Teodor Janković Mirijevski (also written F. I. Mirievskii, Fedor Ivanovich Yankovich de Mirievo; Sremska Kamenica, 17 April 1741 – Saint Petersburg, 22 May 1814) was a Serbian and Russian educational reformer, academic, scholar and pedagogical writer.

[3] His son Ivan Yankovich de Mirievo held the rank of Lieutenant General in the Imperial Russian Army.

Teodor was the son of Jovan (Ivan) Janković, a high-ranking Serbian military officer in the service of the Austrian crown.

His ancestors had been living in their country estate in the Banat since the 15th century when they were forced to leave Mirijevo, near Belgrade, with the encroachment of the Ottoman invaders.

Janković was particularly impressed by the discipline and order he found and also the tabular-literal method by Johann Friedrich Hahn (1710-1789), the mnemonic device that organized each lesson into outline form.

Upon returning to the Banat in 1772, Janković dispatched to Temesvar two young acquaintances, Avram Mrazović and Stefan Vujanovski, who were to spend a year in Vienna at the Normal school and teaching institute.

When Mrazović and Vujanovski returned to the Banat in 1773, Janković apprenticed them as schoolmasters in a local parish to observe whether they had mastered the essentials of Hecker's pedagogy.

[6] After being appointed a director of public school in Timis Province in the Banat, an area inhabited by Serbs and Romanians, Bishop Vićentije Jovanović Vidak of Temesvar made Janković his private secretary in 1773.

Janković headed the implementation in Timis Province of the Austrian school edict of 1774 as applied to the traditions of the Orthodox population, both Serb and Romanian.

The Orthodox religion had employed statutory autonomy since the late seventeenth century, when Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor granted ecclesiastical self-government in exchange for military assistance against the Turks.

Janković was thereby able to win the trust of both the Austrian court and of the Orthodox metropolitans Vićentije Jovanović Vidak and later Mojsije Putnik and his clergy.

Janković sent Stevan Vujanovski to Osijek in 1778 to oversee the preliminary training of elementary teachers at state-run, special schools called Praparanden-Anstalten.

Three such districts for Serb schools were headed by prominent pedagogues and writers of the time: in Banat, Teodor Janković Mirievski; Avram Mrazović in Bačka and Baranja; and Stevan Vujanovski in Slavonia, Srem and Croatia.

In this respect, he is the forerunner of Heinrich Julius Bruns (1746-1794), Joseph Anton Gall (1748-1807), Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Adolph Diesterweg, Friedrich Fröbel and others, and was the first to formulate that idea of "education according to traditions and customs" so influential in his work in the Habsburg Empire among the Serbs, Romanians, Greeks, Bulgars and in Imperial Russia among the Russians, Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Rusyns, and Belarusians.

Efforts to diffuse the written vernacular began in 1770 when the court sanctioned the establishment of a Cyrillic press for Serbs and Romanians alike by the Viennese publishing firm of Joseph von Kuzböck.

It is no accident in this regard that the noted Serbian playwright Joakim Vujić and poet and translator Aleksije Vezilić had graduated from the schools established by the reforms in the 1770s.

Janković alone offered a pedagogical model to the Orthodox Slavs who, for whatsoever reason, were dissatisfied with the conditions of parish schooling in their territories.

On 6 September 1782, Janković had his first meeting with Catherine and Ivan Betskoy, the President of the Imperial Academy of Arts, who served as her advisor on education.

Ten days later, Janković produced a draft plan for a public school system in Russia which was accepted by Catherine on 21 September.

The teachers' manual, "Rukovodstvo uchiteliam pervago i vtorago klassa narodnykh uchilishch Rossiiskoi Imperii," was Russia's first systematic outline of pedagogical method.

Janković was the author of the manual, which was based in part upon a "Felbiger Handbuch" already translated and adapted by him into Serbian and Rumanian in 1776 for use in the Austrian Empire.

Janković's new pedagogical textbook was divided into chapters on the methodology of group lessons, reading, numbers' tablets, and questioning; ways to instruct individuals in learning their letters, writing, and arithmetic; and administrative procedures.

In contrast to the earlier Serbian and Romanian manual, this one practically ignored religion as a subject to be taught in school, was shorter and more precise, and stressed the use of the Russian language in the classroom.

His son, Ivan Yankovich de Mirievo, was a soldier who attained the rank of Major General during the Napoleonic Wars.