Uno Cygnaeus

Uno Cygnaeus (12 October 1810 in Hämeenlinna – 2 January 1888 in Helsinki) was a Finnish clergyman, educator, and chief inspector of the country's school system. He is considered the father of the Finnish public school system. His accomplishments also include the initiation of high class teacher training, emphasizing the importance of women's education and most importantly introducing the use of crafts (veisto in Finnish, sloyd/sløyd in Norwegian, slöjd in Swedish, and sløjd in Danish), as a mandatory subject in the school curriculum.

Cygnaeus was born in Hämeenlinna, Finland, on 12 October 1810. His father died early in his childhood when he was 8 years old. Uno studied natural sciences and theology at the University of Turku and continued in Helsinki when the university moved over to Helsinki. In 1837 he was ordained as a priest and started serving in Viipuri till 1839. In Viipuri he served as assistant pastor and prison chaplain in addition to teaching at a private school. This experience and his study of the work of the educational philosophers Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Fröbel led to the formulation of Cygnaeus’s own educational philosophy and ideas.

In 1840 he was sent off to Russian America to serve for five years as the first pastor of Sitka Lutheran Church in New Archangel (now Sitka, Alaska) as a punishment for an extramarital affair. This place was a trading post, where Cygnaeus got a chance to observe the barter exchanges between the Europeans and the Native Alaskans. Upon his return, he spent twelve years as a superintendent of a Finnish parish school in St. Petersburg.

In 1855 the Russian senate was commissioned to advance the educational system in Finland after Tsar Alexander II ascended to the throne. The senate collected proposals from different sources. Uno Cygnaeus also sent a proposal which gained the senate’s support and Cygnaeus was appointed to develop a folk school system. He travelled via Sweden and Denmark to the German States and to Switzerland to collect information about different educational systems. He was most influenced by the kindergartens in Hamburg and the Swiss school system. Cygnaeus drew up a plan on the basis of notes, which he took during his journeys and the senate approved his plan in 1861.

...
Wikipedia