Poul La Cour - Folk High School Teacher

Folk High School Teacher

During his studies in Copenhagen la Cour had visited his uncle Frederik Barfod every week, and thus came under influence of the Grundtvigian movement, which was based on the philosophy of N.F.S. Grundtvig. La Cour also regularly attended the services of Grundtvig at the church in Vartov. However his emotional involvement with the movement became much stronger when he in 1873 married an adoptive daughter of his uncle, Hulda Barfod, who was very committed to Grundtvig. This can explain the drastic change of la Cour’s life in 1878, when he became a science teacher at the Folk High School in Askov.

In the spring of that year 700 teachers for the Folk High Schools and other interested persons, including la Cour and his wife, gathered in Tivoli in Copenhagen to discuss how to carry out a central idea of Grundtvig’s “school for life”, a central peoples' university. The final result of the meeting was to let Askov Folk High School attempt to carry out the idea by starting an “extended” Folk High School parallel to the existing school. By November Askov could start the new school and with la Cour as one of the teachers.

Teaching the natural sciences at a Christian and Grundtvigian folk High School at a time when Darwinism was a key issue was not an easy task. La Cour - maintaining a fundamentalist view of the Bible – avoided teaching Biology until it was needed as a basis for the new reform of Gymnastics, the so-called Swedish Gymnastics invented by Pehr Henrik Ling. La Cour became one of the pioneers of this controversial activity, connected in some respects with the ideology of the political opposition, and contributed to its final victory with his widely used book, “Menneskelegemet”, a physiology of the human body with direct application to gymnastics.

The controversial parts of Swedish Gymnastics included the absence of military exercises and absence of personal competition, only teams being allowed to receive marks of honour. It was gymnastics for “the whole and undivided man”.

His studies in biology had a spin-off in the form of an invention. In fact it was biological considerations regarding the difference between the human eye and ear (the eye being perfect for determination of position in space, while the ear is perfect for determination in time) that led him to the invention of a new optical telegraph – the spectro-telegraph, where the code of Samuel Morse was transmitted in the form of spectral lines in an optical spectrum.

La Cour’s main job as a Folk High School teacher was to teach mathematics and physics, subjects which were not very highly regarded by Grundtvig – at least not in the way they were previously taught. However la Cour was able to transform Grundtvig’s idea of the “historic and poetic” approach to a new way of teaching mathematics and physics. His educational philosophy became “to let the student follow the same path of development as man himself historically has followed”. This philosophy resulted in two classical works, Historisk Mathematik (1881) and Historisk Fysik (1000 pages, 1896–1901). He relied heavily on German sources in the mathematics book, while the Historical Physics, written with a colleague, contains original work.

The history of science was given in the form of lectures which accorded with the Grundtvig’s recommendation of the “living word”, resulting in both intellectual and emotional impact on the students. Several students never forgot his lectures on the Universe. The Danish author Martin Andersen Nexø was one of these: “Penetrating into the Universe under the guidance of Poul la Cour was a marvellous experience. Out there everything whirled around. Chaos boiled and rotated and gave out of the formlessness birth to: fixes stars, planets and light years, making one almost dizzy. But physics with her strict laws handled it all and kept discipline, forced the most distant nebulae of easy virtue into a most firm reality”.