Set yourself free in Kalleby

By Lars Andreassen, Kristian Kornerup Bang & Stig Gamborg Hansen

The stage light is on and the audience is excited as the band lets the first chords flow towards the hall. Julia is on stage with her back turned towards the audience and the spot­lights shine up her blonde hair that falls down her shoul­ders. Her clear and powerful voice puts words into melodies and sends them towards the audience. But she does not turn around. The audience will never see her eyes. She really can sing, but she dare not. Or, rather, she almost dare not. That she stands there singing at all is a big step forward, even if it is with her back turned to the audience. Especially because it is an audience that is unfamiliar to her. Just a month earlier this same girl disappeared when she was about to perform with the music team at an event at our school. She simply did not show up and nobody could find her.

What kind of fear or anxiety is it that binds her and prevents her from unfolding her talents and expressing herself freely? Indeed not just her, but so many other young people of her generation. It is not just Julia who is over­whelmed by anxiety and has trouble finding her way to the stage or just to the shared duties of the day, which the oth­ers must then do for her. This concerns many young people have these problems, and the tendency is increasing.

The causes of anxiety

In Denmark, we are good at taking note of young peo­ple’s increasing failure to thrive as human beings, but we are less good at exploring the reasons. A research project at Aarhus University points – if not to the direct reasons – then to some of the anxiety-amplifying mechanisms that make the problems grow. Mikael Thastum, who is profes­sor at The Institute of Psychology at Aarhus University and leader of the project Back2School, explains how many par­ents find it difficult to push their child with anxiety to go to school if this is exactly where the child has experienced stressful or anxiety-provoking situations.

When the parents give in, the child experiences an immediate relief and the parents avoid a hard and exhaust­ing conflict. Above all the parents avoid seeing their child suffer. None of us likes seeing that. But the problem is that anxiety is allowed to grow when we give in. What we see is negative reinforcement. As Thastum explains: “If you have parents who are very concerned about a lot of things and who do not believe that you can manage and learn from your experiences but who instead look after you all the time, then as a child you will typically learn that there is reason to be afraid.”

Rather than helping the children to confront the anxiety-provoking situations – which are everyday situa­tions and completely essential to the child’s development – the anxiety will grow out of controlin the worst cases, and limit the young person’s self-expression and chain them to their home.

Others have examined the reasons for young peo­ple’s increasing failure to thrive. They point to a number of thought patterns that over a period of years have grown big among young people and their parents in the Western world. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind pub­lished in 2018, co-authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Luki­anoff synthesize these tendencies into three bad ideas or the three big untruths. They go like this:

1. The fallacy of fragility: What doesn’t kill you, makes you weaker.
2. The fallacy of the emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The fallacy of us vs. them: Life is a battle between good and bad people.

These are the prevalent thought patterns that cognitive therapy is working to change in depressed patients. It was Greg Lukianoff, an expert in individual rights, who has also been treated for depression, who noticed that the thought patterns he tried to overcome in his own therapy had snuck into the everyday language of his students as they argued for their right to enjoy a safe and secure study environment free from harassment.

The problems arise from the best of intentions – the intention to take really good care of one’s children. Haidt and Lukianoff calls it ‘paranoid parenting’, ‘safetyism’ and ‘the decline of free play’.

The problems are as follows:

1. We rob ourselves and our children of a multitude of experiences if we want to protect them and ourselves from every discomfort. This of course becomes even worse if we also believe that unpleasant experiences will not make us stronger but weaker.
2. If our feelings always tell us the truth – that we are good enough as we are, and that our feelings are jus­tified – then we will always have an excuse for not confronting ourselves with other people’s opinion on a given matter.
3. If unpleasant feelings make us weaker, we always have an excuse to run off when our work becomes difficult or when we are challenged in the commu­nity by people with different opinions on things.

In short, we lose the ability to commit to the larger commu­nity. Instead we seek refuge in smaller, subcultural com­munities – perhaps even echo chambers – and voluntarily narrow our horizon of experience. We limit our chances of navigating the wild roads and crooked paths of our form­ative experience. But what is the solution to this problem?

Life in Kalleby

A teacher stood at the top of the piste, enjoying the view with a group of less experienced skiers. Only too late did Lea realise that we were aiming for the lift at the foot of the mountain. As a beginner she did not think she could make that trip. The teacher would not have brought her, had he not been convinced that she could do it. But it would get even worse. Fear of heights and chair lifts. Looking at her through the skiing goggles, the teacher could immediately see that he probably would not get her up in the chairlift, no matter how the trip went. And he would not initiate a discussion about safety and chairlifts at this point, since they both needed to focus on the descent that was so trans­gressive for her.

This is the great thing about skiing trips. You can­not turn around. You have to confront your insecurity, trust your abilities and go through with it. And Lea – and another girl in that group, by the way – actually did it, of course. She trusted her teacher enough to be able to show herself that she could do it, even though she was scared. Perhaps you ski the first couple of kilometres with your heart in your throat, but all along you can see the end of it.

And this is precisely what we want to show our stu­dents at the folk high school. That they can stay in a situa­tion (almost) no matter how they feel. In this manner, they learn to manage the ups and downs in life without running away. We consider this to be part of the basic lessons of life.

At the folk high school, we work to enable our stu­dents to stay in the situations they find provocative. We want to convey the experience that they actually become stronger and not weaker by doing so. We challenge them and we show them that the anxiety-provoking situation is not an eternal condition. Since autumn 2018 we have been playing with the metaphor ‘Kalleby’ in relation to our ped­agogical development work. As early as in 2011, however, one of the authors of this article wrote about the lost city of ‘Kalleby’. For the last 7-8 years we have more or less con­sistently targeted our work to help young people thrive as human beings as described above.

Kalleby is inspired by the universe invented by the Danish author of children’s books Ole Lund Kirkegaard (1940-1979). Kalleby is the name of one of Kirkegaard’s imag­inary towns, but we have made it encompass all his charac­ters. So, it is in Kalleby that the character Albert is dragged to school by his mother, even though he would rather be a pirate. He robs a shoemaker, digs traps for girls and finally sets out to explore the world in an old herring barrel. We also have other famous Kirkegaard characters such as Little Virgil, Orla Frog-Snapper and Rubber-Tarzan, who all live in Kalleby. And we do not discriminate based on their gender, as we find that all children should be able to experience life roughly as it is lived in Kalleby. Because it is an unpredictable environment, as every free environment must be. Kalleby is a common destiny. You do not choose to live there; you are born into it and you must navigate in it. Live with it or change the circumstances if you cannot live with them.

Of course, it is your own choice to go to a folk high school, but you do not get to choose whom you share the folk high school universe with. You meet people with low self-esteem (Rubber-Tarzan), you meet hard-nosed and swaggering, but kind-hearted types (the ‘smith’), slightly or very unpleasant people (Orla) or the kind of people who wants to go explore and often makes everyday life a little bit more magical (Albert, Topper). There are schoolteach­ers and piano teachers, sweethearts, merchants and shoe­makers, pickpockets and tramps. You meet people from all corners of life. And you must relate to all these people and their strange personalities and learn to live and work with them – also when relations are strained. We consider this a part of civic enlightenment and democratic formation.

Furthermore Kalleby offers ample opportunity for non-monitored play. There are drawings that come alive, girl-traps, treasures that must be found, one-legged roost­ers, artists and two-headed dragons. There is, in other words, room to create one’s own experiences – and grow to maturity as a person.