Lituanistinis švietimas emigracijoje

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to throw light on the efforts of Lithuanians to organize Lithuanian- oriented education in the diaspora throughout the last century. For practical reasons our survey is restricted to the North American emigration. There four periods of Lithuanian education may be distinguished. The first is constituted by the efforts of firstwave (economic) emigrants to gain an education themselves and concurrently to teach their children Lithuanian. In this period a crucial role was played by Lithuanian Catholic parishes and the grammar schools they set up. The second period saw the often chaotic endeavors in the Displaced Persons’ camps in Germany to set up a school system at all three levels, a system that was later (but just partially) transferred to the United States. In the third period young Lithuanian-Americans were being educated in the Saturday school network. This period was marked by intense, heated debates about Lithuanianeness, ethnic culture, and Lithuanian-oriented schooling. Finally, the present-day situation, which began after the fall of the Iron Curtain, may be regarded as the fourth period. In all cases, changes in the way emigrants saw themselves were accompanied by changes in what they took the goals of Lithuanian-oriented education to be. If the objective of the Lithuanian schools of the first wave was to integrate people into American society without losing their ethnic identity, then the goal of Lithuanian Saturday schools was not American integration but conservation of Lithuanian national identity. The organization of the diaspora school network proceeded rather spontaneously through the voluntary endeavors of enthusiastic individuals who had no political influence in the receiving country nor extensive financial resources. Thus this article focuses on the efforts of people in their communities to create good conditions for their children’s identitities to develop.