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Clinging to the Classical

The National Education Council and Armenian-Language Instruction in Constantinople, c. 1860 - c. 1890
S’en tenir au classique : le Conseil national de l’éducation et l’enseignement de la langue arménienne à Constantinople (années 1860-1890)
Jennifer Manoukian
p. 147-181

Résumés

L’histoire de l’éducation dans la société arménienne ottomane a très peu été étudiée. Nombre de prénotions circulent encore de nos jours dans les études arméniennes sur la manière concrète dont les enfants arméniens étaient instruits dans le milieu scolaire à la fin du 19e siècle. Cet article s'efforce de démystifier deux mythes courants sur l'éducation arménienne ottomane de cette époque qui circulent encore aujourd’hui : (1) que la Constitution nationale arménienne et son Conseil national de l’éducation auraient été des forces de transformation dans la réforme de l'éducation arménienne ottomane et (2) que la Constitution nationale arménienne et les écoles arméniennes auraient représenté dès le début de puissants vecteurs de valorisation et de diffusion de la langue arménienne occidentale moderne.

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  • 1 G. Utudjian, “Մանկութեան յիշատակներ. իմ դպրոցական կեանքէն [Childhood Memories: From My School Life] (...)

1In 1827, at the age of four, Garabed Utudjian began his romance with the Armenian alphabet. This longtime editor of the Constantinople-based newspaper Massis was first introduced to the shapes and sounds of the Armenian letters at a school run out of the home of a local nun on the European side of the Ottoman capital. Here reading and religion were intimately intertwined as young Garabed learned to sound out words from an alphabet primer before advancing to the Lord’s Prayer and the Nicene Creed. These texts were in Classical Armenian, a form of Armenian distinct from the dialect of Constantinople that Garabed spoke at home and with his friends. Once he graduated to his local church school, Classical Armenian continued to prevail. Like other children of his time, Garabed practiced his new skills by reading aloud from the Psalms, the Acts of the Apostles and Gregory of Narek’s Book of Lamentation – all without the expectation that he would understand very much from them.1

  • 2 Z. Yessayan, 2014, 93-98.

2Fifty years later, in the mid-1880s, we find ourselves in another Armenian-language classroom across the Bosphorus on the Asian side of Constantinople. In it we spot the future novelist Zabel Yessayan as she first learns the building blocks of her craft.2 Major social and political transformations have taken place among Armenians in the Ottoman capital in the intervening years, including the advent of a national constitution that promised to transform schooling for Armenians within the Empire. Yet how young Zabel is learning to read Armenian and the form of the language she is learning are strikingly similar to Garabed’s account from a half-century earlier. Here we find the same methods, the same materials, and, most significantly for our purposes, the same classical variety of Armenian dominating in the classroom. How can we account for these similarities?

  • 3 In Armenian-language historiography, these debates have been called the “language struggle” (լեզուա (...)

3The answer lies in the inherent conservatism of Armenian-language education in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the inefficacy of the Armenian National Constitution in bringing about educational reform in its first decades. As neither of these points has been widely appreciated in existing scholarship on nineteenth-century Ottoman Armenian history, there is a scholarly misconception in circulation that the declaration of the Armenian National Constitution prompted swift and radical change in Ottoman Armenian education and brought about the widespread diffusion of Modern Western Armenian. In hopes of offering a corrective to this narrative, the present article seeks to expose as myths two prevailing – though unsubstantiated – claims: (1) that the Armenian National Constitution and its Education Council were transformational forces in the reform of Ottoman Armenian education and (2) that the Armenian National Constitution and Armenian schools were powerful vehicles for the valorization and spread of Modern Western Armenian from the start. As we will see further along, the insights offered by schoolbook prefaces, memoirs by Armenian students and discussions about education in contemporaneous printed materials tell a dramatically different story. From these sources, we glean that the work of the Armenian National Constitution and its Education Council was defined much more by statements than by action. These sources also show us that Armenian schools in Constantinople were, in fact, one of the final bastions of Classical Armenian and a battleground for the language debates that raged in the second half of the nineteenth century between defenders of Classical Armenian and Modern Armenian.3

  • 4 See, for example, the narratives advanced in oft-cited works such as V. Artinian, 1988; V. Oshagan, (...)
  • 5 The history of Armenian education in the Ottoman Empire has been sorely understudied. The most comm (...)

4It comes as no surprise that misconceptions about Ottoman Armenian education have taken hold in the small body of research that has touched on the topic.4 The importance of educational reform was written into the Armenian National Constitution, and the National Education Council published dozens of documents with proposed curricula and other educational dictates that give the impression that it wielded tremendous authority over Armenian schools. Assuming that the policies in these documents meant practice is at the root of the accepted belief in the power of the Constitution and its Council as well as of the exaggeratedly boastful portrayal of Armenian education in the second half of the nineteenth century.5

5It also comes as no surprise that post-Constitution Armenian schools have been considered powerful vehicles for the spread of Modern Western Armenian. In an attempt to emphasize the modernity of the constitutional system, scholars have erroneously overlaid a hallmark of European modernity and nation-building onto Ottoman Armenian history: the spurning of classical languages and the hailing of their modern iterations. While Modern Western Armenian did assume nearly all the functions of Classical Armenian by the end of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Armenian intellectuals and educators exhibited a great deal of ambivalence about abandoning Classical Armenian for a host of reasons that will be explained further along. Their hesitation manifested in the maintenance into the 1890s of a long-standing educational status quo in which Classical Armenian dominated in Armenian-language education. Clinging to a classical language in this way goes against the expectation for the nineteenth century, during which national movements around the world were endowing vernacular languages with newfound social value and integrating them into school curricula.

  • 6 S. Somel, 2001, 13 and B. Fortna, 2002, 10-11.

6As historians of the late Ottoman period have noted, phenomena that do not fit into the paradigms of modernization, Westernization and secularization have commonly been left out or deemphasized in the writing of late Ottoman history.6 It is, in part, because of these historiographic trends that there is still an enduring perception in Armenian studies that the modern, Western-style constitution ushered in a modern, Western-style school system and the warm embrace of a modern, Western-style language for that school system. These paradigms have fundamentally distorted our understanding of Ottoman Armenian educational history and have kept historians from seeing the extent to which the national leadership – too often framed as pioneers of change – maintained rather than overturned long-standing educational practices. This article, thus, broadly sets out to illustrate the unexpected historical realities to be found when we shed conventional historiographic paradigms and turn to new source bases to reconstruct pieces of Ottoman Armenian history.

  • 7 See notes 25 and 37.
  • 8 For an excellent start, see H. Papikyan 2023.

7Before proceeding, it is critical to note that this article is only a first step in revising the existing narrative on Ottoman Armenian education. Limited in its scope, it focuses exclusively on Armenian schools in the Ottoman capital that were affiliated with the Armenian Apostolic Church. Its conclusions should not be transposed onto schools in other parts of the Empire or onto those run by other groups. This narrow focus means that parallel dynamics within schools for Armenian children run by other confessions and entities, including missionary organizations and charitable associations, will not be treated.7 Nor will the agency of teachers or the reception of transnational philosophies of education be investigated in the detail they deserve. This article thus calls on researchers to consider exploring the scores of worthy topics in the history of Ottoman Armenian education that have been left out of this study and that await rigorous scholarly inquiry.8

The National Education Council and Armenian Schools: Fact and Fiction

  • 9 This article focuses only on education within the Armenian Apostolic millet. It does not explore th (...)
  • 10 For a discussion of the constitutional experiences of Ottoman Armenians, Ottoman Rum and Ottoman Je (...)
  • 11 See Anonymous, 1863. For an English translation of the Constitution, see H. Lynch, 1901, 445-467.
  • 12 Anonymous, 1863, 29-30.

