V. I. Lenin

The Poverty of the People’s Teachers {1}

In view of the All-Russia Congress on Public Education to
be held in December, it is appropriate that we should turn our attention to
an old question which is perpetually new: the poverty of the people’s
teachers.

We have before us Volume I of the One-Day Census of Primary Schools in the Empire . The volume has been published by the Ministry of
Public—what you might call—Education. It is signed by the well-known
statistician Mr. V. I. Pokrovsky.

The bureaucratic character of this official work—bureaucratic and
official in the worst sense of the words—instantly leaps to the eye. The
census was taken on January 18, 1911. It took all of two years to publish
its first volume dealing only with the gubernias of the St. Petersburg
academic district! The only thing we seem to be able to do in our country
without tedious, agonising red tape is to pass laws, like the law against
the press.

As is the practice, the census programme was repeatedly discussed
throughout 1910 by a host of official cabinets and conferences, each of
which did something to spoil it. As a result, for instance, there is only
one head, “Russian Language”, on the question of the pupils’ mother
tongue:
it is clearly prohibited to make the subdivision into Byelorussian, Little
Russian (Ukrainian) and Great Russian. As a result, the census of the
schools of the Empire does not include a number of schools, such as the urban schools set up
under the 1872 statute, private first-and second-category schools, etc.

It is prohibited to collect full data. It is prohibited to know the
truth about the language spoken by the pupils at home. It is prohibited to
make a comparison, between public and private schools.

The man who compiled these statistics, Mr. Pokrovsky, much vaunted by
the liberals, has done his bit to spoil the census returns. Thus,
material has been separately collected on each teacher relative to the size
of salary. It is, naturally, important to know the truth on such a burning
question as the poverty of the people’s teachers. It is important to know
just how many masters and mistresses are receiving the desperately
low, the very lowest, the very low and the low salaries in general.

The material on this has been collected. The information on it
is there . But our liberal statistician “processes” it in such a
way as to cover up the unsavoury truth .

Our statistician merely informs us of the average salaries of
masters and mistresses by gubernia and the different categories of
schools. The official classifications are scrupulously observed. But anyone
who wants to know the truth is not interested in which gubernia and in
which category of schools the teachers starve, but how many
teachers are starving and living in poverty. It was quite possible to
determine from the returns of the census how many teachers are
being paid starvation salaries (say, under 360 rubles, from 360 to
400 rubles, etc.), and this should unquestionably have been done. But it
has not been done. It has been buried in the hundreds of thousands of cards
at the archives.

What the public has been informed of is only the officially purged and
officially embellished averages of salaries by category and
gubernia.... Need we say, too, that the liberal statisticians made a point
of concealing from the public what percentage of the starving teachers have
families.

These “average” figures show that a schoolmistress (in the
St. Petersburg academic district) receives 433 rubles a year, and a
schoolmaster, 376. But most of the teachers are in the countryside. There
“average” salaries are 347 rubles for the schoolmistress, and 367 rubles
for the schoolmaster. (Let us note that the overall number of schoolmistresses is double that of
schoolmasters).

Most of the teachers of the St. Petersburg district are
outside St. Petersburg Gubernia. The salaries of school-mistresses
are: Olonets Gubernia—375 rubles; Novgorod Gubernia—358 rubles; Vologda
Gubernia—320 rubles; Archangel Gubernia—319 rubles; and Pskov
Gubernia—312 rubles.

Even these figures, which put a gloss on reality, make it clear that
the majority of schoolmistresses are paid a starvation salary. With the present high cost of living the 26–30 rubles a
month for schoolmistresses, of whom (on average again) 11.5 per cent are
married and 4.4 per cent are widows, is undoubtedly a beggarly salary which
condemns teachers to starvation and indigence.

From the “category” data we find that 2,180 schoolmistresses worked
in parish one-class schools (in the St. Petersburg academic district, with
a total of 7,693 schoolmistresses). Consequently, we have here a
“category” with a highly impressive number of teachers. What then are
they paid?

An average of 302  rubles in the towns, and 301 rubles in the villages .

The Russian state spends hundreds of millions of rubles on the
maintenance of its civil service, the police, the army, etc., while dooming
teachers in the people’s schools to starvation. The bourgeoisie
“sympathises” with public education—with the proviso, however, that the
teachers live in worse conditions than the servants in the manor-houses and
the houses of the rich....

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Notes:
{1}
Lenin wrote the article in connection with the All-Russia Congress on
Public Education which was to be held in St. Petersburg during the winter
holidays at the end of December 1913. The Bolsheviks wanted to use the
Congress as a legal opportunity for spreading Bolshevik ideas and
revolutionary demands. The article is closely connected with Lenin’s “The
Question of Ministry of Education Policy” (see present edition, Vol. 19, pp. 137–46).

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