Masingu lugemismasin
The Age of Enlightenment initiated an educational reform in the 18th century that quickly reached Estland and Livland. Popular education, which had previously mainly served religious instruction, became more important and more secular in content due to the liberation of the peasantry from serfdom in Estland in 1816 and Livland in 1819. This article examines the dissemination of new pedagogical ideas and teaching methods in Estonian schools. The study focuses on the activities of Otto Wilhelm Masing (1763–1832), placing them within the broader context of local educational conditions. Georges Frédéric Parrot, the rector of the University of Tartu, which was reopened in 1802, proposed collaboration to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and in 1805, the pastor of Vastseliina, George Gottfried Marpurg, published a schoolbook inspired by Pestalozzi. Masing’s activities intertwined the aims of popular enlightenment, the advancement of school education and the improvement of the Estonian written language. His reading sheets, published in 1821, were modeled on posters used in Bell-Lancaster schools, which he combined with a flashcard alphabet and a blackboard. The latter was probably modeled after the reading machine (Lesemaschine) introduced by Karl Gottlieb Plato in Leipzig. Masing used the phonetic method in teaching reading, which is why in his primer (1823) and reading sheets, consonants are designated by a mute e (ke, le, me, etc.). The same letter names appeared in the South Estonian primer by Friedrich Gottlieb Moritz, the pastor of Urvaste. This method of teaching reading had been adopted in the 1680s by Bengt Gottfried Forselius, whose primer began the reform of Estonian spelling. Masing continued this work, improving both the spelling and the teaching method, thereby shaping a teaching method that his contemporaries referred to as the Masing method.