Mallikansalaisen säröilevä ihanne: Opettajaksi sopivuuden ja sopimattomuuden määrittely suomalaisessa opettajankoulutuksessa vuosina 1920–1945

Abstract

The major turning point for Finland was gaining its independence in 1917 and the subsequent civil war. Policymakers believed that lack of education of the lower classes was a key cause of the conflict, arguing that people needed to be educated to create a peaceful society. Creating a new civic nation was a process requiring civic-minded citizens: teachers had a key role in educating and civilizing future citizens. In many ways, teachers were expected to define the nation’s future: they were not only educators but exemplars of the civic-minded citizen. Teachers were expected to be well-behaved and civilized as well as hardworking. They had to possess Christian morals and patriotic values. Teaching, in the eyes of the teacher trainers, was a moral craft that needed to be honed. The main focus of this doctoral thesis is the process of becoming an ideal teacher in the Finnish education system from the 1920s to the first half of the 1940s. The goal is to identify which offenses were deemed so immoral in the teacher training institutions that the misbehaving students were not allowed to become teachers. By examining the offenses and the penalties handed out, it is possible to define which kind of offenses transgressed most against the ideal of a teacher. In Finnish society, the ideal teacher as well as the ideal citizen were strongly based in one’s class and gender, which is one of the main focuses of this study. In this study, five different Finnish teacher training colleges are observed and compared to each other. The data was collected using the archives of the Finnish teacher training colleges—most importantly, using the protocols of the teacher councils of the colleges in question. The method used in this thesis is category analysis: the collected data have been arranged to show examples of the most common forms of misbehavior and the possible effects of gender on a given penalty. Through this analysis, it is possible to define the sphere of agency allowed to a teacher trainee and how much this agency was limited by attributes such as gender and class.