General education schools of Pacific Russia in the context of the reform of 1864

This article is devoted to an aspect of the history of education in the Pacific Russia region that has not been studied in Russian historiography – the reform of the general education school in 1864. The appeal to the historical experience of reforming the education system is determined by the active rethinking of the results of the school reform carried out in modern Russia. The retrospective view of this problem confirms the relevance of our research. The reform of the secondary school was an integral part of the modernization processes that took place after the abolition of serfdom. The reform gave impetus to the growth of the educational network, including the appearance of the first women's and men's secondary schools in Pacific Russia, as well as an increase in the number of students in primary public schools, comparable to the schools of the Ministry of Public Education. The opening of 427 new schools in the region is an undoubted success of the reform, which was achieved thanks to the consensus between the government and society. In the course of the study, the author identified at least three regional programs aimed at modernizing the education system in Eastern Siberia, including the Pacific Russia region. In the 1860s, along with the state authorities, such as regional and regional administrators and zemstvo authorities, the subjects of educational policy were Cossack and rural societies, church parishes, merchants and other entrepreneurs. Private initiatives played a crucial role in the reform, actively promoting school construction. At the same time, the vast majority of primary schools in the south of the region were opened on the initiative of the Cossacks. In the north-east of Pacific Russia, the leading position during the reform was occupied by the Russian Orthodox Church. It was the clergy who initiated the opening of rural parochial schools, stood at the origins of general education for the indigenous peoples of the region and adapted the methodology of bilingualism in the teaching process in national schools. Some reduction in the network of schools, recorded in the late 1860s, was associated with the sale of the territory of Russian America, as a result of which the region lost some of its educational institutions. The connection with the dependence on internal and external migrations associated with the specifics of the development of the territories of Pacific Russia, which played a dual role in school construction, is traced.