8The Armenian National Constitution (Ազգային սահմանադրութիւն) and its National Education Council (Ուսումնական խորհուրդ) were products of an ethos of reform and regulation within the highest echelons of the Ottoman bureaucracy in the mid-nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Sublime Porte mandated a series of communal reforms within the Armenian Apostolic, Rum and Jewish millets in hopes of systematizing, centralizing and institutionalizing its imperial administration.9 These imperial reforms, codified in an edict known as the Islâhat Fermânı, required that each millet draft a set of regulations that would govern its internal community organization.10 The regulations for the Armenian Apostolic millet are commonly referred to as the Armenian National Constitution and were accepted by the Sublime Porte in 1863.11 Article 45 of the Constitution established the National Education Council: a body designed to oversee Armenian education in the whole of the Ottoman Empire. Composed of a committee of seven laymen in Constantinople, the Council included under its purview supervising reforms in Armenian schools; increasing access to education for boys and girls; improving the training and welfare of teachers; selecting textbooks; administering annual exams; and issuing diplomas.12

Figure 1 At 24, Stepan Berdj Boghos Papaziants (1839-1888) became the first secretary of the National Education Council in 1863 and served as a Council member until the mid-1870s (Teotig, 1910, 228).

Courtesy of AGBU Nubar Library, Paris

  • 13 For a history of the Council, see A. Alboyadjian, “Կրթական յիշատակ մը (1853-1903) [An Educational M (...)
  • 14 For expressions of the link between education and national progress, see, for example, Anonymous, “ (...)
  • 15 See, for example, P. Sarkissian, 1936, 44-71. Alboyadjian notes that the existence of these schools (...)
  • 16 M. Dzalian, 1912, 22-23.
  • 17 Anonymous, “Յայտարարութիւն յաղագս ազգային դաստիարակութեան [Announcement Regarding National Instruct (...)
  • 18 See, for example, Anonymous 1840 and Anonymous, 1858a.

9Like many mid-nineteenth-century attempts at social and administrative reform, the Education Council was well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective, particularly during its first decades.13 Upon its establishment, it was hailed as a vehicle for national progress, imbued with the grand hopes of the intelligentsia and considered a way to finally produce the educated national community for which this sliver of the population had yearned for decades.14 This was not the first time that Ottoman Armenians had come together in hopes of improving education. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Armenian Apostolic, Armenian Catholic and Armenian Protestant leaders had all – albeit independently and fueled by a sense of confessional rivalry – worked on a small scale toward opening or improving schools in urban and rural parts of the Empire.15 In 1828, for example, there is evidence of an Education Assembly (Ուսումնական ժողով) organized by the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate of Constantinople in an attempt to centralize the schools under its auspices.16 In 1853, the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate of Constantinople once again attempted to regulate education – this time with an Education Council that boasted a similar but narrower set of objectives than its 1863 iteration (i.e., curriculum development, textbook production, teacher selection and oversight).17 However, as was all too common in Armenian associational life in the nineteenth century, both bodies disbanded soon after their establishment without much to show for themselves. In the 1840s and 1850s, we do read intermittently about plans to reform individual schools, but these plans should not be seen as indicative of larger trends.18 We also know little about whether these plans were indeed carried out.

  • 19 E. Evered, 2012, 17.
  • 20 Just as we see with Armenian communal education, significant periods of time also lapsed between th (...)

10As historians of Ottoman Muslim education have shown, the desire to reform education did not always result in actual change. “Many educational policies of the early nineteenth century simply remained on paper”, Emine Evered has noted, “reflecting the desire to change but the absence of the effort and the means to do so.”19 This dynamic defines the work of the National Education Council in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. Education was indeed enshrined in the Armenian National Constitution and put at the center of its reform agenda. But the Education Council was not equipped to implement its own ambitious plan to centralize a fundamentally decentralized phenomenon like education in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s – a time when the existence, content and rigor of education for Armenian children varied dramatically across the Empire. It lacked the infrastructure, know-how, clarity of vision, community support and human capital needed to realize its goals. This fact resulted in a series of starts and stops in Ottoman Armenian education, many of which chronologically mirrored the vicissitudes of imperial-level education policy.20

  • 21 A. Alboyadjian, 1926, 150.
  • 22 M. Cheraz, 1876, ԻԳ.
  • 23 Many at this time perceived reform projects generally as perpetually paralyzed. In another politica (...)

11It is imperative, therefore, not to exaggerate the power and reach of the Education Council and to distinguish between policy and practice. According to Arshag Alboyadjian, the Education Council acted more as an advisor than as an authority with the power to directly intervene in schools.21 The official curricula and guidelines it published, therefore, do not offer a window into day-to-day practices in Armenian schools. Given that the Council had little power to mandate change, these publications should be seen as aspirational before all else. The disconnect between the Council’s promises of change and the maintenance of the educational status quo disappointed many Ottoman Armenians invested in education, who, by the 1870s, had come to view the Council as ineffective, sterile and largely dormant.22 A contemporaneous example of similar perceptions can be found in the following political cartoon from 1873, in which the Council is portrayed as a paraplegic.23

Figure 2 “The National Education Council: Paralyzed at 12 years old.” Anonymous, “Տասներկու տարուան անդամալոյծը”, Մեղու, vol. 2 (126), 1873, 3

Courtesy of AGBU Nubar Library, Paris

  • 24 H. Assadour, 1879, 20-21. For a full translation of this speech, see V. Ketsemanian forthcoming.
  • 25 These schools and educational initiatives, like most topics in Ottoman Armenian educational history (...)

12Although 1863 did not mark the first time Ottoman Armenians had mobilized to reform education and although the National Education Council itself was, in practice, more deficient than efficient, its creation is not without significance. Indeed, building this infrastructure and framing education as a fundamental expression of national progress emboldened many intellectuals to forcefully voice their disappointment when the Council ultimately failed to make good on its promises. As Hrand Assadour, a young leader in an Armenian educational association, noted in a 1879 speech, “The Education Council seems to have forgotten that it is obliged to oversee national schools […]. It has not fulfilled its function, which is exceedingly important for the future of Armenia.”24 Educational associations like Assadour’s proliferated in the 1880s, reacting to and compensating for the Council’s inactivity by setting out on their own to spread – not just talk about spreading – education with their own schools and other educational initiatives.25 Moreover, the Council’s aspirations to regulate Armenian education across the Empire also brought into more common consciousness the idea of a school system. This idea led educational reformers to set their sights on centralizing a decentralized jumble of schools and on bringing uniformity to Armenian education across the Empire rather than simply at the level of individual schools or regions.

  • 26 M. Ubicini, 1856, 303-304.
  • 27 The variation in Ottoman Armenian education can be seen clearly in an invaluable report on schools (...)
  • 28 See, for example, M. Ubicini, 1856, 304; Anonymous, 1876, 409; and Anonymous, “Ազգային [National]”, (...)
  • 29 Anonymous, 1858b, 3-4. Though it is beyond the scope of this article, girls’ education in particula (...)
  • 30 D. Kapamadjian, 1861, 5.
  • 31 K. Peshdimaldjian, 1829, 125. One example of radically contrasting beliefs about education within a (...)
  • 32 D. Kapamadjian, 1861, 5 and Anonymous, “Ազգային [National]”, Մասիս, vol. 7 (341), 1858, 2.
  • 33 On the cultivation of these values, see J. Manoukian, 2022, 130-134.
  • 34 Anonymous, “Ազգային [National]”, Մասիս, vol. 7 (341), 1858, 2.

13What did the landscape of Ottoman Armenian education look like in the second half of the nineteenth century? In the 1850s, every parish, in theory, had its own free primary school to teach reading, writing, arithmetic and basic Christian doctrine.26 These schools, if they existed at all, were often in precarious financial straits and varied in rigor. It was not uncommon for them to open and close quickly for economic reasons.27 Seeing schooling as a sacrifice, parents – especially those with limited means – also commonly removed their children from school after only a few months or years and sent them to work instead.28 This is, of course, if they even chose to enroll their children in school in the first place. Outside intellectual circles, there were major prejudices against and resistance to formal education for boys and girls alike, prejudices and resistance that endured in certain parts of the Empire into the twentieth century.29 In particular, there was a widespread belief that reading, writing and formal education was only useful for future priests, teachers, translators and writers.30 As one early educational reformer put it in 1829, “since [parents] only know the basics of reading and writing, they consider this enough for their children” as well.31 There was also an idea in circulation that education would lead to atheism, a prospect that was alarming to many.32 Clearly the suggestion often found in secondary scholarship that Ottoman Armenians across the board were highly educated and endowed with a great appreciation for knowledge in all its forms must be approached with caution.33 It took decades for intellectuals to chip away at these mentalities and instill a new conception of education as “a natural obligation for everyone, goldsmiths, watchmakers and blacksmiths included” and as a tool for creating “honorable citizens and enlightened patriots.”34

  • 35 Anonymous, “Ազգային յառաջդիմութեան գործը [The Task of National Progress]”, Մասիս, vol. 14 (688), 18 (...)
  • 36 E. Evered, 2012, 17-18 and B. Fortna, 2002, 72, 96. Lest we think this autonomy is a creation of th (...)
  • 37 On schools run by the latter two groups, see, for example, C. Yetkiner, 2011, 63-83 and P. Houbouya (...)
  • 38 See note 25.

