«Dead souls» in ecclesiastical schools of the Russian empire in the late 18th century - in the early 19th century (the case of the Tver diocese)

Abstract

A case study of Tver diocese deals with the quantitative characteristics of enrollment at ecclesiastical schools in the late 18th century – in the early 19th century, as well as with the clergy attitude towards education. The object of the article is to define how well the statistical data reflect the real enrollment at ecclesiastical schools and how the requests of the clergy to establish a school correspond to the evidence of the cautious attitude to education in a clergy sphere. Documents of management and record keeping of the Tver ecclesiastical consistory, statistic sources, memoirs, publicism as well as religious press were used to point out the fact that though enrollment was quite vast officially, part of the pupils didn’t attend classes due to various reasons and only negligible part of the admitted pupils completed the ecclesiastical school course.