55 The Society for the Restoration of OrthodoxyStates, church educators described their struggles to find and keep vi-
able Ossetian and Svan students, in contrast to the much larger pool
of Georgians and Russians.^111 They also worried about Ossetian and
Abkhaz students who were reluctant to return to the mountains after
their training, instead preferring a career within the multi-ethnic ser-
vice elite of the empire. Graduates of the Tiflis Teaching Institute sup-
ported by the society were obligated to serve at least four years in the
North Caucasus in return for their education.^112
In the classroom the teachers implemented the concerns common
to borderland educated society about the correct practice of ritual and
the cultivation of a genuine faith that would deter the influence of pa-
ganism, Islam, and foreign faiths. A teacher’s lesson plan for the pri-
mary school children at the Kakhsk school in 1870 included a
discussion of the following issues and questions:
- What is a prayer?
- How do we pray? Where does one pray?
- Why it is best to pray in the morning.
- Why are we called Christian and Orthodox?
- What do our names mean?
- Why do we pray in front of icons?
Somewhat more complicated was a discussion of the “essential quali-
ties of God” and more in-depth discussions with the older students on
the life of Jesus from the New Testament and on Old Testament stories
about Creation, Hebrew law, Abraham, and the Jews in Egypt.^113
These were in addition to their studies in arithmetic and the Russian
language. Teachers were particularly proud if they could get the older
students to learn enough Old Church Slavonic to sing in church.^114
Native language instruction on the difficult North Caucasus fron-
tier was contested by Russian conservatives, who viewed the Russian
language as a source of cohesion and identity important to the stabil-
ity of empire, and ironically, by a few non-Russian families them-
selves. Ossetian teacher Vakhar Kubalov in the Batako-Iurtovsk
school shared this exchange with a skeptical father from the village:
‹And what are you teaching your students?’ an Ossetian father of
one of my students asked. ‘Everything that is necessary to him in
life,’ I answered. ‘That’s good: teach him whatever you want, but my
son wants to learn Russian.›^115 Given that the imperial service elite
was multi-ethnic but that the language of administration was
Russian, we can assume that many ambitious non-Russian families
saw knowledge of Russian as a top priority for their sons. The state’s
promotion of native language instruction was viewed by some