Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Peter Kropotkin

Author:Peter Kropotkin [Kropotkin, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: AZ
Publisher: NOLITHO
Published: 2013-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

All Russia wanted technical education, but the Ministry opened only classical gymnasia, because formidable courses of Latin and Greek were considered the best means of preventing the pupils from reading and thinking. In these gymnasia only two or three per cent. of the pupils succeeded in completing an eight years’ course, all boys promising to become something and to show some independence of thought being carefully sifted out before they could reach the last form, and all sorts of measures were taken to reduce the numbers of pupils. Education was considered as a sort of luxury, for the few only. At the same time the Ministry of Education was engaged in a continuous, passionate struggle against all private persons and institutions — district and county councils, municipalities, and the like — which endeavoured to open teachers’ seminaries or technical schools, or even simple primary schools. Technical education — in a country which was so much in want of engineers, educated agriculturists, and geologists — was treated as equivalent to revolutionism. It was prohibited, prosecuted; so that up to the present time, every autumn, something like two or three thousand young men are refused admission to the higher technical schools from mere lack of vacancies. A feeling of despair took possession of all those who wished to do anything useful in public life; while the peasantry were ruined at an appalling rate by overtaxation, and by ‘beating out’ of them the arrears of the taxes by means of semi-military executions, which ruined them for ever. Only those governors of the provinces were in favour at the capital who managed to beat out the taxes in the most severe ways.

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