Kliuchevskii's essay, “Dva vospitaniia” is the pioneering work in the history of childhood and of the family in Russia, and it has been sorely neglected. V.O. Kliuchevskii wrote this piece as a public lecture which was given on February 1, 1893, for the Moscow Committee on Literacy. In it he contrasts the educational values of traditional Muscovite society of the sixteenth century with those of Ivan Ivanovich Betskoi, Catherine the Great's principal educational advisor during the first years of her reign. More precisely, he compares two documents. The first was the Domostroi, the “House-orderer,” of the priest Sil'vestr. He, Metropolitan Makarii, and Aleksei Adashev were the principal advisors of Tsar Ivan IV in the early years of his active reign after 1547. They were the creators of the new ideology of the Muscovite state based on the dream of unified Orthodox Tsardom. They compiled a single all-Russian paterikon, a new unified law code, a unified ecclesiastical rule, and an official geneological history of Russia's rulers. The regimentation of personal behavior represented by the Domostroi was an essential part of the campaign for standardization and codification, which saw the origins of printing in Russia as well. In the sixteenth century these precepts had the same official sanction and status as did Catherine's legislation two hundred years later, especially the Statute of her boarding schools.

The Origins of modern Russian education are transparently clear. Old Muscovy had only religious schools of little consequence. Peter the Great traveled to Western Europe and upon his return to Russia, imported teachers and books, opened the first modern schools, and abandoned the older traditions. The hallmark of the new Petrine educational policy was a fanatical emphasis on technical training. Reinhard Wittram, author of the finest biography of Peter the Great, contrasted the religiocentrism of Muscovite education with the practicality of the great reformer in the simple phrase, ‘Mathematick statt Katechismus,’ which suggests the radical secularization of the new schooling. James Billington merely echoed the conclusions of generations of earlier historians when he wrote that

[Peter the Great's] efforts to advance Russian learning were almost completely concentrated on scientific, technical or linguistic matters of direct military or diplomatic value. “To Peter's mind, ‘education’ and ‘vocational training’ seem to have been synonynlous concepts.” … Peter the Great was important not for introducing foreign technical ideas into Russia, but for making them the basis of a new state-sponsored type of education.