History of education and the struggle for intellectual liberation in post-Soviet Baltic space after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Abstract

This study on a “new” history of education is written from the perspective of a participant in the process of discarding Soviet intellectual and physical boundaries. The fall of the Berlin Wall has, over the past two decades, become a continuous process in post-Soviet societies, when the now liberated historians of education were faced with a new challenge, namely integration into the newly opened world. The only allowed theory, Marxism-Leninism, reduced historians of education to superficial methodology and its trivialisation. However, the collapse of the USSR did not immediately result in new theoretical concepts, because historians were busy discovering fresh facts in newly accessed archives and libraries. Soon, topics on the history of education were being addressed by social scientists, who had succeeded in learning the latest theories, enabling them to present historic material to the general public in a global context. “Acts-and-facts history” slowly lost its place in university courses. Similar to the Revisionists of the 1960s in the West, today historians of education in the Baltics look to the common narratives and borrow theories from the social sciences. Current research in Latvia focuses on the Soviet legacy, internationalisation of education and the stories of those “whose voices have not yet been heard”.