By Jonas Møller
5th November 2018
We meet up in the large room in the midmost of the teachers’ houses. Apart from a couple of collapsible plastic tables and some chairs we have borrowed for the occasion, it is empty. The coffee is made, and someone has bought buns and put out folk high school songbooks. We should have been in the new folk high school building, but the construction work has been delayed, so we have to hang out here in the principal’s house adjoining it. We greet each other – folk high school teachers, the caretaker, the administrator, secretary, matron, kitchen manager, principal and vice-principal. It is Monday morning and the first working day for the 20 or so employees, who in just two months’ time will be bidding welcome to the folk high school’s first intake.
6th January 2019
The students arrive. There are 57 young people aged between 18 and 30, who have chosen to form part of the school’s first intake. They are just as excited as we are. Pitch up with far too much luggage, with parents, brothers, sisters, and their soon-to-be ex-boy/girlfriends. We have forgotten to make name tags, but their rooms are ready, there is coffee on the tables, and the kitchen was approved for use a couple of hours ago.
7th January 2019
The first morning assembly in the orange lecture room. I am the one to take it. Welcome to the folk high school. We are going to sing no. 89 in the folk high school songbook. I tell them about Grundtvig and his youthful infatuation with Constance at Egeløkke. He does not get her, but the young Frederik, who is otherwise so rational and cold, has his eyes opened by this unrequited love and becomes aware of passion, poetry, myths and the power that love exerts on people. Without Constance and this infatuation, we would have had no folk high schools in Denmark is my somewhat bombastic and poetic claim. I tell them about my grandfather, too, who as an 11-year-old was forced by poverty to work on a farm but later went to a folk high school, which made all the difference to his life and, by extension, to mine. I have not told anyone about this before and feel deeply moved myself. Unfortunately, I do not think it had quite the same effect on the students.
14th January 2019
It is Monday morning. Nine o’clock, and I am telling the students that today we are going to talk about the emergence of philosophy in ancient Greece, but first they are to take a songbook and accompany me outside. They look at me aghast, for out on the other side of the school’s blue entrance hall thick snow is falling wildly and piling in drifts. Once we are outside, without coats, I say that we are to sing no. 47, and when the students open their books and find that this is Brorson’s “Op, al den ting, som Gud har gjort” (Arise, all things that God has made) with its ten stanzas, no less, their scepticism about my didactic choice does not diminish. “We’ll get ill,” says one of them, while another suggests that we make do with the first and last stanza. I tell them they should pull themselves together, that a little cold never did anyone any harm, and that a song gets the circulation going. So I start up and deliberately set a very slow tempo. “Ooop, aaal den tiiing, som Guuud har gjooort…”, and the students cannot help smiling while at the same time shivering and taking refuge from the large, heavy snowflakes falling.
Det mindste græs jeg undrer på
i skove og i dale,
hvor skulle jeg den visdom få
om det kun ret at tale?(I wonder at the slightest blade
In wood or dale that drew me,
where should I summon wisdom’s aid
to speak about it truly?)
At the end of the third stanza the door opens and out rolls the cleaner’s trolley with Matron in a T-shirt pushing it, and when she, as a former church warden, hears what we are singing, she stops the trolley with a smile and joins in without needing the songbook.
Hvad skal jeg sige, når jeg ser,
at alle skove vrimle,
de mange fuglesving, der sker
op under herrens himle?(What can I say when I do spy
all wooded crowns enlivened
by many birds that swoop and fly
towards the Lord’s high heaven?)
After the fifth verse, I myself begin to feel the effects of the cold, and we increase the tempo, so the last five verses become a long accelerando that climaxes in the final “Amen”.
Back in the warmth of the school’s common room, we discuss what the song is all about, and the students focus mostly on the religious aspects of the text – the powerlessness of man before an all-powerful God, whom we have to place our trust in when we ourselves cannot manage to put something into words. They are most preoccupied – and most provoked – by the first and the last stanza, which admire God’s greatness and give heaven the final word. Instead, I try to get them to focus on the philosophical qualities of the song, which emerge from the verses in between, all of which start with the question, “What can I say?”. Without revealing that I have stolen the line from another folk high school teacher, I tell them that, of all the songs in the folk high school songbook, “Arise, all things” is the one that poses the most questions and offers the fewest answers. And that this makes it a decidedly philosophical song which glorifies man’s capacity to wonder and to ask questions for which there is no answer.
