To Örebro University

By examining the state school inspector reports of 1861-1863, which provide rich insights into the local conditions of schooling in Sweden, this article sheds further light on the wide range of factors that weakened school enrolment and attendance in nineteenth-century Sweden. In terms of parental demand, these included child labour on farms, at manors, and in industries; the transformation of the servant system among rural households; and religious practices, such as the confirmation and the beliefs of Protestant sectarian groups. On the supply side, factors that school inspectors reported included the inability of Swedish teacher seminars to examine enough teachers and the problematic behaviour of local school boards. As a result, this article provides additional input into the debate in educational history regarding the role of the state, religion, rural elites, and parents in the rise of mass schooling, while simultaneously providing further qualitative evidence to a quantitatively oriented research field in economic history on the determinants of schooling.

The 19^th and early 20^th centuries saw the feminization of the teaching profession. The aim of this article is to examine the professionalization process of female teachers in Finland and Slovenia in the early 20^th century. We focus on the following questions: What were the requirements for entering female teacher colleges? What kind of skills were future female teachers supposed to learn at teacher colleges? How were female teachers supposed to dress and behave? Based on historical source materials, this article reveals both differences and similarities in these respects. Apart from stating varying requirements for entrance to teacher college, this article indicates the teaching skills that was expected from female teachers, and their individual characteristics. As shown in this article, female teachers were expected to be moral and decent individuals, that behaved well and dress restrainedly. As a result, this article raises questions both regarding how and why female teacher ideals vary across countries, but also over time.

The purpose of this article is to clarify what kind of role schools and teachers played in the well-being of Finnish war children during and after the Second World War. The study focuses on the children who were evacuated to Denmark, also known as Finnebørn, and their experiences and memories as war children in Denmark and returning evacuees back home in Finland. All together, 11 former Finnebørn were interviewed for the research. The interview data was supported by other primary sources such as published and unpublished written material and newspaper articles. This article explores the roles schools and teachers played in the lives of the evacuee children; what kind of influence an individual teacher had on Finnebørn’s resilience processes; and finally, how schooling effected children’s well-being. According to our data, going to school played an important role in Finnebørn’s lives. In Denmark, the children’s integration to their new home country was facilitated by supportive and understanding teachers. Escaping the wars, and learning a new language did, however, affect the children’s return to Finland. Having lost their first language, the re-integration into the Finnish society could prove a challenge, to which the Finnish schools and teachers were not prepared for.

Svensk skoldebatt är så mycket, och ibland kan det kännas som om den är för mycket. I kontrast till eftertänksamma samtal, där man strävar efter att belysa en fråga ur olika synvinklar i syfte att verkligen förstå den, står debattens ofta hysteriska tonläge där olika aktörer beskylls för olika slags felsteg. För de av oss som verkligen är intresserade av att förstå hur vårt skolväsende fungerar, och har fungerat, kan alltså debattklimatet kännas otillfredsställande. Innan jul formulerade jag därför ett antal riktlinjer för en bättre och mer givande debatt. Som ordet antyder, var deras syfte inte att ifrågasätta, argumentera eller tillbakavisa, utan snarare att presentera en vision för hur skoldebatten skulle kunna föras. Dessa riktlinjer är inte utan blinkningar till några av de debattörer som tar stor plats i skoldebatten. Men de är publicerade i all välmening och med gott humör.

In an increasingly globalized world, the nineteenth century expansion of mass schooling can no longer be interpreted merely from within a national framework. As a result, vital efforts have been made to investigate and conceptualize the international and transnational histories of schooling. Using the historiography of nine-teenth century schooling as a starting point, this article presents prospects for how these conceptualizations may be further developed employing the notion of a comparative history “from below.” In this article, this notion indicates an analysis that does not take national or supranational entities as the point of departure, but instead promotes a comparative history based on the local level (school districts, municipalities, townships). Consequently, the focus of investigations will shift from national politics, transnational circulation of educa-tional ideas, and international conferences, to the mundane history of schooling, covering issues such as local funding, local school politics, and the practical, and often non-event-worthy, realities of schooling. Although such investigations do not mainly address the oppressed or the marginalized, a comparative history from be-low implies a focus on the ordinary schoolchildren, parents, and teachers, and their schools. What this article consequently proposes is an international history of schooling that is simultaneously local, and a local history of schooling that is simultaneously international.

