Skip to main content

School Reports, 1890s

Mennonite memoirs typically paint a golden picture of schools in the so-called “golden era” of Mennonite life in Russia. The official “Reports on Molotschna Schools: 1895/96 and 1897/98,” however, give us a more lackluster and realistic picture (note 1). What do we learn from these reports?

Many schools had minor infractions—the furniture did not correspond to requirements, there were insufficient book cabinets, or the desks and benches were too old and in need of repair. The Mennonite schoolhouses in Halbstadt and Rudnerweide—once recognized as leading and exceptional—together with schools in Friedensruh, Fürstenwerder, Franzthal, and Blumstein were deemed to be “in an unsatisfactory state.” In other cases a new roof and new steps were needed, or the rooms too were too small, too dark, too cramped, or with moist walls.

More seriously in some villages—Waldheim, Schönsee, Fabrikerwiese, and even Gnadenfeld, well-known for its educational past—inspectors recorded that pupils “do not attend classes very regularly.”

The training of teachers was now largely uniform. Almost all teachers in the reports had completed a four-year Zentralschule (high school) program in either Ohrlof, Halbstadt, or Gnadenfeld. Beyond this, most had also completed two post-secondary years of pedagogical training in Halbstadt—a program begun in 1878. A few of these teachers had done something equivalent in Chortitza, Kharkov, Berdjansk, Melitipol, Odessa, or Pavlograd. A minority of villages still appointed teachers who had not yet completed teacher training, including in Elisabethtal, Friedensruh, Großweide, Kleefeld, Klippenfeld, Landskrone, Marienthal, Nikolaidorf, Schardau and Waldheim. There may be more between the lines, because we know that one of those auxiliary teachers, the young Jacob H. Janzen, in Rudnerweide, was unusually gifted and on his way to becoming a leading educator, poet, playwright and later minister and elder.

All teachers were men, except for one Russian Orthodox auxiliary teacher in the Neu Halbstadt Girls School. The trustee of this school was the wealthy heiress Anna Schröder Franz. Not only Neu-Halbstadt, but Gnadenfeld, Sparrau, and Halbstadt also had a Russian Orthodox auxiliary teacher. Teacher David Dirks, born in Indonesia as a missionary child, had studied theology in Basel, Switzerland. Some schools had a small number of Lutheran or Catholic students.

Payment for teachers was not regulated yet—most were given a house attached to the school, plus a small salary in addition to defined contributions of farm products and the use of a small plot of land. A decade earlier an external assessment concluded that remuneration was “sufficient to support a teacher even with a larger family,” i.e., between 200 and 500 rubles per year in addition to some benefits (note 2). Not surprisingly, the specialized teachers in the school for the deaf--trained in Frankfurt, Germany—received the highest salary.

The wealthiest Mennonites often had their own small schools on their estates or estate clusters. In the 1890s Hochfeld, Neuteich, Rosenhof and Rykopol employed younger teachers with no teacher training. With very few exceptions “sports” was not taught in any villages, but it was practiced in the estate schools. In each case it was the “not fully qualified teachers” doing sports.

Notably almost all teachers were under the age of 40. A generation of older teachers with only Zentralschule training had been almost wholly retired and replaced. An outlier: lead teacher at the Neu Halbstadt Girls School was 62 years-of-age.

In 1881, all schools in the former German settlements were officially transferred to the Ministry of National Education and school boards lost the relative autonomy they had enjoyed. Teachers were now required to pass exams set by the state, and by 1891 pass state exams in Russian language. Graduates from schools with approved curricula could have their period of mandatory civil service reduced from six years to four. This could be reduced by a further year if they graduated from an approved high school—a strong incentive for Mennonite youth to study. The proviso put significant pressure on the board to redraw its curriculum and teacher qualifications to meet both the conditions of the state and the internal formational needs of the Mennonite faith and ethnic community. Though this intrusion by the state was not welcomed initially, it resulted in the formation of highly competent teachers, greater respect for teachers and their opinions, better local remuneration, and a broad awareness of the challenges of Mennonite self-preservation—including the need for better educated congregational leaders (note 3). Only after the 1905 revolution was a teachers’ union or association formed in Molotschna, which was joined by almost all area teachers (note 4).

