Inteligentijos pertekliaus problema tarpukario Lietuvos spaudoje

ENThe article reviews the discourse of the surplus of the intelligentsia in the Lithuanian periodicals of the Republic of Lithuania from 1918 to 1940. The author attempts to answer the following questions: (1) what led to the emergence and development of this discourse – social challenges within the country or a preliminary diagnosis of the problem; (2) what problems are associated with the issue of the surplus of well-educated people, and (3) what solutions were proposed for dealing with this issue. In the first years of Lithuania’s independence, the Lithuanian press emphasised an existing shortage of the Lithuanian intelligentsia. However, from the mid- 1930s, public discourse veered towards the looming problem of the surplus of well-educated people in the country. Attention to this issue was drawn not by the actual surplus of the intelligentsia that had formed in Lithuania at that time, but by the emergence of this problem in the neighbouring countries. Thus, the discourse of the surplus of this layer of society in Lithuania evolved by considering ways to prevent this surplus, which might have become an acute problem for Lithuania, given the growing number of educated people in the country. Discussions in the press about the surplus/scarcity of the intelligentsia were constantly renewed, and they were mostly triggered by the government’s decisions regarding the education system, which produced the future members of the intelligentsia. Depending on the stakeholder, attempts were made to either prove the problem of excessive numbers of educated people as relevant or to deny it. For example, seeking to defend the Catholic educational space in the country and the conditions for the development of the Catholic intelligentsia, from the early 1930s prominent Catholics argued that there was no surplus of well-educated people in the country.At the time, the government’s position ranged from warnings about the threat of the surplus of the intelligentsia to a denial of that threat. Although there was no real surplus of educated people in the country, public deliberations and discussions on measures to address the seeming surplus continued throughout the whole interwar period. In order to avoid a real surplus of the intelligentsia, it was proposed to expand the network of agricultural, vocational, and craft schools, pay more attention vocational guidance of the young, regulate the labour market of higher education graduates, take measures for an even distribution of the intelligentsia in the country thus preventing its concentration in the capital and promoting the distribution of the surplus in the provinces of the country. [From the publication]