Through an extensive study of 12 parishes in the Sundsvall region, this article, informed by studies in the economic history of education, examines changes and continuities in local school politics during the period of 1840–1900. Using the Sundsvall region in the northern part of Sweden as its point of departure, this article shows how basic political conflicts shifted when political franchise, tax regulations and the social structure of the region changed during the second half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the investigated period, the basic conflict of school politics was no longer between those who owned land and those who did not but rather between high- and low-income groups. Judging from local school politics, the local elites of the Sundsvall region, in contrast to local elites in the USA, England, Spain and Prussia, focused their attention on school funding. The main conflicts between the social groups not only concerned the distribution of school expenditures but also included issues, such as the location of schools.

How did teachers make a living for themselves? The purpose of this paper is to examine rural nineteenth century teachers’ livelihood, and more specifically how teachers survived engaging in livelihood diversification or multiple employment. Drawing inspiration from the new social history of livelihood, and using a wide variety of source materials from nineteenth century Sweden, I will show that far from specializing in teaching, teachers were often engaged in multiple occupations still around 1900. I will show how this common practice was discussed, and how teachers work ranged from the encouraged to activities frowned upon, and even included illegal activities. By doing so, I will be able to shed new light on teaching as a profession and occupational title during the nineteenth century, and contribute to the discussion regarding the social and economic position of teacher. By investigating teachers’ livelihood, I will also be able to examine the role of teachers’ multiple occupations in the expansion of mass schooling during the nineteenth century.

History of Education is today a flourishing field of research, underpinned by national and international societies, conferences and an increasing number of journals. Although critically minded scholars such as Jurgen Herbst (1999) have lamented historians of education for endlessly repeating the old mantras of class, race and gender, the field has nevertheless exhibited great ingenuity in developing research dealing with topics such as the educational history of the body, material culture, lived experience, social networks, and international and transnational processes of transfer, circulation and diffusion.

The purpose of this paper is to pay tribute to one of the most promising strands of recent historiographical trends, namely the renewed interest in the social and economic history of education. In this paper, I will trace the development of this strand of research among educationalists, historians and economic historians back to the 1960s, celebrating the seminal work of scholars such as Carl Kaestle, William Marsden, Brian Simon and E. P. Thompson. I will thereafter discuss the theoretical and methodological characteristics of this social and economic history of education, and the opportunities that it presents to both formulate new questions and shed new light on fundamental issues in the historiography of education. To conclude, this paper will honour these pasts efforts by presenting examples of how theoretical perspectives from family history, history of work and wages, and the econometrics of educational expenditure might contribute to a shift towards the social and economic aspects of schooling in, what may be termed, a materialist turn in the field of educational history.

During the nineteenth century, Swedish gymnastics grew to become one of the main models of physical education in the Western world. The purpose of this article is to explore how Swedish gymnastics was adjusted to the female body and mind in the mid-nineteenth century. Using handbooks published by the Swedish educationalist Anton Santesson as an empirical starting point, this article shows how the relationship between gender and gymnastics was complicated and exhibited significant discrepancies. In part, Swedish gymnastics was marked by a one-sex model of gender differences, which meant that gymnastics was perceived as a method for catering to the deficiencies and weaknesses of the feminine nature, in an attempt to make girls and young women more similar to boys. Swedish gymnastics had, nevertheless, vital elements of a two-sex model, according to which gymnastics was supposed to realise the true feminine nature of girls. Following this line of thought, Santesson claimed that, since gymnastics merely followed the laws of the body, it could not make girls more like boys. Santesson’s vision of gymnastics also included disciplinary mechanisms, such as the partitioning of space, which were gender neutral. Apart from presenting insights into the ambiguous and contradictory notions of gender in Swedish girls’ gymnastics, this article thus also raises questions regarding whether other models of physical education were marked by similar discrepancies during the nineteenth century.

The School Act of 1842, revised in 1882 and 1897, organized a decentralized national school system in Sweden, based on about 2,300 parishes. The role of this school act in the rise of schooling in Sweden is fundamental to the Swedish historiography of schooling. This paper examines the precondition, contents and consequences of the school act in order to examine whether it actually was a revolutionary event or merely a confirmation of already pending processes. This paper will thus be able to show how the school act was the result of a lengthy political debate, spanning decades, on popular education and whether it should the provide the population with an minimum of knowledge or form the basis of the knowledge necessary for Swedish citizenship. This tension was also apparent in the formulation of the school act which included formulations on a minimum of instruction. While the education promoted by the school act thus certainly was limited, and did not form a clear break from the previously dominating home instruction, the school act had major consequences in organizational terms, contributing to establishment of schools in the many regions of Sweden where schools previously had been uncommon.