At the Mennonite high school in Ohrloff, students under teacher J. J. Bräul used a 200-page Russian language theory text, as well as a 330-page Russian and world history text. Graduates were required to speak Russian correctly and fluently and write a large paper in Russian on an advanced topic without errors in grammar, spelling or sentence structure (note 5). An external examiner chaired the examinations, and by 1888 all 56 Molotschna village schoolteachers with only a few exceptions were graduates of this system. By order of government school inspectors, Mennonite representatives also participated in larger pedagogical conferences with academic papers, together with educators of nearby German colonies; this apparently proved satisfying for all (note 6). A visiting Prussian Mennonite colleague observed that Molotschna teacher-candidates were, in general, “comparable to the teacher-candidates from the Prussian teacher colleges (Lehrerseminaren)”: weaker in music, science and drawing, equal in geography, history, and mathematics, and superior in language and literature, mastering both the German and Russian materials (note 7). The same observer praised village school teachers for “the patience and effort required to train nine- to fourteen-year-olds in one of the most difficult European languages to the point that they can understand what they read, and freely discuss it orally as well as in writing” (note 8). 

In 1900, about three percent of Mennonites between ten and nineteen years of age were receiving secondary education—similar to Germany and higher than Great Britain. By 1914 that soared to fifteen percent—significantly higher than Germany and Britain, and similar to the United States (note 9). Literacy levels were the hallmarks of progress for Western nations, and by 1897 Mennonites had an almost hundred percent literacy rate for both males and females, whereas only about twenty-eight percent of Russians could read and write.

Excursus:

Whereas preachers had been traditionally elected from those with land and sufficient wealth to carry out their duties without remuneration, now there was a clear shift to the calling and election of teachers into those roles (note 10).

Village teachers not only completed two years of pedagogical training, but their high school examinations included detailed testing of Bible knowledge including the cultural-historical, geographical, and contextual knowledge of the Old and New Testaments; knowledge of the author, composition, goal, and contents of individual biblical books; ability to interpret five to seven Psalms, five chapters of prophetic Old Testament books, the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew and two sections of the Acts of the Apostles. Moreover, graduates had to give a chronological ordering of the life of Jesus, were tested on the basis of the standard German Protestant school church history text by Ottobald Bischoff, as well as on Mennonite church history and its theology using the catechism. Finally, teacher-candidates were tested in music and church hymnody, and were required to interpret eighteen hymns (note 11).

This laid a solid foundation not only for Mennonite teachers, but also for the election of competent lay-preachers, and the opportunity for a select few to pursue advanced studies in theology in Germany or Switzerland, or in other disciplines at Russian universities.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Glenn Penner and Wilhelm Friesen, trans., “Reports on Molotschna Mennonite Settlement Schools: 1895/96 and 1897/98.” From Odessa State Archives, Fond 89, Opis 1, Delo 3232 3258. Peter J. Braun Russian Mennonite Archive, reel 71. Posted by Richard D. Thiessen, https://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/Molotschna_Schools_1896_and_1898.pdf. Cf. also Abraham Görz, Die Schulen in den Mennoniten-Kolonien an der Molotschna im südlichen Russland, edited by the Molotschner Mennoniten-Kirchenkonvent (Berdjansk, 1882), https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/?file=Pis/Goerz.pdf; Peter J. Braun, Der Molotschnaer Mennoniten-Schulrat, 1869–1919. Zum Gedenktag seines 50jährigen Bestehens, edited by Wladimir Süss (Göttingen: Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2001).

Note 2: Wilhelm Neufeld, “Unterrichtswesen unter den Mennoniten in Rußland,” in Jahrbuch der Altevangelischen Taufgesinnten oder Mennoniten-Gemeinden, edited by H. G. Mannhardt, 134–143 (Danzig, 1888), 136, https://books.google.ca/books?id=ok5FAQAAMAAJ&dq.

Note 3: George K. Epp, Geschichte der Mennoniten in Rußland, vol. 3 (Lage: Logos, 2003), 137-140.

Note 4: Cf. “Gründerversammlung des Molotschnaer Lehrervereins,” reprinted in Mennonitische Volkswarte 2, no. 3 (March 1936), 88–90, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/vpetk351.pdf.

Note 5: On J. J. Bräul, cf. Epp, Geschichte der Mennoniten III, 131; P. M. Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia 1789-1910 (Winnipeg, MB: Christian, 1978), 716f., https://archive.org/details/TheMennoniteBrotherhoodInRussia17891910/; Neuer Haus- und Landwirthschafts-Kalender Rußland auf das Jahr 1906 (Odessa: Nitzsche, 1905), 82, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:355-ubr13400-7; A. Kröker, Christlicher Familienkalender 21 (1919), 64, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Pis/CFK19a.pdf; Heinrich F. Goerz, The Molotschna Settlement, trans. by Al Reimer and John B. Toews (Winnipeg, MB: CMBC, 1993), 195; GAMEO, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Br%C3%A4ul,_Johann_J._(1854-1916).

