The system of general and higher education in the Russian Empire: Principles and directions of public policy, regulation, and governing bodies (a historical and legal aspect)

The system of educational institutions of general and higher education, governing bodies, regulation by law of the educational sphere, and, in general, the directions of state educational policy are the most important sphere of any state. From this point of view, this study examines the history of the development of the educational sphere in the Russian Empire and analyzes the main stages and changes that took place in public policy, administration and regulation by law of these processes. Given the wide variety of groups of educational institutions in the country in the 18th - early 20th centuries, this work only considers issues related to the system of general and higher educational institutions, that is, institutions implementing primary public education, male and female secondary education, and universities. In this aspect, the author analyzes the guiding principles of organizing education at the central level - in institutions belonging to the Ministry of Public Education, because it was they who served, first of all, the goals of training a subject of the Russian Empire “in general”, as a basic element of the entire state and the system of public relations. Using the structural-functional and problem-chronological approaches, the author distinguished three periods (with internal stages) based on a general analysis of state policy in approaches to education and, as a consequence, analyzing the corresponding system of educational institutions, governing bodies and normative regulation of the educational sphere. The author concludes that the educational policy directly depended on the ideological views and directions of the domestic policy of the monarchs and the elite of Russia. In the system of organization and management of education, there was a constant struggle between two tendencies: liberal transformations (the beginning of the 19th century, the years of the Great Reforms and the short period of the bourgeois-democratic republic of the Provisional Government) and conservative-protective transformations (tendencies characteristic of a longer period of time throughout the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century) The first tendency was characterized by the all-class nature of education, the elimination of class restrictions, the autonomy of university management, etc. The second trend was characterized by the establishment of class barriers in order to restrict access to education (and therefore, in the future, to public service, to social elevators, etc.) of the lower strata of the country's population, the limitation of the autonomy of universities, the acquisition of a higher level of education by subjects who were considered as a support of the monarchical regime - by landowners, officials, the military, etc.

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