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At the origins of the system of extracurricular activities in technical universities in Russia. Extracurricular work with students of the Navigation School in 1701-1705.

Kleitman Aleksandr Leonidovich

Doctor of History

Leading Researcher, The Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology named after S.I. Vavilov of the Russian Academy of Sciences

125315, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Baltiyskaya str., 14

malk@bk.ru
Other publications by this author
 

 
Savka Ol'ga Gennad'evna

PhD in History

Associate Professor; Department of Document Science, History of State and Law; RTU MIREA

86 Vernadsky ave., c2, Moscow, 119454, Russia

olga-savka@mail.ru
Other publications by this author
 

 

DOI:

10.7256/2454-0609.2024.3.70084

EDN:

KAXDVW

Received:

08-03-2024


Published:

12-06-2024


Abstract: The subject of the study is the initial stage of the history of the School of Mathematical and Navigation Sciences as one of the first Russian secular technical educational institutions. Attention is focused on those aspects of the formation of the School that had not previously been the subject of special research by historians. Based on the complex of documents of the Armory Chamber identified and introduced into scientific circulation, it is analyzed which disciplinary and offenses the first students of the school committed and why. Analyzing the specific court proceedings conducted in the Armory Chamber on the fact of these violations, the authors show how extracurricular and educational work with students was organized. The role of Leonty Magnitsky, an outstanding Russian scientist, mathematician, author of the first fundamental work on arithmetic, in organizing educational work with navigation students, is being clarified.   The research was carried out using traditional methods for historical research, special attention was paid to the identification and introduction into scientific circulation of clerical sources on the chosen topic. As the study showed, the students of the School of Mathematical and Navigation Sciences came from various estates and regions of the Russian state. Once in Moscow, many of them found themselves in a social environment that was not familiar to them, faced temptations that were difficult for them to resist. In this regard, the teachers of the School, and first of all Leonty Magnitsky, paid great attention to educational work among students. An active group of schoolchildren was formed, who, on the instructions of teachers, monitored the behavior of their comrades. For the revealed violations, the perpetrators were severely punished in public. Extracurricular work contributed to the formation of a unified system of values, instilling interest in learning, instilling discipline, and eliminating vices among students. It has become an important factor in achieving the main goal for which the School was established: to train navigation specialists necessary to create a navy in Russia in the shortest possible time.


Keywords:

Peter I, Navigation school, Leonty Magnitsky, history of science, history of education, Moscow, Peter's era, Nikolay Durov, Armory Chamber, Extracurricular activities

This article is automatically translated. You can find original text of the article here.

The School of Mathematical and Navigation Sciences is one of the first Russian educational institutions of a technical profile. It acquired institutional design after the signing of the decree of Peter I of January 14, 1701 on the establishment of a school [2, pp. 119-120], but before that, preparatory work was carried out for several months to open an educational institution. The school was under the jurisdiction of the Armory, which was headed by Fyodor Alekseevich Golovin. The de facto head of the school was the clerk Alexey Alexandrovich Kurbatov [8, pp. 117-118]. Andrei Farkhvarson, a Scot, a graduate of the University of Aberdeen, who was accepted into the royal service in 1698, during the Great Embassy, was responsible for organizing the educational process. Navigation sciences were taught by young Englishmen Stephen Gwyn and Richard Grace (Knight of the Gnaw) [1, p. 9]. Leonty Magnitsky, the author of the first fundamental textbook on arithmetic, published in Russian, played a major role in the organization of the school [6]. In 1701-1753 . The navigation school worked in Moscow, in the building of the Sukharevskaya Tower. In 1715, most of the students and teachers were transferred to St. Petersburg, thus marking the beginning of another educational institution - the Maritime Academy [5]. Several modern leading higher technical educational institutions in Russia trace their history back to the beginning of the XVIII century, being the successors The Navigation School and the Maritime Academy.

The history of the Navigation School began to attract the attention of researchers in the XVIII century, and to date, attention to this topic has not weakened. F.F. Veselago, S.I. Elagin, A.S. Krotkov (XIX – early XX centuries), N.I. Barbashev, L.G. Beskrovny, A.P. Denisov, O.A. Evteev, V.K. Sergeev, A.E. Suknovalov (Soviet period), V.N. Bendu, D.Yu. Guzevich, I.G. Durov, D.O. Serov, I.I. Fedyukin, N.G. Yurkin (modern researchers). Despite the fact that the history of the Navigation School has been studied for almost three centuries, there are quite a lot of unexplored aspects and white spots in it. So, until recently, there were practically no attempts to consider the history of the school in the early years of its existence from the standpoint of social history and the history of everyday life [9].