Note 6: Mennonitische Rundschau 4, no. 36 (September 5, 1883), 1, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1883-09-05_4_36. 

Note 7: W. Neufeld, “Unterrichtswesen unter den Mennoniten,” 136.

Note 8: W. Neufeld, “Unterrichtswesen unter den Mennoniten,” 136.

Note 9: Cf. James Urry, “Prolegomena to the Study of Mennonite Society in Russia 1880–1914,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 8 (1990), 57, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/658/658.

Note 10: See the example of Jacob H. Janzen noted above; for more: https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Janzen,_Jacob_H._(1878-1950). An earlier example of the shift can be seen in the election of the school teacher Heinrich D. Epp as minister in Chortitza in 1864. He served as chair of the Chortitza School Board for seven years, and then as Elder of the Chortitza Church for the last eleven years of his life, 1885 to 1896. Cf. Heinrich Epp, Kirchenältester der Mennonitengemeinde zu Chortitza (Südrußland) (Leipzig: Prieß, 1897), 15, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/vpetk218.pdf.

Note 11: W. Neufeld, “Unterrichtswesen unter den Mennoniten,” 138f.

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "School Reports, 1890s," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), June 10, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/school-reports-1890s.html.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1923 Mennonite immigrants "kept behind": Lechfeld (Bavaria) transit camp

An important part of the larger 1923 immigration story includes the chapter of the hundreds who were held back at Riga and Southampton and taken to the Lechfeld (Bavaria) transit camp for medical care. “Germany generously and magnanimously helped our organizations, on my intercession, to overcome the manifold difficulties connected with such a ( Volksbewegung ) movement of people in such critical times,” Benjamin H. Unruh wrote some years later ( note 1 ). Just as the first group of Russländer Mennonites set foot in Canada 100 years ago this month, the North American relief effort in the USSR was also winding down (August 1923). The famine relief work in 1921 and 1922 had found broad support in the North American Mennonite community. However excitement about a larger immigration of Russian Mennonites to North America was muted, and a new call to action could not forge the same level of cooperation across Mennonite groups. The plan required huge money guarantees. In USSR B.B. Janz h...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is the Church to Say? Letter 4 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Preparing for your next AGM: Mennonite Congregations and Deportations Many U.S. Mennonite pastors voted for Donald Trump, whose signature promise was an immediate start to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Confirmed this week, President Trump will declare a national emergency and deploy military assets to carry this out. The timing is ideal; in January many Mennonite congregations have their Annual General Meeting (AGM) with opportunity to review and update the bylaws of their constitution. Need help? We have related examples from our tradition, which I offer as a template, together with a few red flags. First, your congregational by-laws.  It is unlikely you have undocumented immigrants in your congregation, but you should flag this. Model: Gustav Reimer, a deacon and notary public from the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1920s: Those who left and those who stayed behind

The picture below is my grandmother's family in 1928. Some could leave but most stayed behind. In 1928 a small group of some 511 Soviet Mennonites were unexpectedly approved for emigration ( note 1 ). None of the circa 21,000 Mennonites who emigrated from Russia in the 1920s “simply” left. And for everyone who left, at least three more hoped to leave but couldn’t. It is a complex story. Canada only wanted a certain type—young healthy farmers—and not all were transparent about their skills and intentions The Soviet Union wanted to rid itself of a specifically-defined “excess,” and Mennonite leadership knew how to leverage that Estate owners, and Selbstschutz /White Army militia were the first to be helped to leave, because they were deemed as most threatened community members; What role did money play? Thousands paid cash for their tickets; Who made the final decision on group lists, and for which regions? This was not transparent. Exit visa applications were also regularly reje...
Post a Comment
Read more

Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp, 1942: List and Links

Each of the "Commando Dr. Stumpp" village reports written during German occupation of Ukraine 1942 contains a mountain of demographic data, names, dates, occupations, numbers of untimely deaths (revolution, famines, abductions), narratives of life in the 1930s, of repression and liberation, maps, and much more. The reports are critical for telling the story of Mennonites in the Soviet Union before 1942, albeit written with the dynamics of Nazi German rule at play. Reports for some 56 (predominantly) Mennonite villages from the historic Mennonite settlement areas of Chortitza, Sagradovka, Baratow, Schlachtin, Milorodovka, and Borosenko have survived. Unfortunately no village reports from the Molotschna area (known under occupation as “Halbstadt”) have been found. Dr. Karl Stumpp, a prolific chronicler of “Germans abroad,” became well-known to German Mennonites (Prof. Benjamin Unruh/ Dr. Walter Quiring) before the war as the director of the Research Center for Russian Germans...
Post a Comment
Read more

