And the Sun Rises with the Farmer
(Og solen står med bonden op)
The Philosophical History of the Nordic Folkhighschool
EPILOGUE
Rasmus Nielsen, a Danish philosopher well-known in his time, said at the meeting of Friends of Grundtvig in 1871: “Grundtvig understood that it was necessary to lift the masses by folkly education, and he himself showed the way. So one can see that the history of the world, sometime 100 years from now, will show that after many attempts, the right school for the folk was begun by him, first in Denmark and the North, then in the rest of the world.”
More than a century has passed since this prophecy, and there are folkhighschools in all of the North, even on the Færøy Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and Åland. Outside of the North, everywhere one finds institutions which have borrowed their name from the Nordic folkhighschools – even if they haven’t always adopted their spirit. They are called “Folk High School” in Great Britain, “Heimvolkhochschule” in West Germany, “Volk Hoge School” in the Netherlands, to mention only the most generally known in Western Europe.
It isn’t possible to review all these institutions. To follow the principal theme in this essay, I should like to attempt to analyze to what degree the folkhighschools have continued to be true to what I have presented as their principal task: “revolt [uproar]“, protest, and national identity. Even if I limit the overview of these institutions to these ideas, I must be satisfied with a choice, which I admit is not the same as a worldwide judgment.
As I now begin with Sweden, it is because, as I emphasized earlier, at the time when the folkhighschool movement began, Sweden was outside of what was happen-ing in Denmark and Norway – what I have called “the culture war”, using a Danish expression. There was opposition between an elite culture unavailable to the folk and the culture which the folkhighschool offered, a culture which came from the folk and which should rise from the folk to the elite, in order eventually to embrace the whole nation. This reversal of the cultural currents was really revolutionary. It has not become reality, but as a consequence of the cultural struggle, we have come to the political point of view which we today call “the left”, or the left-directed. In Sweden, other roads reached what in my opinion was essential for the Nordic folkhighschool, namely “uproar” or “revolt”. Therefore I will now add some reflections about the Swedish folkhighschool’s development.
“Revolt” in the Swedish folkhighschool
What went on in Denmark and Norway in the time before “the culture war” happened in Sweden at the time when the folkhighschool was adopted by the folk movements, especially the workers’ movement. This movement has continued to declare that the folkhighschool should work toward “changing society”. In Olof Palme’s words: the folkhighschool should be an element of restlessness in society.
We come still nearer to the Danish and Norwegian culture-war view, when we read what the author and folkhighschoolman Bengt Skördeman (1936-87) wrote in 1976: “As long as anyone has to pay the price for the culture of others, without sharing in it himself, so long we have no culture worth mentioning”
Another side of the Swedish folkhighschool is its pluralism. This also includes a protest, and attracts a French observer above everything else. In France, we talk about pluralism, we try to create such a thing, but it doesn’t exist. In Sweden, all the folk movements, for example the temperance movement, the free-church movements, the cooperative movement, the trade-union movement, the worker’s movement, have their folkhighschools, and each school cultivates its special direction.
At the time when the Swedish folkhighschool celebrated its centennial, four ministers then in the government had been pupils at a folkhighschool. In the 1960’s it was reckoned that between 75 and 85 [members] of the Riksdag were former folkhighschool pupils (about a fifth). To this we can add the many who were active within local government, country courts, administration and cultural life. This is unimaginable in France. One of my University colleagues remarked to me that in France, even the Communist party’s politicians were academically educated!
The writer Ivar Lo-Johansson (born in 1901) declares that, after having been a pupil at a folkhighschool, one must “with improved knowledge turn to improve his class”, adding that the folkhighschool is not to be considered as a springboard, [to move one] out of his class, out of his milieu, but rather as a means for enriching class and milieu”. Here again we recognize what we in France call “social promotion”. Perhaps we can use the Swedish expression “social adjustment”, if by that one means that an individual person should not seek education only for his own advantage. The knowledge gained by an individual should serve the group that the individual belongs to. In France, this development has not led to social criticism.
If the folkhighschool is able to protest against “the establishment” in this way, as Bjørnson said, it is because it possesses a freedom which the foreigner may envy. The state may exercise a certain amount of control, because it subsidizes the schools to a great extent, yet in spite of the fact that in Sweden the schools appear to be integrated into the general school system, yet folkhighschools are not affected by the bureaucratic pattern which hinders the importation of new ideas in traditional schools. The folkhighschools can indeed, as mentioned above, choose their own profiles.
On the whole, one can say that this protest affects not only Swedish society; it is more generally global in influence. All the schools are involved in the Third World’s problems; for example, they accept political refugess, and arrange courses for immigrants, to integrate them into Swedish society.
