Bildung - A Conversation with Lene Rachel Andersen

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

So that is where we need as a civilization, as individual societies and communities, the education and definitely the building that allows us to create strong relationships, to build communities and to connect with other people and actually feel embraced and secure and safe. In the environment that we're in and to provide it for others.

Hi, thanks for joining me. My name's Tim Logan and the Future Learning Design Podcast is brought to you with the support of Notosh. This week's conversation is a precursor to the Global Building Day, which is happening this week on Wednesday, 21st of September. You can sign up and find out more with the link in the show notes. But my guest, the organizer of the day, is Lena Rachel Anderson, who is an economist, author, futurist, and building activist. After studying studying business, economy, and theology, she wrote entertainment for Danish television before becoming a full-time writer focusing on technological development, big history, and the future of humanity. Since 2005, Lena has written 20 books and received 2 Danish Democracy Awards, including the Danish Librarian's Democracy Prize in 2012. Among her books are The Nordic Secret, which she wrote in 2017 with Thomas Bjørkman, Metamodernity, Billedung, and her latest book, Libertism, published this year. She's also written a publicly available paper on building commissioned by the Erasmus+ programme for the European Union, and she is a full member of the Club of Rome, president of the Copenhagen-based Nordic Building, and initiator of Global Building Network, Global Building Day, and the European Building Day.

Hello, how are you?

Good, thank you.

Perfect. Thank you for joining me on the podcast. It's absolutely brilliant. I'm so interested in this concept of building to talk to you about. So thank you for joining me first off.

Thank you for inviting me.

Good. All right. So with the Global Building Day coming up and, and there's, there's an increasing amount of awareness, I would say, about this concept. Of Bildung, which is a strange beast, a strange, ill-defined beast.

Yes, a German word in the English language. Is it tourist? Will it settle?

Will it not? Exactly. So, but I think it has so much connection and resonance with education in the way that education is trying to move in all sorts of ways. So I'd love to talk about some of that. But the first thing is, what is it really? And kind of just maybe a little bit of the history that I've heard you speak about before. Of where it came from and why it came, like what purpose was it serving?

Yeah. So Bildung is not Bildung, it's Bildung. It comes from the German word Bild, which means image. And when we go back to the 1600s, it was the image of Christ. It was part of the religious, spiritual, very emotional movement of Pietism. And that's where Bach wrote all his amazing music. So it was about feeling, you know, of the spiritual development and evolving as a human being into the image of Christ or having the image of Christ as your goal. But then of course came the Enlightenment. And so in the 1750s, '60s, '70s, the religious concept of Bildung kind of disappeared in Germany. And instead there was this new concept of Bildung, which was part of the Enlightenment and which was secular. And so Bildung became the image of you in your full unfolding of who you are and becoming who you are. And among the first writers to write about it was the German philosopher Herder. And there was somebody like Kant who wrote about enlightenment, what is enlightenment. He wrote a very famous essay and where he says that enlightenment is to pull yourself out of your self-imposed immaturity and, and gaining majority. And then there was Friedrich Schiller, and then there was Fichte and Hegel and many others, including the Swiss pedagogue Pestalozzi. And so sometimes they called it Erziehung, so upbringing, which, I mean, even the English word upbringing is like you lift something up. We kind of forget it, but in German it's also to lift up. So we lift up the children into the adult life, into becoming a full human being, an adult. And Bildung is part of that process, and Bildung is also the goal. And so apart from this background, what is it? And the way that I have come to describe it now is that it's two different kinds of knowledge. And the first kind of knowledge is the one that is relatively easy to transfer from one person to the next. So that can be academic knowledge of math, science, languages, geography, or it can be more practical knowledge such as how to bake a bread or fix a bicycle or do something with your hands. And we can transfer that from person to person, so horizontally. And, and so I refer to that as the horizontal kind of knowledge. And you can expand your horizon in all, all directions with that. And you can keep going and going and going. And then there's the other kind of knowledge that is almost impossible to transfer from one person to the next. And I therefore, as a contrast to the horizontal knowledge, call it the vertical kind of knowledge. Which is the emotional depth and the moral aspirations, or moral depth and ambitions, height, whatever you want to call it. But it's your emotional and moral development, which can of course be very thin and shallow and not go very deep, but it can also go extremely deep. And it can go extremely deep from, I mean, you mainly get it from life experience and you also get it from struggling with the horizontal transfer of knowledge and with meeting culture and engaging in culture and reading. And literature is actually one of the best ways to transfer that kind of knowledge if we want to do it, because if you write a character well, the mirror neurons mirror the action of the character in a much stronger way than if you watch it on film, for instance, because reading is a very active process. You have to take that little, you know, black stuff on the white page and turn it into words in your own mind. And then from there you have to create pictures. So it's actually a very active process to read novels. And so there you can actually get the emotional development somewhat across. And you can be, you know, a single mother on welfare with no money. You can be a billionaire, you can be anything, and you can be at home in your favorite chair with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine or whatever. And you're going to have this emotional experience that you would otherwise not have. So we can transfer this vertical depth or knowledge and, and sort of stretch and train the emotional muscles, so to speak, but it's only indirectly. And most of this development comes from living life and making mistakes and having good experiences, bad experiences, and, you know, falling in love and heartbreak and having a child, raising a family, having a job, finding a job, keeping a job, interacting with people, and so forth. And the interesting thing about this kind of knowledge is that If I have an experience that you've never had and I try to explain it to you, you won't feel it. And you may have no idea what I'm talking about. But if I have heartbreak and you have heartbreak and you already tried it and I say, oh, I'm so, you know, my boyfriend just left and you go like, I know exactly what that is like. And then, then we can connect and then we have this shared deep emotional experience. So if other people have had the same or similar experience, we can, we can share our thoughts about it and tell about our feelings, but we cannot transfer this kind of knowledge.

