The School and Lifelong Learning
Grundtvig fought for a school with popular education as the primary focus. The folk high school movement was an act against a conservative ideal of both education and culture. An act against an ideal of literacy and book-learning, a use of language unknown to common people and a learning ideal where the primary relation was between the individual and the book alone.
The movement therefore started as a row with the old school. Grundtvig fought for a public education as an alternative to the university elite. The folk high schools should be for those wanting to learn in general and to help people form part of human relations and society.
The folk high schools have changed naturally - some also radically - through time, but many of Grundtvigs core-ideas about the folk high school are still to be found in the way they are run today. The folk high school of today is engaged in a complex modern reality and influenced both by national, international and global questions.
One of the main concepts still to be found at the folk high schools today is “lifelong learning”. The schools should educate for life. They should shed light on basic questions surrounding life of people both as individuals and as members of society.
To Grundtvig the ideal was to give the students a sense of a common best and focusing on life as it really is. Therefore Grundtvig never set down guidelines for the future schools or a detailed description of how they should be run. He declared that the folk high schools should be arranged and developed according to life as it is and the schools should not hold exams because the education and enlightenment was a sufficient reward.
The essential element was and is the life at the schools. A folk high school becomes what it is because of the individuals of which it is made. Learning happens across social positions and differences – the teacher learns from the student and vice versa in a living exchange and mutual teaching. For Grundtvig dialogue across differences was essential – the ideal was that people must learn to bear with the differences of each other before enlightenment can be realized.
Read more about this topic: Folk High School
Famous quotes containing the words school, lifelong and/or learning:
“And this school wasn’t keeping anymore,
Unless for penitents who took their seat
Upon its doorsteps as at mercy’s feet
To make up for a lack of meditation.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The lifelong process of caregiving, is the ultimate link between caregivers of all ages. You and I are not just in a phase we will outgrow. This is life—birth, death, and everything in between.... The care continuum is the cycle of life turning full circle in each of our lives. And what we learn when we spoon-feed our babies will echo in our ears as we feed our parents. The point is not to be done. The point is to be ready to do again.”
—Paula C. Lowe (20th century)
“Ordinary time is “quality time” too. Everyday activities are not just necessities that keep you from serious child rearing: they are the best opportunities for learning you can give your child...because her chief task in her first three years is precisely to gain command of the day-to-day life you take for granted.”
—Amy Laura Dombro (20th century)