The peasant milieu in which the folkhighschool was born during the 1860’s and 1870’s, was certainly very conservative. But to assume, as is sometimes done, that folkhighschools from the beginning constituted “a school for the oppressed, on the conditions of the oppressed” is to view this institution from an anachronistic, backward-viewing perspective. The peasants of that time, whom we see today as “conservative”, were about to enter into political life under the same conditions as other social classes. The folkhighschool was to help them to fill this role competently; The principals of these first schools did not line up on the side of “the oppressed”.
It is in our own time that Paulo Freire and his “pedagogy of the oppressed” prompts the folkhighschool to act as the school “for the oppressed, on the conditions of the oppressed”. The oppressed, even in welfare-state Sweden, are legion : “the millions of poorly educated, the economically and culturally oppressed” (Greger Morin in Up to Battle for the Folkhighschool, 1976). The folkhighschool protests just as much against the abandonment of all adult education to the communal adult education institution KOMVUX, as to the labor market’s education, AMS. For neither model opens the way for an education which studies society critically.
Grundtvigian “folkliness” in an international perspective.
From the chapter about Denmark in this little essay, it appears that Grundtvig was completely aware that his thoughts about “folkliness”, even if they had a markedly local character, were a link in the general movement for the awakening of national consciousness, which became apparent in Europe in the 1800’s.
In our days, to promote anything which on short or long view approaches a nationalistic philosophy seems to ask for rejection. One is no longer “purely Danish” or “originally Swedish”; one wants to be open to a global philosophy, turned toward the whole world. It is not by happenstance that I have cited a Grundtvig text which emphasizes how he foresaw this opening toward the great world. The “folkly” strain in Grundtvig’s thinking can only be understood in its connection with the “scientific” – in a twinned relationship. “Scientific” in Grundtvig’s speech means universal. But one cannot suppose that Grundtvig gives the idea “universal” the same global meaning that it has for us. The world to which we have become accustomed was unknown in his time. It is more appropriate to note that his sense of the multiplicity of cultures – the Nordic cultures he calls “the Folk-Hearts” – agrees completely with what Senegal’s President L. S. Senghor calls “the humanism of the universal”, where this little, untranslatable “de” means, that it is a humanism that embraces all the cultures of our time. It is then the opposite of that “universal humanism”, which is a Western ethno-centric phenomenon, not considering other cultures than the European.
This distinction between the national and the universal – made concrete by Grundtvig in the Sorø and Gothenburg projects – one can find later in the anthro-pologist Claude Lévi Strauss, who wrote in 1953: “Following the aristocratic humanism of the Renaissance and the middle-class humanism of the 1800’s… a democratic humanism is needful for the closed world which our planet has become – which also may be the last one. All societies are entitled to a place there, not just some few… For no part of humankind may live foreign to a true humanism.”
One of the most outstanding French historians, Le Roy Ladurie, maintains as earlier mentioned, that the purpose “of writing previous history is to learn to understand today’s”. One clearly becomes more and more aware of this. One of the fundamentals of the folkhighschool, “folkliness”, in modern language the same as national identity, seeking after “one’s roots”, has become a common phenomenon. In this connection, I cite an article from Unesco Courier, January 1983, written by Amadou M’Bow. It has a very telling title: “At the Source of the Future”: “Within the growing globalization of fundamental social processes and within the pressure toward homogeneity, which weighs upon the mentality of individuals and groups, (one must record) an awakening of the special, a demand that has obtained first priority: the demand for cultural identity, noticeable since the 1800’s, visible in certain parts of Europe, crystallized in the longings of young nations which were earlier colonies… This demand rises now in the heart of the industrial societies, where the need to preserve and revive regional or ethnical identity becomes strong.”
In those milieus where one engages in the fight for the culture of minorities, one notes carefully how Jacobinish France is, whether one stands on the right- or left-side. The most active of our six minorities, the Breton, is very open for the message of the folkhighschool. I have been shown a translation to Breton of texts from the Danish folkhighschool men Holger Begtrup, Hans Lund and Peter Manniche, written in 1926 and printed in a Breton newspaper Gwalarn in 1928. For that matter, we have arranged for a Grundtvig seminar in Brittany in 1984.
As always in France, ideas flower but reality doesn’t. The need for folkhigh-schools in order to promote the cultures of minorities is obvious, but there are none. Instead, the problem is clearly analysed with thoroughness – but only theoretically!
