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

Political Re shape in the Schools of Latvia Cataclysmic events sometimes needle educators to reconsider the role of schools in preparing children for citizenship. In the United States, the Great effect of the 1930s prompted educators to address the appropriate place of the schools in developing citizens for an industrial democracy. In the tiny Baltic nation of Latvia, the sudden breakup of the Soviet gist caused educators to consider the same questions. A remarkable chain of events at the gaming of the last decade raised the Iron Curtain and paved the vogue for a revival of liberal democracy throughout Eastern atomic number 63 after fifty years of dictatorial Soviet communism. In 1992, Latvia followed many another(prenominal) of its neighbors in declaring its independence. It then turned to the creation of a new policy-making sympathies and developing citizens to ensure its continuation. Religion was to play a prominent role.The church building had traditionally been a significant factor in Latvian political and social life, but the early 1990s saw a new ghostly force in Eastern Europe. Western missionary organizations were searching for footholds from which to evangelise the newly independent nations of Eastern Europe. Two conflicting goals of this evangelism rapidly surfaced. On the one hand, the church building certainly intended 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 communistic 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 shed them in the untenable position of serving twain masters-the Church and the state, two institutions whose ideologie s and goals are ever at odds.Marxist and Christian World reckons and EducationIn ten days that shook the world in 1917, Lenins Bolsheviks co-opted the Russian rotary motion and ushered into existence a Marxist government. Fundamental to the implementation of communism in Lenins view was control of the schools. He declared that The school must dumbfound a weapon of the dictatorship of the proletariat (in Counts, 1957). Under Lenins successor, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet jointure expanded its influence into Eastern Europe. In 1945, the Soviets annexed Latvia and restructured the schools in accordance with Stalins view that education is .