I haven't posted in one of these in a while, but am happy to contribute something here. I will briefly touch on one of the most important places of learning in the history of the socialist movement: the Tiflis Seminary.

Located in Tbilisi, Georgia (which was known as Tiflis while part of the Russian Empire and shortly after, 1801-1936), the Tiflis Seminary was founded in 1817, a few years after the Russians annexed Georgia. As part of their efforts to "Europeanize" the city, the administration set out to build modern establishments, including an opera house, library, wide boulevards, and schools. A religious institution, the seminary was where Georgian students (all male, of course) would go and study to become priests, in the Orthodox faith (Russian Orthodox being the state religion of the empire. Georgia has it's own Orthodox branch, but their independence was curtailed during this era, forced to follow the Russian branch, but I digress).

As the only place of higher learning in the Caucasus (the first university wouldn't be established until 1918), it was where any promising student (nearly always Georgian; of the other major ethnic groups in the region, the Armenians had their own branch of Christianity, while Azeris of course were Muslim) would go.

Students would attend for up to 6 years, and it was a very strict environment, with 12 mandatory subjects including "church history, Greek, Latin, theology, didactics, and scripture, and all taught in Russian". Later subjects also included "holy writings, psychology, physics, literature, basic divinity, church history, Greek, Latin, didatics, Georgian church subjects, gymnastics, singing." The language of instruction was a deliberate choice, even with most students not fully understanding it; while Georgian instruction had initially been included, it was abolished by 1872. There was also little taught on Georgian history, aside from a bit on the Georgian church. The day started at 7.00am and would last until 10.00pm, and were "filled with prayers, classes, private study, and religious services."

Now why is this seminary an important place for socialism? Because nearly every prominent Georgian socialist (read Bolshevik and Menshevik) attended at one point. The most famous student would be one Iosif Jughashvili, who attended for four years between 1895 and 1899 before being expelled. He would gain fame under the alias "Joseph Stalin". Classmates of his would include Noe Jordania (the leader of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, which lasted from 1918 to 1921), Nestor Lakoba (Abkhaz Bolshevik who helped create a separate Abkhaz state, which still de facto exists today), and some other lower-level Georgian socialists.

Though the seminary had strict regulations and banned any literature deemed unacceptable, it was where people like Stalin first came in contact with Marxism and socialism. They clandestinely passed around books and pamphlets, and with the priests in charge confiscating the material it only solidified their positions. They also made the contacts necessary to develop the extensive networks within the socialist parties (both Bolshevik and Menshevik; the latter were quite strong in Georgia) necessary for success.

The seminary shut down in 1919 during the time of the Georgian Democratic Republic, and while a new seminary was opened in Tbilisi in 1993, it is not the same school. Sadly the old building that housed the seminary is not in great shape, and last I was in Tbilisi (early 2018) it was seemingly going through some renovation or demolition, it's never quite certain there (it was boarded up and blocked off from the public, despite being right off the major square of the city).

This is sort of an unpleasant one, but it's one of those little anecdotes that is illustrative of a certain time and place. H. P. Lovecraft did not have a great deal of formal education. He was enrolled at the Slater Avenue School for the 1898-1899 school year but he did not attend the Slater Ave. School in the 1899-1900, 1900-1901, or 1901-1902 terms. In the fall of 1904, after the great shakeup of his household caused by his grandfather's death and subsequent moving (and the disappearance of his cat), Lovecraft was enrolled at Hope Street English and Classical High School.

Here I was confronted for the first time with cosmopolitanism. Slater Avenue School is public, but it is rather a neighbourhood affair, with most of its pupils drawn from the old families. But Hope Street is near enough to the "North End" to have considerable Jewish attendance. It was there that I formed my ineradicable aversion to the Semitic race. The Jews were brilliant in their classes—calculatingly & schemingly brilliant—but their ideals were sordid & their manners coarse. I became rather well known as an anti-Semitic before I had been at Hope Street many days. Knowing of my ungovernable temperament, & of my lawless conduct at Slater Avenue, most of my friends (if friends they may be called) predicted disaster for me, when my will should conflict with the authority of Hope Street’s masculine teachers. But a disappointment of the happiest sort occurred. The Hope Street preceptors quickly understood my disposition as “Abbie” had never understood it; & by removing all restraint, made me apparently their comrade & equal; so that I ceased to think of discipline, but merely comported myself as a gentleman among gentlemen.

• H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 Nov 1916, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner 74-75

Lovecraft was 14 years old at the time; most of his prejudices were probably inherited from his family situation, but if this anecdote is to be believed this is an instance where someone in a position of authority could have maybe done something - and didn't. It is also a very rare instance of Lovecraft admitting to any sort of verbal discrimination. For what it is worth, a nervous breakdown did not permit Lovecraft to complete highschool; he wouldn't be seriously challenged on his antisemitism until well into his adult years a decade later.

I don't have a lot of time so I'm going to talk a bit about Schindler's List.

That might seem like a weird choice, as the movie has no real connection the ideas of school or education as far as I can remember. That's really why I'm writing about it- this is mostly a question I'm talking through in my head and if anyone knows the answer/more about it I'm very interested.

