Iankovich de Mirievo, Fedor Ivanovich

Iankovich de Mirievo, Fedor Ivanovich 

(also F. I. Mirievskii, Teodor Jankovic Mirijevski). Born 1741 (according to some data, c. 1740) in Sremska Kamenica; died May 22 (June 3), 1814, in St. Petersburg. Russian and Serbian pedagogue; follower of J. A. Comenius. Member of the Russian Academy (1783).

Iankovich de Mirievo was a cameralism student at the University of Vienna, where he also studied law. In 1773 he became director of public schools in Timis Province in the Banat, an area inhabited by Slavs (mainly Serbs) as well as Rumanians; he headed the implementation in Timis Province of the Austrian school edict of 1774 as applied to the traditions of the Slavic population. He also prepared a special pedagogical handbook for teachers.

In 1782, Iankovich de Mirievo moved to Russia at the invitation of Catherine II. While working with the Commission for Founding Public Schools, he drew up a general plan for a school system that was adopted in the Statute for Public Schools of 1786. In accordance with the statute, small public schools and central public schools were established. Iankovich de Mirievo organized a teacher-training program for these schools at the St. Petersburg Central Public School, which had been opened on his initiative; he was director of the St. Petersburg Central Public from 1783 to 1785.

Together with Russian scholars and pedagogues, Iankovich de Mirievo wrote the Guide for Teachers of the First and Second Grades of Public Schools in the Russian Empire (1783). He wrote a number of textbooks, including Primer (1782), Writing Samples and a Guide to Penmanship (1782), Rules for Pupils (1782), and An Arithmetic Handbook (no later than 1784). He published a considerably enlarged edition of the Comparative Dictionary of All Languages and Dialects, Arranged in Alphabetical Order (parts 1–4, 1790–91), originally compiled by P. S. Pallas and published from 1787 to 1789. From 1802 to 1804, Iankovich de Mirievo was a member of the Commission for Schools of the Ministry of Public Education (known as the Central School Board from 1803.

REFERENCES

Rozhdestvenskii, S. V. Ocherki po istorii sistem narodnogo prosveshcheniia v Rossii v XVIII–XIX vv. St. Petersburg, 1912.
Konstantinov, N. A., and V. Ia. Struminskii. Ocherki po istorii nachal’nogo obrazovaniia v Rossii, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1953. Pages 61–78.
Ocherki istorii shkoly i pedagogicheskoi mysli narodov SSSR: XVIII v.-pervaia polovina XIX v., Edited by M. F. Shabaeva. Moscow, 1973. Pages 143–54.