Pedagogical innovations and estonian education at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Transnational influences and historical roots

Abstract

The article focuses on Estonian schools’ first contacts with the educational innovations of the Enlightenment at the beginning of the nineteenth century. New pedagogical ideas and methods of teaching, which spread through transnational networks of intellectuals and the written word, reached Estonian (and Latvian) peasants, mainly via clergymen. The ideas of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi were highly valued by Georges Frédéric Parrot, adviser to emperor Alexander I. The vocational school founded by Ferdinand Kindermann served as an example for the parish school opened by Johann Philipp von Roth, pastor at Kanepi. Otto Wilhelm Masing, pastor at Äksi, tried to adapt the Bell-Lancaster method first launched in India and England to Estonian schools. In addition to a transnational perspective, the article makes comparisons with the seventeenth century, when attempts were made to solve similar problems when educating peasants in Estland and Livland.