In the course of archival research, we were able to identify a source containing unique information about the initial period of the formation of the Navigation School, which the researchers could not reconstruct on the basis of other documents. In the personal fund of Professor of the Institute of Railway Engineers Nikolai Pavlovich Durov (1831-1879), who was also a famous bibliophile and collector of ancient books and manuscripts [4], an archive file with documents of the Armory Chamber compiled in the early years of the XVIII century and directly related to the organizational design of the school has been preserved. In general, we were able to reconstruct the history of the existence of this manuscript [3], and we are currently finalizing its preparation for publication.

The documents of this complex can be divided into four parts: 1) petitions of 1702-1705, which were submitted by future navigation students to the Armory, asking to enroll them in school; 2) documents on the organization of the educational process (denunciations of Leonty Magnitsky, who applied to the Armory to solve organizational and technical problems; petitions of students for vacations, etc.); 3) documents of court proceedings that were conducted in The Armory Chamber, when third parties violated the rights of students (insults, beatings, theft, etc.); 4) materials of court proceedings, when the students of the school themselves acted as violators of public order.

These documents allow us to shed light on how, in the first months and years of the existence of one of the first secular technical educational institutions, the problem of motivating students to acquire knowledge was solved, work was carried out to prevent violations of academic discipline and law and order, and the formation of a single team of students united by common ideals and values.

As the documents we are introducing into scientific circulation show, Leonty Magnitsky was the main organizer of extracurricular work with schoolchildren. Richard Grace and Stephen Gwyn also took some part, however, contemporaries controversially assessed their moral qualities, lifestyle and the role they could play in the education of schoolchildren.

One of the areas of extracurricular work was monitoring how students spent their leisure time, where they were and what they did at night. There was a need for this, because in the first months of the school's operation, schoolchildren lived in different inns in Pankratievskaya, Meshchanskaya, Spasskaya and Troitskaya settlements. There were many temptations for young people, many of whom were not Muscovites, who came to the capital specifically to enroll in school. Documents from the N.P. Durov Foundation mention several times "circles" (drinking establishments) where gambling was played, courtyards where wine was traded and "jugs for prodigal theft" were kept. In order for the students not to be distracted from the educational process, several students walked at night through the inns where their comrades lived, and checked that they were at home and did not leave anywhere. During one of these rounds in November 1703, an incident occurred that led to a trial in the Armory. Student Stepan Markov found out that several schoolchildren spend nights in the courtyard in the Meshchanskaya Sloboda, where the dragoon wife Maria Artemyeva lived. Arriving there "at about four o'clock in the morning," he found three students – Peter Rameikov, Prokofy Dunaev and Semyon, who were "drinking tobacco." As Maria Artemyeva testified in the Armory, having come to her yard, the inspector Stepan Markov began to dishonor her and her mother, the widow Marfa, who was there, with "abusive swear words" and began to beat "Malov" her (son) Titus. As the injured women explained, there was nothing reprehensible in the fact that the students spent time in their yard. One of them (Pyotr Rameykov) was Maria Artemyeva's cousin, the second (Prokofy Dunaev) came so that Maria's mother would find him a bride, and the third (Semyon Kolchugin) did not come to her, but to the owner of the inn, because he asked him to make an inscription on the gate about the sale of this yard. It is impossible to determine how this particular episode ended on the basis of documents that have survived to our time. Giving explanations about this incident, the teacher Leonty Magnitsky noted that he really gave Stepan Markov a painting of the courtyards where the students lived so that he would go around them at night. Before that, there had already been cases when schoolchildren were caught at night for various "outrages". For this, "according to school custom" they were punished, and henceforth they were forbidden to walk around the city at night, "except in great blessed need and then with the knowledge of whom they were ordered" [7, l. 177-183].

Close attention was paid to ensuring that students did not drop out of school, disappointed in it. There were several documented cases when students "fell behind from school", returned to the cities from where they were from, to the kind of occupation that they used to lead. Such violations were considered very serious and entailed severe penalties.

So, for example, on August 11, 1703, Leonty Magnitsky informed the Armory that the student Afanasy Belonosov, who received a salary for his studies, also "cunningly took money from the students", fled Moscow, and soon appeared in Novgorod at the town hall in the clerks. A decree was sent from the Armory to the Novgorod governor, Y.V. Bruce, so that the runaway student would be caught and chained up accompanied by an armed convoy to Moscow. The money that Afanasy Belonosov received in the form of a salary for his studies, as well as those he borrowed from other students, had to be collected from him, and if he did not have the necessary amount, from his relatives or those people with whom he lived in Novgorod [7, L. 144-147].