14According to one reformer of the time, Armenian schools in the Ottoman Empire c. 1865 could be grouped into three categories: (1) schools in small villages and towns outside the capital where students learned only the alphabet and the Psalms; (2) schools in cities outside the capital where Classical Armenian was taught, but where the quality of education was poor; and (3) schools in the capital where Classical Armenian, other languages and the basics of many different subjects were taught.35 Illustrating a common bias of the time, this reformer failed to mention that Armenian education did not begin and end with schools affiliated – however tenuously – with the Armenian Apostolic Church. Until the mid-1880s, non-Muslim groups within the Ottoman Empire had the autonomy to run their own schools and educate their children with little intervention from imperial authorities.36 As Ottoman society was divided administratively by confession and education was the responsibility of each confession, most schools were run by or affiliated with religious institutions. While schools in the hands of the Armenian Apostolic Church indeed constituted the majority, Armenian children also attended schools run by Armenian Catholics and Armenian Protestants as well as those run by American Protestant and European Catholic missionaries.37 In the 1870s and 1880s, the educational landscape became more complex as more and more schools run by Armenian educational associations began to open, especially outside the capital.38

  • 39 Anonymous, 1868, 11 and M. Cheraz, 1876, 47-49.

15Disseminating and reforming formal education were major preoccupations in the second half of the nineteenth century and were discussed at length in the press. Portrayed consistently as a panacea for moral, intellectual, social, national and economic ailments, formal education was seen as the clearest path to national progress and enlightenment.39 Few intellectuals were ever satisfied with the state of education, which they frequently lambasted in print. Particularly troubling to many was the chasm between rhetoric and reality. In 1874, writer, translator, textbook author and school principal Madteos Mamourian offers us a glimpse of the crumbling interior hidden behind the glimmering façade of Armenian education:

  • 40 [M. Mamourian], 1874, 386.

To support education, people have conceived of pretty councils; they have formed associations; and they have decided to send students to Europe to study the art of pedagogy […]. Looking at all of this activity from afar, any foreigner would surely think that Armenians do not spare any thought, money, effort or time in support of the most vital issue on Earth and that certainly, having reformed many schools, they are the wisest, most learned and most powerful people in the East. But anyone who looks at this movement more closely will search in vain for follow-through and realization. Individual councils come and go, and appeals and mandates in the press are read like entertainment. Big proposals, decisions and plans shine only on the page.40

  • 41 B. Fortna, 2002, 27.
  • 42 D. Vincent, 2000, 9-12.
  • 43 We can discern this watchful eye from the abundance of educational news from abroad featured in the (...)
  • 44 For praise of Ottoman Rum schools in Smyrna, see H. A. P., 1876, 420-421. For praise of the Allianc (...)
  • 45 M. Cheraz, 1876, 49.

16Intellectuals like Mamourian were hyper-conscious of the failures of Ottoman Armenian educational reform, in part, because they were constantly comparing themselves to other groups in the midst of the global “Age of Education.”41 The 1860s, 1870s and 1880s were a period of tremendous growth and democratization in education and literacy, particularly in Western Europe and the United States.42 These transformations, which seemed all the more glorious from a distance, came under the watchful eye of many Ottoman Armenian intellectuals.43 Seeking to keep pace with educational advances around the world, Ottoman Armenian intellectuals felt self-conscious about their perceived belatedness as they looked toward the United States, toward the “civilized nations” of Europe and around at their fellow Ottoman subjects.44 “Let’s be smart and draw useful lessons from the experiences of people who have had the good fortune of being enlightened before the Armenian people”, a young Minas Cheraz proclaimed before a Teachers’ Assembly in 1873. “[…] I propose that we choose the best from the systems of the civilized world and implement it in our own schools.”45 It is, therefore, in response to these global tides of change that we see larger-scale mobilization for education in the 1870s and 1880s and a greater interest in working to reform teaching methods and approaches rather than simply proclaiming the need to do so.

Armenian-Language Instruction in the Nineteenth Century

17As we have seen, the Armenian National Constitution and the National Education Council it created may have expressed the need to reform education in the early 1860s, but change did not happen overnight. While this historical moment is commonly depicted in secondary scholarship as a watershed, there were, in fact, many more continuities between educational life before and after the ratification of the Constitution than scholars have assumed. Nowhere can we see these continuities more clearly than in the realm of Armenian-language instruction.

  • 46 M. Hroch, 2000, 80-83.
  • 47 [M. Karakashian], “Լեզու եւ առանձինն հայերէն լեզու [Language and the Armenian Language In Particula (...)
  • 48 M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Զ.

18While Europeans in the midst of nation-building often began teaching a modern language in their drive to expand education, we do not find the same pattern among mid-century Ottoman Armenians.46 This fact goes against the pervasive – though uncorroborated – claim that the Armenian National Constitution, the National Education Council and its affiliated schools were positive forces in the diffusion of Modern Western Armenian. In reality, the power players in Armenian education deliberately hindered its diffusion until the final decade of the nineteenth century. Schools, in this way, were one of the final strongholds of Classical Armenian, which lingered in education long after Modern Western Armenian had replaced Classical Armenian as the primary language of print among Ottoman Armenians. In discussions during the drafting of the Constitution c. 1860, its architects were indeed confronted with the question of whether to propose removing Classical Armenian instruction from schools altogether. But the majority of the drafters, including future members of the Education Council, resisted this change and chose to keep Classical Armenian the sole form of the language taught in schools, as it had always been.47 “Some have feared”, as Meguerdich Kiredjdjian, an early grammarian and proponent of Modern Armenian, wrote in 1864, “that when Modern Armenian grammar enters schools, Classical Armenian will be abandoned and the original language of Hayk will be lost.”48

Figure 3 Meguerdich Kiredjdjian, an Armenian Evangelical pastor and author of Հայերէն քերականութիւն աշխարհաբար լեզուի նախակրթական դպրոցաց համար, 1864 (Teotig, 1915, 127)

Courtesy of AGBU Nubar Library, Paris

  • 49 For a selection of these perspectives, see H. A. P., 1876, 417; Anonymous, 1877, 75-76; and N. Puza (...)
  • 50 J. Manoukian 2023, 159-224.
  • 51 A. Aydenian, 1866, 261.

19This fear is palpable throughout the period of this study and is intimately intertwined with beliefs about the function of Classical Armenian within the mid-century national movement. At the time, Classical Armenian was seen as an essential pillar of nationhood and was believed to have the power to unite Armenians scattered around the world who spoke different languages or distinct varieties of Armenian in daily life. National leaders thought that abandoning Classical Armenian would be a death sentence for the nation and pave the way for the loss of religious sentiment, knowledge and national genius.49 While Modern Armenian had been the language of newspapers and other printed materials for decades, it still lacked prestige and legitimacy in the eyes of certain members of the Ottoman Armenian intelligentsia into the 1880s.50 In contrast to Classical Armenian, Modern Armenian was widely considered to be, in the words of one reformer, “weak, ugly, undignified, impoverished, and in a word, a black stain on the face of an ancient nation.”51 For these reasons, many intellectuals during this period clung tightly to Classical Armenian and clashed considerably with other thinkers who called for expanding the domains of Modern Armenian, particularly into education.

  • 52 For comparison, it was only in 1834 that schoolchildren in France were officially permitted to begi (...)
  • 53 S. Hackert, 2012, 158-159.
  • 54 See K. Ayvazian, 1869, 3.
  • 55 The two most notable grammars of non-classical varieties of Armenian published before 1850 were not (...)