After a brief pause, I turn up with a trolley on which there are three large buckets. I gather the students and tell them that I am now going to try to short-circuit their brains and alter their perception of reality. I inform them that the one bucket is full of very hot water, the next of ice-cold water while the third contains luke-warm water. The task before them is that, one at a time, they are to place one hand in the cold bucket and the other in the hot one and to see how long they can keep them there. When they cannot manage any longer, they have to take their hands out and move across to the third bucket with luke-warm water and put both hands in it. Then they just have to feel what happens and what their body is telling them.
I had taken the idea from a teacher at university, who, as part of a lecture about Plato, illustrated the relation between sensory phenomena and the world of ideas by explaining how, as a child, he had experimented with putting his hands in cold and hot water in order to experience how the cold hand felt as though it was burning while the hot one felt icy cold. These two contradictory signals the brain was receiving from the body gave rise, according to my – slightly eccentric – teacher, to a mind-expanding and almost spiritual experience, in which he recognised that he could no longer rely on his senses and therefore had to re-evaluate his entire picture of the world and begin to philosophise. He concluded this anecdote by regretting that there at the university he was unable to subject us to the same experience before continuing the lecture with an account of Plato’s allegory of the cave. This story made an impression on me, and when I later became a folk high school teacher and was to start teaching Plato myself, it struck me that as a folk high school teacher I did not have to restrict myself to talking about it but had the freedom and the opportunity to just do it and in that way physically and sensorially make manifest what usually remains abstract and theoretical. First enliven, then enlighten.
After all the students have had their hands in the water, we gather together again. Even though they may not exactly have found they have had their picture of the world short-circuited, by sensing it with their own bodies they have grasped the point. We talk about the weird feeling of being disturbed in our sense impressions and in our perception of reality. Can we trust our senses? What is real? What is true? I give them an introduction to Plato and his time, before I ask the students to form small groups and read and discuss the extract from The Republic known as the allegory of the cave.
7th February 2019
Thursday morning. I deliberately arrive 15 minutes late for my philosophy class but have written, in advance, “Whose responsibility is it?” on the blackboard and have left sheets of paper on the tables with the quotation: “Enlightenment is mankind’s escape from its self-inflicted disenfranchisement”. We are to talk about moral philosophy, taking Kant’s categorical imperative as our starting point. I am apparently not sufficiently well-prepared: I talk too much myself, and after one lesson the students are completely knackered.
13th March 2019
Although it is not foggy, I do a morning assembly about Martin A. Hansen’s Løgneren (The Liar), the famous novel in diary form, whose first entry is dated 13th March. I conclude by inviting the students to join a study group where we will read and talk about the book together. Twenty students sign up for it and buy the book. That warms the cockles of an old folk high school heart.
15th March 2019
Folk high school party! All the staff and students join in, and we eat sushi, sing songs and drink cold beer. We have survived the first six weeks of our first semester. On 3rd March, we welcomed 13 new students, who were trying to jump onto our train at full speed. We prepared carefully, talked to the ‘old’ students about integrating without assimilating, about making space and being open. But still it was bloody hard, and we have made a list of the first 15 things we have to do better and differently next time. But right now there is an effing party going on, all 70 students are still on board, and in a bit the staff band is going to play Westlife’s “We got a little world of our own” for the students.
4th April 2019
Today, we lost our first student. She came to me last week and told me that she did not really feel happy and that she was not sure she should stay on here. It was a surprise to me, as I thought she was getting on fine. We tried to help her, but there was nothing to be done about it. Everyone gathered to say their goodbyes in the evening sunlight behind the school. The students themselves had arranged to make a circle and sing ‘their’ song, which two of them had written after the first month.
Skåler, skråler sange, som vi ikke kender,
alt for meget kaffe, jeg får gule tænder.
Men dine røde kinder gør det helt orange.
Ved, at du er modig, for du tog en chance.(Cheers and here’s to songs we do not know but bellow,
Drinking too much coffee made my teeth go yellow.
But your cheeks are red and make it all turn orange.
Know you grasped your chances, that you have the courage.)
It was a really heartfelt and tender moment that the students themselves took care of. She was fetched half an hour ago, and I have just been handed her keys by one of the other students.
6th April 2019
Sitting at my computer. I have stupidly agreed to write a piece about enlightenment for life for the folk high school’s anniversary at the same time as I am starting a brand-new folk high school. The deadline for submission has passed, but do a couple of days matter when folk high schools have existed in Denmark for 175 years.