Another student, Lev Ivanov, after studying for five months, stopped going to school after Easter 1703. When he was found and interrogated in early July of the same year, he gave a childish explanation for his absenteeism: "That de school student Yerofey Sukhanov told him, Lv, that you would not be given a salary, and for what, he did not tell him." The head of the Armory, F.A. Golovin, ordered other students to punish him before school and send him to Voronezh as a sailor. A negligent schoolboy beat his forehead, asked to be left in Moscow, because he had an old sick mother, whom, if she died, there would be no one to bury. As a result, the case was limited to merciless batogami beating in front of school, and the direction of Lev Ivanov back to study [7, l. 152-157 vol.].   

As the materials of the trials conducted at the Armory show, admission to study and consent to receive feed money was considered as an obligation for students not just to attend classes, but to complete their education and master the sciences taught. School absences due to illness were allowed. However, in case of termination of training due to an incurable disease, the student must return all the feed money received. For example, on September 13, 1703, Mikhail Ivanov, a student, addressed the Armory with a petition. He enrolled in school, studied for several months and fell ill. Since there was no healing, and he could not study further due to his health condition, he asked to be released from further education. Leonty Magnitsky was instructed to examine the student and confirm whether he was really ill. The arithmetic teacher confirmed: "That schoolboy is sick, and there are scabs on his face and all over his body with pus." Apparently, an equally important problem was not the fact of the disease itself, but the attitude of other students towards the sick person: "According to those signs, it means that the word is not clean." According to this incident, F.A. Golovin decided to release Mikhail Ivanov from further studies, forcing him to return all the feed money he had previously received: 15 rubles, 2 altyn and 2 money, as well as an arithmetic textbook [7, l. 158-160 vol.].

A significant part of the documents deposited in the personal fund of Professor N.P. Durov are devoted not to disciplinary violations, but to crimes committed by students in the first months of the Navigation School. The most common offense was theft.

Several episodes of thefts were explained by the difficult financial situation of schoolchildren. Not all of them received feed money. So, for example, Semyon Golosov, Pyotr Zabusov and Lev Golos at the end of September helped one person clean up after a fire and stole flour from him "a quarter of a grain and another melkov borashnya" [7, l. 161-161 vol.]. Another schoolboy who found out about this informed Leonty Magnitsky, who, in turn, - To the Armory. Fearing punishment, the students returned all the stolen property to the owner. The fact that flour became the subject of the students' criminal attempts testifies to their difficult financial situation.

The defendants in another trial, students Timofey Warriors and Stepan Popov, turned out to be accomplices in a crime – the theft by student Ilya Domashnev of a yard girl, expensive clothes and a large amount of money from his father. Their only participation in this criminal episode was expressed in the fact that, while in a trading bath, they asked the main offender to "share money with them for scarcity." They spent the money they received on clothes: "velvet hats with a gray Trukhmen sheepskin band, a half-coat of kamchaty zholto, a mottled red shirt with a golden golun, a sash of camel rudo zholto color" and silver crosses with chains [7, l. 235 vol.].

Summing up, it should be noted that the creation of the Navigation School entailed serious changes in Moscow and wider Russian society. A new social group of navigation students appeared, whose representatives studied with foreigners invited to Russia personally by the tsar. They studied secular sciences, mastered outlandish devices that were not familiar to Russian people. The students came from various social strata and regions of the Russian state. To unite them, to instill in them common values and behaviors, was not an easy pedagogical task. Already in the first months of the school's operation, much attention was paid to the organization of extracurricular and educational work among students. An active group of schoolchildren was formed, who, on the instructions of teachers, monitored the behavior of their comrades and reported detected offenses. The punishment system was aimed at building students' confidence that misconduct is unacceptable, and retribution for it is inevitable. The punishments were harsh and demonstrative. However, despite the severity of the procedures, both teachers and school leaders delved into the life problems of students, sometimes showed leniency to committed offenses. Extracurricular work contributed to the formation of a unified system of values, instilling interest in learning, instilling discipline, and eliminating vices among students. Educational activities have become an important factor in achieving the main goal for which the school was established: to train navigation specialists necessary to create a navy in Russia within the shortest possible time.