20Before the mid-nineteenth century, teaching the grammar of a non-classical form of Armenian in schools was nowhere near the realm of possibility.52 As was the case elsewhere around the world at this time, it was generally accepted that only a written language could be grammatical and could be codified in grammar books, which required fixed, stable and consistent literary models of usage that only written, often classical, languages could boast.53 Since the spoken form of Armenian on which Modern Armenian was based had long been seen as nothing more than a corruption of Classical Armenian, it would have been laughable for a corruption to have a grammar of its own, let alone one that would be formally studied.54 While glosses in Modern Armenian had been used in Classical Armenian dictionaries, grammar books and other pedagogical materials since at least the mid-eighteenth century, these glosses were conceived of merely as bridges to the classical language. By no stretch of the imagination were Armenian writers or grammarians working to valorize the study of non-classical forms of Armenian in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.55

  • 56 For a rich study of how Armenian children learned to read in the nineteenth-century Ottoman and Rus (...)
  • 57 See S. Somel, 2001, 6 and B. Fortna, 2011, 76.
  • 58 Anonymous, 1830, 36.
  • 59 See F. Furet and J. Ozouf, 1982, 307-308.
  • 60 F. Göçek, 1994, 272.
  • 61 These books continued to be used into the twentieth century to teach reading outside the capital. F (...)
  • 62 For an account of learning to read through these texts in the 1880s, see Z. Yessayan, 2014, 106. Th (...)
  • 63 S. Papaziants, 1866, Ե.
  • 64 Histories and hagiographies include those by Eghishe, Eznik, Ghazar Parpetsi and Koriun. Adjarian n (...)

21This exclusive focus on the classical language in education has to do with a very different understanding of the purpose of grammar, reading and schooling from the one we see at the tail end of the century.56 Like their fellow Ottoman subjects and others around the world, Ottoman Armenian intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century used formal education as a way to, first and foremost, instill in children a religiously based sense of morality in hopes of ensuring their salvation.57 We can see this connection very clearly in a document issued by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1830: “At six, by order of the prelate or his deputy, children should be sent to school to learn reading and elements of faith, which are necessary for salvation. If their minds are sharp, they will be permitted to study the art of grammar and other subjects until the age of fourteen.”58 Reading, in other words, was before all else a religious imperative in a cultural ethos in which texts were sacred and required study to uncover their mysteries.59 As Fatma Müge Göçek has noted for Ottoman subjects of all faiths, learning to read could not be “separated from the mastery of religious texts.”60 This reality is made abundantly clear when we consider the most common books used until the final decades of the nineteenth century to teach children to read in Armenian schools in the Ottoman capital.61 As we saw in the opening vignette, children like Garabed and Zabel would begin with an alphabet primer infused with religious teachings, known as a քերական, այբբենարան, հեգերէն or հեգարան, to become familiar with the shapes of the letters and to practice sounding out words.62 Once they had mastered the letters, they would move on to reading aloud from the Psalms, the Acts of the Apostles, the Gospels and Gregory of Narek’s Book of Lamentation, referred to colloquially as the Narek.63 Advanced students were also given histories and hagiographies attributed to early Armenian writers and Church Fathers.64

Figure 4 Pages from an 1842 Armenian alphabet primer with an opening line that reads “Holy Cross, Help Me” in Classical Armenian (left) and a syllabized passage from the Acts of the Apostles (right)

Anonymous 1842

  • 65 M. Noubarian, 1893, 421.

22This salvation-based conception of reading and education can help us understand the sole focus on Classical Armenian, despite its widespread incomprehensibility and lack of utility for most students. In this worldview, Classical Armenian grammar was the key needed to access sacred texts on the path to salvation. “At that time, knowing Classical Armenian meant knowing everything”, mused writer and translator Mesrob Noubarian, reflecting on his school days in 1850s Smyrna.65 But, as we proceed further into the nineteenth century, certain intellectuals begin to question the long years children were required to spend “parroting” a language that they did not understand and that would be of little use to them after leaving school. This questioning marked the beginning of a slow distancing from an educational paradigm in which repetition and rote memorization were more valued than understanding and intellectual engagement. In the following frank depiction of prevailing educational norms, we catch a glimpse of the concerns of reformers c. 1850:

  • 66 N. Zorayan, 1851, Ը-Թ. Zorayan was one of the most outspoken advocates for educational reform in th (...)

There are many collections of excerpts of beautiful poetry by exemplary writers, which ten- or twelve-year-old children must learn by heart and which oftentimes include sublime themes that forty-year-olds can barely understand. These qualities make children think about cake and candy as we force them to understand the spirit of Virgil and Ovid and to reflect on and marvel at their magnificence. Therefore, it is not surprising that a child, after struggling like this for ten to twelve years […] leaves school ignorant, stupid, narrow-minded, bad-tempered, prejudiced and entirely useless.66

  • 67 F. Göçek, 1994, 273.
  • 68 B. Fortna, 2011, 13; F. Furet and J. Ozouf, 1982, 166-167; and M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Ը.
  • 69 [N. Roussinian], 1853, Գ. While throughout this period reformers referred to Modern Armenian as a “ (...)

23The notion that reading and education should be useful was a radical new idea in Ottoman Armenian educational thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. Out of this new idea emerged a different purpose for reading, as it began to “acquire a value in and of itself [and] was no longer treated as a by-product of the study of the religious sciences.”67 Here the ability to read became a practical tool used to access the latest “useful knowledge” and to prepare students for their future social roles.68 With the advent of this new educational paradigm came, for the first time, arguments in favor of codifying and teaching Modern Armenian grammar in schools to allow students to more easily access and produce this useful knowledge. To its supporters, Modern Armenian language instruction also became a symbol of modernity and yet another way to keep pace with global trends: “Nowadays there is not a single nation in Europe that does not write in the language it speaks and that does not learn what it needs”, wrote reformer Nahabed Roussinian in 1853. “Even the two major nations that rule in the East do so: the Ottomans and the Persians.”69

  • 70 H. A. P., 1876, 421 and S. Papaziants, 1868, Ե.
  • 71 M. Cheraz, 1876, 190.
  • 72 H. A. P., 1876, 421 and S. Papaziants, 1868, Ե.
  • 73 M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Թ.

24It is through these conflicting beliefs about the purpose of reading and Armenian-language education that we can better understand the debate over classical versus modern language instruction in Armenian schools. No longer finding the former paradigm compelling, proponents of teaching Modern Armenian commonly cited practical reasons for their opposition to the linguistic status quo in education. They focused, in particular, on the additional challenge for students posed by having one school language and a different home language.70 With an appreciation for education already on shaky ground, reformers feared that this divide would discourage students and potentially lead to their abandonment of formal education altogether.71 They also cited the lack of utility of Classical Armenian for the vast majority of students who would not enter the priesthood or a learned profession and would thus have few opportunities to use the language in the future.72 This lack of utility was contrasted with the immediate utility of Modern Armenian, which had become essential for understanding newspapers and other contemporaneous printed materials. It was a disservice to students, they argued, not to teach them the language of the public sphere and dashed any hope that “the whole nation would be made up of literate and thinking people and thus be inventive, clever and industrious.”73

  • 74 This kind of school was referred to as a դպրատուն and represents a clear continuity between pre- an (...)
  • 75 M. Dadian, 1867, 32-33.
  • 76 M., “Վարժապետական ժողով [Teachers’ Assembly]”, Արարատ, vol. 6 (8), 1873, 316-317. Another aspect of (...)

25The influx of these new perspectives did not lead to dramatic changes in Armenian-language instruction right away. For example, we have evidence that, into the 1880s, many boys and girls in Constantinople were sent to informal, home-run schools where they learned how to read through the same Classical Armenian religious texts that had long dominated rather than through the Modern Armenian readers that were being published with increased frequency at that time.74 Furthermore, in formal Armenian schools, the preferences of teachers also prevented rapid change. Without authoritative educational bodies, teachers were ultimately the ones who decided what would be taught in their classes, a kind of power that was a source of great anxiety for reformers during this period.75 In reformist circles, there was a general concern over how the “whims” of teachers would affect the “nation’s children, who instead of progressing are subjected to backwardness.”76 This “backwardness” was what Hagop Sirouni called the “old spirit”, which he notes remained pervasive in the educational sphere long after new pedagogical theories had made their début precisely because of the beliefs and preconceptions of the teachers themselves:

  • 77 H. Sirouni, 1988, 72.

