ABSTRACT
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the gradual introduction of compulsory schooling in Denmark–Norway and Sweden, reflecting the Lutheran amalgamation of spiritual and worldly powers. This chapter explores the enduring impact of this heritage on Nordic teacher cultures, tracing underlying continuities from the role of the Lutheran pastor to that of the elementary school teacher. Inherent to Lutheranism was a tension between subservience to official religious doctrine and a radical religious subjectivity, which provided it with a capacity to both control the individual in depth and constitute it as a responsible, self-reflective subject. Seeing this tension as an enduring quality of Nordic elementary schooling, pedagogy, and teacher cultures, the chapter pays particular attention to the ‘civil revolution’ which, from the 1840s onwards, gave rise to lay awakening movements, new pastoral roles, and the modern Nordic teacher. While these transformative processes were intertwined in all the Nordic countries, their sequences and distinctive forms varied, giving rise to three nationally distinct teacher cultures. The chapter concludes that the compulsory school and its teaching have partly usurped the role of the Lutheran church and its preaching: to police society’s common values while, at the same time, redeeming the subjectivity of each child.
