PUBLIC EDUCATION BULGARIA

The desire for education amidst the Bulgarian peasantry amounts almost to a passion. That this should be so seems strange in a country where the great mass of the population are extremely ignorant, very much set on their own ways, and averse to innovations of any kind. The Boers, who in many respects so closely resemble the Bulgarians, are completely free from this craze for booklearning. What was good enough for their fathers is, in their opinion, good enough for themselves, and will be good enough for their children after them. But in this respect the Bulgarians are completely different I cannot make out that any educational census has ever been taken in the country.

The common opinion, however, is that in the rural districts, at all events, the proportion of the adult population who have even an elementary knowledge of writing or reading is extremely small. In the Turkish days the village priests never took any trouble to impart to their parishioners the scanty stock of education they themselves possessed; and in as far as they had any opinion at all on the matter, that opinion was unfavourable rather than otherwise to the diffusion of book-learning amidst the laity. Yet ever since the liberation of Bulgaria, the peasants have been almost morbidly eager to have their children taught at school; and the system of Free Education, which has been introduced throughout the State, is warmly supported by popular sentiment.

This is the more curious as the peasant farmers till their own lands themselves, not by paid labourers; and the services of every member of the family are required to supply the requisite amount of field labour. The children of the house are set to work early, and the loss of their assistance during school hours must be a serious matter to their parents.

The only explanation

 The only explanation I can offer for this general thirst for education amongst a people, who have apparently very little taste for booklearning in itself, is the following. The Bulgarians, as I have already remarked, have an intense belief in the past glories of their country, and have also an equally intense faith in the future which lies before it Whether rightly or wrongly, they have got it into their heads that popular education is an essential condition of Bulgaria’s taking, what they deem, her proper place in the world ; and when once an idea of any kind has got into Bulgarian heads, its dislodgment is a matter of excessive difficulty.

Then, too, there prevails throughout the community an equally general but more practical belief that education opens the door to the public service, the only form of employment, other than that of agriculture, to be found in a country with few and small industries, little trade and less capital. There is hardly a man in the service of the State who was not born a peasant of peasant parents ; and the spectacle of the success achieved by the ministers and public officials, who owe their position almost entirely to the fact that they had received an education somewhat above their fellows, renders every Bulgarian parent desirous to obtain like advantages for his own children.