Former teachers, whose horizons had never gone beyond the Psalms, the Acts of the Apostles and the Narek, had immediate successors who clung to old traditions, especially to their veneration of Classical Armenian. Modern Armenian was a vulgar, impoverished, and consequently still charmless language in their eyes.77

  • 78 R. Berberian, 1907, 308.
  • 79 V. Torkomian, 2020, 93, 135-136. For a French translation of this memoir, see V. Torkomian 2007.
  • 80 H. Adjarian, 1967, 97.
  • 81 M. Karakashian, 1866. This is the first of at least five editions published by the end of the centu (...)

26While Classical Armenian remained fixed in the curriculum of Armenian schools, we do begin to see small compromises in Armenian-language instruction in the second half of the nineteenth century. These compromises can be understood as tacit acknowledgment of new educational currents by those within educational power structures who were reluctant to change their ways but not entirely oblivious to the needs of the day. First, Classical Armenian teachers began supplementing time-honored texts with other works in the language. Reteos Berberian, a student in early 1860s Constantinople, recalls being tasked with translating passages from an 1841 history of the Ottoman Empire from Modern Armenian into Classical Armenian.78 Vahram Torkomian, a student in early 1870s Constantinople, fondly remembers classes spent listening to and reading excerpts from Classical Armenian translations of the Iliad, Paul and Virginia and The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses.79 Similarly, Hrachia Adjarian recalls translating the fables of La Fontaine into Classical Armenian as a student in late 1880s and early 1890s Constantinople.80 All three of these men – like many men and women of their generation – remember using Classical Armenian literature readers by Madatia Karakashian, who guided students through Classical Armenian literary texts with glosses in Modern Armenian.81 In this way, while Modern Armenian was not explicitly taught in schools, we do see it used in classroom exercises as a bridge to Classical Armenian.

Figure 5 Madatia Karakashian (1818-1903) with his popular Classical Armenian literature reader

Collage by Daniel Ohanian

  • 82 A. Aydenian, 1866, 313 and N. Puzantatsi, 1885, 341.
  • 83 A. Souren, 1874, Ը. This system is also explained in S. Papaziants, 1868, Ը. Cheraz mentions that w (...)
  • 84 For a bleak portrait of learning to write in Classical Armenian, see K. Odian, 1851, 4.
  • 85 H. A. P., 1876, 418-419.
  • 86 S. Papaziants, 1868, Ը.

27Second, although only the grammar of Classical Armenian was formally taught, its purpose began to be reframed starting in the mid-1860s. Staunch advocates of Classical Armenian in education began to argue for its essential role in helping students write in Modern Armenian.82 A complete reversal of the long-standing use of non-classical forms as bridges to the classical language, learning the classical language was now justified as a way to help students grasp the logic of Modern Armenian. Third, the educational expectation that students should understand (i.e., read) Classical Armenian but write in Modern Armenian also began to gain currency as “the dominant system of teaching the Armenian language in national schools” by the 1870s.83 Teaching writing in Classical Armenian had been a periodic target of reform for decades; learning to write in Classical Armenian was a task that had long been recognized as onerous for students.84 In the second half of the nineteenth century, reformers emphasized how opportunities to write in Classical Armenian outside of school were even fewer than opportunities to read in the language, noting that not even priests wrote their sermons in Classical Armenian.85 In this small but significant change in Armenian-language instruction, we see Modern Armenian secure a foothold in a way that, as one cautious reformer wrote, did not “erase either one and contributed to the diffusion of both Classical Armenian and Modern Armenian.”86

  • 87 One textbook, a collection of prose passages and poems in Modern Armenian, was conceived specifical (...)
  • 88 F. Waquet, 2001, 12.
  • 89 S. Papaziants, 1868, Զ-Է and M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Զ.

28It should also be emphasized that, while students did not formally study the grammar of Modern Armenian, many had, by the 1870s, begun to use textbooks written in Modern Armenian on a variety of subjects (history, geography, science, etc.). Without formally codified norms to follow, their textbooks, the press and other printed materials of the day served as models for writing in Modern Armenian, constituting an informal kind of apprenticeship necessitated by a pro-Classical Armenian educational status quo.87 This seemingly unusual arrangement is not unprecedented. As Françoise Waquet explains in detailing the social history of Latin in the late eighteenth century, “French had worked its way into schooling, but neither its grammar nor its literature was yet being taught.”88 Such a counterintuitive dynamic, of course, had its critics among Ottoman Armenian intellectuals. Many zeroed in on the absurdity of requiring students to learn the grammar of a language they would not be writing in, of shunning the one they would be writing in and of expecting students to pick up the rules of Modern Armenian by osmosis.89

  • 90 M. Cheraz, 1876, 136.
  • 91 J. Manoukian, 2023, 359-376.
  • 92 Anonymous, [1881], 569. For reasons that are still unclear, in the 1870s and 1880s, the Education C (...)
  • 93 Kh. S. Ekizian, “Հայոց լեզուին վրայ [On the Armenian Language]”, Հայրենասէր, vol. 1 (8), 1843, 3. “ (...)
  • 94 Tsolag, “Ազգային լեզու [National Language]”, Մասիս, vol. 29 (2768), 1880, 3.
  • 95 Anonymous, 1862, 7.
  • 96 K. Tirakian, 1880, Զ.

29A few words are also in order regarding the medium of instruction in Armenian schools. While Classical Armenian was favored as an object of study, it was not – and could not be – used as a medium of instruction because of its widespread incomprehensibility. As an experiment, teacher Minas Cheraz tried addressing his students in Classical Armenian in the early 1870s. He reports being met with peals of laughter from a classroom of boys who “thought [he] had been speaking Japanese.”90 From rare glimpses of linguistic dynamics in the classroom, we can glean that the medium of instruction depended on the school and region. Armenians in large swaths of the Ottoman Empire had no knowledge of any form of Armenian.91 While educators did not like to call attention to Armenian linguistic diversity, it is likely that these communities were instructed in their native Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic. An Education Council report from 1881 is one of the few published documents from this period to address language concerns in the classroom, permitting lectures to be held in a “language that students can understand [… until] they can find utility in Armenian lectures.”92 But what variety of Armenian might this report be referring to? It is essential to remember that Modern Armenian, while gradually becoming a spoken language among the educated class, was still not anyone’s first language in the late nineteenth century. As a result, teachers and students likely used their own regionally distinct dialects of Armenian in the classroom, complete with Turkish and other borrowings common in informal conversation.93 “It is true that in the past thirty to forty years, our written language has been cleansed of foreign words”, one writer noted in 1880, “but our spoken language has hardly taken a step.”94 While some schools wrote a purity-of-language clause into their by-laws, such a practice would have been difficult not only for students and teachers to maintain but also for schools to enforce.95 It is precisely from complaints about the absence of a sense of “concern or duty to speak pure Armenian” in the classroom that we can gain a sense of its prevalence.96

  • 97 M. Cheraz, 1876, 186-187; M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Թ; S. Papaziants, 1868, Ը; and P. Bozadjian, 1890, (...)
  • 98 M. Cheraz, 1876, 143.
  • 99 One of the markers of these changing tides was the call to translate into Modern Armenian texts tha (...)

30To be clear, in the late nineteenth century, not even the staunchest advocates of Modern Armenian wanted to do away with Classical Armenian in education entirely. Instead, they argued for reserving the study of the classical language to secondary-school students; for updating its instructional methods; and for teaching Modern Armenian in addition to Classical Armenian as a separate subject.97 This growing consensus regarding Classical Armenian can be best summed up, once again, by the quintessentially quotable Minas Cheraz: “Classical Armenian is like an old coin: precious but useless.”98 Slowly but surely, this perspective became more widespread and the tides began to turn in favor of Modern Armenian.99 The sense of standing between two language-educational paradigms is fully encapsulated in the following reflection from 1878:

  • 100 Anonymous, 1878, 213.

