The Scandinavian Element in the United States: University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 111, No. 3, September, 1914Babcock, Kendric Charles
History
The Scandinavian Element in the United States: University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 111, No. 3, September, 1914
Babcock, Kendric Charles
Scandinavians -- United States
One of the results of the excessive splitting-up of the Scandinavian
churches is that the energies which ought to be concentrated are
frittered away on unnecessary schools. A separate denominational school
and a family paper seem to be indispensable parts of the machinery of
every newly organized sect, no matter how young or how small or how poor
it may be.[260] The number of these institutions continually varies with
the ups and downs of the denominations trying to support them. In 1893,
Mr. J. J. Skordalsvold, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, put
the number of Scandinavian colleges, schools, and seminaries in the
United States at thirty-six, with an attendance of about five
thousand.[261] Sixteen of these, with an attendance of twenty-five
hundred, one-half of the total, were located in Minnesota. By 1900 the
sixteen had grown to twenty schools, having property worth $500,000, one
hundred and sixty teachers, and three thousand students.[262] In that
state, however, and in others like North Dakota, these schools are
likely to follow the same course as many of the schools of other
pioneering Protestant denominations, and become little more than
preparatory schools on the one hand, or theological seminaries on the
other, leaving to the State university the maintenance of higher
education in every field save arts and theology. Even as secondary
schools, not many of them will be likely to survive the third generation
of the original immigrants, unless they are much better endowed than any
one of them is at the present time.[263] The Red Wing Seminary (Hauge
Synod) of Red Wing, Minnesota, founded in 1878, is essentially an
ordinary private secondary school with a theological course attached,
and three-fourths of its work is conducted in English.[264] Bethany
College at Lindsborg, Kansas, one of the three prosperous Swedish
colleges, and perhaps the most ambitious, is substantially an
English-speaking college, with nine departments of instruction, and in
1912 a registration of 919. Only in the classes in Swedish language and
literature is the instruction given in Swedish, tho "Swedish is required
of all students preparing to enter the ministerial work of our Swedish
Evangelical Lutheran Church."[265] Luther College, the Norwegian
institution at Decorah, Iowa, has followed along the same course only
not quite so far. Several years ago the proportion between English and
Norwegian as media of instruction was slightly in favor of the English
in the college classes; in the classes in the preparatory department,
in the literary societies, and in the conversation of the students,
English was decidedly predominant.[266] The practice of this, the
oldest, and in some respects the soundest and most influential, of the
Scandinavian colleges, is sure to be adopted by the lesser schools which
survive their adolescence.
[260] Bille, _History of the Danes in America_, 20-24,--an excellent
account of some of these attempts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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