Development of Nordic liberal adult education and its influence on European adult education – from N.F.S. Grundtvig to the Grundtvig programme in Socrates 2.
Nordic liberal adult education or popular enlightenment dates back to the religious and social movements in the 19. century and to the Danish poet, clergyman and educational thinker N.F.S. Grundtvig. Spiritual founder of the Nordic residential folk high schools, he was answering to the political need to make farmers and citizens participate in public life. The folk high schools built on language, history and poetry, but even more important were the pedagogical methods deployed, the way the teaching was done. Understanding was based on the living word in true dialogue, and not on dry books, and the school for life was to deal with real life, not abstract matters as the ordinary schools for death. A core-element in the learning situation were the life-experiences of the participants, and teaching had to be based on and related to the life-experiences of the adults, if any hope of motivating them to continuing studies should survive.
A later member of the liberal adult education family were the evening schools and study-associations, which intended to play the same role for the workers, as the residential folk high schools did for the farmers. Later on study-associations were created by other political parties and ended by involving people from all layers of society.
This liberal adult education tradition still goes strong in the populations in Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, to the extent, that still today 25% of the Nordic adult populations (between 18-65 years of age) each year participate in liberal adult education courses.
The family includes today younger members like continuation schools, production schools, day high schools, open youth education, youth schools and clubs, and has influenced libraries and museums, radio and television. In recent times even the formal and vocational training as well as labour market training has become influenced by this educational thinking.
Pedagogical methods like the study-circle has had a big impact on recent European adult education organisations and ways of organising learning, and the ways of thinking, the value-based political education, the concept of knowledge, person and the world, has fundamentally influenced folk high schools and other learning organisations in Belgium, Germany, Britain, Holland, Poland, the Baltic countries, and others.
Grundtvig is thus an original thinker in general and civic adult education and learning, father of a long tradition for linking democratic issues and values to learning and learning opportunities of adults
ARNE CARLSEN
See also GRUNDTVIG
