Intrinsic and extrinsic patriotism in school: Teaching history after Estonia's critical juncture

It is often postulated that history as a school subject is a prominent means of identity and patriotism building in students. In fact, the subject probably does function that way in most countries, even when the stated aims of history teaching differ. But countries also differ with regard to the contentions among the present representations of their past. In Estonia, for example, there is a large minority population of Russian speakers besides the ethnic Estonian majority, and the two ethnolinguistic communities can be seen as viewing the Estonian past from robustly different perspectives. This study is about how history teachers of both groups deal with the society's and the state's expectation of instilling patriotism into their students. It seems that ethnic Estonian history teachers pursue this aim in a largely implicit and casual way, and based on an intrinsic motivation rather than on some external demand. Russian teachers perceive the state's expectations much more explicitly and try to construe their students’ loyalty to Estonia by a more differentiated reference to the past Soviet realities. This and other findings are discussed in terms of critical juncture theory.