Those who came before us thought that the modern language was only for speaking. Writing and reading were unique to Classical Armenian. But when time began to wrestle with this idea and a laudable movement started to make education and learning accessible to the people, various books composed in the modern language were published. The natural result was to study the structure of the language and to work to perfect it.100

  • 101 Grammarian Zabel Donelian (aka Sibyl and later Zabel Assadour), among others, identified the 1880s (...)
  • 102 B. Fortna, 2002, 29.
  • 103 This does not mean that certain schools did not integrate it earlier. Schools in Smyrna, for exampl (...)

31When these lines were published in 1878, significant ideological labor was still needed before the grammar of Modern Armenian could be valorized, codified and taught as a separate subject in Armenian schools. It is impossible to point to a single date for the integration of Modern Armenian grammar instruction in Armenian schools because of the immense educational variation across the Empire, the unreliability of educational policy reports and the limited information we have about actual classroom practices. We can say with certainty, however, that it was being more seriously considered in the 1880s, a foundational period of growth, change and attempted centralization for education at the communal, imperial and global levels.101 As Benjamin Fortna has shown, this decade represented a kind of educational turning point, a time when many societies around the world were simultaneously mobilizing against “common anxieties over the ‘demands of the present.’”102 In part in response to these common anxieties, the study of Modern Armenian definitively entered schools – albeit gradually, quietly and without fanfare – by the end of the nineteenth century.103

  • 104 On an 1894 list of textbooks sent by the Council to the Sublime Porte for approval, we find both Mo (...)
  • 105 P. Young, 2001, 206. For one account of having a Modern Armenian grammar book approved c. 1898 and (...)
  • 106 A. Arpiarian, 1890, 336 and S. Tavtian, 1891, Ա.
  • 107 These student grammars include works by Puzant Bozadjian, Zabel Donelian, Smpad Tavtian and A. G. B (...)
  • 108 H. Kazandjian, 1907, 925.

32In the 1890s, we start to see for the very first time a series of student grammar books of Modern Western Armenian and the language’s inclusion in schools alongside Classical Armenian as a separate subject in its own right.104 By this time, the Education Council had begun to wield more control over educational affairs and had begun approving Modern Armenian textbooks for use in schools.105 By multiple accounts, Modern Armenian grammar instruction had still not entered all schools in Constantinople in the early 1890s and a final – this time heeded – call for Modern Armenian grammar books could still be heard.106 The decade brought a veritable explosion of Modern Armenian grammar books as the language form became an end in and of itself in Armenian-language instruction rather than simply a means to Classical Armenian.107 As one Modern Armenian teacher and grammarian wrote in 1907, “We can say that Modern Armenian has found its way in the past ten to fifteen years.”108 As such, the unobstructed flourishing of Modern Armenian language instruction in Ottoman Armenian schools is – contrary to the dominant scholarly assumption – a turn-of-the-century story.

*

  • 109 A. Arpiarian, 1890, 330.

A quarter-century ago [c. 1865] when Armenian children first set foot in school, the first alphabet primer [այբբենարան] they would start studying was in Classical Armenian. This primer would be followed by another Classical Armenian primer [հեգարան], after which would come the Psalms and the Acts of the Apostles. The crowning glory was the Narek and then a grammar of Classical Armenian.
At that time, who would have dared to say that five- or six-year-old children should be given a Modern Armenian reader [ընթերցարան]? Those people would have been considered godless, faithless if they had dared to say that it was detrimental to give children materials in Classical Armenian. Now those who dare to say that primary school students should be given materials in Classical Armenian are considered antediluvian dunces. Therefore, a belief that a quarter-century ago was evidence of piety, a quarter-century later is considered undeniable proof of stupidity.109

33This reflection from 1890 highlights the dramatic – albeit slow – change in opinion in the final decades of the nineteenth century over how children should begin reading in Armenian and what form of the language they should first encounter at school. The shift to Modern Armenian in education overturned a centuries-old educational status quo in which Classical Armenian reigned supreme. This transition thus marks a pivotal yet underappreciated moment in Ottoman Armenian social, cultural, literary and intellectual history, the reverberations of which are still felt today in Armenian-language education throughout the post-genocide Armenian diaspora.

34But, as we have seen, the Armenian National Constitution and its National Education Council had little to do with ushering in this change. Despite their conventional framing as transformational forces in Ottoman Armenian society, we find much more inefficacy than efficacy in the early history of the National Education Council and, when active, much more of a drive to maintain the status quo in Armenian-language education than to change it. The scholarly narrative has furthered the idea that administrative changes in the 1860s were naturally coupled with swift changes in the realm of education, but, upon closer look, this presumption does not reflect the realities on the ground. This article has aimed to reevaluate the perceived power of the National Education Council, to reveal the widespread preference among mid-century Ottoman Armenian educators and intellectuals for Classical Armenian instruction and to underscore the relatively late entry of Modern Armenian instruction into Armenian schools in the Ottoman capital. This article has also set out to expose how much there still is to uncover about the history of Ottoman Armenian education and how much of what we think we know may be based on assumption rather than on evidence. This final objective is expressed with the hope that Ottoman Armenian educational history will become the subject of more sustained and rigorous scholarly inquiry in the years to come.

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their incisive and constructive comments. I am also grateful to Houri Berberian, Peter Cowe, Alexia Hatun and Daniel Ohanian for their generous feedback on various drafts of this article. Finally, I am indebted to the National Library of Armenia and the Armenian Catholic Mekhitarist Congregation in Vienna for facilitating my research by digitizing nearly all of the Armenian-language books and newspaper that I cite.

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Notes

1 G. Utudjian, “Մանկութեան յիշատակներ. իմ դպրոցական կեանքէն [Childhood Memories: From My School Life]”, Մասիս, vol. 42 (3980), 1893, 116-117.

2 Z. Yessayan, 2014, 93-98.

3 In Armenian-language historiography, these debates have been called the “language struggle” (լեզուապայքար) or the “writing struggle” (գրապայքար). See H. Adjarian, 1951, 504-568.

4 See, for example, the narratives advanced in oft-cited works such as V. Artinian, 1988; V. Oshagan, 1997 and A. Ter Minassian, 1997.

5 The history of Armenian education in the Ottoman Empire has been sorely understudied. The most commonly cited work on the topic is P. Young, 2001. For all its merits as a pioneering study, this dissertation falls into both of these traps and fails to isolate distinct socio-politically bound phases in Ottoman Armenian education within the more than sixty years her study covers. Other histories with similar drawbacks include K. Sarafian, 1930 and Sh. Voskanyan, 2009.

6 S. Somel, 2001, 13 and B. Fortna, 2002, 10-11.

7 See notes 25 and 37.

8 For an excellent start, see H. Papikyan 2023.

9 This article focuses only on education within the Armenian Apostolic millet. It does not explore the dynamics within the Armenian Catholic or Armenian Protestant millets, which also underwent reform during this time and ran their own schools.

10 For a discussion of the constitutional experiences of Ottoman Armenians, Ottoman Rum and Ottoman Jews in comparative perspective, see A. Koçunyan, 2018, 104-148. For an English translation of the edict, see Anonymous, 1975, 315-318.

11 See Anonymous, 1863. For an English translation of the Constitution, see H. Lynch, 1901, 445-467.

12 Anonymous, 1863, 29-30.

13 For a history of the Council, see A. Alboyadjian, “Կրթական յիշատակ մը (1853-1903) [An Educational Memory (1853-1903)]”, Բիւզանդիոն, vol. 7 (2160), 1903, 1. This is the first part in a multi-part article. Alboyadjian notes that the Council only gained a measure of authority in the late 1880s. It is likely not a coincidence that this period coincided with more direct imperial control over non-Muslim education. Here the Council was likely used as a mechanism through which to implement the educational directives of the Sublime Porte. More research is needed to understand the influence of the Council in this phase of its operations.

14 For expressions of the link between education and national progress, see, for example, Anonymous, “Ազգային յառաջդիմութեան գործը [The Task of National Progress]”, Մասիս, vol. 14 (688), 1865, 2, and Anonymous, 1868, 11.