While the architecture, educational ideas and material culture of nineteenth century school buildings have been properly investigated, we know less about the actual processes of designing and building schools. By exploring these processes, this chapter examines how local decision-makers, school designers, builders and workers influenced the dynamics between state governance and school design in Sweden, 1840-1900. The analysis is based on a case study of 66 school building projects in the Sundsvall region, located in northern Sweden.

In this chapter, I will argue that the local design and building processes fundamentally influenced school design. The school districts' organisation promoted low cost alternatives, diversity among school buildings and caused delays; builders and architects adapted schools to the local sense of aesthetics, hygiene and appropriate temperature for classrooms, and the local needs to accommodate the areas’ school aged children in the planned class-rooms; and, not the least, the morals, organisational skills and know-how of builders and building workers marked the varying quality of the school buildings. In comparison with investigations that focused on national building plans, I will thus be able to present a much more complex image of the relationship between state governance and school design, showing, once again, that what you want is not always what you get.

Particularly in rural areas, nineteenth century school funding relied to a significant degree on payments in-kind, such as grains, hay and fuel. In this respect, studies have shown how Swiss teachers were remunerated in grains, wine, firewood and sometimes bread, salt or salmon in 1800, how French mid-nineteenth century teachers occasionally were granted foodstuffs such as eggs, milk and butter, and how German teachers were presented with grains, wine and loaves of bread. 

Using a wide range of source materials, including local school district minutes and teacher’s memories, the aim of this paper is to examine the roles of (male) teachers’ families and the local villages in the monetary and non-monetary economy of primary school system of mid-nineteenth century Sweden. Theoretically influenced by the social history of livelihood, and family history, I will analyze the work conducted by teachers’ wives and children to transform in-kind salary into something of value for the teacher and his family. I will also address the efforts of family members, and local villagers to mobilize additional in-kind resources, enabling teachers and their families to make a living our of a meagre teacher salary. Apart from shedding new light on teachers’ salaries, this article will thus also point to the significant roles of the social institutions of family and village, and gender relations, in the funding of nineteenth century school systems.

This article discusses how an increased interest in the global, the international and the cross-national may be informed by the recently renewed focus upon the social and economic history of education. The history of school buildings in a comparative framework offered here illustrates how such approaches also have important contributions to make to the study of international and cross-national phenomena. This article therefore makes a case for a social history turn in this field.

Alongside sloyd, Swedish gymnastics (The Swedish system/ The Ling system) is Sweden’s most significant contribution to the history of education. Invented by Pehr Henrik Ling (1776-1839), and refined by his son Hjalmar Ling (1820-86) among others, the purpose of this system of gymnastics was to systematically exercise each part of the human body. While mostly featuring free-standing exercises, it also involved some apparatus work, and was marked by a high degree of formalization. Promoting manliness and nation-building, the Swedish system soon won a significant following across the world.

 Using the Benedict Anderson’s conceptualization of nationalism and Michel Foucault’s analysis of discipline as starting point, this paper explores the comparatively under-studied issue of how the physical education of girls was construed in the Swedish system during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The main issues that this paper will address is the societal and individual problems that girls’ gymnastics was to solve, the strategies and techniques that the Swedish system employed for this purpose, and how the Swedish system’s effects on the girls was to be understood. 

Focusing on the works of Anton Santesson (1825-92), who along with Hjalmar Ling was the main author on girls’ gymnastics in Sweden, I will show how girls’ physical education was conceptualized as a response to a nation in social, cultural and physical crisis, that in part was the result of the detrimental effects of schooling on girls’ bodies and minds. By establishing a nation-wide network of state gymnastic inspectors, and implementing a system of gymnastics that was adapted to the un-manliness of the female body, the Swedish system would foster girls that were both adapted to the demands of a modern nation, and the virtues of traditional society.

The physical environment in early years education and care is crucial. This paper examines the Swedish government’s vision of preschool design in the welfare state of the 1970s and the conceptions of children and society upon which it was based. Presenting an investigation of reports, booklets, and study materials published by various branches of the central government, this paper analyses an ambitious preschool design intended to provide children with a diverse and stimulating environment that supported their independence and freedom of choice. Unlike similar designs in postwar Europe, this preschool design was not formulated in response to the experiences of the world wars. Inspired by the theories of Piaget and Erikson and based on the rationality of the Swedish welfare state, this preschool design was instead intended to remedy the shortcomings of a perceived anonymous, sterile and barren modern society. In relation to existing research, this paper contributes to the study of the so-called nursery heritage by examining how it was formulated in the setting of the Swedish welfare state. In so doing, the paper also provides ample ground for a continued critical discussion on contemporary strands of neoliberal preschool design.

