{"id":638,"date":"2012-08-21T08:00:56","date_gmt":"2012-08-21T08:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/?p=638"},"modified":"2012-08-20T22:10:42","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T22:10:42","slug":"grundtvig-and-the-love-of-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/2012\/08\/21\/grundtvig-and-the-love-of-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Grundtvig and the Love of Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

These days, elev\/er<\/strong> (pupil\/s, student\/s) all over Denmark are coming back to school life after sommerferien<\/strong>\u00a0(the summer vacation). Sweating, with the sun shining through the classroom curtains, they\u2019re doing their best to rehearse and learn the answers the teacher would like them to write in their final eksamen<\/strong> [ekSAmen]. Everyone\u2019s competing with themselves and everyone else in order to get the highest karakter\/er<\/strong> (mark\/s, grade\/s). Well, not everyone: Some students don\u2019t get any marks at all, and have neither tests nor exams to prepare for\u2026 Welcome to the folkeh\u00f8jskole<\/strong>, one of the backbones of modern danskhed<\/strong> (Danishness) and perhaps one of the most notable Danish contributions to global culture\u2026<\/p>\n

\"Grundtvig\"<\/a>

Grundtvig as we like to see him: A wise old \u201dFather Denmark\u201d. \ud83d\ude42<\/p><\/div>Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig<\/strong> was a Danish priest, author and politician who lived from 1783 to 1872. He was a very influential person, and his texts and ideas are still very prominent in Denmark. N.F.S. Grundtvig, as he\u2019s usually called, wanted to free the minds, as he saw it, of his fellow Danes: Through folkeoplysning<\/strong> (general education, literally \u201dfolk enlightenment\u201d), everyone should get a chance to understand the basic things \u2013 like the history of your forebears \u2013 required in order to become a content and fully \u201dalive\u201d member of their society. In a way his mission was helping people to become \u201dfully human\u201d. Grundtvig believed that some of our most \u201dhuman\u201d moments occur when we\u2019re engaged in conversation with each other. Therefore he placed great emphasis on den levende samtale<\/strong> (the living conversation), rather than rigorist learning from books. Grundtvig loved modersm\u00e5let\u00a0<\/strong>(the mother tongue, which for Grundtvig of course was Danish!) and was fascinated by Nordic mythology. He was also a Christian who meant that religious faith should come from the heart and could not be imposed on anyone. In the same way people should not be \u201dforced\u201d to learn anything. They should learn out of love or interest, in order to grow as humans, and not to gather A\u2019s and B\u2019s in a list.<\/p>\n

Grundtvig\u2019s ideas resulted in the first folkeh\u00f8jskole<\/strong> [FOLkeh-hoy-skoh-leh], which opened its doors in R\u00f8dding in 1844. The first pupils were mostly young farmers.\u00a0Folkeh\u00f8jskole<\/strong> means \u2019folk high school\u2019, and today there are about 70 h\u00f8jskoler<\/strong><\/a> (as they\u2019re called in short) in Denmark, as well as several Grundtvig-style h\u00f8jskoler<\/strong> in other countries, from Norway to the US to Nigeria.<\/p>\n

Thousands of Danes have spent a semester at a h\u00f8jskole<\/strong>, and returned home with ideas about democracy and the value of art, knowledge and togetherness. The h\u00f8jskoler<\/strong> also play an important role in conserving and evolving the Danish song tradition.<\/p>\n

Most h\u00f8jskoleelever<\/strong> (h\u00f8jskole<\/strong> students) today are people in their early twenties who\u2019ve finished public school but don\u2019t feel ready yet for a job or further studies. They come to the schools to socialize and \u201dfind themselves\u201d and experience something out-of-the-box: sail a canoe, stage a play, take a course in pottery, learn Spanish<\/a>, sing in a choir\u2026 The courses usually last one semester, and include many optional subjects. Students pay for their stay, and eat and sleep at the school during the whole period. The place quickly becomes an osteklokke<\/strong> (cheese-dish cover), as we say in Danish: A world of its own, a place of joy and laughter and friendship, where the rest of the world seems oh so far away\u2026<\/p>\n

In a couple of days we\u2019ll be talking to three h\u00f8jskole<\/strong> survivors<\/a>. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

These days, elev\/er (pupil\/s, student\/s) all over Denmark are coming back to school life after sommerferien\u00a0(the summer vacation). Sweating, with the sun shining through the classroom curtains, they\u2019re doing their best to rehearse and learn the answers the teacher would like them to write in their final eksamen [ekSAmen]. Everyone\u2019s competing with themselves and everyone…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":2131,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[238011,238010,238009,238006,238005,238007,238008],"class_list":["post-638","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-danishness","tag-danskhed","tag-folk-hight-school","tag-folkehojskole","tag-grundtvig","tag-hojskole","tag-rodding"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":643,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions\/643"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}