95 Years at the School Desk: How Tajikistan’s Leading Pedagogical University Was Born

The Tajik State Pedagogical University named after Sadriddin Aini is preparing to mark 95 years since the opening of the institution that became the country’s leading teacher-training university.

The government decided in April 1930 to establish a higher pedagogical institution in Stalinabad. The Stalinabad Pedagogical Institute opened on September 5, 1931, although its first academic year began late because it lacked both teaching staff and students. Admission rules for the Tajik Agro-Pedagogical Institute were published on September 27. The institute had departments of language and literature, pedagogy, and agrobiology, with a three-year course of study.

The institution began as a “Pedagogical Academy” and became the Tajik State Pedagogical Institute three years later. Despite the formal three-year program, it produced its first graduating class only in 1938. Many of its first organizers and lecturers came from Moscow and Leningrad and did not know Tajik, while students did not know Russian. Classes therefore relied on interpreters, slowing the curriculum and programs by half.

Teachers gradually learned Tajik. Lyubov Vladimirovna Uspenskaya, a philology scholar and professor who arrived in Stalinabad in 1935, compiled the Russian-Tajik and Tajik-Russian dictionary. The institution later added historical, literary, geographical, physics and mathematics, and foreign-language faculties. In 1939, the Stalinabad Pedagogical Institute received the name of poet Taras Shevchenko. It was awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples in 1981, took the name Kandil Duraev after 1991, and was later renamed for Sadriddin Aini. Today, the university serves as a major educational and scientific center for training teaching and engineering specialists.