One of the most famous scenes in the film is the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto, with Schindler and his girlfriend on their horses watching from above. That's the scene with the "little girl in the red dress," and you may have read in the news about people reacting negatively when, for example, figure skaters use the background music from that scene in their performances while wearing red dresses. I don't really have too much to say about that, but it is in fact the song that they're skating to that I want to talk about

The song in the background is Oyfn Pripitchik (I picked a spelling and am sticking with it, because in the course of researching this I encountered like ten). And that's where the theme comes in, because while it's sung hauntingly in the background of people being herded from their homes and murdered, you'd never know that it's about children learning how to read. More precisely, here are the first two, most famous stanzas (courtesy of Wikipedia)-

Oyfn pripetchik brent a fayerl,
Un in shtub iz heys,
Un der rebe lernt kleyne kinderlekh,
Dem alef-beys.
Zet zhe kinderlekh, gedenkt zhe, tayere,
Vos ir lernt do;
Zogt zhe nokh a mol un take nokh a mol:
Komets*-alef: o!*

Or, translated into English-

On the hearth, a fire burns,
And in the house it is warm.
And the rabbi is teaching little children,
The alphabet.
See, children, remember, dear ones,
What you learn here;
Repeat and repeat yet again,
"Komets-alef: o!"

It's a very sweet song, describing the inside of a typical cheder- a small school, often in the home of the melamed/teacher, in which young boys learned the basics of how to read Hebrew. This was generally done using a rote teaching method; in this case, both the alef bais (Hebrew alphabet) and nikkud (vowelization marks) are being taught simultaneously. Alef is the first letter of the alphabet, and kamatz is one of the vowelization points- together they look like אָ. Together, they don't quite make the sound in the Wikipedia transliteration- while there are variations according to accent, it's more of an "uh." The melamed and students would then move on to "kamatz bais buh, kamatz gimmel guh," and once they were done with the alef bais would move on to the next vowelization point- "pasach alef ah, pasach bais bah, pasach gimmel gah." Once completed, the students have the building blocks to read Hebrew- I remember learning how to read Hebrew through a variation on this method myself at my Jewish day school.

The song was written in the late 1800s by Mark Warshavsky, a lawyer in Kiev who wrote Yiddish folk-style songs as something of a hobby but which became so popular that they were often regarded as being almost timeless. Sholem Aleichem, the famous Yiddish author whose stories also drew on the power of folklore, was a major backer of his; there was some controversy in that those who saw themselves as genuine folklorists felt that the water was being muddied. Ironically, by this point the traditional cheder was in a sharp decline as a backward relic, but perhaps it was that element of rose-colored nostalgia that made the song ubiquitous in the early decades of the 20th century, even as Jewish school systems were being modernized.

Knowing all of this, one then wonders (or at least I do) why the song was chosen for the background of one of the most tragic scenes in Schindler's List. Beyond a brief comment in an article about how Spielberg remembered his grandmother singing it, I haven't been able to find any remarks by any creators of the film discussing this in depth, so that's the bit where I'm curious if anyone else knows- in the meantime a few points:

- The idea of using popular Yiddish songs as an element of nostalgia for prewar Europe and a symbol for its destruction is a pretty common one. In theory, any popular Yiddish song could have done for the effect in the film, given that the majority of its viewers do not understand Yiddish. But even if so, a song like this could serve as a memorial to the lost world evoked by the song.

- This song in particular was actually parodied during the Holocaust as Baym Ghetto Toyer, about the horrific experiences endured by Jews in the ghetto in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania and their struggle to survive. In this respect, it becomes a song with a direct connection to the Holocaust.

- Of course, in this scene the focus of the audience is placed on a child- the little girl in the red coat. While the song would be about young boys learning (until the early 20th century formal religious education for girls was extremely uncommon), it is still a song about children in a scene in which we are focusing on a child, making it thematically appropriate.

- I kind of held out on you, because above I only included the first two stanzas- but perhaps it's the final two stanzas that really explain it.

Ir vet, kinder, elter vern,
Vet ir aleyn farshteyn,
Vifl in di oysyes lign trern,
Un vi fil geveyn.

Az ir vet, kinder, dem goles shlepn,
Oysgemutshet zayn,
Zolt ir fun di oysyes koyekh shepn,
Kukt in zey arayn!

In English

When you grow older, children,
You will understand by yourselves,
How many tears lie in these letters,
And how much lament.

When you, children, will bear the Exile,
And will be exhausted,
May you derive strength from these letters,
Look in at them!

The concept within Jewish tradition that learning the Torah (seen as the main purpose of literacy, and the goal to which all of the young children in this cheder would be striving, ideally) is not only a value in and of itself but is something that keeps the Jewish people going throughout exile is a well established one, even if interpreted differently over time. In Jewish religious and folk imagination, reverence for Torah, its scholars and its meaning became part of explanations for how the Jewish people have been able to survive despite persecution and murder throughout the years. When one looks at it this way, a melamed teaching his students to read Hebrew isn't just giving them a practical skill, he is giving them a connection to their heritage, something which will give them religious comfort and meaning no matter what horrors have happened in the past and no matter what will (not may) happen to them in the future. The idea of Jewish suffering has in many ways been written into the canon, and this song accepts its inevitability while also showing how it can be overcome.

While I have no idea if this occurred to Spielberg as he made the movie, the use of this song- and the invoking of traditionally Jewish ways of maintaining identity and dignity during the Holocaust- is something that's very important to me, as it provides a window into the way that many Jews, and specifically many of the Jews who perished, experienced their suffering at this time. I've written about similar things here, here and here.

Much as I'd like to write something original on this, there really isn't much out there in terms of secondary material on Taiping education, which means I really can't do much more other than repost my piece on education in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom from last year's Floating Features series: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cmf44o/floating_feature_share_the_history_of_asia_the/ew6ar25/?context=3