Den 18 juni 1842 signerade kung Karl XIV Johan, i stadgan betecknad som “med Guds Nåde, Sweriges, Norriges, Göthes och Wendes Konung”, Kongl. Maj:ts Nådiga Stadga angående Folkunderwisningen i Riket. Denna stadga, som under 2017 fyllde 175 år, har allt sedan sin tillkomst varit omdiskuterad.

Although the history of school finance is fundamental to the history of schooling, the topic has suffered from relative neglect. This article presents an analysis of how the funding of the expansion of the Swedish school system changed during the second half of the nineteenth century and why this change occurred. Using the framework of the social history of salaries, it shows that the educational revolution entailed by the expansion of schooling was accompanied by an equally fundamental shift in school finance. From a large degree of in-kind resource mobilization in the form of grain, hay, firewood, etc., school funding became monetarized. Instead of relying on in-kind taxes, or the services of parishioners, the education system became mainly dependent on money.

The reasons for this development were many and varied. At the national political level, teachers' in-kind salaries were abolished following a debate that noted the changing salary terms in other sectors of society, the conflicts that in-kind salaries created at the local level, land reform, and the problems related to the quality of in-kind salaries. At the local school district level, these quality issues were raised, too, but the problems with collecting in kind taxes and the problems created by changing tax regulations were also noticed.

In addition to contributing to our knowledge of the history of school finance, this investigation also has implications for our understanding of the rise of mass schooling. Instead of being a part of grand narratives of social conflict, state formation or industrialization, from the vantage point of school funding, the history of schooling becomes part of the history of salaries, prices, and taxes. In the decentralized school system of a primarily rural Sweden, this also means that schools must be understood in local and rural contexts.

This book presents expert analysis on how the remarkable rise of mass schooling was funded during the nineteenth century. Based on rich source materials from rural Swedish school districts, and drawing up evidence from schooling in countries including France, Germany, England and the U.S., Westberg examines the moral considerations that guided economic practices and sheds new light on how the advent of schooling did not only rest upon monies, but also on grains, firewood and cow fodder. Exploring school districts’ motives and economic culture, this book shows how schooling was neither primarily guided by frugal impulses nor motivated by a fear of the growing working classes. Instead, school spending served multiple purposes in school districts that pursued a fair and reasonable economic practice.

In addition to being a highly-detailed case study of Sweden 1840 – 1900 this book also entails a broadening of the theoretical horizon of history of education into social, agrarian and economic history in a wider context.  With a focus on different systems of school finance, this work reveals a key change over time: from a largely in-kind system supporting schools in an early phase, followed by an increasingly monetarized, depersonalized and homogenized system of school finance. Boasting an interdisciplinary appeal, this will be a welcome contribution of interest to scholars in the fields of education history, sociology, and economics.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Swedish gymnastics won a large following across the world. Employing the concepts of educationalisation and gender, I will explore how the physical education of girls was conceptualised and justified in the Swedish system during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the publications of Anton Santesson (1825–1892), who was one of the main authors on girls’ gymnastics in Sweden, I will show how girls’ gymnastics was conceptualised as a response to a social, cultural and physical crisis, which were perceived as partly stemming from the detrimental effects of education on girls’ bodies and minds. Girls’ gymnastics was thus construed as vital to the future of the Swedish nation. While men and manliness remained fundamental to the strength of the nation, girls’ gymnastics was vital to women’s rearing of boys and thus instrumental to the development of masculinity in men.

Drawing inspiration from the new social history of livelihood, this article examines how rural nineteenth-century teachers made a living by engaging in livelihood diversification. By using a wide variety of source materials from nineteenth-century Sweden, this article shows that, far from specialising exclusively in teaching, teachers were often engaged in multiple occupations as late as the year 1900, and that teachers’ work ranged from activities that were encouraged to those that were frowned upon or even illegal. As a result, this article sheds new light on teaching as an occupation in the nineteenth century and contributes to the discussion of the social and economic positions of teachers. By investigating how teachers earned their livelihoods, this article also addresses the role of teachers’ multiple occupations in the expansion of mass schooling during the nineteenth century.

