Readers for Norwegian-American Schools

Abstract

5 Readers for NorwegianAmerican Schools* by Anne Hvenekilde For the Norwegian settlers on the midwestern prairie the Norwegian language schools established by the various religious groups were an important expression of their ethnicity. For the Norwegian Lutheran settlers the need for schools that could prepare their children for confirmation, which required the ability to read the Lutheran catechism, was urgent from the very beginning, and schools of the Norwegian public school pattern were established almost immediately after settlement in a large number of Norwegian- American communities. Educational institutions at all levels not only were important expressions of Norwegian Lutheran heritage in general, but also were central in several of the most serious debates between the Lutheran synods during the last half of the nineteenth century. The establishment of schools and above all the debate about educational issues in the Norwegian Lutheran synods has been *The material presented here is treated more fully in the dissertation " 'Hvad gjor vi saa med arven?' En studie av abc-er og leseboker utgitt til norsk morsmâlsundervisning i Amerika" (University of Oslo, 1992), which also deals with the Norwegian- American primers. I would like to thank numerous members of the Norwegian- American Historical Association (NAHA), Sons of Norway, and Nordmanns-Forbundet for their generous responses to my search for Norwegian- American primers and readers through the NAHA newsletter. 135 136 Anne Hvenekilde studied by several scholars, among them Laurence M. Larson, Arthur Paulson and Kenneth Bjork, Nicholas Tavuchis, and Frank C. Nelson.1 Norwegian Americans published textbooks for their own schools, and in the period between 1853 and 1925 no fewer than forty-six books for teaching and studying Norwegian as a mother tongue were published for use in America, most of them intended for the church schools. Among these were eighteen primers, eight readers, and two that were a combination of reader and primer. In addition, six declamation books, five books with letter formulas, and five grammars were published . After the publication of the last reader in 1925 there was no longer a market for books in Norwegian for native speakers, and the Norwegian language textbooks published since then are books for students without Norwegian as their first or dominant language. In this article I will present the former type of readers only. At the core of the school issue lay some of the most central questions that every immigrant individual and every immigrant community has had to face: to what extent they should let themselves assimilate into the mainstream culture, and to what extent they should try to keep the culture and language from the old country. Should the parents try to keep their children away from the American public schools that were developing rapidly alongside the small NorwegianAmerican church schools, and so protect their Lutheran faith and Norwegian heritage, or should they make use of the free public schools to give their children a smoother entry into the mainstream society with its opportunities for quicker wealth and a chance to transcend the class barriers that had been so confining for many of them in Norway? The different synods took different stands on this issue. The Haugean synods (Eielsen's and from 1875 the Hauge synod) took a clear stand for the use of common schools. They were, as a religious minority even before migration, used to dealing with a school system and a state church that they had to supplement with their own meetings, and most of them saw no reason to deny their children access to the English language Readers for Norwegian- American Schools 137 and the possibilities offered to them through the common school. The leaders of the more high-church Lutherans in the Norwegian Synod were, on the other hand, strongly opposed to the idea of letting their children be exposed to the nonLutheran , in fact non-sectarian, teaching of the common schools and influenced by the other children and parents who might not only be non-Lutheran, but sometimes even Catholic . There was also general scepticism about the fact that a growing number of the teachers in the common schools were female. In the home country the schoolmasters were all men. The leaders of the Norwegian Synod...