It has to come through, through experience.

Yeah. And so the combination of the two is what Bildung is. And Fichte is one of the philosophers who gives a very concrete example when he says that Bildung comes from Anstoß, pushbacks. So whenever you sort of bump your head against the world and it's like, ouch, I didn't see that one coming, or dammit, what an idiot I've been. That is when the Bildung happens. So if you go through life and everything is just, you know, like when they play curling and everything is swiped away in front of you, you won't have a lot of Bildung. But if, but if you have struggles and things don't, you know, happen the way that you thought they would or hoped they would, that is when the Bildung happens. And when we look at the current education school systems, particularly the past 30 years, we have almost only focused on the transfer of horizontal knowledge. And we've been so afraid of entering into the moral sphere. I know I'm from Denmark. I know that in the '70s when I went to school, we had a lot of Marxist teachers and there was this huge communism scare and indoctrination scare, which made all teachers and all parents and all, you know, school boards really afraid that teachers would say anything that could be interpreted in any kind of way as either political or religious or moral or anything. And I think we've lost something really important. And we have, as a consequence, children who spend the major part of their awake hours during the day when they're most motivated among adults who are not giving them moral guidance because they're afraid of being, you know, called indoctrinating or whatever. And so how can children even learn that adults have moral values? And if they learn it from their parents and their I don't know, grandparents, uncles, and so forth. They may not know that people who have the complete opposite moral values are actually kind people. And one of them may be their math teacher who's actually very caring and helps them with everything. So I think we need to bring this back into the school system in the appropriate way. And it's easy for me to say because I don't have children.

So yeah, I mean, that's free, but it is, I mean, So there's a huge amount in there that I'd love to pick up on. So if we go, let's go back a few steps to the grown-upness. Vista calls it grown-upness, but that idea of the vertical development, and I think it feels like there's more and more conversation about that idea of vertical, but even, even in professional learning in, in businesses, enterprise, et cetera, we're beginning to acknowledge that this vertical development might play a role in the way that culture develops in an organization or whatever. And so We're taking time to look at it.

Oh, absolutely. We all know it. It's not, you know, rocket science. Everybody knows that being 10 years old is different from being 25 years old, which is different from being 45 years old. And everybody knows that if they have a really tough question, they may have to make a really big life decision, they ask their grandmother. I mean, so if they still have her around. So we know that wisdom comes with age, and we know that this emotional depth and this capability of taking other people's perspective, seeing things in their context and, you know, factoring in all kinds of different aspects and different perspectives and different factors and actors in whatever problem we're in or challenge. We become better at that with age. And so, so yeah, it's already there, but we've been very poor at talking about it lately.

But I think there's perhaps that my hope is that we're getting a bit better at talking about it. And the fact that we are talking about it is, you know, is an example of that maybe. But people like Keegan and that kind of idea of self-authoring, I'd love to just maybe spend a little bit of time on that. 'Cause I think that's a really useful frame, especially when you're working with children and you're thinking about, you know, Schiller's idea about moving from the kind of physical, emotional through to, through rational into self-governing.