This article discusses the significance of in-kind taxation and payments in kind for the establishment of an elementary school system in Sweden, in the 1840–1870 period. By analysing the funding of teachers’ wages, the heating of the school facilities, and school building construction in the 12 rural school districts of the Sundsvall region, this study shows that schooling to a large extent relied on in-kind transactions in this area. Despite the practical problems that such transactions entailed, the author has argued that they were instrumental in the establishment of schooling in the Sundsvall region. Apart from making schooling affordable for the school districts, since in-kind taxation and payment made it possible to avoid extensive cash expenditure, the natural economy presented an opportunity to align the school funding to the school districts’ local resources, price levels and social structure. In contrast to the historiography of schooling that has mainly linked the emergence of mass schooling to the modernisation of society, this work reveals that age-old customs of in-kind transactions are an important factor to acknowledge when explaining the educational revolution that mass schooling entailed.

The historiography of state intervention generally, and the historiography of state subsidies in particular, has indicated that state intervention may have a wide variety of effects on school systems, depending on the kind of intervention and its context. A centralization of the school systems funding and organization have been perceived as resulting in increased regional equality in Massachusetts (Kaestle & Vinovskis, 1980, 199) and France (Grew & Harrigan, 1991, 227). Matching grant formulas have, on the contrary, been said to increase differences between poor and rich school districts, since they allocate funding depending on how much districts spend on their schools (Swanson & King, 1991, 197). Studies have also shown of state grants have been used to increase the funding gap between schools for the white and the African-American communities in the USA (Margo, 1982), and that cost per pupil did not seem to converge after the introduction of payments by results in England and Wales after 1862 (Mitch, 2010).

This paper examines the efforts to reform and centralize the funding of the Swedish primary school system in the early twentieth century. From the 1870s and onwards, the funds of the Swedish primary schools had been distributed according to a matching grants system. In 1871, previous state subsidies were replaced with a system of matching grants that covered half of school teacher salaries (with a maximum subsidy of 250 SEK per primary school teacher (folkskollärare) and 75 SEK per junior school teacher (småskollärare). In 1875, the grants were made more generous to match two-thirds of teacher salaries with a maximum of 400 SEK for primary school teachers and 125 SEK for junior school teachers. This was later followed by minor adjustments of the maximum level of the subsidies.

In 1913, this system of matching grants was reformed. After parliamentary debate on raising the level of state subsidies, starting already in 1878, the Swedish parliament decided in 1913 that the state was to cover 90% of teacher minimum salary and all of the add-ons that teacher received after a certain number of years. As a result, the government grants increased from contributing to 30 percent of the local school districts’ revenues in 1910 to 49 percent in 1920 (Westberg 2017).

By examining available statistical data, and contemporary parliamentary debate, this paper studies the intentions behind this reform, and the impact that this reform had on regional disparity of Swedish schooling in the early twentieth century. As a result, this paper contributes to the historiography of state subsidies, and the literature on the centralization of primary school systems during the end of the nineteenth century in Sweden and elsewhere in the West.

The rise of mass schooling is certainly one of the absolutely fundamental developments of the last three centuries. Today, schooling is a global institution, both as a normative principle and as an organizational reality. The chapters collected in Classroom Struggle explore the early stages of this development through analyses of elementary school teaching in ten countries during the nineteenth century. While each chapter focuses on national or local settings, the volume as a whole accomplishes an international analysis of homogeneity and variation in teaching practices. The book is consequently presented as a contribution to the still rather neglected field of transnational analysis of teaching.

The book is divided into three parts that contextualizes the history of teaching in slightly different ways. The first part, “Struggling with Political and Economic Contexts”, puts emphasis on the relationship between the societal context and educational reform; the second part, “Struggling for a Rationalized Pattern of Teaching” addresses the efforts of imposing central regulation on instruction; and the third part, “Struggling with Competing Systems of Teaching”, deals with the relationships between different teaching systems. Including ten chapters, an introduction and a postscript, this means that it is an ambitious volume that covers a wide variety of countries, contexts, time-periods and source materials. This is thus a volume that encompasses analyses of competing systems of teaching in Schleswig-Holstein in 1819-1830, an examination of the data gathered by the nation-wide Portuguese extraordinary inspection of 1875, and an analysis of the modernization of instruction in Brazil during the nineteenth century.