LA PEDAGOGÍA PROGRESISTA (JOHN DEWEY) , SUS IDEAS Y TEORÍAS PRESENTES EN LA PROPUESTA

youth and drew on his skills as a local scribe who served his community by writing and transcribing texts, big or small. One of his customs was to copy yearly almanacs at the end of each year which he sold to his neighbours.3 Lynge’s private manuscripts reflect extensive study and scholarly work, most of it involving scribally produced texts.4 Furthermore, he served as a teacher in his community for decades and instructed around 15 children at a time at his home.5 Nothing suggests, however, that Sighvatur Grímsson ever attended Sigurur Lynge’s school, though it is evident from his diaries that he was acquainted with the family. It is likely that the fee was prohibitive for Sighvatur’s parents.

The key source of information on Sighvatur’s primary education and early literary activities is the short autobiography he wrote (using the third person) in his early fifties.6 There Sighvatur concisely describes how he, at the age of seven, learned to recognise the letters of the alphabet and to connect them into syllables and words at his mother’s knee:

In his youth, Sighvatur got accustomed to practicing his reading with printed books as was common then, but he actually never received any instruction in reading Latin type, because his mother, though she was sharp-witted and knew many things by heart, could not read that typeface. The way the teaching proceeded was that first he was shown the letters of the old Sjöorabók by bishop Jón Vídalin, and it went well at first, but the second time, Sighvatur did not recognise the first letter in the second word and received a slap from his mother. But it was the first and last slap because after that he memorized all the letters and could read the book fluently after a fortnight. This was just before Christmas 1847, and after the New Year he got hold of one sheet from Alingistíindi in Latin type, and started then to compare the letters with his Sjöorabók and to find those which were most similar, and in this way was able to guess the identity of the letters for which he found no match in the older text. In this way he gradually deciphered the sheet and could read Latin type fluently by springtime.7

3 _{Lbs 1973 8vo: Sigurur Lynge’s diaries 1836-1881. Sigurur made at least nine almanacs for his neighbours}

in 1841, according to his diaries. Several manuscripts now preserved in NLI are associated with his name.

4 _{See Gumundur Hjaltason, ‘Sigurur Lynge’, Óinn 10/3 (1914-1915), pp. 22-24.}

5 _{Lúvík Kristjánsson, ‘Minnisblö Sigurar Lynge á Akranesi’, Árbók Landsbókasafn Íslands: Nr flokkur 15}

(1989), pp. 14-16.

6 _{Lbs 3623 8vo: Sighvatur Grímsson’s autobiography written in 1892. Autograph, written in the third person. It}

was first published in 1965 as ‘Æviágrip Sighvats Grímssonar Borgfirings fram til 27. des. 1892 eftir sjálfan hann’, Árbók Landsbókasafns Íslands1964, 21 (1965), pp. 91-99.

7 _{Ibid., [pp. 1-2]. ‘Í æsku vandist Sighvatur vi a læra bóklestur á prentaar bækur, sem á var tít, en ó fékk}

hann enga tilsögn a lesa latínuprent, ví móir hans, sem ó var skarpgáfu og kunni afar miki utan bókar – kunni ekki a lesa a prent, en annig var kenslunni vari, a fyrst var honum snt letur á Sjöora bókinni gömlu, eftir biskup Jón Vídalín, og gekk a allvel í fyrsta sinn; en egar til kom í öru sinni, á mundi Sighvatur ekki fyrsta stafinn í öru orinu, og fékk hann á kinnhest hjá móur sinni, en a var sá fyrsti og síasti, ví eftir a mundi hann alla stafina, og gat lesi bókina vistöulaust eftir hálfan mánu. etta var fyrir jól 1847, en eftir Nári barst honum í höndur ein opna úr alingistíindum me latínuprenti, og fór hann á a bera sig a bera á stafi saman vi Sjöora bókina sína og leita uppi, hverir líkastir vóru, og gat annig gizka á, hverir eir stafir vóru, sem hann fann engan líkan í eldra prentinu. annig smám saman komst hann út úr blainu og gat lesi latínustl um vori vistöu laust’.

