The establishment and activity of Lancasterian schools in Bessarabia in the 1820s-1840s

In the given article the author examines the Lancasterian System of Education established in Bessarabia on May 28, 1823 at the proposal of Count I.A. Kapodistrias. Initially, these schools were opened in Chişinău, Bălţi and Ismail, and later in Bender and Hotin. Education in them was based on a system of mutual learning. The founder of the Lancasterian System of Education was an English teacher Joseph Lancaster, who was teaching poor children without payment. The originality of this system is that its methods do not have a purely religious character; we can say that the teaching of religion was limited to reading the Bible without its interpretation. It should be noted that the mutual education system in Bessarabia was introduced at the behest of Alexander I. To maintain Lancasterian schools in Bessarabia there were spent annually 3780 assignation roubles. But the Lancasterian schools have not received much popularity among the population, and attempts to establish these schools in villages were unsuccessful. At the end of the 1840s some of them, except the Chişinău Lancasterian School, were transformed into preparatory classes of the county gymnasiums, while others merged with the new parochial schools, which started to appear in Bessarabia under the Regulation of parochial schools in 1836.