Underground education

The Greek "Secret School" ("Krifó scholió"). Oil painting by Nikolaos Gyzis, 1885/86.

Underground education, or clandestine education refers to various practices of teaching carried out at times and places where such educational activities were deemed illegal.

Examples of places where widespread clandestine education practices took place included education of Blacks during the Slave Period in the USA[1] and the Secret Teaching Organization in Poland under the Nazis.[2]

There is a Greek - mostly oral - tradition claiming that secret schools (Krifo scholio) operated during the Ottoman period. There is scant written evidence for this and many historians view it as a national myth. Others believe that the Greek secret school is a legend with a core of truth. According to certain sources, secret schools for Albanians operated in late 19th century by Albanian-speaking communities and Bektashi priests under Ottoman rule.[3][4]

Lithuania. Monument of the "School of Hardship" (Vargo Mokykla), by sculptor Petras Rimša. A mother, by her spinning wheel, is secretely teaching her child to read an illegal book in Lithuanian[5]

In Lithuania, clandestine schools (Slaptoji mokykla) operated almost in every village, at the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century, because of the suppresion of Lithuanian language by the tsarist Russian government.[6]

Secret schooling was organized in Jewish Ghettos during the Nazi regime and the German occupation in Europe. During the Taliban rule in various parts of Afghanistan (late 20th, early 21st c.), secret schools operated, mostly for women and girls.[7][8] In 1930's and '40's, the authoritarian nationalistic regime of Brazil took anti-immigrant measures, especially against the Japanese. Japanese and other foreign schools, languages and printed material were restricted, and a compulsory assimilation program was instituted. Japanese schools became illegal in 1938. During that period, Japanese immigrants established secret schools and a newspaper in japanese was printed.[9]

See also

References

  1. Plato; Julius A. Sigler; Anne Marshall Huston (January 1997). Education: Ends and Means. University Press of America. pp. 264–. ISBN 978-0-7618-0452-9.
  2. (in Polish) Ryszard Czekajowski, Tajna edukacja cywilna w latach wojenno-okupacyjnych Polski 1939-1945
  3. Selçuk Akşin Somel, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839-1908. BRILL, 2001, σ. 206.
  4. Clayer, Natalie (1995). "Bektachisme et nationalisme albanais". In Popovic, Alexandre; Veinstein, Gilles. Bektachiyya: Études sur l'ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach. Istanbul: Isis. p. 281.
  5. Saulius A. Suziedelis, Historical Dictionary of Lithuania, Scarecrow Press, 2011 p. 326
  6. K. Žukauskas, On the clandestine teaching in Lithuania, Psychology (Psichologija), Vilnieaus Universitetas Faculty of Philosophy, 1972, No 12Abstract in english.
  7. Afghan girls risk their lives to go to secret school, The Guardian. Sep. 30, 2006
  8. Inside Afghanistan's secret schools, The Guardian, July 2, 2001
  9. Daniela de Carvalho, Migrants and Identity in Japan and Brazil: The Nikkeijin. Routledge, 2003. Chapter "From 1930 to 1954". Page number not available.


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