Ann Mari Flodin:

The School Song. Different perspectives of a compilation of school songs. A follow-up study

This paper reports on a follow-up study of a thesis from June, 1998, called: The treasury of songs as social memory. The songs mentioned in the title were compiled by the students of the Swedish teacher training collegues in 1941. A special study of these songs and, in particular, the sonngs written by the students of the Stockholm teacher training college make up the principal part of the thesis. The present paper presents the theories on collective memory and socal memory, used by Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs, that constitute mymain theoretical frames of reference of how a treasury of songs is created and preserved. The purpose of this follow-up study was to discuss different ways of reading the songs. In Part I I discuss categorization. The theories presented are the classical theory which means that categories are sets defined by common properties of objects. That is used in the above-mentioned thesis. Another way of doing it is suggested by George Lakoff. He calls his model the cognitive models of the prototype theory with the basic-level category structure, the superordinate and the subordinate ones which mainly depend on gestalt perception. Basic-level concepts are directly meaningful because they reflect the structure of our perceptual or motor experience. In Part II I discuss how Roland Barthes applies Saussure's linguistic schema of signifier/signified = sign as denotation, and how he adds to it a second level of signification, connotation. I also study patterns of redundancy in songs and its opposite entropy. At the end of the paper, Part III, I examine how different contexts of the students influence the way they remember the songs the once learned. They seem to have forgotten the non-suitable ones for future teachers.