The development of the non-scholastic agricultural education in the Baikal region in the early XX century

In the early XX century the increasing necessity of the literate population that was engaged in the agriculture and the lack of agricultural educational institutions made it possible to provide rapid development of non-scholastic agricultural education. The main objective of the article is to present all variety of non-scholastic educational forms existed in the Baikal region. These forms included lectures, readings, panel sessions hold by governmental agronomists and advisors in agriculture, opening of the experimental fields, arrangement of school grounds in the parochial schools. The work is based on the unpublished documents of the State Archive of the Irkutsk region (fund 176 - Administration of the Irkutsk region and the Trans-Baikal area's governmental property; fund 178 - the Irkutsk governorate governmental agronomist), The State Archive of the Trans-Baikal area (fund 1, list 1 (agriculture) - the Trans-Baikal regional Authority; fund 320 - the Trans-Baikal regional agronomic organization of the Department of Agronomy), the State Archive of the Republic of Buryatia (fund 266 - Barguzin and Buryat parochial training school). The published materials are: the report of the Irkutsk Province's agronomic organization for 1914, works of the Trans-Baikal agronomic council for 1914, the report of Pisarev E.V. on maintenance of the peasant farms for 1913-1914. Non-scholastic propaganda of the agricultural knowledge got a wide spread occurrence due to the introduction of the agricultural organization in the region. The latter started establishing experimental fields and agricultural courses. Governmental agronomists, advisors in agriculture organized lectures, readings and panel discussions on various spheres of agriculture throughout the Irkutsk province and the Trans-Baikal area. So, in the Irkutsk province by 1914 there were 249 lections with the audience of 8703 listeners, on the Trans-Baikal area the number of lections was 173 and quantity of listeners was 4856 respectively. In conclusion, non-scholastic agricultural education in the Baikal region in the early XX century started with the promotion of new agricultural equipment and achievement of experimental fields, with new plants, breeds of livestock and new agricultural tools. At the same time a rather low level of literacy of rural population, the lack of sufficient number of high-qualified specialists in agriculture made the process of the successful implementation of non-scholastic agricultural education quite difficult.

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