PUBLIC EDUCATION

There are few countries in which education is as free as in Sweden. From the grammar school to the university in all its stages, the cost is defrayed entirely by the state or the parish. Education is thus not a privilege of the wealthy, but a benefit common to all.

In Norway you are scarcely ever out of sight of a schoolhouse, and Professor Nielsen, of the university, on being asked concerning the ratio of the illiterates, looked surprised and replied that he was not aware of any illiterates; that he did not recollect having seen any statistics on the subject, and ventured to assert that anybody in Norway could both read and write.

Education is free throughout the entire primary system, a course of seven years, between the ages of seven and fourteen, when the law prohibits the employment of children in any occupation, and requires them to attend school at least thirty hours a week for twelve weeks each year in the country and fifteen weeks in the cities. The maximum term is forty weeks in both city and country districts. There are in the kingdom 5,923 school districts, governed by Skolestyret boards consisting of the parish priest, the president of the municipal council, and one of the teachers chosen by themselves. There is also a board of supervisors, composed of three men or women, elected by the parents of the parish. Childless people are not allowed to vote. This board of supervisors does not appear to have any definite function except to advise and find fault. The school board elects the teachers, determines the courses of study and methods of discipline, and submits recommendations and estimates for appropriations annually to the municipal council. In both city and country what is called “voluntary instruction” is provided outside of the legal school hours, which may be taken advantage of by people who are willing to pay for additional attention from the school teachers, but it is neither free nor compulsory.

The compulsory studies in the primary schools are the Bible, the catechism of the Lutheran creed, the Norwegian language, the usual elementary branches, with history (including a treatise on the constitution and the government of Norway), botany, physiology (including the fundamental principles of hygiene and the effects of the use of intoxicating liquors), singing, drawing, wood-carving, the use of the lathe and other tools, manual training, gymnastics, and rifle shooting.

The national law requires that schoolhouses shall be so located as to be within a distance of two miles of the residences of ninety per cent of the children of school age. The poor are provided with text-books upon application, and in some places the municipal council provides every child a warm dinner at noon. It can be paid for if the parents prefer, but the better classes look upon this provision with prejudice, as they do upon all charities. Nevertheless, it is an excellent idea to be sure that the children of the poor get at least one warm meal every day. In the city of Christiania, 711,302 meals are served annually in the primary schools. The average attendance is 22,750, so that only about 24 per cent of the children take advantage of the free dinner. Only 18,341 of these meals are paid for, and those are taken on stormy days by children of well-to-do parents.

The Norway school teachers must be graduates of normal schools, of which there are twelve in the kingdom; they must pass examinations and serve a probation of three months before they are definitely engaged, but when they have once received an appointment, they are settled for life and sure of a pension at the end of the long term of faithful service. The same rule applies to all civil service employees, for the school system is a part of the government. There is no such thing as rotation in office. Promotion is expected by all who deserve it. A worthy and efficient teacher, having begun in youth at the lowest grade, expects advancement to the highest, according to the judgment of the school boards and supervisors. School teaching is a career, just as a government clerkship is a career. People enter both professions with the expectation of making them their life-work, although from our point of view they offer very little inducement.

The average salary of the school teachers in Norway is only about $220 a year, the men receiving a little above the average and the women a little less. The highest salaries are paid in the city of Christiania $756 for men and $434 for women. Head masters to the number of 1,992, like parsons, are furnished with houses to live in and little tracts of land, three or four acres, where they can raise vegetables for their families and keep cows; and nine hundred and ten of them add a little to their incomes by serving as parish clerks. When they become too old to teach, they receive pensions of from $56 to $224 a year, and when they die, their widows are remembered by the government to the extent of from $28 to $74 per year.

The primary school system of Norway costs an average of $5.60 per child per year in the country, and $13.16 per child in the city, or $1.26 per capita of population in a year.

There is a secondary school system under the control of the national government, administered by the department of education and religion. It embraces forty-six high schools, located in different parts of the country, known as Latin-Gymnasier, or classical schools, at which students are prepared for the university, and Real-Gymnasier, or technical schools, in which they are taught English, mathematics, the natural and applied sciences, bookkeeping, stenography, and other branches that will fit them for commercial or industrial pursuits. There are also twelve cathedral schools, one for each ecclesiastical diocese, which were founded in the middle ages, and are supported by large estates acquired from the early kings and by confiscation of church property after the Reformation. There are also five private academies, attended chiefly by the sons of rich men.

