Chapter 5 Using Textbooks to Constitute a Nation
On Ove Høegh-Guldberg’s Textbook Reforms in 18th Century Denmark-Norway
In: Exploring Textbooks and Cultural Change in Nordic Education 1536–2020Search for other papers by Kjell Lars Berge in
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Abstract
In this chapter it is demonstrated how prime minister Ove Høeg-Guldberg in 1775 after the fall of Struensee – and in opposition to Struensee’s radical enlightenment government – reformed the curriculum in the Dano-Norwegian Latin schools as an explicit political project. Høeg-Guldberg’s Latin school reform was conservative, yet it presented some untraditional patriotic features. The reform was supposed to establish in the students minds an unquestionable religious faith, as well as a resilient loyalty with the absolute monarchy. It his way the students should be empowered in their future positions as the King’s and the Lutheran church’s officials. A necessary tool for this cultural formation was the teaching and reading of the textbooks that constituted the Latin school curriculum. Together this literature represents the text culture that the Latin school pupils had to read and to learn by heart, to be accepted as a student at the university. This Latin school text culture was construed as a canon consisting of religious texts, classics from ancient Rome and Greece. The untraditional elements of the reform was the implementation of so-called “science texts”, but first and foremost texts that was supposed to encourage the Latin school students to master the Danish “Fatherland language” in writing and speaking in other to strengthen the Latin school students’ Danish identity. In this way Ove Høeg-Guldberg introduced a patriotic and nation-building oriented mother-tongue education for the first time in the Dano-Norwegian Latin schools.