This paper examines the public education system in Vilna Governorate in the period between the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This part of the work analyzes the system's development in the period 1908-1917. The authors drew upon a body of archival documentation from the Russian State Historical Archive (Saint Petersburg, Russia), a pool of statistical data published in Memorandum Books for Vilna Governorate in the period from 1880 to 1915, and an array of statistical data on the Vilna Educational District published in the scholarly journal Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya. The authors made use of certain regulatory documents as well. The authors' conclusion is that by the end of 1914 students in Vilna Governorate accounted for a mere 50% of the total number of school-age children in the region. The governorate was still far from the introduction of compulsory primary education, as it had a motley ethnic makeup and large numbers of Catholics, Jews, and Dissenters. Of note is the fact that in the last pre-war year the region witnessed a sharp increase in the number of Catholics in attendance at its educational institutions. As early as 1915, in light of the "Great Retreat" of the Russian army, a portion of the educational institutions were evacuated to the empire's central regions, with the percentage of students, thus, starting to decline. [For Part 2, see EJ1238495.]