The folk high school as laboratory

By Dagmar Winther

“Become the best version of yourself” is a slogan that can be used to sell anything: educational course, skin care, membership of fitness centres, coaching sessions, sub­scriptions to magazines and weeklies. It grabs our atten­tion, as all good clichés do.

“Become the best version of yourself” is a dreadful expression. Underneath that bland exterior lies an inbuilt criticism, an unhelpful fixation with self and, at the least, a huge task. “How good is ‘best’”? And what does good mean, anyway? A process of optimisation. A performance. And anyone working with young people is familiar with their focus on performance, their anxiety about failure or missing out on something, about not succeeding in all aspects of their lives. Young people encounter it every­where. When exactly is it that we can be together without having to perform?

“Become someone else” has a different ring to it. A bit schizophrenic and expansive. But there is also something liberating in it. In the idea that you can step into a space where a transformation is possible.

This is the space that young people step into at a folk high school. That is why such schools work. They are based on the special quality that we might call transformation or simply change. Democracy is dependent on us wanting the best for each other. As Bernie Sanders’ presidential cam­paign so rightly asked: “Are you willing to fight for some­one you don’t know?”

This is where the folk high school allows time. Time to get under each other’s skin, to mir­ror themselves in each other and to flower. This is a fine process that we who work at folk high schools always fol­low with pleasure.

Dagmar Winther

And we seldom are. First, we would like to fight for those whom we do know. Fighting for others come second. But it does come. The feeling of wanting to take responsi­bility along with a feeling of need and necessity and, not least, of entering into relations with others. Then again, we have to feel that we can do it. That transformation is possi­ble. We fight best for what we hold most dear.

But love at first sight is not necessarily what hap­pens when folk high school students look each other over on their first day and anxiously take in each other’s pierc­ings, tattoos and scars. This is where the folk high school allows time. Time to get under each other’s skin, to mir­ror themselves in each other and to flower. This is a fine process that we who work at folk high schools always fol­low with pleasure.

This process of coming into flower might well be called a process of discovery and unfolding potential. And to a large extent that is what it is. But the true magic comes about when students discover the opportunity for transfor­mation. The way folk high schools frame this process is dis­creet but absolutely crucial. It is all about a calm insistence on those ways of working that make transformation possible.

At our folk high school, there are really very few rules, and those there are are dynamic. Most of them can be dis­cussed and negotiated. The most important thing for us is to work to help students to experience the transformative potential in their opportunities to take responsibility for themselves and for each other. To feel they are contribut­ing just as much for the sake of the community as they are for their own benefit. That they are involved and are given space in teaching processes, and that they find inspiration in the forms of togetherness that we practice. And that they discover each other.

Mette

It was one of the school’s cohorts that had kicked off with some hardcore partying. By day two they kept arriving with crates of beer and, reluctantly, locked them away again when we reminded them that the first week was alcohol-free. Having fallen in love with each other and with the folk high school concept, they let rip as soon as we let it go. Our ambitions about giving students a say and about democratic participation boomeranged on us; they felt our opposition to alcohol except at weekends was rigid and undemocratic.

In no time, a group of students of course put together a majority for lifting the ban, which we refused to do. Our insistence on dialogue, on getting them to see the whole pic­ture and to see that there were those who would suffer under a looser alcohol culture did not succeed. The battle lines were drawn, with an unpleasant atmosphere at daily meetings, infringements of the ban and a divided group.

Mette was one of the good, strong and feisty girls who love folk high school and partying and all the fun and games. She was academically bright, good at taking the lead, popular and in every way a girl with masses to offer. For her, parties were an important part of her time at school. And Mette was determined to take up the fight with us and with the rules. She argued that, as a school, we could not ignore the culture that young people were part of. We should not, she felt, be a bell jar, and our restrictions were based on prejudice and were divorced from reality. Like so many other strong students before her, she was unable to see the problem – for surely everyone was welcome to join in?

We should not, she felt, be a bell jar, and our restrictions were based on prejudice and were divorced from reality.

Dagmar Winther

Mette was very good-natured in her insistence. She returned to us a number of times, tried out her arguments on her parents at home. She really wanted to understand our stance. One evening she sat yet again in the teachers’ common room discussing the issue.

“You are hopeless,” she muttered. “Why is it you think it’s oh! such a no-no to drink alcohol?”

“There’s nothing wrong with alcohol,” I replied with a tired yawn. “But you’ve been partying every weekend for your entire time at high school. Don’t you think you could soon do something different?”

That made her think.

A couple of days later, she came up to me in the din­ing hall.

“If it’s just because we have to do something differ­ent, then in a way I can understand it,” she said and left the room.

