Ideas for Educational Reform, 1832

After four decades in Russia, the president of the Guardianship Committee for Foreign Colonists, Andrei Fadeev, considered only eight of 116 Mennonite teachers in the two larger regions of Katerynoslav and Tauria—which included the Molotschna—fit to teach (note 1). Jakob Bräul’s Rudnerweide schoolhouse was given the same status as Heinrich Heese’s Ohrloff Agricultural Society School with regard to policies and “especially for the teaching of Russian” (note 2).

Fadeev triggered great angst when by “imperial decree” he distributed a book to church elders written by German Mennonite Abraham Hunzinger on the modernization of Mennonite schools and church. It was a friendly gesture and poke. The Molotschna was already a tinderbox, and this spark introduced by a state official to strengthen the community ignited a fire in the colony. Fadeev wrote to Johann Cornies on January 12, 1832:

“Most valued Cornies ... I advise you to acquire and read a booklet sent to your church leaders from St. Petersburg by imperial decree. … [About the Religious, Church and School Systems of the Mennonites, with Suggestions for Improvements] by Abraham Hunzinger. It is the intention of the government that our Mennonites should accept some of its suggestions, especially with respect to schools. … Your esteemed religious leaders must not miss the opportunity to make improvements in this regard without delay. For example, a secondary school might be founded … to properly educate village schoolmasters. It could be directed by Heese, assisted by Hausknecht [Einlage].” (Note 3)

Cornies--who would soon drive educational reform in Molotschna--wrote his friend Jacob van der Smissen (the first theologically trained and salaried Flemish Mennonite minister in Danzig) for his assessment of the volume.

“Treasured friend …On orders from the Tsar, the Minister of the Interior [Fadeev] sent a book by Abraham Hunzinger, a Mennonite archivist in Hesse, to our elders and to Khortitsa that includes suggestions for the reform of Mennonite life that might bring them closer to the state and integrate them with it. Would our local Mennonites be prepared to accept some of the suggestions, especially those relating to schools? I have not yet read the book.” (Note 4)

Many of Hunzinger’s church reforms assumed the contexts of Germany or Holland, e.g., that all pastors be educated, salaried and, when preaching, in robes as in Amsterdam, with equality in privileges with other denominations.

But it was Hunzinger’s educational recommendations that were of greater interest to Fadeev, namely that Mennonite school teachers too be properly paid, specially trained, and able to employ instructional materials and methods for the training of “good people and virtuous citizens”—for sake of the “character of the nation.”

For this goal, and for the training of “true Christians,” Hunzinger argued that the credentialed pastor and credentialed teacher can complement each other, ensuring that young people are introduced neither to errors nor superstitions—for example, the existence of “ghosts”—which could negatively prejudice a child for life (note 5).

Hunzinger’s pedagogical recommendations emphasized real, experiential understanding with the head and heart. His book refers to the Enlightenment educational philosophy and Volksgeist nationalism of Johann G. Herder, that is, that in every people lies a distinctive spirit; it mentions the romanticism of the young poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the warm Pietism of Goethe’s university friend and author, Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (note 6).

The Pietist emphasis on personal feelings—which was the overwhelming tone and style of Heese’s successor Tobias Voth (a more recent immigrant from Prussia), for example—was largely foreign to the “Flemish” Mennonites of Chortitza, and a matter of curiosity to the Flemish Mennonite ministerial in the Molotschna at best (Rudnerweide was Frisian).

Mennonite farmer-ministers had claimed sole oversight and supervision of the schools in Russia. But they could not even “find time for study or memorization for they, like the lay-person, must work their field and run their farm. These preachers are all untrained, unpaid and eat their own bread,” according to a Swiss observer (note 7). And in hindsight, a later historian of education in the Molotschna wrote “nothing from that source [elders] was ever done for the schools” (note 8), justifying the regime’s intervention

Hunzinger’s booklet also had a more obviously polemical edge. He took special aim at those conservative Mennonites in his own German states who continued to reject the value of education, and who argued that “to love Christ is better than all knowledge,” or that the “Father of light” and the Holy Spirit will give the unprepared preacher “all that is necessary to know.” Hunzinger countered that it is a “false opinion” for Christians to “despise all worldly wisdom” and “all the sciences.” These and other particular opinions, according to Hunzinger, “are based upon error and hinder training of the spirit, progress in knowledge and in truth, improvement of religion and reasonable teaching and training of children” (note 9).

Not surprisingly, a significant portion of the Russian Mennonite ministerial rejected Hunzinger’s book and its recommendations that repudiated their own church-centric, essentially pre-modern educational tradition. The book had little immediate impact on Molotschna schools, but indirectly it brought already simmering differences to a boiling point—especially in the person of Heinrich Balzer, a minister in the Rudnerweide Frisian church, and later in Ohrloff (see next post on Balzer).

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Detlef Brandes, “German Colonists in Southern Ukraine up to the Repeal of the Colonial Statute,” in German-Ukrainian Relations in Historical Perspective, edited by H.-J. Torke and J.-P. Himka, 10–28 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1994), 20.

Note 2: Peter M. Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, 1789–1910 (Winnipeg, MB: Christian, 1978), 780f., https://archive.org/details/TheMennoniteBrotherhoodInRussia17891910/.

Note 3: “No. 254, Andrei M. Fadeev to Johann Cornies, 12 January 1832,” in Transformation on the Southern Ukrainian Steppe: Letters and Papers of Johann Cornies, vol. 1: 1812–1835, translated by Ingrid I. Epp; edited by Harvey L. Dyck, Ingrid I. Epp, and John R. Staples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015; 2020), 258f.

Note 4: Cornies, “No. 260, To Jacob van der Smissen, 5 February 1832,” Transformation I, 263.

Note 5: Abraham Hunzinger, Das Religions-, Kirchen- und Schulwesen der Mennoniten oder Taufgesinnten (Speyer: Kob’schen, 1830), 100, 180, 87,

Note 6: Hunzinger, Das Religions-, Kirchen- und Schulwesen, 151, 180; also 128, 153, 180.

Note 7: Daniel Schlatter, Bruchstücke aus einigen Reisen nach dem südlichen Rußland in den Jahren 1822 bis 1828 (St. Gallen: Huber, 1830), 363f., https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb11008440_00005.html.

Note 8: Peter J. Braun, “The Educational System of the Mennonite Colonies in South Russia.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 3, no. 3 (July 1929), 171. Irina Cherkazianova’s claim that “almost all teachers were preachers in this earliest phase” is difficult to substantiate; “Mennonite Schools and the Russian Empire: The Transformation of Church-State Relations in Education, 1789–1917,” in Minority Report: Mennonite Identities in Imperial Russia and Soviet Ukraine Reconsidered, 1789–1945, edited by Leonard G. Friesen, 85–109 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 88.

Note 9: Hunzinger, Das Religions-, Kirchen- und Schulwesen, 105, 106.

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History of the Russian Mennonites

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