Browsing by Subject "tyttökoulu"

Finnish grammar schools were partly gender-segregated during the independence time, because 35 finnish-language girls’ schools operated in Finland and at the most approximately 40% of all pupils studied in these girls’ schools. The task of this thesis is to find out, using the methodology of oral history, the significance of the girls’s schools as an educator in the memories of pupils from 1930s to 1970s. My thesis is based on qualitative research, where I describe and analyze school memories with a phenomenon- and event-focused research method and I use oral history to interpret broad cultural and social phenomena and events. The focus of my thesis is school history and social development viewed from a microhistorical perspective. With the oral history data I form a longitudinal picture of the individual as part of the girls’ school culture and I examine the transitions of the education culture across generations and find out what the girls’ school’s education has meant to different generations of women in the past. The source of my thesis is the survey material on girls’ and boys’ schools experiences collected in the Finnish Literature Society’s folk poetry archive’s tradition and contemporary culture collections in 2005-2006, which consists of girls’ school memories written by 26 women. The research material includes seventeen different girls’ schools located in ten different cities. The school memories I studied represented a strong narrative of experiences of teachers’ educational practices towards their pupils. The girls’ school pupils of 1930s and 1940s took the educational ideas of the school to be humility, necessary submission and the interest of the homeland as a matter of course. The teachers in the school memories were harsh and demanding, the punishments were based on blaming and creating shame. In 1950s the school’s educational culture sought uniformity and unity, and the teachers’ educational task emphasized the maintenance of the school’s operating culture with strict discipline and control of order. Restrained behavior was a demand internalized by the pupils from the school of the time. In 1960s the educational culture of the school began to change, although the teachers’ actions were still based on restrictive pedagogy and eradicating arrogance from the pupils. It was only at 1970s that the democratization of the school changed the teachers’ attitude towards their pupils and they were met as individuals. Throughout the decades, special sexual morality education was emphasized in the educational mission of the girls’ school. The pupils saw the schoool’s mission to raise kind, obedient, innocent and well-mannered girls.