The University of Christiania, which is one of the first in Europe, was founded in 1811, and has five faculties, with sixty-three professors, eighteen fellows, and about 1,450 students, of whom 70 are studying theology, 20 law, 330 medicine, and 600 are in the scientific department. The professors are appointed by the king, and receive salaries of about $950 a year, with a longevity allowance in addition amounting to about $125 every five years. The fellows are paid about $350 a year, and are provided with lodging rooms. Tuition at the university is free upon payment of a matriculation fee of $10. Women have been admitted on even terms with men since 1882, and 260 have matriculated, of whom 53 have taken degrees. The university has an endowment of $1,310,000, with legacies amounting to about $250,000 to encourage original investigations in special lines of study. The Nansen fund, which amounts to about $150,000, is intended to encourage exploration on the seas. The hospitals of Christiania are in charge of the medical department.

There are also the usual schools for the deaf, dumb, blind, weak-minded, and crippled children, supported by the state, and reform schools for the correction and restraint of the depraved. Technical schools, with day and night classes, for teaching the trades to young men and women, four schools of engineering in different parts of the country, nine industrial schools for women only, where they can be trained to earn their living by sewing, dressmaking, weaving, millinery, embroidery, and other needlework, bookkeeping, typesetting, stenography, typewriting, photography, and other lines of industry, and an art school especially patronized by the king in connection with the art gallery at Christiania, where painting, drawing, and designing, modeling, decoration, and the art of architecture are taught.

In most of the counties are found what are called Amtsskoler schools to educate people for a practical life, with separate courses for each sex, the boys being taught farming, gardening, and mechanics, and the girls the arts of the household. There are also schools of deportment, where girls are fitted to act as governesses and are taught the social graces, music, dancing, the languages, and conversation. In several of the cities are workingmen’s colleges, known as Arbeiderakademier, where mechanics who have an ambition to acquire a better knowledge of their trades and general culture, may attend lectures in the evenings, delivered by scientific men, successful mechanics, and other specialists. The range of subjects includes every branch of human activity.

In Sweden, in the Folkskola, Elementary or People’s School, maintained by the parish under the direction of the school board and the close supervision of the state, instruction is compulsory as well as gratuitous. As in Norway, between the ages of seven and fourteen every boy and girl must attend a public school, unless the parents can show that their child is receiving equivalent instruction elsewhere, in a private school or at home. No exception or compromise is allowed, and no “half-time” system or “rush” through the school to suit the convenience of the factory or the farmer. For seven years, during eight and a half months of the year, allowing for summer, Christmas and Easter holidays, and thirty-six hours per week, every boy and girl in the kingdom receives instruction and goes through the same curriculum. The school board, which has the direct management of the schools is elected to the parish, and women are eligible to it. The state, which controls the whole system of education, from the A.B.C. class to the college and university, maintains alike its unity and its efficiency, and sees to the strict enforcement of the law. Parents who try to evade it, through malevolence or neglect, may even, after due warning, be deprived of their children, who are taken over by the community during their school years.

In thinly populated districts the school may be “ambulatory,” held now in one part of the district and now in another, so that all may attend in turn. In such cases the schooling is reduced to four months in the year. But there is no district, however poor or thinly populated, without its Folkskola. There are nearly twelve hundred of these in the land, attended by seven hundred and forty-two thousand pupils, and employing sixteen thousand two hundred and seventy teachers of both sexes.

No more conscientious, hardworking, and respectable class of men and women can be found than the teachers. Eight years’ study, first in a special seminary and then in a training college, has taught them their profession both in theory and practice. They are convinced of the importance and dignity of their office, and are respected accordingly. Socially, the general type of the school teacher is a superior one. There are at present in the Riksdag, occupying seats as members of the second chamber, no fewer than eleven teachers in elementary schools, twelve teachers in secondary schools, one inspector of schools, and one university professor. In the rural community, the school teacher is something of an authority. Most of the members of the parish have “sat under him” at school in their early life, and owe to him most of what they know. For years he has been diffusing knowledge around him, and has been looked up to as the fountain of book learning. He is the local parson’s great coadjutor in parish matters, and being a ready speaker, is of no mean influence in the parish assemblies. The one dark blot in the existence of the school teacher is the small salary received. Few of them receive so much as $300 a year, the average running from $225 to $275; even in Stockholm the figure going little beyond $300. Living is, however, cheap in the rural districts, and these teachers, who are drawn generally from the rural and indigent classes, are accustomed to frugality and economy. They are lodged free of rent in the schoolhouse or a cottage attached to it, and are allowed firewood and other small prerequisites. They have generally a small garden or potato patch to cultivate, and can keep a cow and a few hens. They often add to their modest stipend by extra work, such as teaching in the evening classes, playing the organ in church, and writing, or some such work after school hours.

