Iakob Gogebashvili

Iakob Gogebashvili (Georgian: იაკობ გოგებაშვილი) (October 15, 1840 – June 1, 1912) was a Georgian educator, children’s writer and journalist, considered to be the founder of the scientific pedagogy in Georgia. Through his masterly compiled children's primer, Mother Language (დედა ენა), which in a modified form serves to this day as a text book in Georgian schools, every Georgian since 1880 has learnt to read and write in their native language.

Iakob Gogebashvili was born in village Variani near Gori, Georgia (then part of Imperial Russia) to a poor family of a priest Simon Gogebashvili. He studied at Gori seminary and Tiflis before entering a theological academy in Kiev in 1861. Simultaneously, he attended the lectures in natural sciences at the Kiev University where he became familiar with the political ideas of Russian enlighteners such as Herzen, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. Yet, unlike many of his contemporary Georgian intellectuals, he was affected less by the Russian radicals than by a Christian background in the seminaries of Gori and Tiflis. Returning to Georgia in 1863, he taught arithmetic and geography at the Tiflis Seminary and later became its inspector. Gogebashvili’s apartment, frequented by the seminarian students, soon became a haven for forbidden discussions of art and politics. Consequently, he was dismissed on the orders from the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg in 1874.

From then on, Gogebashvili became a free-lance and devoted his energy to promoting education among his countrymen. In 1879, he helped found the Society for the Spreading of Literacy Among Georgians through which he channeled his efforts aimed at countering Russification, especially in the school system, and at reversing the erosion of Georgian language whose status he compared with that of a "wretched foundling, deprived of all care and protection." Gogebashvili quickly gained influence among the constellation of intellectuals around Prince Ilia Chavchavadze who spearheaded the movement for Georgian national revival until his assassination in 1907.

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