Sorø Academy

Facts

From monastery to elite school

By Keld Grinder-Hansen, Cand.mag., Ph.D. (18 stories)

Sorø Academy added to Bishop Absalon's Cistercian abbey from 1162. After the Reformation, the Crown took over the abbey estate. In 1586, King Frederik II established a boarding school here for 390 noble and upper-class children. In 1623, King Christian IV opened an academy for young noblemen here. The academy functioned as a senior school but closed down as early as 1665. The school continued until 1737. The second academy was in operation from 1747 until 1793 and in 1826, the third Sorø Academy was founded. This new academy moved into the new classicistic main building. Poet Bernhard Severin Ingemann was both a teacher and principal at the third Sorø Academy.

Public place

Selected entry

Cane and able

Story written by Keld Grinder-Hansen

Time / Periode 1586 2009

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For centuries Sorø Academy's school was a traditional, strict boarding school for children of the elite. In his biography, Social Democratic Minister for Social Affairs Karl Kristian Steincke wrote about his schooldays at Sorø Academy in the 1890s: The teacher we perhaps had most respect for was Zoffmann, our nature studies teacher (...) no one understood how to keep discipline like he did, and gain respect (…) He had an indefinable quality, a personality that made boys instinctively aware that resistance is useless. If you forgot where you were in a moment of distraction, he underlined his natural authority with a cane, a real fishing rod that he handled with unusual skill." "