Rationality and Universality: A New Historical Assessment of the Predecessor of Kaunas Higher Courses in Lithuania
Rationality and Universality: A New Historical Assessment of the Predecessor of Kaunas Higher Courses in Lithuania

Summary/Abstract: On January 27, 1920, public higher education courses, known as the Higher Courses (Lith. Aukštieji kursai), were started in Kaunas, in the hall of the building of the Ministry of Education (which today houses Kaunas Maironis University Gymnasium). The school was founded a century ago and operated on a voluntary basis, and it became the forerunner of higher education in the independent state of Lithuania in the interwar period. The Higher Courses and the university, founded two years later, evolved under more difficult conditions than the higher education institutions in other independent Baltic countries. In the other Baltic countries, higher education was restored after the First World War drawing on the academic potential that had been displaced and damaged during the war. These people survived, which allowed their knowledge and academic experience to be put to good use. After the loss of the capital, Vilnius, in independent Lithuania, even the moral illusion of the historical continuity of the university, which was closed in the 19th century, was gone. The intelligentsia had to create a completely new academic base in the temporary capital, Kaunas.

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