Education in the «world» of large agrarians of Ukrainian provinces at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries

Abstract

The article is concerned with research of one of the major elements of vital space of large landowners of Ukraine – education. The sources of the research are office documents and memorials of large landowners. The novelty of the analysis lies in the focus on the educational component of the everyday practices of large farmers in the Ukrainian provinces. The study is based on the principles of scientific objectivity and historicism, general scientific (heuristic, analysis and synthesis, generalization) and special historical (historical and typological, historical and genetic) methods, and the key provisions of the modernization concept.

The factor of education had been traced in two dimensions – as the element of raising children in the families of large farmers and in the context of charitable and philanthropic activities, which in the period of the late 19 - early 20 centuries acquired high social significance. In this way, the author traces the influence of family traditions on the behaviour of representatives of new generations of wealthy farmers under conditions of modernization breach, when education was turning from an exceptional phenomenon into a compulsory one. Educational practices are analyzed using the examples of landowning families, such as Halahany’s, Myklashevsky’s, Skoropadkyi’s, Tershchenko’s, Hrokholskyi’s and others. It has been determined that at the early stage, private teachers were invited to the families of these children, who provided general training. Later, the boys received a gymnasium education - either full-time or external – and then entered universities, both Russian and Western European. Being educated and understanding the need to raise the overall intellectual level of the society in which they have lived, representatives of landowning families made a significant contribution to the development of the educational network.