferable to mere obedience because it is capable of becoming self-discipline conscious of its own utility and meaning. T o educate people, to Makarenko, is to teach them to live in the socialist society, and such a life is a balance of learning, productive work, self-government, and group works.