A picture of education in Divin. Early in the 20th century, disaster struck:
After the burning of the building of Divin’s School there were big problems with the building during the advent of the 1911-1912 school year.
We learn more details:
Then, the board of the educational neighborhood decided to rent space in the homes of private individuals.
The teacher A. Bushchik served as the temporary acting head of the Diviner School at that time. There is a copy of her memorandum and report to the authorities in early 1915. {
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She was held as the person responsible for and the governing body of the school; she wrote the following:
The building of the Diviner School burned down on April 25, 1911, and the current school is located in a rented house, rented out by the educational community board from a peasant of the town of Divin.
The school consists of two rooms. The first room is 6.5 arshins [a Russian unit of length equivalent to 28 inches] in length, 4 arshins in width, and 3.5 arshins in height. The room has three windows 1.5 arshins in height and 1.0 arshins in width. The second room is 6.5 arshins in length, 4 arshins in width, 3.5 arshins in height. It also has three windows of the same size as the first room.
The teacher's apartment consists of one room of 5.5 arshins in length, 4.25 arshins in width, 3.5 arshins in height. It has 3 windows with a height of 1.5 arshins and width of 1.0 arshin.
In the rooms for the students there are 14 well-arranged desks. The other desks are uncomfortable and need to be replaced with new ones.
The school has its own land of 1,176 square yards. This land is inconvenient for a vegetable garden, but it is quite suitable for the planting of garden trees. Presently, this land is not fenced in, as the peasants expect the speedy construction of the school. The school does not have sufficient funds to protect its land.
Building material was released and cut down in the month of April of this year. However, the material has not been transported to the construction site of the future school building. The reason is that the permit to export the felled and timber was received late (on November 29th), when the transport of the timber was impossible.
The school needs the following books and teaching manuals:
Baryshnikov. Reader -- 5 copies
Kiseleva. Basic Arithmetic Malinina-Burenina. -- 5 copies
Problem-set book Raevski. Geography, Part 1 -- 5 copies
Filaret. Catechism -- 5 copies
Yurevich. Basic Geometry -- 5 copies
Smirnov. Basic History of the Church -- 5 copies
Muratov. Church Slavic Grammar -- 5 copies
The teacher teaches religious and secular singing. Students of the entire class sing the prayer: "Heavenly King,” “God Bless,” “Our Father,” “God Save the Tsar,” as well as secular songs. Choir singing is taught by the senior teacher, Tunchik.
During the year, an audit was conducted in the school (one time) by the local inspector, on May 12th.
The following entry was left in the audit book:
Visited the Diviner two-year school on May 12, 1914. During the day of the visit the students of the 5
th department had an exam in the natural sciences and geometry. The students answered correctly and in detail, they proved theorems {
43} using drawings, accompanied by the relevant arguments. Reviewed were written examination works released about the Russian language and arithmetic.
The works were performed satisfactorily. It could be seen that the students prepared for the exams quite thoroughly.
The library and office records are kept in proper order.
The school premises – hired, are uncomfortable and too small to accommodate all of the children who want to study. It is necessary to look into a rapid start of the construction of a new building for the school. I ask that a copy of the records in duplicates be immediately presented to the inspector of public schools.
(Signature) Inspector I. Paszkowski
From the 20th July 1914, Head of School Tunchik was called to mobilize for military service. His duties were temporarily assigned to the teacher A. Bushchik.
On the 7
th of January [Christmas day as celebrated by the Russian Orthodox Church, in accordance with the old Julian calendar] a Christmas tree was arranged for the students. The children recited poems and performed fables, sang songs. At the conclusion, sweets were given out to all of the students.
The Acting Head, A. Bushchik
In the early summer of 1915 all of the timber and brick construction material was brought to the school area, where the construction of the new building of the school was set to begin in the fall. But fate did not have it for these dreams of Diviners to come true.
With the arrival of the month of August, the sound of gun bursts intensified each day. At night, the earth trembled with gunfire more and more. The war front moved nearer to us every day.
Finally, on August 14 the Diviner residents, driven by fear of war, fled deep into the central Russian provinces, as refugees.
The remaining local Roman Catholics utilized the flight of the Diviner peasants. Together with the Catholics of the surrounding villages, they built themselves a Catholic Cathedral in Divin. The material for this construction was all of the wood and brick intended for the construction of the school.
During the retreat of the Russian army, Divin suffered yet again: Divin’s Orthodox Assumption Church, the bell tower and part of the center of the town, in which the Jewish population resided, burned down. Jewish families affected by the fire produced by war, moved into the best peasant houses. The owners of these houses had left as refugees. The Jews lived in these houses until the peasants returned to their homeland. {
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Our Diviner soldiers having mobilized for the war, suffered and were food for the lice in the trenches for two consecutive years before they learned the sad news that their homeland, Divin, was given away to the enemy. Only substantially later, they learned the truth, from the soldier-revolutionaries, that all suffering and sacrifice was in vain. After all, they were enduring all of the front-line hardships and endangering their own lives, not in defense of their peasant interests, but the interests of the wealthy: the landowners and capitalists.
