"Bursa", "ShkID" or where our ancestors studied

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

High school is such a familiar place that it seems that it has always been the same as it is now: with spacious classrooms, a clear timetable, calls and changes. Therefore, in literature lessons, we were often perplexed by the names of institutions in which the characters of classic books studied.

We decided to collect the most interesting old schools and tell what it is and who studied there.

Bursa

- And turn around, son! How funny you are! What are these priests' cassocks on you? And that is how everyone goes to the academy? - With these words old Bulba greeted his two sons, who had studied at the Kiev school and had come home to their father. Nikolay Gogol "Taras Bulba"

Among the heroes of Nikolai Gogol, there are several students of the Bursa at once, the most famous of them are Khoma Brut ("Viy") and the brothers Ostap and Andriy ("Taras Bulba"). In the introduction to Viy, the author gives a colorful description of the Kiev Academy, where the cold war of seminarians and students has not stopped for several generations. But who are the Bursaks and how did they differ from their comrades in misfortune?

In the pre-revolutionary education system, this was the name given to the students of theological schools who were at full board. Consequently, a bursa is the same seminary, but with a hostel. Theology, rhetoric and philosophy were studied here. The position of the Bursaks was unenviable. Due to scarce funding, the students lived in difficult unsanitary conditions, where they often starved and worn out rags.

All this learned people, both the seminary and the bursa, who harbored some kind of hereditary enmity with each other, were extremely poor in means of food and, moreover, unusually gluttonous; so to count how many dumplings each of them ate at the supper would be an absolutely impossible task; and therefore the voluptuous donations of wealthy owners could not be sufficient. Nikolay Gogol "Viy"

The students had several ways to improve their financial situation: donations, which Gogol writes about, teaching children and performing with church hymns and booths on religious holidays. To earn more money, the Bursaks wandered from farm to farm. During one of these trips, Homa Brut met the little lady.

Lyceum

Bless, jubilant muse, / Bless: long live the lyceum! / To the Mentors who kept our youth, / To all honor, both the dead and the living, / Raising a grateful cup to our lips, / Not remembering evil, we will reward for the good. Alexander Pushkin "October 19"

Most modern lyceums specialize in precision subjects. And this has nothing to do with those educational institutions to which the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, praised by Pushkin, once belonged.

The project of a school for future enlightened officials was developed by Mikhail Speransky at the very beginning of the 19th century. Initially, not only noble children, but also the Grand Dukes Nikolai and Mikhail Pavlovich were supposed to study in Tsarskoe Selo. After the fall of Speransky, Alexander I did not allow his younger brothers to enter the lyceum, but did not touch either the educational institution's program or the funding that was planned to be allocated for its maintenance. Students studied various disciplines, ranging from "moral" (God's law, ethics, political economy) to the exact sciences (mathematics, statistics, physics and cosmography), this list also included courses in fencing, horse riding and swimming.

In addition to Tsarskoye Selo, there were seven other lyceums of this type in Russia, in many of them education was equated to university.

Institute for Noble Maidens

Two days passed, and the institute's life returned to its former rut. Days and weeks dragged on, extremely monotonous. It came today, similar as two peas to yesterday.

Classes went on in the same order. The screaming voice of the inspector and the incessant "sawing" of Pugach inspired a terrible melancholy. I took up the books with a fervor bordering on soreness. Lydia Charskaya "Schoolgirl Notes"

The full name of these educational institutions is the Closed Women's Institutions of the Department of Institutions of the Empress Maria. Unlike the same students, schoolgirls are associated with good manners, calmness and a carefree life. It seems all the more surprising that girls of the privileged class and rich bourgeois women were brought up as harshly as boys. Of course, none of them wore rags, on the contrary, the students of such institutions were famous for their neatness in their clothes, but a meager diet, poorly heated rooms and ice-cold water for washing made the life of the students very, very difficult.

In education, the bias was made on languages and etiquette. Corporal punishment was not accepted, but various kinds of psychological pressure were encouraged: boycotts and public humiliation of the offender. Girls existed in a very small, closed society, where there was simply no reason for emotions. In order to somehow remedy this situation, the schoolgirls came up with a tradition of adoration, the objects of which were senior students and teachers.

Shkid

Teenagers were gathered everywhere. They were taken from "normal" orphanages, from prisons, from distribution centers, from exhausted parents and from police stations, where they brought motley homeless children straight from a raid in dens. The commission at the gubo sorted out these "defective", or "difficult to educate", as they called then the guys spoiled by the street, and from there this motley crowd was distributed to new houses.

This is how a special network of orphanages-schools appeared, in the ranks of which was the newly baked Dostoevsky School of Social-Individual Education, later reduced by its defective inhabitants into the sonorous "Shkid". Grigory Belykh and L. Panteleev "Republic of ShKID"

The Dostoevsky School for the Difficult was opened in 1920, when gangs of street children were active in the country, and became one of dozens of educational institutions where former juvenile bandits were brought up. However, at the origins of the famous "Shkida" were teachers Viktor Nikolaevich Soroka-Rosinsky and his wife Ella Andreevna Lumberg, who made the school at 19 Staro-Peterhof Avenue unique.

Despite the difficult contingent of students, Soroka-Rosinsky introduced a system of self-government, practiced punishment, but did not stoop to the rod, and considered play the most important part of raising a child. An individual approach here was more of a necessity than a fashionable novelty: both those who could barely read at the age of fifteen and those who were fluent in one or two European languages got into the “Shkid”. The establishment and existence of the school was like an obstacle course.

Of the sixty teachers who worked at Skida at different times, only ten stayed here for a long time. But the efforts of these people paid off: among the graduates of the school were engineers, writers and directors.