15 See, for example, P. Sarkissian, 1936, 44-71. Alboyadjian notes that the existence of these schools and the sense of competition they sparked played a more significant role in educational reform than the Council ever did. A. Alboyadjian, 1926, 150.

16 M. Dzalian, 1912, 22-23.

17 Anonymous, “Յայտարարութիւն յաղագս ազգային դաստիարակութեան [Announcement Regarding National Instruction]”, Մասիս, vol. 2 (43), 1853, 1.

18 See, for example, Anonymous 1840 and Anonymous, 1858a.

19 E. Evered, 2012, 17.

20 Just as we see with Armenian communal education, significant periods of time also lapsed between the drafting and implementation of imperial-level education policy. The 1856 edict led to the Ottoman Education Act of 1869, which was not implemented in earnest until the 1880s. For authoritative studies of Ottoman imperial education, see E. Evered 2012, S. Somel 2001 and B. Fortna 2002.

21 A. Alboyadjian, 1926, 150.

22 M. Cheraz, 1876, ԻԳ.

23 Many at this time perceived reform projects generally as perpetually paralyzed. In another political cartoon from the same year, we see inefficiency incarnated as a man on crutches, another doing a cartwheel and yet another sitting on the ground staring at his hand with the caption: “How National Projects Are Going.” See Anonymous, “Թէ ինչպէս կ՚երթան ազգային գործերը [How National Projects are Going]”, Մեղու, vol. 2 (121), 1873, 3.

24 H. Assadour, 1879, 20-21. For a full translation of this speech, see V. Ketsemanian forthcoming.

25 These schools and educational initiatives, like most topics in Ottoman Armenian educational history, have not been studied as closely as they deserve. For brief descriptions of the educational associations that flourished throughout the Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Y. Boghossian, 1957-1969 and H. Khalapyan, 2025, 65-77.

26 M. Ubicini, 1856, 303-304.

27 The variation in Ottoman Armenian education can be seen clearly in an invaluable report on schools in the Ottoman provinces c. 1900. Some villages did not have a school. Others had at one time had a school that closed because of lack of funds, schoolbooks or a school building. Among functioning schools, some only operated in the wintertime, because children were needed for their agricultural labor at other times of year. See Anonymous, 1901-1903.

28 See, for example, M. Ubicini, 1856, 304; Anonymous, 1876, 409; and Anonymous, “Ազգային [National]”, Մասիս, vol. 7 (341), 1858, 2.

29 Anonymous, 1858b, 3-4. Though it is beyond the scope of this article, girls’ education in particular was a major preoccupation and a battleground for reformers. While some educators feared that teaching girls to read and write would lead them to read morally suspect novels or to write love letters, advocates of girls’ education framed their instruction as vital for national progress. For one account of poet Vahan Tekeyan’s mother being removed from school c. 1850 in Talas because of her betrothal at age seven, see V. Tekeyan, 2024, 94.

30 D. Kapamadjian, 1861, 5.

31 K. Peshdimaldjian, 1829, 125. One example of radically contrasting beliefs about education within a single family can be found in the memoir of famed linguist Hrachia Adjarian. Adjarian’s mother and sister never learned to read, and his father was only semi-literate. In the mid-1880s, Adjarian recounts overhearing a school trustee praise his work ethic to his father. “What a shame”, Adjarian’s father is said to have replied. “It would be better for [my son] to be working than for him to be hard-working [in school].” H. Adjarian, 1967, 43.

32 D. Kapamadjian, 1861, 5 and Anonymous, “Ազգային [National]”, Մասիս, vol. 7 (341), 1858, 2.

33 On the cultivation of these values, see J. Manoukian, 2022, 130-134.

34 Anonymous, “Ազգային [National]”, Մասիս, vol. 7 (341), 1858, 2.

35 Anonymous, “Ազգային յառաջդիմութեան գործը [The Task of National Progress]”, Մասիս, vol. 14 (688), 1865, 2. We know the most about the third category of schools thanks to the first project of the Education Council: a report with detailed information about each Armenian Apostolic school in the capital, including the number of male and female students, the number of teachers and the subjects taught. See Anonymous,1865. On the experiences of one student who attended the second kind of Armenian school in Kayseri c. 1870, see S. Timourian, 2023, 7-11.

36 E. Evered, 2012, 17-18 and B. Fortna, 2002, 72, 96. Lest we think this autonomy is a creation of the historian, we see this idea articulated clearly in 1874: “The Ottoman state has given us almost complete authority to educate the children of our own nation, tend to their needs and produce educated individuals who are useful to the state and to the nation.” [M. Mamourian], 1874, 390-391.

37 On schools run by the latter two groups, see, for example, C. Yetkiner, 2011, 63-83 and P. Houbouyan-Coutant 2020.

38 See note 25.

39 Anonymous, 1868, 11 and M. Cheraz, 1876, 47-49.

40 [M. Mamourian], 1874, 386.

41 B. Fortna, 2002, 27.

42 D. Vincent, 2000, 9-12.

43 We can discern this watchful eye from the abundance of educational news from abroad featured in the Armenian-language press. See, for example, Anonymous, “Կրթական վիճակագիր յԱմերիկա [The State of Education in America]”, Արեւելեան մամուլ, vol. 13 (12), 1883, 602.

44 For praise of Ottoman Rum schools in Smyrna, see H. A. P., 1876, 420-421. For praise of the Alliance israélite universelle schools for Ottoman Jews, see S. Dussap, 1882, 249-251.

45 M. Cheraz, 1876, 49.

46 M. Hroch, 2000, 80-83.

47 [M. Karakashian], “Լեզու եւ առանձինն հայերէն լեզու [Language and the Armenian Language In Particular]”, Սէր, vol. 1 (19), 1861, 188.

48 M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Զ.

49 For a selection of these perspectives, see H. A. P., 1876, 417; Anonymous, 1877, 75-76; and N. Puzantatsi, 1885, 341-342.

50 J. Manoukian 2023, 159-224.

51 A. Aydenian, 1866, 261.

52 For comparison, it was only in 1834 that schoolchildren in France were officially permitted to begin learning to read in French rather than in Latin in schools. See F. Furet and J. Ozouf, 1982, 138. Thank you to Sebouh Aslanian for this reference. For one fascinating exception concerning Middle Armenian in the fifteenth century, see S. Budak and M. Pifer 2024.

53 S. Hackert, 2012, 158-159.

54 See K. Ayvazian, 1869, 3.

55 The two most notable grammars of non-classical varieties of Armenian published before 1850 were not written to valorize Modern Armenian as a legitimate written form. Mekhitar of Sebastia’s 1727 grammar was intended to be a steppingstone for Turcophone Armenians on their path to acquiring Classical Armenian. Elias Riggs’s 1847 grammar was intended to be a tool to help American Protestant missionaries acquire the spoken Armenian they needed to evangelize. Their differing objectives distinguish these books from grammars of Modern Armenian written in the second half of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, according to one grammarian, neither of these grammars was accessible, let alone in circulation, by the 1890s and neither was thought to have had an impact on the study of Modern Armenian. See Z. Donelian, 1897, Ե.

56 For a rich study of how Armenian children learned to read in the nineteenth-century Ottoman and Russian Empires, see A. Ghoogasian, 2025, 265-325.

57 See S. Somel, 2001, 6 and B. Fortna, 2011, 76.

58 Anonymous, 1830, 36.

59 See F. Furet and J. Ozouf, 1982, 307-308.

60 F. Göçek, 1994, 272.

61 These books continued to be used into the twentieth century to teach reading outside the capital. For one account of using them in a village school outside of Sivas c. 1905, see H. Elmassian 1980.

62 For an account of learning to read through these texts in the 1880s, see Z. Yessayan, 2014, 106. This “alphabetic” or “synthetic” method of reading pedagogy had been used in Europe since at least the ninth century. More research is needed to determine when it was integrated into Armenian education. See D. Vincent, 2000, 45-46.

63 S. Papaziants, 1866, Ե.

64 Histories and hagiographies include those by Eghishe, Eznik, Ghazar Parpetsi and Koriun. Adjarian notes that in the late 1880s and early 1890s, some texts used for Classical Armenian literature classes were banned by the Ottoman government because they were published abroad, in Venice, and were thus considered subversive. Banned books included Classical Armenian translations of works by Church Fathers like Ephrem the Syrian and John Chrysostom, among others. H. Adjarian, 1967, 97.

