The Icelandic Learned School as a secondary school in 19th-century Europe

Abstract

Iceland, inhabited by Norse people since the 9th c., had a population of fewer than 70,000 until the 1870s. Christianity, adopted in 1000 CE, brought literacy and cathedral schools, later reinforced by Lutheran Protestantism in 1550 and special privileges for Icelandic students at the University of Copenhagen. European secondary schools in the early 1800s placed increased emphasis on mathematics, sciences, and modern languages, modelled on the French lycée and Prussian gymnasium. In Iceland, the sole Icelandic secondary school could adapt to these changes due to the mathematician B. Gunnlaugsson, educated at the University of Copenhagen and trained in geodesy. By the 1870s, schools in the Danish school system were divided into a languages-and-history stream and a mathematics-and-science stream. However, the Iceland’s school was too small to split, there was no strong person to defend the study of mathematics, and a proposal to run a combined stream was rejected. A mathematics stream was only established in 1919.