Background
The museum was created in 2004 in connection with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Vorotynets school. The museum's collection was based on exhibits from an earlier museum, founded in 1982 by the school's former director Vasily Mikhailovich Shirgin.
The head of the museum until 2010 was Honored Teacher of Russia Dyuzhakov Alexander Mikhailovich.
Poetic invitation
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We invite you to the museum:
Once you've visited it, You will at once recall Unusual people, Worthy and decent. Here is a museum of school memory. In its halls you will meet Teachers you knew, Cheerful, wise, and tired. And here we have gathered them. Now they are only exhibits: The principal, the deputy head — all are here. Don't forget them, children! |
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Tour by Dyuzhakov Alexander Mikhailovich
Transcript of a brief tour through the museum's halls
- Until recently, when greeting guests, we used to say that the founding of our school should be dated to the opening of the zemstvo school in the village of Vorotynets (disambiguation) in 1904 on the basis of a parish school. However, today we no longer have such certainty, since a number of documented and as-yet-undocumented pieces of evidence have come to light showing that an educational institution — possibly even two — already existed in Vorotynets before 1904.
Based on a certificate from the State Archive of the Nizhny Novgorod Region we know that in 1904 the village of Vorotynets simply gained a new, convenient building for a two-class Ministry of Public Education school, with apartments for teachers and a library-reading room. You can see this two-storey building in a photograph from the 1950s. It stood next to the church, on the spot where the treasury building now stands.
In 1932 the Vorotynets first-stage school became a seven-year school. Classes were held in the 1904 building and in houses of dispossessed peasants and merchants that had been converted for school use.
In 1935-1936 two new buildings were built in Vorotynets on a vacant lot behind Maxim Gorky Street. The Vorotynets secondary school was housed there. The seven-year school also continued to operate. Today the 1936 building houses a sports school. The two-storey building was demolished in 2007.
- Our museum has an album of photographs, unfortunately not of all, but only of the school's leaders known to us. We would especially like to note Zoya Sergeyevna Odintsova, the first head of the Vorotynets incomplete secondary school, Anatoly Pavlovich Kozlov, the school's director during the Great Patriotic War, and the post-war directors Viktor Fyodorovich Vershinin and Vasily Mikhailovich Shirgin, who did a great deal for the school's development.
- On November 23, 1963, construction began on a building for the Vorotynets secondary school on a new street of the settlement, named Kosmonavtov Street (Cosmonauts Street) in honor of the conquerors of space. The first stone in the foundation of this new building was laid by tenth-grader Vitya Mayorov. As it turned out, Vitya himself never got to study at this school. But for 36 years now, Viktor Fyodorovich Mayorov, a 1965 silver medalist, has gone to work at his native school.
- On September 1, 1968, the new building was solemnly opened. Nikolai Terentyevich Karmanov, head of the Vorotynets repair-and-construction section, ceremonially handed the keys to the school's director, Vasily Mikhailovich Shirgin.
- In 1971 an eight-year school split off from the secondary school; it was headed by Viktor Fyodorovich Vershinin, Olga Nikolayevna Labayeva and Igor Valentinovich Lyapidevsky. Meanwhile, another wing was being added to the building on Kosmonavtov Street, and once it opened, the schools merged again. At that time the school's director was Nikolai Mikhailovich Vtorov. He was succeeded by Eva Ivanovna Smirnova. Since 1990 our school has been headed by Vera Dmitrievna Shindina, an Honored Teacher of the Russian Federation. In 1998, in order to move away from a two-shift schedule, the school was given the reconstructed building of the "Rodnichok" ("Little Spring") kindergarten, which today houses the elementary school.
- The most valuable exhibits in our museum can be called the education certificates issued to our school's graduates at various times. In 1910 Pavel Ivanovich Ladeynov graduated from the Vorotynets two-class Ministry of Public Education school. The grading system draws attention: in most subjects the pupil received a grade of 3, which was qualitatively rated as "good." The stand also displays a Certificate granting exemption from military conscription.
