VISIOONIDEST TEGURIKS HARIDUSPOLIITIKAS: EESTI HARIDUSIDEOLOOGIA PEASUUNAD JA ÜHISKONDLIK ORGANISEERUMINE ESIMESE MAAILMASÕJANI
FROM VISIONS TO A FACTOR IN THE FIELD OF EDUCATIONAL POLICY: THE EDUCATIONAL AIMS AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF THE ESTONIANS

Summary/Abstract: From the beginning of the 19th century two trends could be distinguished in the ideology of the people’s education of the Baltic provinces. The first one placed great emphasis on the Baltic peculiarity in the Russian Empire, evaluated independence from the central government and local Lutheran cultural tradition (Baltic-German clergymen and educationists K. G. Sonntag, C. C. Ulmann, from the 1860s Estonian nationalist J. Hurt). The second trend set its hope on treasury or on the Russian State educational institutions (Rector of Tartu University C. F. Parrot, educated in the spirit of the Enlightenment, later on Estonian intellectuals J. Köler, C. R. Jakobson, M. Veske, A. Grenzstein). At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries a hybrid current came to the fore in the Estonian educational ideology. It stressed such values and notions as evolutionary development of education, morality, national self-being, self-help and cooperation, Lutheran cultural heritage (leader of moderate liberals J. Tõnisson and pastor V. Reiman), class distinctions, all-Russian democratic movement (radical liberal journalist K. Päts). Common for all representatives of that current were such leading ideas as participation of Estonians in school administration, the rights of commune in educational policy, Estonian as the language of teaching in the schools and national territorial and administrative autonomy within the Russian Empire. This current won the leading place in the Estonian national educational policy during the first Russian revolution in 1905. In the following years the aims of the liberal current gained considerable power in the field of educational policy through rapidly increasing organizational structure of the Estonian society: through the agricultural and educational societies, cooperatives and credit banks. The municipalities, which had been taken over from Baltic-Germans (at Valga in 1901, in Tallinn in 1904 etc.), acted eagerly in the field of general and commercial education. In the Estonian educational thinking, characterized until then first of all by national interests and self-defense, gradually principles of self-government became rooted.

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