I refer now to one of our ethnologists, who died too young a few years ago, Robert Jaulin. The article I am quoting has the title: “Folk Murder, Milieu Murder, Self-Murder”. Mankind, he says, is always “manifold”. But it’s difficult to acknowledge this. Even socialism, at least in its common Marxist form, has not recognized the inescap-able differences among human civilizations. The eternal concern of the Marxists has not been the manifold forms of civilization, but rather to find a final Messianic model, to apply to all of mankind. That is what they have fought for.
Marx dealt with the labor problem in relation to a new humanity… (here, there is a change from the times of the 1800’s). Twenty years ago, no revolutionist could have considered fighting for a multiplicity of civilizations. One should fight for a world of equality, based on a universal catechism, and one should hold to that.
There is a war which must be led on behalf of all the minorities, or rather on behalf of all civilizations. A civilization is not the same as a “traditional minority”. All civilizations… must now join together to fight “de-civilization”, that is, negative univer-salism. No longer can the battle cry be: “Proletarians of all countries, unite”, if that is understood to mean “to become all the same”. Now, it must be: “Civilizations in all places, unite in order to be different”… There is something global in the present day version, declares the author.
Robert Jaulin insists further, that one is tempted to see in the most obscure civilizations models for a possible future realization of that end, which is truly revolutionary.
“Another America”
I discovered these tendencies in America – to my great encouragement. To be sure, they are found only sporadically, but such attempts should not be despised, for the very reason that they are noticeable in milieus connected with the American folkhighschool movement. An American with a Danish family background on one side, who was aware of the Danish folkhighschool, Mildred Jensen Loomis (died in 1986) entitled one of her books, provocatively: Alternative Americas (notice the plural); An informal history by the grandmother of the counter-culture. Here one reads: The America of the Indians was free. The invading Europeans repeated here the same kind of exploitation that they fled from in Europe. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that just about every great problem that one meets in North America today, every form of unethical behavior and every offense against personal dignity, freedom and self-government has European roots.
“Cooperation, democracy, ‘bottom-line’ technology, natural birth, holistic medicine, opposition to the state, all of this existed in the native communities of America from north to south, from east to west… They are not products of some ‘New Age’, new times. These ideas grew strong and developed throughout the millennium. It is among the native folk that we shall find the best examples of how we should live in the 21st century.”
The so-called “Folk Schools” in America, find great difficulty in defining “folk-liness” in a land, a part of the world, where immigrants from the whole world meet the culture of the original population. A Canadian of Czech origin, whose wife is Danish [Jindra Kulich], * speaking at the international Grundtvig bicentennial celebration in Copenhagen, declared that interest in the mythology of the Indians and Inuits is steadily growing. Many people who have become rootless are seeking desperately for their origins. This search may be expressed in various ways, may be more open to find what is common for everyone, in the many-sided mosaic that is America,. That is why, as one writer emphasizes, a folk-school is a place where one can look for the common sources and the home connections that unite us and make us whole, where we discover that we are inseparably bound to the earth and to each other.
The first “Folk-schools” (in America) were founded by immigrant Danes, and were directed toward the Danish population in USA. But as Enok Mortensen in his book Schools for Life points out, it has long been clear that such a school can only succeed if it grows out of a common ground and is relative to our par- ticular situation. It must find its own voice, speak its own ‘living word’ and sing its own songs. We must go beyond Grundtvig and the Danish-American school and take into account how we live in America in the ‘80’s, at the same time that we keep in mind the strength of the folkhighschool experience and the wisdom in the Grundtvigian vision.
“Revolt” in the American Folk-school movement
” To be content with circumstances as they are, to be ‘neutral’, is to stand on the side of the oppressors, who also want to maintain the status quo.”
OPTION, Winter 1984
As great as this search after an identity is, even in the USA it is united with a protest, a “revolt” against the established society, much like the unrest which disturbs folkhighschools based in Denmark and Norway.
This protest, it seems to me, is especially interesting in the American context. The Danish parliamentarian Harald Holm wrote in 1871, explaining the Danish situation in Norway, that protest affects only “a small flock”. But this little group were bearers of a different future. The similar “small flock” in the USA declares that society needs Folk Schools, as we move toward a sustainable society, based on renewable resources, hopefully with liberty, justice and peace for all….If the natural environment is to be preserved and rural life revitalized and rural communities rebuilt as places where life is worth living – then the ideals and methods of the folk schools may well be seen as a model, or concept of, our commitment, how best to go about the task of meeting the world crisis of our time, how best to expend our money, time and energy to that end. [Harley J. Gibson]
This demanding account of the role that Folk Schools should be responsible for playing in society closes with a warning: Every community needs at its heart something in the nature of a folk school as a leaven and catalyst. For society changes, but established institutions do not change. A Folk School must by its very nature preserve those challenges which life sets before us.
