EDUCATIONAL CURIOSITIES IN RUSSIA

Evening Star, Issue 12551, 8 July 1905, Page 12

EDUCATIONAL CURIOSITIES IN RUSSIA

The views of the Russian Government ' upon education, as gathered from their consistent line of action for centuries past, are plainly that it is nothing more than a necessary evil, to be limited in quantity and carefully strained in quality. It is a penal offence to open a school in Russia unless anu until ail the proper authorisations have been duly sought, at consider- ! able expense in fees, legitimate and otherwise, and obtained in the course of time, the period varying irom one to five or seven years, according to the amount of influence brought to bear upon the Ministries concerned. Men are sent to exile annually lor teacning the alphabet and rudi- ! ments to country children without being duly licensed for that purpose. Those who are licensed to teach become less ministers of lea-ming than servants of the bureaucracy, bound in on all sides by i " programmes " and " prescriptions " and other formidable documents, bidding the teacher inculcate only the amount and quality of knowledge which is considered likely to produce " politically-promising " pupils. " Politically promising" is a word which defies translation, but its meaning is early made plain to the Russian. To the English reader it may be explained as " unquestioning submission to anything and everything " ; the least attempt at open expression of dissatisfaction with the whims and injustice of any official in this land of uniforms suffices to mark the incautious as " politically unpromis-

ing," and the " offender" thenceforwa. - ' enters upon the path which ends in the convict gaol or the long Siberian road. Education—or, as it is called in Rir■■•:•■!•. " national enlightenment"—there i' -1 ■ ..> primarily at effecting a comprunr tween the demands of the peypl.- tor, knowledge and the fears of the Government as to what may result if knowledge become unrestricted. University professors are not permitted to venture beyond certain strictly defined limits in exnounding the history or ~*a | literature of any nations, ancient or modj em, which rank as free. The luswry of Russia is carefully "pruned of all the I most interesting portions, and the first j thing a Russian student does when he , gets beyond the frontier of his country ' is to lay hands upon all the foreign books he can fino. whioh tell him wnat he has been kept ignorant of about the real lines of development—or the want oj development—of his native land. The number of professors who have lost their chairs, have been confined in secret monastery prisons, and have gone into exile or escaped abroad for serving the cause of learning in defiance of the petty restrictions of the " Ministry of Public Enlightenment " may be counted by scores. England and America know something of the best of them to-uay, and Frsunoe has ] long been a home to exiled tiussian intellects. Greek, the literature which has ' formed the greatest statesmen of all the : ages in every country of Europe, is an especial bugbear of tne powers of " En- , Lightenment." ' A former Minister of Enlightenment ] gave away the views of the bureaucracy ! during one of the periodical crusades j against Greek when he officially declared i. that the "study of the literature of thej free political communities of Greece was prejudiciaJ to the interests of the Russian State," and Greek was for the time , abolished. Russia is not, of course, with- ; out her fair share of men of genius, but the consistent policy of the " Ministry of E/ilightenment" is such that the only Russian names known to the learning of the world at large are those of chemists, astronomers, and mathematicians—one of each, to be accurate. These subjects are beyond the ken of the political police, and their professors are less hampered than all others. If this is the state of things in the universities, it may be imagined that matters are bad beyond account in the lower ranks of " Enlightenment." A famous " prescription," or circular order, i emanating from this Ministry of Enlightenment some years ago, is still in force, though probably entirely disregarded in practice under the pressure of public opinion to-day. It gave orders that the teachers in the common schools were bo confine the study of the art of reading to the "mechanical practice" o! it. In other words, the children were to be i-aught their letters, and to produce the sounds arising from a combination of letters, but no attempt whatever was to be made to explain the meaning of anything read. For years after the issue of this remarkable " prescription " children were passed as " literate" who could read any word at sight with tolerable fluency, but had never the ghost of a notion as to the • meaning of what they read. It naturally liecame the -ractioe to pick out long and formidable-lookine words, and often these i were strung together in any order without I connection or sense. In the statistics | and reports of inspectors prodigies who could pabble thronjrh the list of senseless sesquipedalian monstrosities were accorded all the privileges of uie " literate," pro-

' viding, of course, that they were well up i in the equally unconscious repetition of I the prescribed church prayers. A very great deal of the common-school education in Russia_ to-day is not veary much better than ttiia. I !*<-~res, perhaps hundreds, of schools I only exist on paper, and until the Zemat-1 vos took up the cause of national educa- j tion with vigor there was hardly any \ teaching worthy of the name anywhere in ' Russia outside the capital and principal towns of uie Empire. Occasionally an honest report of the actual condition of things finds its wav into print, and we hear of schools whose teachers are utterly illiterate, of schools consisting of four bare walls, without books, slates, or any other " properties. Here is a recent rather telling summary of the .situation, which I have attempted to render, though with considerable loss of the original force, into English. It should be noted that a Ministerial Circular enjoins the removal of the headgear on entering any of the neat haunts of the Russian Bacchus who contributes one quarter of the national income. Of this total income a little over 2 per cent, is expended by the Ministry of Enlightenment in the "education" of the nation. Of fence there's scarce a trace remains, The house is ruinous, broken panes. Cracked door-frames welcome frosty Yule : And that's the village school! A neat new house, gay, sunny, briorht, With garden in front—a scene of delight : Hats off!—" Good day, just give us a drop!" That's the Drink Mpnonoly Shop ! —' Evening Standard.'