Agricultural Educational Institutions of Steppe Tavriya of the end of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Centuries

Abstract

The development of agrarian education in the southern Ukrainian region is still among the understudied topics, since there has not been done a comprehensive and sufficiently complete study nowadays, and the available researches are fragmentary and leave a significant number of gaps to the historical studies. The purpose of the research is to highlight the agricultural education formation of the Ukrainian peasantry in Steppe Tavriya, to determine the role of educational institutions of an agricultural profile in the education system of the region. The methodology of the research is based on a positivist approach to the reconstruction of the historical past using special historical methods: chronological, systematic, and historical comparative. The scientific novelty of the article consists in the coverage of the pre-Soviet history of an agricultural education of the Ukrainian peasantry of Steppe Tavriya through the prism of educational institutions establishment, their financing, the formation of ideas about student and teacher teams, which testified to the peasant nature of agricultural education in the region. The Conclusions. The local self-government bodies and private initiative played a key role in the development of educational institutions of an agrarian profile in the lands of Steppe Tavriya. Owing to their energy on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries two leading agricultural schools appeared, which trained agricultural specialists until the beginning of the 21st century – the Obitochenska and the Lukianivska lower agricultural schools of the 1st category. These schools can be called “peasant” schools, because 2/3 of their student contingent consisted of peasants from surrounding counties, who wanted to escape from the shackles of not large plots of land and hopelessness. Free education, availability of scholarship programmes for a full board and the support of local patrons attracted even the poorest peasant youth to study there. On the other hand, the requirement to study agricultural science, a large share of a practical component in education, working in the field without days off led to the fact that only a third completed their studies (25% of the entrants of the Lukianivska school, and 39% of the Obitochenska school).