True, the general situation (in America) has not been favorable for Folk Schools. But nowadays, everything is changing. In a time of ecological disturbance, social division and spiritual decline, we need Folk Schools. Perhaps the Folk-school movement can gain new life through schools that take root in all parts of the country and bring people together to study these situations.
Indeed, the situation has not been good for Folk Schools. But as conditions change – as big nation-states and urban empires show signs of crumbling – as international communities and communes continue their groping experiments – as economic pressures and new technologies point more and more toward decentralist tendencies and what is called neighborhood power and community self-reliance – the folk school philosophy may yet come into its own, even in ways we do not now anticipate.”
Myles Horton and Highlander Research and Education Center, Tennessee
“To serve the disadvantaged ”
There is no better example than Myles Horton, to illustrate how one, through a concrete experience of the Danish folkhighschool, may come to see that the model cannot be transplanted in the USA.
The historian Howard Zinn, who gave his book the title A People’s History of the United States, acknowledges that much of ‘the people’s history’ has never been reported. In reality, “one hardly notices the modest voices that fight to make life better.” History is “the history of the establishment, which is always most attentive to state and statesman – the guardians of the existing system – but which fails to respect a rebellion against the culture of the majority.”
This explains why [American] history doesn’t mention Folk Schools, which all the country’s leadership seems to be unaware of – as the magazine OPTION. Journal of the Folk School Movement of America regretfully declares.
Meanwhile, there is an exception, and that is Highlander Folk School [now Highlander Research and Education Center]. In a celebration of its 50 years of existence and work, Andrew Young, an earlier ambas-sador of the USA to the United Nations, declared: “For fifty years, the Highlander Center has promoted ideas about leadership and a spirit of independance, which changed the direction of history.”
Highlander, which calls itself “the school for problems” and whose aim has always been “to serve the disadvantaged” has recently joined The Folk School Association of America. This has increased the view of political choices on the Left flank.
When in 1983 “the Danish Society” arranged a seminar about “Grundtvig’s thoughts in North America”, Myles Horton, Highlander’s founder and leader, described the school’s activity and tried to explain what he had reason to be grateful for in Grundtvig’s ideas, and what he had learned from the folkhighschools which he had visited.
It was in 1931 that Myles Horton decided to travel to Denmark, on the advice of Aage Møller, at that time the minister [of the Danish congregation] in Chicago. After reading everything he could find about Denmark, Horton set out. He learned Danish at Borup’s College in Copenhagen. He visited several folkhighschools and studied the labor and cooperative movements. He viewed Grundtvig as “a revolutionary with prophetic insight” and his “philosophy”, he said, reminded one of the Hopi Indians’ holistic philosophy in America. – yet another reference to “America before the whites”.
But the impressions which Myles Horton took back from his visit in Denmark were not all positive: He had got the impression that Grundtvig’s thinking had been bypassed; he would prefer to deepen his contacts with the labor movement and its folkhighschool in Esbjerg.
Naturally, Myles Horton knew of the Folk Schools that had been founded by and for Danes in the USA. He had early understood that there could be no question of copying the Danish model, but that it was necessary to create something appropriate to the American situation.
Highlander, from the beginning and during various periods of its existence, had never lost its chief task from view: “to serve the disadvantaged”. Highlander has to a high degree worked to strengthen the labor movement. Highlander illegally brought together blacks and whites during the time of racial segregation, and this activity – with the consequent arrests, imprisonment and confiscation – made the school known throughout America. Today, Highlander tries to oppose “internal colonization” by bringing together Mexicans, Puerto-Ricans, Black and White poor people, especially from the Appalachian area, one of the most neglected regions in the USA.
Highlander’s teachers, who as a rule are University educated, all must learn that “instruction alone is not able to serve the people, without – and this is the important thing – also becoming oneself a part of the people.”
One generally connects the famous song “We Shall Overcome” with High-lander. Actually, this song originated during the tobacco workers’ strike in the 1940’s, and Highlander learned the song from them. But it is insisted that the song is not Highlander’s most important trademark. Rather, it is the fact that today in all the Southern states, one finds people who declare that a weekend course at this school changed their lives and made it possible for them to work more effectively to change the world.
Myles Horton has retired as leader of Highlander, but the center continues in the same spirit as in his time.
This Folk School seems to be primarily characterized by its protest against an oppressive society. It has broadened its protest to include the cultural aspect. In the fight against “the American way of life” and the mass-culture promoted by massmedia, Highlander tries to promote the local cultures. In this way, the Center organized in April 1986 a weekend meeting about “our cultural multiplicity”. The workshop brought together people from the whole South, one met cultural ideas and traditions from different backgrounds, inherited by widely separated groups of society. The purpose of this weekend is and was comprised within the frame of the Grundt-vigian dialectic between the national and the universal. In Highlander Report, the center’s publication, we read: “We widen our horizons and our view of the world through accepting and participating in a different perspective.”