- Nearby we see the most interesting confirmation of the existence of an elementary girls' school in Vorotynets. This is a copy of the certificate of its completion, issued to Anastasia Yakovlevna Gorshkova in 1913. The number of this certificate — 215 — indicates that this school had already existed for several years. According to local historian Mikhail Vasilyevich Malov, in 1899 this school was named after the poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth. After the October Revolution the Vorotynets school remained an elementary school, or, as a 1926 certificate issued to Alexei Chuyev puts it, a first-stage school.
- A special pride of the museum is the secondary-school certificate of Sergei Nikolaevich Bakanov, a 1940 graduate. Sergei's sister Galina Nikolaevna Bolshakova, together with her husband Stanislav Ivanovich, gave us this relic. The memory of one of the school's first graduates, who died on May 3, 1945, is kept in our museum.
- Until the early 1990s our schools had a compulsory uniform. Our exhibition displays the formal school uniform of a Pioneer boy and girl. Scarlet Pioneer neckerchiefs and Pioneer badges served as symbols of membership in the Pioneer organization. Nearby you can see Pioneer paraphernalia: a drum, a bugle, a pennant. The museum's badge collection holds Little Octobrist stars, Pioneer and Komsomol badges, and "GTO," "GSO," "Young Traffic Inspector," and "Young Marksman" badges.
- The Vorotynets secondary school — the district's largest educational institution — has remained one of the best throughout all the years of its existence. The school staff was repeatedly awarded commemorative badges as a winner of socialist competition. In 1970 the school's Komsomol organization received a bust of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as an award. In 1985 it was presented with a commemorative badge for the 40th anniversary of Victory, and in 1987 for the 70th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. In 1991 the school once again received the Travelling Red Banner for the best preparation for the new school year. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the abolition of socialist competitions left the Red Banner permanently in our school.
The school has always been an active participant in all kinds of contests, competitions, and reviews... And not just a participant, but a winner and a prize-holder too. This is attested to by the numerous sports cups, certificates, and diplomas displayed on our stands.
- Textbooks are what a school cannot do without. Our stand displays veteran textbooks. You will certainly recognize the ones you yourself studied from. For example, the "Arithmetic" textbook for first grade from 1959. When our present-day teachers opened it, they were amazed. In the 1950s-1960s, first grade covered material that today is taught in second grade. So much for the "increasing complexity" of modern curricula!
- The Museum of the History of the Vorotynets School is the keeper of unique book editions from the early twentieth century. Books of religious and educational content. Popular-science pamphlets were accessible to Russian people in the early 20th century, since they were printed in large runs and cost relatively little. Also on display here are several volumes from the complete collected works of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, published in 1911.
A corner of the old school with the exhibition "Pedagogical Circle of 1938"
- Before you is a corner of the old school. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century it changed little: a teacher's desk with its ever-present inkwell, a pupil's desk with a sloped writing surface, a blackboard. On the teacher's desk a small exhibition is laid out, dedicated to the pedagogical circle of 1938. Pupils of the first 10th grade of the Vorotynets secondary school were admitted to it. Over the course of half a year they studied teaching methods for the primary grades. And in August they became teachers. Klavdiya Ganina — head girl of the first graduating class of the Vorotynets secondary school — was taken on to work at the Vorotynets seven-year school, as attested by a certificate signed by director Ivan Vasilyevich Remov. The exhibition displays photographs of the circle's members and of Klavdiya Alekseyevna Ganina with her pupils on an outing in Ostrov. The photograph was taken by teacher Sizov, who died during the Great Patriotic War. Most of the pupils of the first, 1938 graduating class became teachers — Ivan Kuzmich Komov, Fyodor Ivanovich Kamnev, Klavdiya Alekseyevna Ganina, the Stepanov couple, Alexander Mikhailovich Sekachev, and others.
Our tour has come to an end, and we thank you for visiting our museum. And we invite you to cooperate with us. We will gratefully accept, for temporary or permanent safekeeping, any documentary or material evidence relating to the school's history.