Educational institutions, curricula and cultural models in the higher education of the nobility and intelligentsia at the turn of the 20th century in Russia

This essay aims to highlight the evolution of higher education reforms in Russia from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th Century. It deals with the political situation when the first Lyceums were founded and the politics of educational reform at that time. It outlines the subjects taught in the Lyceums and other educational institutions in terms of cultural models as well as in relation to the Russian state’s new demands for the running of its administration. Finally, it discusses the distinction which the Russian educational system created between the education of the old nobility and the rising elite. The first part will focus on the educational history of the Russian ruling class of the 19th century: the Saint Petersburg Pauline Jesuit college founded in 1805 and closed in 1815 in the wake of the Jesuits’ expulsion from the Tsarist capital; the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo established in 1810 in Moscow and known as the Imperial Lyceum of Alexandrovo after Tsar Alexander’s transfer to Saint Petersburg 1844; the Yaroslav Institute of High Sciences (founded in 1803) and the Saint Petersburg Imperial School of Jurisprudence (1835-1917). The second part deals with the Seminar for the Instruction of Russian Jurists in Berlin (1887-1896) and the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople (1894-1914). These two schools, as well as the Russian School of Higher Social Studies in Paris (1901-1906), educated famous protagonists of the social changes which arose in Russia in the early years of the Twentieth Century.