Israel. Ulpanim, Tehila Center and folkliness
The problems of national identity in Israel
Since one of Grundtvig’s chief ideas, “folkliness”, is an original variation of the national awakening during the 1800’s, I should like to examine Zionism from his per-spective. It may be viewed as the last national movement of this century. We shall come to see how two institutions in separate surroundings attempt to achieve a national consciousness in Israel. They were not unaware of the Nordic folkhigh-school; on the contrary, they were inspired by it, though without copying it.
One cannot strive for national identity in Israel without coming upon a very special problem: How can a Judaic national feeling be created in a state where 112 different nationalities live side by side, and how can the 1.2 million from the diaspora, which includes 80% of the Jews, be integrated there?
First of all, Zionism’s chief purpose was to obtain a fosterland for a people who had lived in separate places all over the earth for nearly 2000 years. It was an emancipated Jew who created the movement in cosmopolitan Vienna, influenced by the 1800’s’ concern for nationality. To understand the proposition of the founder Theodor Herzl, we must for a moment return to the French Revolution. In a famous speech in the National Assembly in December 1780, the speaker proclaimed: “It is necessary to forget the Jews as a nation and to consider all the Jews as individuals. They must comprise neither a political corporation nor an organ- isation in the state, they must individually become fellow citizens.”
Right in line with the political and cultural Jacobinism in France, and in line with the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Jews were thus deprived of the right to their own culture. Thus began the process of secularizing the Jews, and their assimilation into Western Europe.
After a century, during which the Jews were integrated into the culture of those countries where they lived, the Dreyfus affair (1894-1906) created violent anti-Semitism. Theodor Herzl, who was present as an Austrian journalist during the trial in Paris, saw that it was necessary to deal [with the situation] and if possible to take the Jews out of Europe.
What did he recommend in his little book, The Jewish State, which was pub-lished in 1896? Herzl wasn’t thinking of Palestine as “the Jewish people’s historical fatherland”. He had no plans at all to import the national mother-tongue, Hebrew, into the Jewish homeland that he was campaigning for. Quite simply, he recommended his own mother-tongue, German. As a young man, he had dreamed of solving the Jewish problem by having the Jews convert to Catholicism. To obtain the necessary support of the great powers for his suggestion, he emphasized finally, that a Jewish national homeland would create “a defense for Europe against Asia”, and he added: “We shall serve as an outpost of culture against barbarism.” In response to the demand of Jews at risk, he localized the country finally to Palestine. But it should be noted that Herzl was unaware that this country was already inhabited by Arabs.
To set this primitive, and for us almost unimaginable, suggestion into the context of its times, it is appropriate to remind you of the humanist Viktor Rydberg’s defence of the West in opposition to the barbarism of the East – in the expresion about “the sword-lily” set “as a knightly outpost of the light at the gate to Europe” etc., which I have used as a motto in the chapter about the Swedish sharp-shooter movement.
I hope that this little resumé of history makes it easier to understand why the founder of the state of Israel wanted to create a little enclave of European culture beside the Mediterranean’s eastern shore, never mind the Arabian world, which was unknown and despised.
But when the state of Israel was founded in 1948, it naturally became clear that it was necessary to give Jews who came from such different countries a national con-sciousness which would bring them to be a Folk.
The main thing must be language. And Israel succeeded in the effort to make that language, which for 2000 years had been used only in the service of religion, into a national speech. Hebrew became the cement of the Jewish Folk in Israel.
But how should they manage the problem of aliens, immigrants? How could those Jews who came from so many separated countries and didn’t know Hebrew be integrated into a national fellowship?
It was to solve this problem that the inspiration of the Nordic folkhighschool was used. During the 1950’s, a connection was made between the Ulpanim and the North. Ulpan means the Hebrew study place, the school. It is a kind of boarding school, where Jewish immigrants stay for six months, to undergo integration into the Jewish society. Ulpanim’s chief task is to “bridge the gulf between Israel and world-Jewry”, that is, to integrate all Jews into an actual Jewishness. Does this mean a Jewish “folkli-hood”? Ulpanim answers: “A viable stability, growing out of a deep root in the Jewishness of Israel, and the culture of the country.” This means not just to immerse oneself in earlier times. Ulpan Akiva, near Netanya, is certainly the most open and liberal-minded of these schools. Primarily, it offers a complete openness toward new ideas, new connections and new cultural influences. Ulpan Akiva aims to be “a dynamic fellowship”.
