The System of Public Education in Samarkand Oblast in the Period Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries

This paper examines the system of public education in Samarkand Oblast, a province within the Russian Empire. It touches upon the ethnic composition of the region's population, details the religious, gender, and social-estate composition of its student body, and presents data concerning the operation of its educational institutions. The work relies on two groups of sources: 1) archival materials from the Russian State Historical Archive (Saint Petersburg, Russia); 2) published documents. The second group is represented by the annual Survey of Samarkand Oblast and Samarkand Oblast Reference Book . The study's findings revealed that in the period between the late 19th and early 20th centuries the development of the system of public education in Samarkand Oblast was attended by certain problems due to its distinctive characteristics as a region. The period witnessed a fourfold increase (from 8 to 32) in the number of Russian educational institutions in the region, and also during that period secondary education became accessible there to both boys and girls. A relatively smaller increase was posted by the region's Russian-indigenous schools - their number more than doubled (from 5 to 12). Due to the small size of the Russian population in Samarkand Oblast, the oblast's leadership would include in the statistics the figures for Muslim and Jewish ecclesiastical educational institutions there, although such schools were hardly ever included in reports on oblasts and governorates across the Russian Empire, as they had little to do with secular education. Consequently, Samarkand Oblast was one of the country's biggest underperformers in terms of public education, as 100,000 out of its 105,000 school-age children were not in school by 1915.