Queen Elizabeth II and Aunt Adina Neufeld Bräul

This month (April 2023) we celebrated my aunt’s 97th birthday—Adina Neufeld Bräul. Queen Elizabeth II and Aunt Adina were born within hours of each other, April 20-21, 1926. She once told me—in somewhat different words—that this makes her wonder about God’s providence … In 1944 in German-annexed Poland, my 16-year-old uncle Walter Bräul was required to report for military service. His first thought: no good soldier should be without a girlfriend! Before leaving for training, he asked one of the girls from "the trek" on a date to see a movie in Exin. Seven years later they would marry in Paraguay. Adina and her mother and sister were on the same trek or group (Gnadenfeld/ Molotschna) out of Ukraine as Walter and my mother (in the 2023 photo). Adina’s most terrible memory of the trek was when their wagon almost tipped over into a deep ravine. She was 17—a year older than Walter—and it was Walter’s 17-year-old brother Peter who literally jumped from his wagon to physically stop ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Traveler's Impressions of the Molotschna, 1927

In November 1927, Susanna Toews of Ohrloff, Molotschna wrote to her brother Gerhard in Canada, "Father is sleeping and the sisters are reading, even though they have read the stuff ten times. . .. Twice a week we get Das Neue Dorf . We read the most important material the first evening and then father reads the rest of it the next day" ( note 1 ). A youth in Friedensruh, Molotschna reported to the communist youth paper Die Saat in 1928, that their village receives 13 copies of Das Neue Dorf , 6 copies of Die Saat , one of the Moscow-based Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung , 16 copies of Die Trompete, 2 copies of Neuland , and some Russian papers as well. On average, 2 papers per household--all communist papers. A Mennonite-based monthly agricultural journal, “The Practical Agriculturalist” ( Der praktische Landwirt ) had been approved for publication in Ukraine in 1924 but was shut down in December 1926. Government authorities in Ukraine were exasperated to see a “significant a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Warthegau, Nazism and two 15-year-old Mennonites, 1944

Katharina Esau offered me a home away from home when I was a student in Germany in the 1980s. The Soviet Union released her and her family in 1972. Käthe Heinrichs—her maiden name (b. Aug. 18, 1928)—and my Uncle Walter Bräul were classmates in Gnadenfeld during Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and experienced the Gnadenfeld group “trek” as 15-year-olds together. Before she passed, she wrote her story ( note 1 )—and I had opportunity to interview my uncle. Käthe and Walter both arrived in Warthegau—German annexed Poland—in March 1944 ( note 2 ), and the Reich had a plan for their lives. In February 1944, the Governor of Warthegau ordered the Hitler Youth (HJ) organization to “care for Black Sea German youth” ( note 3 ). Youth were examined for the Hitler Youth, but also for suitability for elite tracks like the one-year Landjahr (farm year and service) program. The highly politicized training of the Landjahr was available for young people in Hitler Youth and its counterpart the League of G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flemish Anabaptists and Witch Hunts

Political leaders have long used the term "witch hunt"--and there is an historical connection to Mennonites. Anabaptists and so-called “witches” were arrested and tried for related reasons in the Low Countries in the 1500s: namely, as a means to divert God’s wrath. The late-Medievals feared that heresy—in this case ana-baptism and the challenge to other sacraments—invited the wrath of God, and was an instrument for the devil’s own hellish apocalyptic assault. The assumption: the devil's tactics to destroy Christendom included the use of both heretics and sorcerers. Gary Waite writes convincingly that both were seen as “polluting” the community and thus both had to be "excised." "This fear of pollution, or scandalizing God or the saints, also explains why small numbers of peaceable Mennonites were so harshly treated during the second half of the sixteenth century. Plagues, fires, and economic and social crises were often blamed on the presence of even a smal...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mennonites and the Crimean War (1853-56)

Martin Klaassen was traveling through the Molotschna Mennonite Colony when the Crimean War broke out in 1853 ( note 1 ). His diary notes that the following hymn was sung before the sermon: December 1853 . With regards to the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey, the song, No: 723 “O Lord, the clouds of war are threatening now, above our heads we see them roll” was sung before the sermon” ( note 2 ). As the war effort grew, thousands of troops came through Molotschna: January 14, 1854 . Today our colony has received billets: in Halbstadt about 1,000 soldiers. It is said that Joh. Neufelds have offered liquor ( Branntwein ), naturally without charge. The soldiers are supposed to have marched in with jubilant singing and much hilarity. They had been very happy for the wonderful reception they got, and promised to accomplish great things. In March, England and France also declared war on Russia. March 26, 1854 . At noon today there was suddenly a military transport at ...
Post a Comment
Read more