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IV. EDUCATION AND MENTAL CULTURE IN SWEDEN.
The total number of female scholars from 1873/1900 amounted to 6,778;
during 1873/98, the mean average was 25 per annum at every school. In 1900,
the total attendance was 614. The age is generally between 18 and 20.
Instruction is given in the Swedish Language, History, Geography, Natural Science,
Hygiene, and Domestic Economy, Arithmetic, Book-keeping, Writing, Singing, and
several kinds of needlework and weaving. At two of the recently established
People’s High Schools in Norrland, the lectures for women are given in winter
at the same time as for the men and are partly common to both sexes.
At most schools of this kind the pupils when leaving form a
People’s High School alumni association, which meets twice a year at
their schools to hear lectures and discuss questions of general interest.
Moreover, public lectures and national festivities are often held at
the schools, and are largely attended by the people of the
neighbourhood. Many of the teachers, too, are busied as lecturers in discussion
clubs in different parts of the neighbourhood. So-called »summer-courses*
have been started at many schools. These last from 8 to 14 days and
are intended for students that have left, for common school teachers,
as well as for others interested in such matters, and are carried on
with the assistance of popular lecturers from the universities or other
schools. The work of popularizing knowledge, brought about by the
People’s High Schools, is thus in many respects of very considerable
importance.
Congenial with the People’s High schools are the so-called Workmen’s
Institutes, located in the towns and offering to the working classes there
popular lectures and opportunities for instructive reading. The first institute of tho
kind was established 1880 in Stockholm by A. Nyström, M. D. The lectures at
it have chiefly pertained to history and natural science. After the pattern of the
Stockholm institute, others of the same kind have been organized in several more
Swedish towns as also in our neighbouring countries.
Of låte years, an important and steadily increasing activity has been
exercised in Sweden by a great quantity of Iieoture associations of various kinds.
The work has in some cases been entered upon by societies founded for other
purposes, as working-men’s associations, trade unions, temperance societies a. o.;
but generally special associations have been founded for the purpose of arranging
popular scientific lectures. In a marked degree, this movement has, of låte years,
been promoted by the establishing of central offices procuring lecturers; by means
of these offices, a considerable unity and a better organization has been brought
into the work. The oldest of these central offices is the one for Southern Sweden
at Lund (since 1898), from which for the current year (1902) more than 900
lectures are ordered to be delivered by about 50 different lecturers at 75 various
places. After the example of the central office at Lund, others of the same kind
have been organized in Stockholm and Gothenburg as well as in Uppsala —
the last mentioned only arranging for serial lectures.
The costs for these lectures were, to begin with, defrayed by the fees of the
society members and by subventions from the respective communities and County
councils, but nowadays to a considerable degree also by State grants. For 1902,
Government has thus disbursed a total of 65,000 kronor to 123 different lecture
institutions, but as petitions for subvention were sent in by no less than 56 other
recent associations — which, however, had to be refused on the strength of
insufficient means at disposal — Government has presented a proposal to the Riksdag
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