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Abstract: The article discusses the debatable problem of Russian historiography: the nature of education in the mining schools of Russia in the XIX century. According to modern historians of the Urals, including the author of this article, the absolute majority of them were elementary general educational institutions. At the same time, according to the established Soviet tradition, some teachers of the region and modern historians of the Altai and Zabaikal Regions continue to attribute mining schools to vocational education. Meanwhile, throughout the XIX century the training course in the vast majority of them traditionally included only the basic subjects like reading and writing. This was explained by a whole complex of interrelated reasons: the young age of the pupils, the lack of appropriate educational and material base and qualified teachers to teach special disciplines, the traditions of skills acquisition on practice. Later there appeared clear guidelines of the Ministry of National Education, which a significant part of the mining schools were supervised by. The Ministry of Education insisted that general education should come before any special education, and it should not be mixed with vocational education in one and the same educational institution. Therefore, special subjects were not taught in mining school for a certain period of time, including in the centers of state and private mining districts. Three primary mining technical schools in the Urals were a rare exception in the second half of the XIX century.