Educational activities of the city and working consumer cooperation in Siberia of early 20th century

The article reviews the activities of theurban consumer cooperatives in Siberia to promote public education in the early 20th century. The basic parameters of educational activitiesof cooperatives were identified: reasons, goals, methods, value. The cooperators felt that there was a need to expand the educationsystem for children and adults in urban and rural areas. Cooperation was amateur organizations, so the questions of literacy andeducation determined the ability of citizens to govern. It is shown that non-trade cooperation activities held stages in the gradual development.With the financial strengthening of cooperatives the contributions to cultural and educational purposes increased. The crisis ofthe First World War revealed the need for more cultural and educational work. Most actively it was held in cooperatives in Krasnoyarsk,Tomsk, Omsk, Novonikolayevsk, Verkhneudinsk, Chita. Cooperatives gave money to schools, colleges, high schools, institutes, universities,supplying students scholarships, warm clothing, and books. They opened libraries, cooperative and educational courses foradults, equipped People's Houses. The article considered the most important initiatives of cooperation in the field of public education.An important achievement was the opening of the Mariinsky cooperative school. In October, 1917 the Mariinsky Cooperative Unionand the Union of Credit and savings and loan associations established a school for children of members of consumer societies. Theschool, organized in Mariinsk, served all consumer cooperatives of Mariinsky County. Mariinsky School acquainted with cooperation intheory and in practice, because it had a cooperative of student manuals, consumer society, and credit society under the school. With thehelp of cooperatives in 1917 in Omsk the Institute of Commerce was founded, which later was converted into a polytechnic. Cooperationworked with city governments and societies of private initiative. Educational activities of consumer cooperatives in the early 20thcentury shaped the ideology, corresponding to the cooperative ideology based on the principles of initiative, independence, democracy,human orientation, priority of human values. The role of cooperatives in organising schools, colleges, institutions of higher education isshown in the context of the idea of membership of cooperative socio-economic activities in the sphere of civil society, an importantcriterion of which was the ability of citizens to organize themselves on a democratic basis.

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