65 M. Noubarian, 1893, 421.

66 N. Zorayan, 1851, Ը-Թ. Zorayan was one of the most outspoken advocates for educational reform in the late 1840s and 1850s.

67 F. Göçek, 1994, 273.

68 B. Fortna, 2011, 13; F. Furet and J. Ozouf, 1982, 166-167; and M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Ը.

69 [N. Roussinian], 1853, Գ. While throughout this period reformers referred to Modern Armenian as a “spoken language”, it is important to remember that no reformer ever advocated for codifying anything other than a purified form of spoken language.

70 H. A. P., 1876, 421 and S. Papaziants, 1868, Ե.

71 M. Cheraz, 1876, 190.

72 H. A. P., 1876, 421 and S. Papaziants, 1868, Ե.

73 M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Թ.

74 This kind of school was referred to as a դպրատուն and represents a clear continuity between pre- and post-Constitution education. Evidence of these home schools come almost entirely from memoirs; they are not often mentioned in educational reports from the time. See Z. Yessayan, 2014, 93-98; Z. Kalemkiarian, 1952, 6-9; V. Torkomian, 2020, 19-22; and H. Adjarian, 1967, 22. For a rare mention in contemporaneous materials, see H. Vartanian, 1863, 69. Դպրատուն comes from դպիր, a title sometimes given to literate people. Thank you to Aram Ghoogasian for this detail.

75 M. Dadian, 1867, 32-33.

76 M., “Վարժապետական ժողով [Teachers’ Assembly]”, Արարատ, vol. 6 (8), 1873, 316-317. Another aspect of the “backwardness” mentioned in memoirs with startling consistency is corporal punishment, especially bastinado (ֆալախա). In these texts, the memory of learning to read is commonly bound up with the memory of the beatings endured for reading mistakes in the classroom. See Z. Yessayan, 2014, 96 and G. Utudjian, “Մանկութեան յիշատակներ. իմ դպրոցական կեանքէն [Childhood Memories: From My School Life]”, Մասիս, vol. 42 (3980), 1893, 117. For Krikor Zohrab, the fear of bastinado represented his earliest and most indelible memory of school. K. Zohrab, 1889, 20. On corporal punishment in Armenian education at this time, see A. Ghoogasian, 2025, 303-313.

77 H. Sirouni, 1988, 72.

78 R. Berberian, 1907, 308.

79 V. Torkomian, 2020, 93, 135-136. For a French translation of this memoir, see V. Torkomian 2007.

80 H. Adjarian, 1967, 97.

81 M. Karakashian, 1866. This is the first of at least five editions published by the end of the century.

82 A. Aydenian, 1866, 313 and N. Puzantatsi, 1885, 341.

83 A. Souren, 1874, Ը. This system is also explained in S. Papaziants, 1868, Ը. Cheraz mentions that writing in Modern Armenian was common in schools before 1874. See M. Cheraz, 1876, 193. There is evidence that reading in Classical Armenian but writing in Modern Armenian remained in effect in certain schools until at least the early 1890s. See Z. Yessayan, 2014, 112.

84 For a bleak portrait of learning to write in Classical Armenian, see K. Odian, 1851, 4.

85 H. A. P., 1876, 418-419.

86 S. Papaziants, 1868, Ը.

87 One textbook, a collection of prose passages and poems in Modern Armenian, was conceived specifically for students to use as models in this linguistic apprenticeship. A. Biberdjian, 1879, Ե-Զ. We also find books in the 1880s and 1890s that are touted as “grammars” of the modern language but are essentially books of literary excerpts and exercises without any explicit grammar instruction. See, for example, T. Terzian 1884.

88 F. Waquet, 2001, 12.

89 S. Papaziants, 1868, Զ-Է and M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Զ.

90 M. Cheraz, 1876, 136.

91 J. Manoukian, 2023, 359-376.

92 Anonymous, [1881], 569. For reasons that are still unclear, in the 1870s and 1880s, the Education Council was referred to as the Կրթական խորհուրդ rather than the Ուսումնական խորհուրդ.

93 Kh. S. Ekizian, “Հայոց լեզուին վրայ [On the Armenian Language]”, Հայրենասէր, vol. 1 (8), 1843, 3. “Some think that pure Modern Armenian is already spoken in schools”, this writer tells us in 1843. But, as he explains, this was just not true.

94 Tsolag, “Ազգային լեզու [National Language]”, Մասիս, vol. 29 (2768), 1880, 3.

95 Anonymous, 1862, 7.

96 K. Tirakian, 1880, Զ.

97 M. Cheraz, 1876, 186-187; M. Kiredjdjian, 1864, Թ; S. Papaziants, 1868, Ը; and P. Bozadjian, 1890, [1-2].

98 M. Cheraz, 1876, 143.

99 One of the markers of these changing tides was the call to translate into Modern Armenian texts that had only ever been published in Classical Armenian. See J. Manoukian, 2022, 171, footnote 160. One such example is the Modern Armenian translation of the Narek. See K. Narekatsi 1902. Thank you to the anonymous reviewer for pointing me to this text.

100 Anonymous, 1878, 213.

101 Grammarian Zabel Donelian (aka Sibyl and later Zabel Assadour), among others, identified the 1880s as a decade of slow transition and reevaluation in Armenian-language instruction in schools. See Z. Donelian, 1897, Զ.

102 B. Fortna, 2002, 29.

103 This does not mean that certain schools did not integrate it earlier. Schools in Smyrna, for example, were known to have integrated Modern Armenian instruction much earlier than most schools in Constantinople and had limited Classical Armenian instruction to advanced students in 1868. See H. A. P., 1876, 417. By 1881, we find instruction in Modern Armenian included in the Education Council’s model curriculum, but, as we have seen, policy does not necessarily mean practice. See Anonymous, 1881, 560-576.

104 On an 1894 list of textbooks sent by the Council to the Sublime Porte for approval, we find both Modern Armenian and Classical Armenian grammar books. See Anonymous, 1894, [1-4]. On the Council’s 1887 list of textbooks, no Modern Armenian grammar books appear. See Anonymous, 1887, 2-3. Modern Armenian also appears as a separate subject on the Council’s proposed curriculum in 1893. See Anonymous, 1893, 8.

105 P. Young, 2001, 206. For one account of having a Modern Armenian grammar book approved c. 1898 and the – ultimately unfounded – fear of rejection by the Council on linguistic grounds, see H. Assadour, 1921, 239-241.

106 A. Arpiarian, 1890, 336 and S. Tavtian, 1891, Ա.

107 These student grammars include works by Puzant Bozadjian, Zabel Donelian, Smpad Tavtian and A. G. Bedigian, among others.

108 H. Kazandjian, 1907, 925.

109 A. Arpiarian, 1890, 330.

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Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 1 At 24, Stepan Berdj Boghos Papaziants (1839-1888) became the first secretary of the National Education Council in 1863 and served as a Council member until the mid-1870s (Teotig, 1910, 228).
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Légende Figure 2 “The National Education Council: Paralyzed at 12 years old.” Anonymous, “Տասներկու տարուան անդամալոյծը”, Մեղու, vol. 2 (126), 1873, 3
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Légende Figure 3 Meguerdich Kiredjdjian, an Armenian Evangelical pastor and author of Հայերէն քերականութիւն աշխարհաբար լեզուի նախակրթական դպրոցաց համար, 1864 (Teotig, 1915, 127)
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Légende Figure 4 Pages from an 1842 Armenian alphabet primer with an opening line that reads “Holy Cross, Help Me” in Classical Armenian (left) and a syllabized passage from the Acts of the Apostles (right)
Crédits Anonymous 1842
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Légende Figure 5 Madatia Karakashian (1818-1903) with his popular Classical Armenian literature reader
Crédits Collage by Daniel Ohanian
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Jennifer Manoukian, « Clinging to the Classical »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 16 | 2025, 147-181.

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Jennifer Manoukian, « Clinging to the Classical »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 16 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 05 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/4105 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15gmi

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Jennifer Manoukian

University of California, Irvine

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