Secondary education in Denmark

Secondary education in Denmark (in Danish: ungdomsuddannelse, "youth education") usually takes two to four years and is attended by students between the ages of 15 and 20. Secondary education is not compulsory, but usually free of charge, and students have a wide range of programmes to choose from. Some education programmes are academically oriented, the most common being the Gymnasium. Others are more practically oriented, training students for jobs as e.g. artisans or clerks through a combination of instruction in vocational schools and apprenticeship.

The Gymnasium has its origin in the cathedral- and monastery schools established by the Roman Catholic Church in the early Middle Ages, and seven of the schools established in the 12th and 13th centuries still exist today. The medieval schools had, broadly speaking, only one purpose: to educate the servants of the Catholic Church by teaching them to read, write, and speak Latin and Greek. Following the Reformation's official implementation in 1536, the schools were taken over by the Crown; their primary purpose remained preparing students for theological studies, only now it was for the benefit of the Protestant Church.

This educational base remained nearly unchanged until 1809, when the old Clergyman's School was transformed, in accordance with the spirit of the time, into a humanistic Civil Servant's School, the purpose of which was to "foster true humanity" through immersion in the ancient Greek and Latin cultures combined with some teaching of natural science and modern languages.

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