The Museum of town and district history is one of the destinations of the project “Museums of the Kirillov district”. An interactive tour “Lesson at old school” was conducted for its participants there. The team of the “Kirillov Electrical Networks” and the team of pupils of the Goritsy school attended it.
They learnt when first schools were opened, what the word “school” meant and how the training process was organized. All participants without exception were surprised at the first definition of school – “rest, entertainment”. Modern pupils were amazed, but they would be glad to apply this definition in practice. The visitors got acquainted with one of the first schools in the Kirillov district which was organized in the Tsypino village by local priest Ivan Mikhailovich Brilliantov. 29 boys and 5 girls wert to that school.
Both adults and children gave correct answers to the questions concerning the subjects and named the main of them: Religion, Russian with Calligraphy, Arithmetic, Church Singing, Reading of church and civil books. They also learnt that the school year lasted a little bit longer than in the modern school. Its beginning and end depended on the terms of village work. Pupils went to the elementary school during the period from 2 to 5 years.
Thanks to reproductions of the artists’ pictures, they saw interiors of classrooms, lessons at schools, exams, pupils’ uniform. Then the participants studied the school period in the Soviet Union when great attention was paid to literacy of the population. The Pioneer and Komsomol organizations played an important role in the education of younger generation at that time. The teams were offered to become pioneers: to tie a red scarf, to put on a field cap and to fasten a badge. If adults were pioneers once, pupils knew about them only thanks to films. Nevertheless, everybody liked this transformation.
The participants attended three lessons in the course of the interactive tour. They checked their logic doing problems and calculated using an abacus at Comic Mathematics. The second lesson was Fairy Literature where they remembered fairy tales and proverbs of their childhood. And then they learnt to write pen and ink at the Russian lesson. The pupils of “the old school” got acquainted with old textbooks, an ABC book, exercise-books and a pupil’s mark book. All participants of the project got a chance to gain new knowledge, to acquire many skills and to get positive emotions.
