Paradigms of Eighteenth-Century Russian Education, or is It Time to Move beyond Secularization?

Abstract

This essay considers the evolution of the historiography of eighteenth-century Russian education, emphasizing recent shifts in the dominant paradigm of secularization. It identifies three wide vectors (1) the place of the state as prime institution builder; (2) the pace of standardization; (3) the problem of “reflexivity,” or laying bare the assumptions underlying scholarly narratives. The paradigm of secularization overlooks crucial aspects of Russian education in the eighteenth century, but recent scholarship implicitly challenges long-standing templates.

Notes

1 Literacy texts and the languages of literacy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have occupied a large place in my own scholarship, dating back to the 1980s. I am pleased to see that it remains a topic of scholarly interest, as reflected in the works of Olga Kosheleva, Ekaterina Kislova, and Maria-Cristina Bragone, several of which are cited in this paper, among others.

2 I should note in passing that for all their challenges to convention, all of these studies un-reflectively reproduce the most traditional geography of the Enlightenment, with a border that ends somewhere around the Oder River, maybe at times inching toward the Vistula. But, sadly if predictably, the East Slavic/Ruthenian/ Russian/Orthodox world does not make it onto their radars. Some boundaries, alas, never seem to fall away.

3 Although intellectual history per se falls well outside the parameters of an essay on education history let me note that there are clear and welcome signs that the discussion of religious discourses within the Russian Enlightenment is gaining depths, with Zorin’s book as one outstanding example. Here and there one even sees the spark of debate and impatience, as in Konstantine Bugrov’s recent review of Hamburg (Bugrov, 2017, p. 710).

4 Together and separately, Uspenskii and Zhivov produced dozens of works on the topic, many of which were subsequently collected and translated into various languages including English. In memoriam, Ernst Zitser assembled a complete bibliography of Zhivov’s writings in 2014 in the journal Vivliofika (Zitser, 2014).

5 As Kosheleva and others have noted, the Russian word `shkola’, which today translates directly as `school’, had a different meaning in Muscovy, one that did not imply the presence of physical classrooms (of which there were almost none before 1680). Instead, it meant a site of learning or study, implying a master-apprentice relationship, involving one or a handful of learners, or `apprentices.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gary Marker

Gary Marker is Professor of History at State University of New York (USA). His area of specialization is early modern Russia and his research interests include print culture, history of education, gender, and rekigious discourses.