References
1. Benda, V.N. (2009). Activities of military special educational institutions for the training of artillery and engineering personnel in the 18th century: monograph. St. Petersburg: GUAP.
2. Veselago, F.F. (1852). Essay on the history of the Naval Cadet Corps with an appendix of a list of students for 100 years. St. Petersburg: tip. Morsk. kadetsk. korpusa.
3. Klejtman, A.L. (2024) A forgotten source on the history of the School of Mathematical and Navigational Sciences. In Voprosy istorii estestvoznanija i tehniki. (In print).
4. Klejtman, A.L. (2023) Scientist, museum worker and bibliophile Nikolai Pavlovich Durov (1831–1879) and his contribution to the development of the history of science and technology in Russia. In Institut istorii estestvoznanija i tehniki im. S.I. Vavilova. Godichnaja nauchnaja konferencija, 2023. Trudy XXIX Godichnoj nauchnoj konferencii Instituta istorii estestvoznanija i tehniki im. S.I. Vavilova RAN, posvjashhennoj 160 letiju so dnja rozhdenija V.I. Vernadskogo (pp. 192–195). Moscow. 
5. Krotkov, A.S. (1901). Naval Cadet Corps: a brief historical sketch. St. Petersburg: Jekspedicija zagotovlenija gos. bumag.
6. Magnickij, L. (1703). Arithmetic, that is, the science of numbers. Moscow: Sinodal'naja tipografija.
7. NIOR RGB. F. 96. Op. 1. D. 1. Materials of the School of “mathematical and navigational sciences”, which is run by the Armory Chamber.
8. Serov, D., Vidnichuk, A., Zhukovskaja, A., & Fedjukin, I. (Eds.) (2023). Letters and papers of profit-maker Alexei Kurbatov (1700–1720s). Moscow, ID VShJe.
9. Jurkin, N.G. (2019) Professional schools of Peter I: innovation or continuation of traditions. In Intelligencija i mir, 4, 9-30.

Peer Review

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The era of Peter the Great had such a great impact on Russian society that disputes regarding it took place not only in the XIX century, but throughout the past twentieth century. By the way, the transformations of the beginning of the XVIII century laid a serious foundation for the development of science and education. Today, in the context of the increased attention of the Russian state and society to education and science, it seems important to turn to the history of Peter the Great's reforms. These circumstances determine the relevance of the article submitted for review, the subject of which is educational work with students of the Navigation School in 1701-1705. The author sets out to examine the history of the creation of the Navigation School, as well as to analyze extracurricular work with students of this school. The work is based on the principles of analysis and synthesis, reliability, objectivity, the methodological basis of the research is the historical and genetic method, which, according to Academician I.D. Kovalchenko, is based on "consistent disclosure of the properties, functions and changes of the studied reality in the process of its historical movement, which allows us to get as close as possible to reproducing the real history of the object" and its distinctive sides are concreteness and descriptiveness. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the very formulation of the topic: the author, based on various sources, seeks to characterize educational and extracurricular work among students of the Navigation School at the beginning of the XVIII century. Scientific novelty is also determined by the involvement of archival materials. Considering the bibliographic list of the article, its versatility should be noted as a positive point: in total, the list of references includes up to 10 different sources and studies. From the sources attracted by the author, we will point to materials from the funds of the Russian State Library, L. Magnitsky's textbook, etc. Among the studies used, we will point to the works of V.N. Benda and N.G. Yurkin, whose focus is on various aspects of studying the history of vocational schools of the Peter the Great era. Note that the bibliography is important, both from a scientific and educational point of view: after reading the text of the article, readers can turn to other materials on its topic. In general, in our opinion, the integrated use of various sources and research contributed to the solution of the tasks facing the author. In general, in our opinion, the integrated use of various sources and research contributed to the solution of the tasks facing the author. The style of writing the article can be attributed to scientific, at the same time understandable not only to specialists, but also to a wide readership, to everyone who is interested in both the history of the Peter the Great era, in general, and education during that period, in particular. The appeal to the opponents is presented at the level of the collected information received by the author during the work on the topic of the article. The structure of the work is characterized by a certain logic and consistency, it can be distinguished by an introduction, the main part, and conclusion. At the beginning, the author determines the relevance of the topic, shows that "Leonty Magnitsky was the main organizer of extracurricular work with schoolchildren." The paper shows that "one of the areas of extracurricular work was monitoring how students spent their leisure time, where they were and what they did at night." The author shows that "despite the severity of the procedures, both teachers and school leaders delved into the life problems of students, sometimes showed leniency to committed offenses." The work notes that "Extracurricular work contributed to the formation of a unified system of values, instilling interest in learning, instilling discipline, and eliminating vices among students." The main conclusion of the article is that "educational activities have become an important factor in achieving the main goal for which the school was established: to train navigation specialists necessary to create a navy in Russia within the shortest possible time." The article submitted for review is devoted to an urgent topic, will arouse readers' interest, and its materials can be used both in lecture courses on the history of Russia and in various special courses. In general, in our opinion, the article can be recommended for publication in the journal "Historical Journal: Scientific research".