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How did an educated Latvians become commonplace? The Moravian brethren and the spread of literacy
The Livonian Brethren Church, also known as the Livonian Herrnhut (Moravian) Brethren Church, occupied the minds of the people of Livland from the autumn of 1729, when the first Herrnhut missionaries arrived under the leadership of Brother Christian David, and operated with varying success until the Second World War. Its heyday, or first great success, was in the late 1730s and early 1740s, as well as in the 1820s and 1850s. There was also a certain upsurge in the 20th century with the establishment of the independent Republic of Latvia, but it did not reach the levels of the 18th and 19th centuries.
It is fairly safe to say that the phenomenon of the Livonian Herrnhut movement was typical of the time, especially at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. At the end of the 17th century, the so-called confessionalism in Europe, of which Pietism was one of the typical features, was coming to its logical end. However, in the 17th century, its route to Livland was closed, because the Swedish government was very intolerant of such movements, and this was supported by the strictness and discipline of orthodox Lutheranism in Sweden.
The defeat of the Swedes in the Great Northern War led to a cardinal change in the situation, and the ideas of Pietism flowed in here too; members of the nobility and clergy of Livland were already familiar with these ideas. It is therefore a logical outcome that interest in it arose in Livland when Count Nikolai Ludwig von Zinzendorf of Saxony decided to revive the idea of the former Bohemian Hussite Brethren, continuing the traditon of Pietism by establishing the so-called Restored Brethren Parish, which quickly acquired the name of the Herrnhut Brethren Parish, named after its location.
The famous wife of the General of Valmiermuiža (Wolmarshof), Elisabeth Magdalena von Hallart, who was familiar with Pietism, the Herrnhut Brethren Church and Count Zinzendorf himself, steered the activities of the Livonian Brethren in a certain direction. As an educated woman of that time, she was concerned about the poor knowledge and lack of understanding of Christianity among her peasants. She also realised that only one thing could change the situation: educating the peasants.
This problem had also preoccupied the Swedes in the 17th century since the time of Gustav II Adolph, but although the Swedes created a series of laws that were supposed to encourage the establishment of peasant schools and the education of peasant children, in actual fact, serious and sufficiently extensive educational measures did not get implemented.
Hallart knew perfectly well that a school would be of no use without a teacher, so firstly she advocated the organised training of teachers.
Coincidentally, her activities were perfectly in line with both the aims and the principles of the Herrnhutians. Having received permission in Riga, Hallart built an entire complex for the parish on her property at Jērakalns in Valmiermuiža. On 23 August 1738 a seminary for the training of teachers for peasant schools opened its doors.
By 1742, when the Russian government initiated the process of banning the movement, more than 100 of the most talented young Latvian peasants had graduated from the seminary, mostly from Livland, but some peasants came from Courland and some young men from Russia. Many of them became teachers in the newly opened peasant schools. Thus, from the turn of the 1730s/40s onwards, peasants in Livland finally had true access to elementary education, where they learned to read, the basics of Christianity and how to sing the tune, i.e. sight read.
18th-century thought provided significant support for this policy of educating the peasants of Livland, which was initiated in principle by the Herrnhutian movement: it was the Age of Enlightenment, or the century when society's views in many areas began to change radically and there was increased discussion about the need for all citizens to have equal rights, equal access to education and broad participatory governance.
As a result, the general public also became increasingly concerned about the education of the peasantry, and during the 18th century the network of peasant schools in Livland grew considerably, and in the second half of the century the results of this policy are evident – every year, hundreds of peasant children learned to read, and many also to write, and new horizons opened up for the most gifted, the most diligent, the most able, which had been inaccessible to the Latvian peasant until then – they became teachers, clerks, sextons and churchwardens, lay judges of the peasant courts, and in the 19th century, largely thanks to the transformation brought about by the idea of the teachers' seminary at the Valmiermuiža parish, they were able to acquire higher education and become pastors.
And so we see that the education of peasants, which started within the framework of the Brethren Church and whose initial goals were quite modest – a good Christian and an obedient citizen, over time led to creating the foundations of a national Latvian intelligentsia that had not existed on Latvian soil until then. Through the participation of the Old Latvians in the first half of the 19th century, the New Latvians appeared on the Latvian historical scene in the middle of the 19th century and educated Latvians became commonplace. And the presence of a national intelligentsia is one of the most important preconditions for national awakening.
