System
The system of education and upbringing created by K.I. May stipulated mutual respect and trust in the teachers and students, constant cooperation with the family, and the aspiration of the educators to allow for and develop the individual abilities of each student and to teach them to think independently. All this, in combination with the high quality of education, allowed the school year after year to release highly moral, well-rounded youths, prepared for “work useful to society”. Thanks to the special atmosphere springing from this educational institution (called the “May spirit”), the K. May School was the “state within a state, separated by an endless ocean from State conventionalism” (aptly expressed by 1890 graduate D.V. Filosofov). Its participants, in terms of both social position and national identification, were quite diverse, without discrimination: Swiss children, sons of the princes Garin, Galitzine, the counts Olsufev and Stenbok-Fermor, representatives of the entrepreneur families Vargunin, Durdin, Elisseeff, Tortonov, and scions of the liberal intelligentsia Benois, Bruni, Grimm, Dobuzhinsky, Roerich, Rimsky-Korsakov, Semenov-Tyan-Shanskii, among others. Moreover, in many cases this school educated several generations of one family. Among these, the Benois dynasty holds a unique record: 25 members of this clan studied “at May”.
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