The Need for More Greenlandic People in Education: Professor Naja Trondhjem 

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The education in Greenland has drastically changed since the country gained home rule in 1979, with the Greenland Home Rule Act referendum. Associate Professor Naja Trondhjem of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark was able to witness that change firsthand.

Trondhjem is an associate professor of Greenlandic and Arctic Studies in the department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She has studied both in Greenland and Denmark for her education, at both the primary school level and PhD level.

“I had attended the public school from first through seventh class in Uummanaq,” Trondhjem said, “Where I was born. I then spent one year in Denmark to acquire the Danish language. I moved to Nuuk for some higher education and then moved to Denmark for three years. I started teaching there but left and started teaching at the University of Greenland, where I received my master’s. I went to Denmark to take further education in linguistics and finished both my master’s and PHD at Copenhagen, where I was an assistant teacher for Danish students, teaching Greenlandic as a foreign language.”

When Trondhjem was going through primary school, Greenland was going through pivotal political movements, which would have rippling effects on the education system.

“I was born in 1957,” Trondhjem said, “so I was in the middle of the Danish relationship transformation period. When I started school, I learned to read in Danish because we learned Danish in first class, and we first got the Greenlandic language in third class. It was a different way of doing things, and it was a system where we should all learn the Danish system, education language, and even become a Dane, maybe.”

Not only was the Danish language a major influence on students, but students were sent to Denmark for parts of their primary educational years.

“We were also sent to Denmark for one year,” Trondhjem said. “We were in seventh class when we were sent to Denmark, just before High School education. At that time, many Greenlanders were sent to Denmark to become more acquainted with the Danish language. It was a harsh Danification period.”

However, when Greenland received home rule in 1979, much of this shifted, including the focus of courses for students who were already accustomed to the old system.

“It was now the Greenland Language that was in progress,” Trondhjem said, “and Danish was not so focused. At least in Nuuk, many children became Danish speakers, only Danish speakers, and then they were stuck between the Greenlandic and Danish. It was not a good period for them.”

Another issue that came from this reform of education is that many of the teachers in the schools were still Danes, not Greenlandic. As well, while the reform changed the curriculum and specified what was to be taught, it didn’t provide the resources to do so.

“There was a lack of Greenlandic school materials in the Greenlandic language,” Trondhjem said. “The resources were very limited, because our system was based on the Danish system and language. No one could follow the process. In the 1990s, the Danish-speaking population became very oppressed because of the Greenlandic pressure that spread everywhere. Even though they had started integration to the class systems where Danish and Greenlandic should be mixed, it didn’t work, especially in Nuuk. There were too many Danish children who had to have their own classes, and that had to continue until the tenth class.”

Trondhjem said that once they reached high school, nearly every subject went back to being taught in Danish, and that pattern continued into higher education, the only exception to this being the Greenlandic department, which has Greenlandic writing now.

The ramifications of this change are still evident today, according to Trondhjem, being one of the reasons why there is a lower admittance of Greenlandic people to universities.

“Statistics say that half of the public-school graduates do not go further to another education because they have too low of Greenlandic, Danish, and English competencies,” Trondhjem said. “This is partly because our Greenlandic materials have been based on the Danish materials. When it comes to grammar, for example, they used Missionary grammars which were made for missionaries to learn the language. It has been transformed into Greenlandic grammar learning. The children have learned their language as if it were a foreign language, because that’s the only grammar lessons they have.”

This has also affected the types of jobs that Greenlandic people have been able to access, which has led to the nation hiring foreigners, specifically Danes, to make up the difference.

“There are only 57,000 people in Greenland,” Trondhjem said, “so we can’t educate all the people for all the jobs, so there are a lot of Greenlandic clerks and schoolteachers. In the Government, all the advisory jobs for Parliament are still held by Danes, because they lack educated personnel for these jobs. There are only a few doctors and nurses, and they must hire a lot of Danes in these positions. It makes it harder for the hospital to fill jobs.”

Education has the power to open doors to all kinds of opportunities and work. Part of that education, being language, which gets the time to teach and develop the skill divided between two to three languages, has impacted the nation heavily. Independence, according to Trondhjem, could be a way of helping to fix this issue.

“I am a teacher of language,” Trondhjem said, “so I think language is very important. In my opinion, the public schools teaching the Greenlandic language should be much better if independence is achieved.”

This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into Greenland’s people, history, and culture. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on Edge of the Arctic: Greenland, the Land of the People.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.