Uppeldi og menntun - 01.01.2013, Page 75

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 22(1) 2013 75
KristÍn bJarnadóttir
Arithmetic textbooks of two centuries: Goals, target
groups and traditional values
aBstraCt
This article recounts a survey of six arithmetic textbooks, written in Icelandic and
published in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century, their goals, target
groups, relations to each other and to European cultural currents, and the values they
represent. All of them adhere to the European arithmetic tradition of the Late Middle
Ages in their introduction of Indo-Arabic numerals and arithmetic methods.
The two eighteenth century textbooks were the first substantial arithmetic text-
books printed in Icelandic. They were offshoots of the Enlightenment movement, de-
liberately published in order to raise the educational standards of Icelanders in the
field of arithmetic. Their authors, Ólafur Olavius (1780) and Ólafur Stephensen and
Magnús Stephensen (Ólafur Stefánsson, 1785), were educated in Copenhagen, in di-
rect contact with the cultural currents of Northern Europe of their time; the German-
Danish Enlightenment movement, based on Evangelic-Lutheran protestant heritage.
While Olavius is concerned with presenting a variety of methods to solve arithmetic
problems under indirect influence from Comenius, the Stephensens present strictly
academic content, drawn directly from an introductory course at the University of
Copenhagen.
The two nineteenth century authors, Jón Guðmundsson (1841) and Eiríkur Briem
(1869; 1880), were educated in Iceland only, under the influence of the champions of
the Icelandic Enlightenment movement. Both of them introduced to their fellow coun-
trymen the art of arithmetic in a rule-based way, but in the spirit of self-instruction.
They made deliberate efforts to teach young people economical allocation of their
resources and avoidance of squandering their income on imported luxuries.
The twentieth century authors, Sigurbjörn Á. Gíslason (1911a; 1911b; 1912) and Elías
Bjarnason (1927; 1929; 1939; 1940; 1941a; 1941b; 1963; 1964; 1965), lived in a society of
increasing urbanism. However, they also had firm roots in the vanishing rural society,
reflected in their examples and problems. Their employment in schools is also re-
flected in their books, but in a different way. While Sigurbjörn Á. Gíslason in the 1910s
may have been influenced by Pestalozzi’s educational ideas of releasing children from
the tyranny of methods, Elías Bjarnason in the 1920s is more concerned with teach-
ing particular methods to ensure necessary skills. This agrees with concurrent trends
detected in Denmark by Hansen (2009). Elías Bjarnason’s textbook was chosen for free
national distribution in 1939, republished in a revised edition in the 1960s and was to
have a dominating influence for the age group 10–13 through the 1970s.
The authors shared some characteristics. Firstly, they were filled with a youthful
enthusiasm. Ólafur Olavius was only in his early thirties when he imported the coun-
try’s first print shop to print secular literature, and Magnús Stephensen was merely
23 years old when he rewrote his father’s manuscript of a textbook, according to his