Mariinskaya Gymnasium for Girls
From saving girls’ education to one of the best local schools
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Keeping up
with the times
From the vault
On September 19, 1859, the school warden told the principal: “Conceived by the Irbit City Society, a noble cause has been accomplished, with the opening on the 17th day of this month of a girl’s school, to great fanfare.”
In the mid-19th century, there were three times as many boys as there were girls studying in the Perm Province. However, the way people viewed female education gradually changed
The movement for equal rights in education crystallized with the transition to newer social practices. This sentiment became especially apparent in Irbit, home to one of the largest trade fairs in the Russian Empire.
General layout of the fair in Irbit
Carousel during Irbit fair
Square in front of Passage during the fair
Merchant center. Opening of the fair
Irbit during the fair
No place
to study
Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak about Irbit
“A big village most of the time, Irbit would become a magnet for people of many countries, ethnic backgrounds, languages and religions during the fair. Anyone who came here was swept up by this powerful wave. Eager to make a profit, all kinds of people would come here, but this diverse crowd with all its languages and cultures could easily understand each other’s interests, needs and aspirations…”
There were many challenges at first
Low pay for teachers, poor teaching skills, and ignorance of basic rules of behavior among teachers, educators and students alike. But the biggest challenge was that the classroom space was literally unusable. It was a damp, unheated barrack that merchants rented during the fair to store their goods. The district’s inspector for education sounded the alarm. While the city council was slow to get things moving, it finally supported the project. The authorities and the local merchants came up with the funds to save the school.
Yekaterinburg merchants - participants of Irbit fair in 1894
Irbit merchant Alexander Stepanovich Stikhin
Irbit merchants
Saving
ordinary female students
Rules
for female students
Female students shall attend public church services on Sundays and on other holidays when there are no classes, as well as go to church on the evenings before these days.
Female students shall stand up straight when answering a teacher, no matter how briefly.
Only Russian shall be spoken while on the school premises.
It started with the faculty. From the 1880s onwards, the school employed only highly educated teaching staff and managers from the capital
Initially designed to offer only three years of education, known as a pro-gymnasium, the school turned into a full gymnasium with seven grades. Three years of studies gave the girls little opportunities: unable to find jobs, they were confined to being housewives and sometimes even became prostitutes.
The city wanted a better future for its girls and did everything to get the necessary approvals by the early 20th century.
Students of Mariinsk Female Gymnasium
Gymnasium student Vera Yevgenyevna Ikonnikova
Students at the classes
A new building for an upgraded school
The girls’ gymnasium needed a new building. Yuly Dyutel, an architect from St. Petersburg, was invited to build it.
Yuliy Osipovich Dutel
Read about him
The solution he offered was quite unusual: to combine Russia’s traditional gingerbread-style architecture with the brick style that was popular at the time and came from Northern Germany and Italy where buildings had exposed brick fronts instead of plastered facades.
German architectural style inspired the founders of the Gymnasium
German architectural style, which was taken for the Gymnasium
View on map
It took two years, until 1883, to build the two-story school stretching along Permskaya Street (now 37 Karla Marksa Street) in central Irbit.
Education
as a trend
It took the school 20 years to expand its curriculum from a three-year program to seven grades. In 1903, the school changed its status from a pro-gymnasium with three grades to a gymnasium offering seven grades, and added an eighth grade in 1904 for training teachers, enabling its graduates to obtain a degree in teaching. That attracted more students, with their number growing from several dozen in the 1880s to almost 400 by 1913.
Konstantin Belavin made a great contribution to improving the curriculum by recruiting the best educators and purchasing equipment
It took the school 20 years to expand its curriculum from a three-year program to seven grades
In 1903, the school changed its status from a pro-gymnasium with three grades to a gymnasium offering seven grades, and added an eighth grade in 1904 for training teachers, enabling its graduates to obtain a degree in teaching. That attracted more students, with their number growing from several dozen in the 1880s to almost 400 by 1913.
Konstantin Belavin made a great contribution to improving the curriculum by recruiting the best educators and purchasing equipment
Seventy percent of the graduates became teachers in rural schools. Apart from training teachers, the city council wanted the school to offer eighth-grade students a general course that would allow them to enroll in universities and master other subjects. But the 1917 upheavals upended those plans.
Konstantin Alexandrovich Belavin
Read about him
Seventy percent of the graduates became teachers in rural schools. Apart from training teachers, the city council wanted the school to offer eighth-grade students a general course that would allow them to enroll in universities and master other subjects. But the 1917 upheavals upended those plans.
Takeaway
The city found a way to keep the school running and develop it. By learning from its own mistakes, soliciting donors and recruiting professional teachers, the gymnasium emerged as one of the best educational institutions in the Perm Province.
Irbitsky
Passage
The heart and soul
of Irbit’s trade
of Irbit’s trade