I met her many years later, and we spoke of it. For her it was the “something different” that had made all the difference. Not something better, but something different.

It is possible to give yourself a new experience. Possi­ble to encounter something different – and become some­one else.

Mads

Mads was fed up to the back teeth with the thought of hav­ing a theme week. Not just a theme week – a creative pro­cess in which everyone would play a part, and it would end up with a piece of total theatre. Not everyone’s cup of tea but nevertheless with a role for everyone. Those less used to being on stage could play in the band, work with stage­craft or do PR work. Mads had never before had to suffer such a total waste of time. He was academically bright and had come to folk high school to learn more in his subject area. He could accept that he had agreed to form part of a community committed to each other, but that was a far cry from spending a whole week on something as trivial as this. It was just too much. And our insistence that his par­ticipation was important and necessary was received with some reluctant shaking of the head.

Mads in effect sabotaged the entire week for his work group. Every idea ran up against his cold irony or deafen­ing silence. We interceded and appealed to him. And he climbed dutifully into his costume and did what he had to, but there was no mistaking his lack of involvement. Typi­cally, on the night his performance was one of the best, for Mads had both talent and a fine sense of comic timing. He received the audience’s applause with due stoicism.

A few years later, I met Mads at our student party for past students. He was well into his degree course. Things were working out for him as they often do for lads like that.

There was something he wanted to tell me, but typi­cally for him, it was hard for him to spit it out. Finally, he pulled himself together.

“I have to say that I am not terribly proud of myself about that week,” he said.

“And now I’ve had to listen to that – on top of everything else!” I said. “The way you kept complaining.”

“Ok, ok. But I did stand up there on the stage, and I actually think I was pretty good in the role of narrator. I mean, it was fun playing theatre. And I think I was good at it,” he said.

“You certainly were.”

“Weeell. Perhaps one ought to become an actor if I get fed up with the other stuff. But I just wanted to say that it wasn’t really the worst week in the whole world.”

“Well, blow me down!”

“Yeah, right?”

It is possible to give ourselves a new experience. It is possible to becoming someone else. It is not rocket science to suggest that communities of togetherness can transform us. It is just so rare to get the opportunity to form part of them for long enough for it to be truly transformative; and for the framework that allows togetherness to be lived out to be set up dynamically enough for it to be liberating. This is where the folk high school finds its main justification. We stand here long enough for us to see each other in ear­nest. But we are also here long enough to help each other towards transformation. It is possible to give ourselves a new experience. It is possible to become someone else.

The folk high school as a democratic laboratory

A democracy that is under pressure requires special atten­tion if it is to thrive again. If there is one thing that we have become aware of during these recent turbulent years, it is that we cannot take democracy for granted.

A folk high school like Rønde is designed to prepare students for higher education, and when we find ourselves talking to the educational institutions where we will be sending our students, they tell us how enthusiastic they are about students from folk high schools. But that is not simply because of their academic ability – that is what they will be acquiring on their courses.

It has more to do with their understanding of the importance of togetherness. A student counsellor on a mid­wifery course told me that the wonderful thing about folk high school students is the natural way in which they take care of togetherness. They naturally bring the chairs to­gether to make up a group or invite the others to join in a study group, or set up a party committee, or involve a broad swathe of their fellow students. In the world of higher and further education, where drop-out rates are high and loneliness is a major problem, folk high school students are part of the solution.

In the world of higher and further education, where drop-out rates are high and loneliness is a major problem, folk high school students are part of the solution.

Dagmar Winther

Democratic practice takes many forms and is inter­preted in many ways at different folk high schools. What their particular ways of working with it might be is not necessarily the thing that matters most. What is par­ticular to this form of school is the constant insistence and focus on togetherness. And putting into words the necessity of maintaining togetherness. And the time to allow it to take effect.

At folk high schools, considerations of togetherness come first. This finds expression in the encounter between teachers and students and among the students themselves. Teaching, social interaction, partying, meetings, morning assemblies, shared meals – every space at a folk high school is influenced and inspired by such considerations. Learning is not an individual and back-breaking phenomenon that takes place in a separated classroom or in front of specially adapted screens. Folk high school learning is learning for life – that’s something we have known for generations – and folk high school learning is a highly social phenomenon, which reflects human beings’ relations to and dependence on each other. Teaching is not a matter of instrumental learning but of a learning that is warm, that is in the interests of life and makes sense from the point of view of a lived life. It is in communities of togetherness that people become what they are and what they want to be. We believe that the folk high school as a concept is the surplus that society invests with regard to its future.

But it does all depend upon people knowing that it is possible to become someone else.