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This packed paragraph reveals many interesting aspects of the procedures and priorities of household education at the time. The first is that young Sighvatur was primarily taught to recognise and read print type, despite the poor availability of printed material. This, and the choice of Sjöorabók, an eighteenth-century compilation of Christian sermons that had been one of the most prevalent religious books in Icelandic homes for decades, represents the priority on what has been termed ‘religious literacy’, i.e. the capacity to plough through a familiar (religious) text.8 _{Danish historian Thomas} Munck has argued that

in Denmark (as elsewhere in Europe) the campaign for improvements in basic reading skills in the early eighteenth century initially was driven almost entirely by religious concerns: even minimal reading skills could improve the ability of parishioners (women as well as men) to recall and recite the various commentaries on Luther’s Catechism on which all congregational devotion was based. Reading in that sense was a means of helping memorization – and of consolidating uniformity – rather than a route to independent learning.9

This heavy emphasis ‘from above’ on the pious purpose of literacy thus disregarded the literary sphere of scribal culture, whether in the form of consumption (reading) or (re)production (writing) of secular material, entertainment or information.

Secondly, Sighvatur’s description makes it apparent how ambiguous and multi-layered the concept of literacy was at that time, and how the progress of Sighvatur’s learning was affected by the level of literacy within the household. By the mid-nineteenth century, when Sighvatur was growing up, there were two kinds of typefaces to be found in Icelandic books, the outgoing blackletter or Fraktur typefaces and the increasingly used Latin or Antiqua typefaces. The transition to Antiqua was taking place in these years, and the changeover could disrupt the continuity of literacy established in blackletter type. Sighvatur’s mother, born at the turn of the nineteenth century and accustomed to the older typeface, was unable to read Latin print and taught her son to read blackletter type by the use of the eighteenth-century Sjöorabók, an approach which necessarily limited his access to reading matter.

8 _{Loftur Guttormsson, ‘The Development of Popular Religious Literacy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth} Centuries’, Scandinavian Journal of History 15/1 (1990), p. 8. The book referred to as Sjöorabók is Jón Vídalín, Siø Predikaner wt af eim Siø Ordvm Drottens Vors Jesu Christi, er han talade sijdarst a Krossenum (Hólar, 1716). After this first edition, the book was reprinted four times, in 1731, 1745, 1753 and 1832. 9 _{Thomas Munck, ‘Literacy, Educational Reform and the Use of Print in Eighteenth-Century Denmark’,}

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Alingistíindi (‘Parliamentary Minutes’) was in fact the first publication to be produced fully in Antiqua in Iceland, printed at the renovated and relocated Landsprentsmijan in Reykjavík in 1845. Icelandic texts in Latin typefaces printed in Copenhagen had been available since the early nineteenth century.10 In the same year, the issue of multiple typeface literacy was addressed in an article in the journal Fjölnir. The anonymous writer strongly advocated the full employment of Latin type and the comparable handwritten script, as it was time-consuming and confusing to learn to read and write in more than one style.11

Thirdly, and as a consequence of the conditions described above, it was in fact up to Sighvatur himself to bring these literary skills to the next level, not only in terms of writing skill but also of other levels of reading. The first step was, according to Sighvatur’s narrative, to compare the Gothic type of the Sjöorabók with a sample of Latin type in the form of a sheet from the Alingistíindi. With this method he learned, by his own account, to read all printed books within a few months. Printed secular texts were, however, still rare and hard for the general public to get, but as a substitute, it was common for handwritten books to be made, borrowed or lent to be read or copied. So the next step in Sighvatur’s journey towards full literacy was to become proficient at reading manuscripts, a task even more complex than reading printed matter. Their quality and age varied vastly, and the types and styles of handwriting depended on the age of the manuscript and varied from one writer to another. Reading ability in the mid-nineteenth century thus had many facets, because there were so many different styles of print and writing.

This issue of multi-layered literacy had been addressed a century earlier in Jón Ólafsson’s pedagogical proposal Hagenkir, which suggests that children should be introduced to at least three types of lettering in their primary education. To be able to read various types of handwriting as well as printed matter, he recommends that the teaching of reading include a range of typefaces and that the same approach be used in subsequent writing instruction.12 Jón Ólafsson put his ideas into practice in a handwritten textbook in the mid-eighteenth century, containing twelve stories written in three different

10 _{orsteinn orsteinsson, ‘ættir úr letursögu’, an appendix to Ingi Rúnar Evaldsson, Prent eflir mennt: Saga} bókagerar frá upphafi til síari hluta 20. aldar (Reykjavík, 1994), p. 507.

11 _{‘Um latínuletri’, Fjölnir (1845), p. 29. The article echoes and cites earlier writings of the Danish scholar} Rasmus Christian Rask in his Lestrarkver handa heldri manna börnum (Copenhagen, 1830).

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