Yrjö Karilas as a Youth Educator in the 1920s and 1930s

Authors

• Lauri Julkunen Jyväskylän yliopisto

Abstract

This article focuses on Yrjö Karilas (1891–1982) who was a Finnish teacher, youth worker and a writer of youth literature. Karilas made an extensive career in the field of youth education especially in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Civil War in 1918, Karilas quit his job as a teacher and started his career within the YMCA-movement as a secretary of the YMCA in Helsinki and as a general secretary of the central organization of Finnish Christian Boy Work (Suomen NMKY:n Pojat). Karilas was a very productive writer and innovative educator, and his ideas spread effectively through magazines and books targeted to young people and educators. One of his special fields was educative biographic literature, through which he taught Christian values and life view to the youth. In his writings Karilas emphasized the need for both spiritual and physical development for boys to grow up into decent citizens. This article examines the ways in which Karilas argued the need for boy education and the goals and means he had concerning boy education. The results are based on qualitative content analysis of Karilas' texts (youth literature and guides for youth workers) and some archive documents. The main focus is on the educational ideas and conceptions about youth education in post-Civil War Finland.