Vocation in Crisis: a Self-Taught Ambulatory School Teacher Jacob Ahlsman and the Coming of Primary Schools in the Nineteenth-Century Finland

Authors

• Anna Kuismin Helsingin yliopisto

Abstract

There is little research on early Finnish ambulatory schoolmasters. Jacob Ahlsman (1798–1872) provides an interesting case, because one can find various types of sources about his life and career. Besides parish council minutes, there are popular articles based on oral history as well as Ahlsman’s manuscripts, memoranda and newspaper articles, among others. Mostly self-taught, Ahlsman managed to rise from a beggar boy to the position of an ambulatory teacher. In his early adulthood and middle-age he was a respected and extremely hard-working teacher, but in the 1850s his teaching methods, based on his observations in 1826 at the Bell-Lancaster school in Turku, were met with criticism. The article analyses the controversy between the schoolmaster and the parish council and analyses its background, the most important of which is the pressure from the changing requirements, subsequently ending up in the Primary School Act in the 1860s. Ahlsman’s revivalist religiosity, his eccentricity and his position between the common people and learned gentlemen are also discussed.