Aiming for a whole and equal nation

Educational perspectives and their backgrounds in J. E. Sunila's thinking and politics

Authors

• Tuomas Rantala Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.107582

Keywords:

vocational education, democracy, education, agrarian league, agriculture, smallholder farming, equality, J. E. Sunila

Abstract

The Agrarian League was Finland’s leading bourgeois party during the interwar period. One of its leaders was J. E. Sunila (1875–1936), who served twice as the Prime Minister and three times as the Minister of Agriculture, among other things. Outside politics, Sunila held the post of Chief Director of the Board of Agriculture; he also worked as a teacher at several folk high schools as well as the university. The period studied in this article extends from the 1890s to the 1930s. In this article, I aim to place Sunila’s educational ideas in a wider context and examine their connection to the ways of thinking that sought to find a golden mean between capitalism and socialism. In his various roles, Sunila was a key figure in the agrarian country that had recently gained independence and suffered a civil war. In this article, I study the means that Sunila saw appropriate for stabilising the conditions and reducing the divisions between people. I discuss the roots of Sunila’s thinking and how it changed over the years. I also examine how Sunila saw the connection between agriculture and democracy and the educational methods that were used to strengthen this connection. Sunila emphasized the importance of agriculture in creating a peaceful atmosphere and thereby also protecting democracy.