After 1840 the education of peasants, which included many members of my own family, was required and was equal to our American first through 8th grade in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Quote from: Finelly on August 15, 2005, 12:29:39 PM
.....[in part]....
By 1914, Imperial Russia had 8 million young people enrolled at all educational levels; 112 thousand students were enrolled in ninety-one institutions of higher education; there were reckoned to be 12,586 public libraries in Russia with 8,900,000 volumes; and the daily circulation of newspapers equalled 2,729,000 copies. In 1920, 73 percent of the urban population and 44 percent of the total population (aged nine to forty-nine) were literate. Although the events of World War 1, the revolutions of 1917, foreign interventions, and civil war between Whites and Reds all imposed huge costs in terms of loss of life and property, by 1925 there still remained millions of persons with primary education and hundreds of thousands with secondary education.8 [...in part....].[/i][/b]
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This included boys and girls.
All the officers from our family had educations to the 8th and some higher. All could speak two or more languages.
Here in the US, during that time period, the children were to go to school up to the age of 12. So, there wasn't very much difference in the law.
Although there wasn't a law which stated that Russian factory proprietor send the children whom they employed to school, law did voice that children had the "opportunity" to attend school three hours a day and eighteen hours a week. According to Henri Troyat in DAILY LIFE IN RUSSIA UNDER THE LAST TSAR p. 96: ...the majority of big Russian firms have created educational establishments near their factories, under the ontrol of the Ministry of Public Education. On January 1, 1899 there were 446 schools of this kind in Russia, attended by nearly 50,000 adolesents. "
The municipal authorities of the country schools was part of the "mir". Villages like my German-Russian colonies built schools for primary and secondary levels. Every household paid their share to pay for the teachers as well as their dwellings.., plus they gave them hay for their horse and cow, etc...
Added to this were military schools for the future officers.
The wealthy German-Russian farmers often times sent their children to Germany to universities.
VILLAGE LIFE IN LATE TSARIST RUSSIA by O. S. Tian-Shanskaia p. 44:
>>Ivan is sent off to school when he is ten. "He'll be better paid if he can read and write," say the peasants. Nowadays, in view of wages paid in Moscoe, more and more peasants are endeavoring to have their sons learn reading and writing. They say such thins as: "In Moscow if is more important than here to know ready and writing, and you are judged by your knowledge of it," and "It is harder to cheat a literate person."
p.45 >>Our area has only one state school and some parochial schools. The program of the state school is very comprehensive (two grades, five sections, five years of study), and rarely does anyone finish the school. Their program of the parish schools (one grade for two years, two grades for four years, and a two-year grammar school) is as follows: Catechism, Church Slavic, choir, Russian, country, introduction to geography and Russian history.<<
Many of the German-Russian priests studied in Germany and returned to be in charge of their parochial schools which had teachers who had instruction as well as having graduated from parish schools. According to my family members, they all went the eight years (1-8th).
Boys taken in as apprentices were required to go to school.
The talented student could gain a scholarship and go up the ladder of education...
Of course, the Russian schools were not as good as the Western European school, but Russia was a huge place and difficult to manage.
I remember being surprised when I read the stats on the number of country men and women who had gone the 1-8th were the ones who went off to Moscow and others cities and became the "workers". See THE RUSSIAN WORKER, LIFE AND LABOR UND THE TSARIST REGIME by Victoria E. Bonnell, as Editor. An example, page 207 , Table 5.1. shows:
salescherks who were literate between the ages of 13 to 40 years of age
men 94.5
women 85.5
children 89.5
If a person was older than fifty, the percentage dropped to 65.6.
This book can be a eye opener for some of you.
AGRBear