In Ulpan Akiva, people from the whole world meet, including European non-Jews and Arabs, so that “the steady change in this Ulpan’s social structure, which is characterized by different languages, religions and concepts of faith, offers a miniature portrait of the problem in Israel and in world-Jewry.” The leader of Ulpan Akiva, Sulamith Katznelson, whose father was the first president of the state of Israel, visited the Nordic countries several times during the ‘50’s. I have been quite moved to find in her accounts of her journeys the names of several of my good friends: Sture Altvall (Nordic Folkhighschool in Kungälv, Sweden), Allan Degerman (Åsa Folkhighschool in Sweden), Johannes Novrup (Magleås High School in Denmark). There has been no question of the Ulpanim schools transferring a Nordic model, but there has been a living inspiration. And I dare to affirm that the atmosphere that rules at Ulpan Akiva – which is the one I know best – really makes one think of a Nordic folkhighschool: song, human warmth streaming from fellowship, the teaching methods free of all school-like pressures, yes, one feels oneself at home in this atmosphere.
Tehila’s work to manage the growing population
“The power” in Israel has always lain with the Askenazi, the European Jews, including not only Russians but even American Jews. They have “Hebraised” the country, but one may ask what culture the official Hebrew language carries. An elite-culture, undoubtedly a Jewish culture, but interpreted through institutions to which the great majority of the people have had no access. This common problem is com-plicated in Israel by the fact that the Sephards are now more numerous than the Askenazi. Although “Sephard” means Spanish in Hebrew, one can better charac-terize the Sephards as “Jews from the East”. Actually, it means those Jews that come from Arabian countries, where they had lived peacefully for a thousand years. But they became persecuted in their countries and immigrated to Israel during the 1950’s.
To integrate these 700.000 eastern Jews put the young state up against an unheard-of problem, and the problem has not found any satisfactory solution, either politically, socially, economically, or culturally. The established Askenazi society has not ceased to flaunt its superiority and its contempt for these proletarians, who were often illiterate, at least partially, and who in general lacked the ability to adjust to “civilized” society, which Israel had shaped according to the Western model.
But where does one find the true Jewish culture? Voices were raised in acknowledgement that the eastern Jews really stood much closer to the original Jewish culture than the Europeanized and secularized Askenazi.
So this was a situation which could have resulted in a “culture war” somewhat like the Nordic model. But the gulf between the privileged, that is the Askenazi, and the eastern Jews was without doubt too deep for the initiative to come “from below” as it has done in the North. Therefore, it came “from above”. The Education Ministry undertook actions which led to the setting up of Tehila centers.
Among the eastern Jews, women were the most handicapped group. It was to help them that a very interesting educational work was begun.
The first Tehila center was set up in 1975 in Beersheba, the “capital” of the Negev, where a large number of eastern Jews lived. Women come to the center one day a week, and their instruction continues for seven years. It is formed similarly to the traditional school system, but with the definite purpose of convincing these women, despised by all who have education, that they too have the right “to go to school”.
Within the traditional frame, a pedagogy is exercised which has the basic aim of fellowship. The teachers are always together with the pupils, and in addition to normal daily contact, they use what in the North is called “searching-out activity”. Women instruct women. Teachers regularly attend local, regional and national meet-ings, so as to keep abreast of developments. Beyond the regular school subjects, much time is devoted to the women’s original cultures. Furthermore, something even more important happens in these centers: those women who come from Arabic countries are accustomed to a type of community life which has disappeared in modern society.
The Tehila center creates a new form of fellowship, which draws the women out of their isolation and loneliness. The Tehila centers, as I have said, are set up by the authorities and have not grown spontaneously from below. It was plain that these oppressed people, shut out of society, could not be expected to take the initiative. But it is remarkable to see how these individuals change. I have attended festivals with such women, who have been traditionally doomed to silence since time out of mind, and have seen how they develop in a milieu where one reckons with both their handicap and their special ability. During a festival, they could accurately and enthusiastically present those cultures which they had brought with them to Israel from their original countries.
It has been said of the folkhighshool, that it has always been “a prompter of revolution everywhere in the North” and – more precisely – attempted to encourage rebellion against the culturally elite, who often are also the politically, socially, and economically ruling elite. (Poul Engberg, Højskolebladet 7/11 81). Isn’t that exactly what the Tehila centers are trying to do?
The two latest branches of the Grundtvigian tradition:
The Grundtvig Institute in Nigeria and the Australian Folk High School Movement
To celebrate the bicentennial of N.F.S. Grundtvig’s birth, representatives from 35 countries assembled in Copenhagen in September, 1983 – an impressive manifestation of that interest which Grundtvig’s thoughts, as exemplifed in the Nordic folk-highschool, still awaken in our days in many lands.
