Parochial Teacher-Training Schools

pedagogical schools in prerevolutionary Russia for training teachers for parochial schools. Men’s and women’s parochial teacher-training schools were established in the second half of the 19th century and were under the protection of the Synod. They had a three-year course of study but gave only an advanced elementary education. Beginning in the late 19th century, graduates of second-class teachers’ schools were accepted into parochial teacher-training schools.

The subjects of instruction in the schools were theology, church history, singing and music, Church Slavonic, Russian, literature, arithmetic (with the fundamentals of geometry and surveying), geography, drafting and drawing, needlework (in women’s schools), and pedagogy. The pupils received teaching practice in the two-class parochial schools attached to the parochial teacher-training school.