In their cloisters, boys from surrounding villages — and occasionally girls as well — received elementary instruction in the Mass and in dogma.
The primitive writing-and-counting schools had their origins here, usually with very mediocre teachers, but they were very useful and therefore they flourished, maintained by private support and by the guilds.
A substantial stride was taken in the direction of popular education in 1721, when King Frederick IV established 240 schoolhouses bearing the royal insignia and called them Cavalry schools after a division of the country into military districts.
A series of calls by the church for universal confirmation which could only be met by some degree of literacy, brought many new schools into existence.
However, it was the 'philanthropic' movement, a very active current of educational thought inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the second half of the 18th century, that first succeeded in creating a real school for ordinary people, open to all children.
When a prolonged agricultural crisis and economic slump after the Napoleonic Wars threatened to cripple the entire educational reform programme, the government had to resort to a distressingly mechanical method of education, the so-called Bell-Lancaster method imported from the industrial north of England, which reduced the number of teachers by a drastic simplification of the curriculum to enable preposterously large numbers of pupils to be taught by a single individual.
After some years, this method provoked increasing opposition from parents, who wanted more liberal and inspiring forms of education.
Their demands received vigorous support from the poet-clergyman N. F. S. Grundtvig, who exercised a powerful influence on the development of Danish schools.
The middle schools rapidly attained great popularity, and over the next half-century, large numbers of children and young people used them as a stepping stone to upper secondary education.
[citation needed] Any child resident in Denmark is subject to 10 years of compulsory education from the age of six to sixteen.
The Ministry of Education confers on private schools the right to use the final examinations of the folkeskole, thereby exercising a certain extent of quality control.
In extraordinary circumstances, the Ministry of Education may establish special supervision, for example if there is reason to believe that the school teaches a subject so poorly that it may give the pupils problems later on in life.
The new act, which came into effect for the school year 1994–1995, has abolished the division of the subjects of arithmetic, mathematics, English, German, physics, and chemistry into basic and advanced level courses in the 8th to 10th forms, introducing a system of differentiated teaching, by which the teachers have to adapt their teaching to the prerequisites of the individual pupil.
"The folkeskole shall endeavour to create such opportunities for experience, industry and absorption that the pupils develop awareness, imagination and an urge to learn, so that they acquire confidence in their own possibilities and a background for forming independent judgements and for taking personal action.
The school shall prepare the pupils for active participation, joint responsibility, rights and duties in a society based on freedom and democracy.
The following optional subjects and topics may be offered to the pupils in the eighth to tenth years: French or German as a third foreign language, word processing, technology, media, art, photography, film, drama, music, needlework, wood- or metalwork, home economics, engine knowledge, other workshop subjects, and vocational studies.
The basic subjects are Danish, religious studies, mathematics, art, history, music, physical education, English and science.
In addition to the basic skills, the folkeskole is required by law to help promote the personal and social development of each individual student according to their capability.
This aspect of pedagogic policy requires close co-operation between school and home, and an ongoing dialogue is sought between teachers, parents and pupils.
In this case, regularly means at least twice a year and refers explicitly to information as to the student's personal and social development as well as his purely academic attainment.
In the first to eighth years, information is given either in writing or, more commonly, as part of conferences between all three parties: pupil, parents and class teacher – which are a regular feature of Danish school life.