To what extent are the institutions that claim relationship to this model faithful to what separates such schools from the traditional educational system. And – what to my mind is even more important – to what extent have they managed to hold fast to what separates them from the steadily growing sector – adult education? Do they understand the value of what is characteristic of the Nordic folkhigh-schools: the concept that these schools are free, that for that reason there are no entrance exams or graduation diplomas, that attending these schools doesn’t lead to any pre-determined result?
I think that these are the basic aspects which are understood as essential throughout the world. In Grundtvigian terminology, one speaks of “life-enlightenment”. This “school for life” is adapted to each country’s special conditions, and can thus take on quite different expressions. I will limit myself to a discussion of the latest branches of Grundtvigian thinking: the Grundtvigian Institute which has recently been set up in Nigeria, and “The Australian folkhighschool-movement”.
The Danish Højskolebladet [Folkhighschool Journal] told its readers in May, 1986, about an experiment in “life-enlightenment”, which was quite fascinating.
A course was held at Askov in 1982 as a follow-up of a meeting in 1980 about “The possible use of Nordic folkhighschool ideas in developing lands”. A participant in the Askov course was a Nigerian with a doctoral degree from the University in Ibadan. It seemed clear to him, that this “life-enlightenment” was exactly what was needed in a country where the educational system quite slavishly followed the British model. He therefore resigned from his official position with all its advantages and returned to the little town that he had come from. With the help of the whole local population, he set up a Grundtvig Institute, which began its work in 1984 with 7 pupils – compare Christopher Bruun! – and in 1986, had 70.
Apparently the people understood that they must change their situation and that this must come from a popular movement, if they would free the land from corruption and the steady power of the state and lead it along a democratic road. The Danish cooperators, to whom I refer here, were pleased to find “a local society, which to a broad degree builds on the same democratic ideals of agreement and coming-together as we know in Denmark” (at least, this was true until the communal reform in 1970).
Later contacts (February 1987) with this Grundtvig Institute result in more reserved impressions. The institute departs from fundamental Grundtvigian ideas and is more like a higher vocational school than a folkhighschool. This is certainly ines-capable; it was explained to the Norwegian visitor (Kåre Grytli), that the authorities on whom financing depended were not yet prepared to approve a really Grundt-vigian project.
One can perhaps sum up the situation thus: the project is remarkable in its original form. There is talk about “life-enlightenment”, about the struggle to advance cultural identity and meaningful technological development. The reality appears to be quite different, but this is certainly not the first time that a gulf has opened between dream and reality. In any case, Danish organizations are ready to help the Nigerian “Grundtvig”, Kashi Ozumba.
The founding of the Grundtvig Institute in Nigeria started from below and was supported by “the base”. It is quite different in Australia.
“The Australian Folk High School Association, Ltd.” was founded at the same time, 1984, with close connections to the Ministry of Education. The Danish “highschool union” has followed the develop-ment of this association closely from the beginning.
Why was it necessary to create an institution which, according to what we are told, follows the Nordic folkhighschool model? Without doubt, it is first and foremost because “the [official] educational system is coupled to conditions which no longer exist”. It is therefore necessary to shape something decidedly new. The institution to come should be planned to enhance rural life, in a city or near it. It should be “a boarding school without examination rights and without a vocational curriculum.” The number of pupils should be limited to 50, and “the teachers should be expected to live at the school and to supervise the students to a reasonable degree.”
It is correctly announced that this will really be “a new institution with a new style”, and that it will have to do with “life”. But will the attempt to adapt “Grundtvigian fostering principles” to Australian social and economic conditions “agree with the best in the modern Danish folkhighschools”?
Australian society obviously has some special cultural problems. What does it mean “to be Australian in the 20th and 21st century”? To know the answer, one must try to “investigate the Australian character”. One must not forget “aboriginal studies”, that is, studies of the original population. One must take into account an important Australian problem: “cultural multiplicity”. Finally, one asks the question: “Is there an Australian identity?”
The institution will temporarily be installed in The Bandon Grove School. It had been intended to call it a Folk High School, but this unfamiliar expression worried people so much that it was decided to call it “Bandon Grove Live and Learn”.
Will these two branches of Grundtvigian thought come to live and grow?
The folkhighschool and postindustrial society
We have seen that the little world that circles around the American “Folk Schools” is very conscious of the deep-going and accelerating changes that affect our planet, shaken by a world crisis.