At fifteen, after seven years’ assiduous attendance at the Folkskola, the boy and girl have finished their education, so far as compulsory instruction goes, and they are free to begin work on their father’s farm, in his shop or his trade, or take service anywhere and shift for themselves. They may, however, if they like, pursue their studies further in the continuation schools, or in the evening classes provided in most parishes, or repair to a college or gymnasium town, if they elect to enter the church, the liberal professions, or the service of the state. But they have first to be confirmed, and it is here that the definite religious instruction is given. The preparation for confirmation, which entails a much longer and more advanced course of religious instruction than is usual for confirmation in England, is independent of the school and takes place in church, parents being allowed every liberty in the choice of the clergyman who performs this office for their children. English readers who are acquainted with Longfellow’s admirable translation of Tegner’s beautiful poem, “The Children of the Lord’s Supper,” are aware of the importance of this ceremony in Swedish social life. It is the great turning point in the existence of Scandinavian youth. The boy and girl emerging from it leave boyhood and girlhood behind them. Knee-breeches and short frocks have given way to pants and long skirts. The boy sports his first watch and glories in his first shirt-front. The girl discards her long plaits, and wears her hair in a top-knot. They have made their profession of faith in public, have been examined in regard to it, and have had to answer for it in the presence of the whole congregation. They have assumed henceforth the full responsibility of their acts. In the eyes of the church, if not in the eyes of the law, they are free and responsible members of society.

The secondary schools are maintained by the state, and are confined to the towns. They comprise nine forms in seven classes, of which the last two have double forms. The first three correspond to the curriculum of the primary schools, where are taught reading, writing, arithmetic, history, natural sciences, singing, drawing, and gymnastics, to which are added Sloyd and gardening for the boys, and needlework and cooking for the girls. Scholars who have passed these in the primary schools enter into the fourth form. They are generally divided into two branches, the classical and the modern, according as the classics or languages predominate in the curriculum, which comprises religion, Swedish composition, history, geography, philosophy, Latin, Greek, German, French, mathematics, zoology, botany, physics, chemistry, and drawing. After the fourth form, pupils must declare, with the written approbation of their parents or guardians, whether they will follow the classical or non-classical course, according as they intend to qualify for the universities or the technical high schools. Not all the pupils who attend these secondary schools complete the full course and pass the final examination. More than half those who mean to devote themselves to trade, agriculture, or industry, and those who have not developed the capabilities necessary to confront the severe final test of the “maturity” examination leave the school on attaining the upper forms. To those who intend to enter the professions, the civil and military service, and the church, the full course of the secondary school is necessary, the “maturity” examination certificate being the only open sesame to the universities, the special colleges, and the technical high schools. To obtain it and to don the white cap, which is the outward and visible sign of university membership, is the first great step in the life of the ambitious youth.

For young men destined for the technical trades and professions, there are open, after they have passed the maturity examination at the secondary school, two special institutions, where they complete their technical training the Technical High School of Stockholm, and the Chalmers Technical Institute at Gothenburg, besides elementary technical schools at other places. The Stockholm Technical School, which is the most complete, comprises five branches: (1) mechanical technology and machinery, shipbuilding and electrotechnics; (2) chemical technology; (3) mineralogy, metallurgy, and mining mechanics; (4) architecture; (5) engineering. The course in each of these sections takes between three and four years. Generally several are combined, constituting a course of six or seven years.

There are two universities in Sweden Upsala in the north, founded in 1477; and Lund in the south, founded in 1668, to which may be added the Medical College in Stockholm, founded in 1810, and limited to the medical faculty. The studies at these universities are thorough and comprehensive, but unusually long. They have each four faculties, theology, jurisprudence, medicine, and philosophy, and grant three different degrees in each, besides special degrees in theology and jurisprudence for entering the church and the government services. Even these last, which are easiest to obtain, require a course of from four to five years. To take a medical degree a young man must stay nine years at the university, and two additional years in the hospitals, making eleven years in all. Unlike English and American universities, the Swedish universities are non-residential. Like those of the Continent, they are only teaching institutions, and the students who matriculate at Upsala and Lund must lodge in town or board with families living there. Beyond attending the lectures and going up to be tested, they have no direct intercourse with their professors.

In this brief sketch of the institutions provided by the state it will be seen that what especially characterizes public instruction in Norway and Sweden is its undoubted thoroughness and depth, though a serious penalty is paid for this in the extreme length of the course. By the time it is completed, and the young man issues from the protracted ordeal, armed for the battle of life, several of the best years of his youth are passed; he is already between twenty-five and thirty years of age when he first treads on the threshold of his career. On the other hand, he enters it not only with the necessary qualifications whereby to rise to eminence in it, of which the severe tests he has undergone offer evident proof, but with the assurance of finding the way more or less open to success.