Scandinavians in American Schools

Andreas A. Hjerpeland immigrated to Fillmore County, Minnesota, in 1870, when he was 35. He bad attended a teacher's college in Norway and found his services in demand. For 10 years he traveled to Norwegian American communities from Minnesota to the West Coast. In 1877, be wrote to one of his former instructors in Norway, describing the life of a traveling teacher.

I came here [Lanesboro, Minnesota] late in September and began teaching October first. Since then I have taught school the whole time, that is for seven months, and have gotten twenty dollars per month plus board and washing....
Because there is freedom of religion, and no state church, the public schools have no religious instruction, leaving that up to the parents themselves. This is the reason the Norwegians, as well as other nationalities, establish parochial schools, so that the children will receive religious instruction. But the parochial schools have a low status...

Huldah Johnson Simonette was the daughter of Swedish immigrants who settled in the Dakota Territory. She remembered what school was like for her brother Henry in 1889.

That spring Henry was six and was sent to school with only a slate and a pencil. The teacher was a Miss Susie Swift. ... Another early teacher was Mrs. Ed Pettys, who with her aged mother and small children and one baby, occupied the old Sedgwick house.... She would go home at noon, one mile from the school house, to care for the baby, leaving instructions with the school children to resume their studies at the proper time until she returned, many times at two o'clock. Needless to say, pandemonium reigned in the meantime.
A school term was usually six months long, three in the fall and three in the spring.... Mother was very particular about school attendance. We children were never absent or tardy without a good reason. We walked one and one-half miles to school. Learning the English language was not too difficult for adults as all children in the neighborhood learned it fast and well; they spoke it more fluently than the mother tongue ... and as the children talked English at home, their parents soon learned it as well.

John W. Anderson remembered his schooling in a rural area of Wisconsin in the early 20th century.

My six years in the Heineman school were not happy ones. The teacher relied on the rod to punish those who failed to learn as well as those who broke the rules. I believe I got more whippings than any two children in the school. Yet even this school was better than staying home to work on the farm. We had a mile and a half to walk each way. Temperatures of thirty degrees below zero were not uncommon. Sometimes we had four feet of snow and there were no snowplows. Our school lunch, which was sometimes frozen solid, was most often bread and syrup or peanut butter. We seldom had any meat, eggs or butter. These had to be sold to the store to buy clothing and the other necessities of life we couldn't raise on the farm.

Resource: The Scandinavian American Family Album, by Dorothy and Thomas
Hoobler, Oxford Press, New York.