Pedagogical Innovations and Estonian Education at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century: Transnational Influences and Historical Roots

A Põldvee

doi:10.3176/hist.2021.1.04

Abstract

Pedagogical Innovations and Estonian Education at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century: Transnational Influences and Historical Roots

Highlights

Educational institutions characteristic of the European societies of the modern period were formed on the territory of the present-dayEstonia during the Lutheran Swedish rule of the seventeenth century.At the beginning of the 1630s a gymnasium was founded in Tallinn
In less than ten years Estonian schoolmasters were trained and a network of parish schools was created. This process can be regarded as part of the so-called Swedish literacy campaign, which had a focus on reading skills,[1] during which an educational programme organised by the Lutheran church strongly influenced by German models was quite successfully carried out, first of all the New Testament was translated into Estonian and common people were taught to read it.[2]
Masing suffered several setbacks when preparing his reading posters. As his orthography innovations were met with resistance among some intellectual circles, Masing complained to Rosenplänter that together with the reading posters, he would stop all the “damned Estonian writing business” and everything even remotely connected with the Estonian language.[84]

Summary

Introduction

Estonia during the Lutheran Swedish rule of the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the 1630s a gymnasium was founded in Tallinn The German progressive educationalist Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818) described the era of Enlightenment as “a pedagogical century”.8 The ideas of this “century” and of progressive education (Ger. Reformpädagogik) reached the Baltic provinces. Detailed research into the question of what kind of response the pedagogical ideas of the Enlightenment found in Estland and Livland provinces was started only a couple of decades ago. For parents from affluent circles – mainly noblemen, the educated social ranks, the so-called literati and merchants – offering one’s children the best and preferably the most modern education and upbringing was almost the ultimate purpose of life They tried hard to find for their children capable and educated tutors and governesses, who were in high demand in the Baltic countries, and even sent their children to learn in German education institutions.

12 The Transnational in the History of Education

19 About Pestalozzi’s connections to Estonia and Livonia

Conclusion