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Karl May School
59°56′24″N 30°16′10″E / 59.939871°N 30.269317°EThe Karl May School (Russian: Петербургская школа Карла Мая, romanized: Peterburgskaya shkola Karla Maya) is a secondary school in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
In 1856, on the day of the Autumn Equinox (22 September), on the initiative of a few German families seeking to provide their children with a more applied secondary education than that available in the contemporary State educational institutions, a private German boys' school was opened in a wing of building no. 56, 1st line, on Vasilievsky Island. It was led by Karl Ivanovich May (1820–1895), a talented professional educator and follower of the progressive educational views of A. Diesterweg, J. H. Pestalozzi, N. I. Pirogov, K. D. Ushinsky and F. Fröbel. In 1838, he had graduated with distinction from St. Peter's Principal German College and in 1845 from the historical-philological faculty of the Imperial St-Petersburg University.
During its first years the school was elementary, consisting of three classes, but beginning in 1861 it received the official title of "Modern School [Natural Science College] of Gymnasium Rank", which reflected its intensively applied direction in advanced secondary education (in comparison to State educational institutions).
At the end of the 1850s one of the school performances opened with herald walking with flags emblazoned with May bugs; the director and all present were very pleased with this symbol. From that point on, attendees of this school have referred to themselves as May bugs for the rest of their lives.
The school's principal motto was the founder of modern pedagogics, Yan Amos Komensky: First love, then teach. In accordance with this slogan, a collective of educators was formed, consisting only of people possessing high moral and professional qualities. The writer Lev Uspensky, a 1918 graduate of the school, remarked in his memoirs (paraphrased): At May there are not and could not be educator-obscurantists, teacher-Black Hundred members, or bureaucrats in uniform. The instructors at May, generation after generation, were selected on the basis of their scholarly and educational gifts.
The system of education and upbringing created by K.I. May stipulated mutual respect and trust in the teachers and students, constant cooperation with the family, and the aspiration of the educators to allow for and develop the individual abilities of each student and to teach them to think independently. All this, in combination with the high quality of education, allowed the school year after year to release highly moral, well-rounded youths, prepared for "work useful to society". Thanks to the special atmosphere springing from this educational institution (called the "May spirit"), the K. May School was the "state within a state, separated by an endless ocean from State conventionalism" (aptly expressed by 1890 graduate D.V. Filosofov). Its participants, in terms of both social position and national identification, were quite diverse, without discrimination: Swiss children, sons of the princes Garin, Galitzine, the counts Olsufev and Stenbok-Fermor, representatives of the entrepreneur families Vargunin, Durdin, Elisseeff, Tortonov, and scions of the liberal intelligentsia Benois, Bruni, Grimm, Dobuzhinsky, Roerich, Rimsky-Korsakov, Semenov-Tyan-Shanskii, among others. Moreover, in many cases this school educated several generations of one family. Among these, the Benois dynasty holds a unique record: 25 members of this clan studied "at May".
In this school, boys representing nearly all of the national diasporas of St Petersburg were educated — Russians, Germans, French, English, Tatars, Jews, Finns, Chinese, etc. In this way, as was already noted at the beginning of the 20th century, this school could in no way be called monarchical, democratic, republican, or aristocratic. It always strove to be human.
From the very beginning the school consisted of two divisions. Children who appeared inclined towards the humanities were designated Latinists and in the initial years studied in that division, later to be renamed Gymnasium. Here, along with German and French, the ancient languages Latin and Greek were taught. Gymnasium students, having studied for nine years, as a general rule prepared for the continuation of their education at university. Young people more inclined towards the natural sciences were called non-Latinists: over the course of eight years in the natural science division they acquired a great quantity of knowledge of the exact sciences and prepared for engineering work. Until 1909,a small commercial division existed in which English was studied instead of French. Thanks to this structure, in 1881 the official title of this secondary educational institution became "K. May Gymnasium and Natural Science College".
