Kungur Grammar School: Composition of Students and Their Fate (1736–1740)

Abstract

This article is based on a set of archive documents introduced into scientific circulation, and comparative analysis of census data, as well as student’s progress reports. The paper is the first to reconstruct the organization and activities of the Kungur word school, about which nothing is known in the literature. The author reveals a special position of this educational institution, initiated by V. N. Tatishchev, in the system of Mining authorities’ schools. It was the only school acting in a town rather than in a factory settlement, that subordinated not to the factory office, but to the Perm Zemstvo. The school was distinguished by a special social structure of its pupils, children of clerks, priests and churchmen who lived in the territory of the Kungur district. While the children of factory workers, who constituted the majority in mining schools, began their school education with the alphabet with a rare exception, 60 % of the Kungur school pupils were taught to read and write at home. The peculiarity of enrollment to this school was a high proportion of young men from 15 to 20 years old. Only in this school the students did not receive any state salary. Most of them were taken from villages and forts of the Kungur district, and all the students, including orphans, studied away from home without any support from the Mining authorities. Meanwhile both clergy and clerks could assign their sons to the service at their own will, rather than at the behest of the authorities. At the same time the Chancellery of the Chief Mining Authorities tried to control the assignment of apprentices. It sent the Kungur schoolchildren to enter the German and Latin schools in Ekaterinburg, so it was not earlier than 1740 that pupils in Kungur began learning arithmetic. The author managed to determine the fate of most of the students from that school: the number of those dismissed to the Vyatka Bishop’s school in 1736, and those transferred to the German and Latin schools of Ekaterinburg and also them who continued their studies at the Kungur Arithmetic school and were assigned to the Perm Land Office and Perm Provincial Office. The school ceased to operate in 1740 as a result of prohibition to teach the children of clergy in mining schools, received from the Governing Synod and the General-Berg Direktorium. Further research is needed to discover the fate of the last six pupils who remained in the school after the dismissal and sending to Vyatka Bishop’s school 15 clergy children in 1740.

Keywords

• v. n. tatishchev
• the urals
• mining schools
• kungur grammar school
• composition of students
• fate of students