One of my Danish friends asks whether this is a crisis within the industrial soci-ety or a crisis of the industrial society. But it is much more, according to the definition of a “crisis” as something overpowering. We are now living through a fundamental change, which will definitely transform our society, as the change is irreversible.
Some Americans seem to feel that this change favors the founding of folk-highschools. In Australia, it has been declared that the educational system was planned for a situation that no longer exists. Therefore, new institutions must be created to meet new ideas and fill new needs. And so one turns to the Nordic folk-highschool.
In this “new society”, currently called “the postindustrial society”, wage-labor will be reduced to a minimum. Man must change his attitude toward work, and is no longer to be identified with his job. As is well known, in the old peasant society, one asked a person: “Where do you come from?” In the industrial society, the question is: “What is your work?” And if one no longer has a salaried employment, he is set aside, reckoned as displaced, one who no longer has a place in society.
This development leads to a dualistic, “double” society” one for those who are integrated in the production process, and another for those who are outside. And the last-named category is the one that is growing.
This development must be faced. We know, and it is often said, that “the folkhighschool originally was to be a counter-culture.” (Helge Severinsen in Nordic Newspaper for Adult Education, 1980, no. 5). More than ever before, we need a “counter-culture”, a massive and effective reaction, to escape the dehumanizing of our life and our culture. In this situation, the folkhigh-school can occupy a central place.
People must learn that loss of a salaried job doesn’t mean loss of human worth. It is also necessary to teach them that there are other places, other ways to work, than those the industrial society forces upon us. And aren’t there many such engaging attempts precisely within the folkhighschools?
Nobody can eliminate the modern technologies that invade our lives in giant steps. If technology is controlled by others than technocrats, the changes can occur that we desire. But we must never forget that technology is never neutral. One of our well-known philosophers, Professor Jaques Ellul, held a colloquium in Bordeaux in 1985, with the theme: “What Does Technology Transfer?” He affirmed: One never transfers a single piece of knowledge, but rather a whole set of these conditions: our habits, our culture, our social life, a special way of experiencing the relationship between the individual and society, something which for example eliminates that mystical and symbolic way of thinking that is the wealth of many developing countries”. (Article in Le Monde, 20/3 1985).
“Mystical and symbolic way of thinking” can of course not be programmed into a computer.
One can declare, as I have done several times in this writing, that the interest in mystical ways of thinking has awakened anew. It is an instinctive reaction for people who dare to save themselves from conquest by a society where science – as another French thinker says – has homogenized culture. For instead of taking its place among all the other aspects of culture, science dominates all of human life with its rationality, allowing no space for feelings, transcendance. “The scientific explosion” threatens “the destruction of mankind”, as Michel Henri says. The book that he published in 1987, is frankly called Barbarism.
Erich Fromm wrote: “We are living through a time when the promise of unlimited progress has turned toward defeat.”
Let us explore new paths and encourage confidence in the Nordic folkhighschool to plow new fields.
SOURCES
The historical part of this paper – unless otherwise stated – is built on sources from the doctoral dissertation by Erica Simon, Reveil national et culture populaire en scandinavie. La genése de la højskole nordique 1844-1874. Uppsala 1960. There is a complete bibliography in the dissertation.
As to the Epilogue, the following may be mentioned:
The bit about the Swedish folkhighschool: Up to Battle for the Folkhigh-school. A debate about the Swedish folkhighschool put together by Jan Peterson, Plebs publishers 1976.
And Ingemar Sallnäs: “The Folkhighschool in Sweden, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”
Article in the magazine Nordic Contact, October 1984.
For the citations concerning “Folk Schools” in America:
OPTION: Journal of the Folk School Association of America, 1984, 1985, 1986.
Myles Horton: “Influences on Highlander Research and Education Center, New Market, Tennessee” in Grundtvig’s Ideas in North America. Published by The Danish Society, 1983.
Frank Adams: “Highlander Folk School: Social Movements and Social Change in the American South” in Other Dreams, Other Schools by Rolland G. Paulston, 1980.
Articles about the folkhighschool in Nigeria:
Erik Høgsbro Holm: “Grundtvig is still living in Ubu” Høgskolebladet, May 5, 1986.
Kåre Grytli: “Nordfolk – a folkhighschool in Nigeria in appearance” Folkehøg-skolen, March 1987.
Among other French authors, the following are cited:
Claude Lévi Strauss: “Panorama de l’ethnologie”, Diogene¨1953.
Robert Jaulin: “Ethnocide, Ecocide, Suicide”, article in Roland de Miller’s “Les noces avec la terre”, Editions Scriba 1982.
by Erica Simon, 1989
Askov Højskoles Forlag
Translated by Kathryn Parke, 1998