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Karl May School
59°56′24″N 30°16′10″E / 59.939871°N 30.269317°EThe Karl May School (Russian: Петербургская школа Карла Мая, romanized: Peterburgskaya shkola Karla Maya) is a secondary school in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
In 1856, on the day of the Autumn Equinox (22 September), on the initiative of a few German families seeking to provide their children with a more applied secondary education than that available in the contemporary State educational institutions, a private German boys' school was opened in a wing of building no. 56, 1st line, on Vasilievsky Island. It was led by Karl Ivanovich May (1820–1895), a talented professional educator and follower of the progressive educational views of A. Diesterweg, J. H. Pestalozzi, N. I. Pirogov, K. D. Ushinsky and F. Fröbel. In 1838, he had graduated with distinction from St. Peter's Principal German College and in 1845 from the historical-philological faculty of the Imperial St-Petersburg University.
During its first years the school was elementary, consisting of three classes, but beginning in 1861 it received the official title of "Modern School [Natural Science College] of Gymnasium Rank", which reflected its intensively applied direction in advanced secondary education (in comparison to State educational institutions).
At the end of the 1850s one of the school performances opened with herald walking with flags emblazoned with May bugs; the director and all present were very pleased with this symbol. From that point on, attendees of this school have referred to themselves as May bugs for the rest of their lives.
The school's principal motto was the founder of modern pedagogics, Yan Amos Komensky: First love, then teach. In accordance with this slogan, a collective of educators was formed, consisting only of people possessing high moral and professional qualities. The writer Lev Uspensky, a 1918 graduate of the school, remarked in his memoirs (paraphrased): At May there are not and could not be educator-obscurantists, teacher-Black Hundred members, or bureaucrats in uniform. The instructors at May, generation after generation, were selected on the basis of their scholarly and educational gifts.
The system of education and upbringing created by K.I. May stipulated mutual respect and trust in the teachers and students, constant cooperation with the family, and the aspiration of the educators to allow for and develop the individual abilities of each student and to teach them to think independently. All this, in combination with the high quality of education, allowed the school year after year to release highly moral, well-rounded youths, prepared for "work useful to society". Thanks to the special atmosphere springing from this educational institution (called the "May spirit"), the K. May School was the "state within a state, separated by an endless ocean from State conventionalism" (aptly expressed by 1890 graduate D.V. Filosofov). Its participants, in terms of both social position and national identification, were quite diverse, without discrimination: Swiss children, sons of the princes Garin, Galitzine, the counts Olsufev and Stenbok-Fermor, representatives of the entrepreneur families Vargunin, Durdin, Elisseeff, Tortonov, and scions of the liberal intelligentsia Benois, Bruni, Grimm, Dobuzhinsky, Roerich, Rimsky-Korsakov, Semenov-Tyan-Shanskii, among others. Moreover, in many cases this school educated several generations of one family. Among these, the Benois dynasty holds a unique record: 25 members of this clan studied "at May".
In this school, boys representing nearly all of the national diasporas of St Petersburg were educated — Russians, Germans, French, English, Tatars, Jews, Finns, Chinese, etc. In this way, as was already noted at the beginning of the 20th century, this school could in no way be called monarchical, democratic, republican, or aristocratic. It always strove to be human.
From the very beginning the school consisted of two divisions. Children who appeared inclined towards the humanities were designated Latinists and in the initial years studied in that division, later to be renamed Gymnasium. Here, along with German and French, the ancient languages Latin and Greek were taught. Gymnasium students, having studied for nine years, as a general rule prepared for the continuation of their education at university. Young people more inclined towards the natural sciences were called non-Latinists: over the course of eight years in the natural science division they acquired a great quantity of knowledge of the exact sciences and prepared for engineering work. Until 1909,a small commercial division existed in which English was studied instead of French. Thanks to this structure, in 1881 the official title of this secondary educational institution became "K. May Gymnasium and Natural Science College".