Uppeldi og menntun - 01.01.2013, Page 76

professor’s lecture notes, thereby importing the novelties of decimal fractions and
algebra to Iceland. Jón Guðmundsson and Eiríkur Briem, who wrote his book at the
age of 23, later became, as well as the Stephensens, outstanding personalities in the
advancement of Iceland to modern society.
Secondly, the target groups of all the authors except Sigurbjörn Á. Gíslason were
self-educating youngsters in the absence of schools. Even if schools were an emerging
phenomenon in the 20th century, the majority of children through the 1920s attended
itinerant schools which required children to stay at home, studying on their own for
long periods, and lower secondary schools only became commonly accessible in the
1930s.
While all the authors’ interests in the progress of Icelandic society are beyond
doubt, their visions were to maintain the values of the old self-sufficient rural society,
and to teach the public to make the most of its current resources. Only Olavius in the
eighteenth-century and Sigurbjörn Á. Gíslason in the early twentieth-century were
concerned with giving their readers versatile learning experiences in accordance with
recent educational theories. Reflecting upon their educational vision one may wonder
if attitudes and opinions of the general public on the nature of mathematics would
have developed differently if their textbooks had achieved more far-reaching effects.
Keywords: Arithmetic, arithmetic textbooks, old values, farming society, self-instruction
aBOUt tHE aUtHOr
Kristin Bjarnadottir (krisbj@hi.is) is associate professor at the University of Iceland,
School of Education. She completed her M.Sc. degree in mathematics at the Univer-
sity of Oregon in Eugene and a Ph.D. degree in the field of mathematics education at
Roskilde University, Denmark. Kristín has taught mathematics, physics and math-
ematics education at secondary and university levels in Iceland and written textbooks
in mathematics. Her research interests are in the field of the history of mathematics
education.
reiKningsbæKUr tveggJa alda
Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 22(1) 201376