Political Reform in the Schools of Latvia :: Religion in Education Soviet Union Essays

Political Reform in the Schools of Latvia Cataclysmic events sometimes spur educators to medical prognosis the role of schools in preparing children for citizenship. In the United give tongue tos, the Great Depression of the 1930s prompted educators to hook the appropriate place of the schools in development citizens for an industrial democracy. In the lilliputian Baltic nation of Latvia, the sudden breakup of the Soviet Union caused educators to take aim the same questions. A remarkable chain of events at the turn of the depart decade raised the Iron Curtain and paved the way for a revival of liberal democracy throughout Eastern Europe afterward fifty years of dictatorial Soviet communism. In 1992, Latvia followed many of its neighbors in declaring its independence. It then turned to the creation of a new government and developing citizens to ensure its continuation. Religion was to play a prominent role.The Church had traditionally been a significant factor in Latvia n governmental and accessible life, but the early 1990s saw a new religious top executive in Eastern Europe. Western missionary organizations were searching for footholds from which to evangelize the freshly independent nations of Eastern Europe. Two conflicting goals of this evangelism rapidly surfaced. On the maven hand, the Church certainly indecadeded to gain converts to Christianity, but it had a political mission as well. Missionaries and their host governments envisioned Christianity as a vehicle to reinstitute a public morality lost under decades of communist rule. In the minds of many, Christian virtue spread throughout the populace would form a necessary foundation for the growth of liberal democracy. Both the Church and the State targeted the schools as the delivery system for moral instruction. However, this use of the schools put them in the untenable position of serving two masters-the Church and the state, two institutions whose ideologies and goals be e ver at odds.Marxist and Christian Worldviews and EducationIn ten days that shook the world in 1917, Lenins Bolsheviks co-opted the Russian Revolution and ushered into origination a Marxist government. Fundamental to the implementation of communism in Lenins view was control of the schools. He declared that The school must become a weapon of the dictatorship of the proletariat (in Counts, 1957). Under Lenins successor, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union expand its influence into Eastern Europe. In 1945, the Soviets annexed Latvia and restructured the schools in accordance with Stalins view that preparation is .