Free. Free. Yeah. Responsible personality. And so if I should just Sum up what Friedrich Schiller said about 230 years ago, it is that he sees three kinds of people. And the first one is the person who's in the throes of his or her emotions and cannot transcend them. And then once you transcend your emotions, you usually do that by becoming the rational person who has internalized the norms and moral values and expectations of others. But that also means you're not free because then the expectations of others are defining what you choose to do and how you choose to do it. But you can also transcend this mode of being, so to speak, and become what he calls the free person. And the free person has the capability of combining, or actually has both, he calls them drives inside him. So the emotional drive and the rational drive, and he calls it the play drive or the freedom. So you can both feel your own emotions and you know what society is expecting, which means that you have this choice constantly. Do I follow the norms and what other people and, you know, what I usually do, or do my emotions actually tell me that, huh, this is maybe not the best choice, or this could be downright, you know, morally wrong 5 or 6 steps out into the future. I mean, right here at the sort of first step, it might be the right thing to do, but I see the bigger picture and I can tell how this is a problem. And so that capability, the process and the result, he calls Bildung, and he also refers to it as the upbringing. That's where the lifting up thing comes into the picture. And the interesting thing is that he calls it the, uh, aesthetic upbringing, or the book has the name, The Aesthetic Education of Man, but really it is upbringing. He talks about upbringing. And so from the emotional mode of being to the rational mode of being, he talks about aesthetics and the calming aesthetics that sort of brings us into, you know, alignment with our contemporaries in the society that we're in. And that can be music, it can be architecture, it can be all kinds of, you know, symbols. And then in order to transcend that, we need the aesthetics again. And now we need aesthetics that can, you know, wake us up and shake us up and allow us to feel the emotions again. So it's two different kinds of aesthetic pulling and pushing us out of one way of being. And, and I think we have kind of overlooked the aesthetic aspect. I mean, we've saved, you know, money on schools and gotten rid of music lessons, choir, painting, all the, you know, various crafts and aesthetics that, that at least used to be there when I was a kid. And then he also makes a very interesting observation because he writes this in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and he's part of the feudal society in the 1780s and '90s. And the bourgeoisie were like so enthusiastic about the French Revolution because finally one of the tyrants fell. So now they, they could probably have, I mean, that was what they were hoping for, political freedom. And then the French Revolution turns into this bloodbath and they're like, oh, wow. Oh, if that is the alternative to tyranny, maybe political freedom is not such a good idea. Can this really be true that we cannot have political freedom? Will it eventually always end in a bloodbath? And that is where Schiller comes in and writes this and says, so the emotional person cannot handle political freedom because in case of a revolution or if they're just angry, they will react with, with violence and riots. And that's a no-go. The rational person who takes their moral guidance and directions from other people's expectations and sort of mirror what is, what is going on, they will just run after the emotional people. And so they can't stop by themselves. The only people who can handle the political freedom are the free people themselves. And so because they can feel that, yes, Latijn felt that's good. But that does not allow us to create a bloodbath and just go hunting for everybody else that we do not like. And so I, I think this, this connection between the political freedom and the emotional development, I haven't seen others do it. I know that there are some philosophers, psychologists out there who, who get close, but I, I've not seen it in connection with political science, for instance. And I think it's really crucial that we keep this in mind, particularly as things are changing a lot in our world. And a lot of people are going to suffer from anxiety and anger and frustration for a good reason, because the way that the, the world used to be is dissolving. And people do not have the education or practical skills necessarily to make a living in, in the new economy. And a lot of people are losing their economic foothold, their cultural foothold, their educational foothold, just their foothold. And when that happens, it's dangerous. And so we need to have a political debate. We need to have a public discourse that does not talk about, what is it, back baskets of deplorables or whatever you might, from a very academic point of view, be tempted to call people who are losing in the current changes. So, so that is where we need as a civilization, as individual societies and communities, the education and definitely the bildung that allows us to with the horizontal transfer of knowledge, understand intellectually what's going on and have the skills that allows us to make a living and grasp the opportunities that are still there, but also the, the emotional depth and the connection to culture, to ourselves and to others that allows us to create strong relationships, to build communities and to connect with other people and actually feel embraced and secure and safe in the environment that we're in and to provide it for others. And this is where the emotional development comes in, and particularly in leadership where some of this developmental psychology has been used.

So one of the things I wanted to move on to, which comes out, maybe I could kind of draw out of what you've just said, some of the things that I hear in relation to what you could call formal education, schooling, university, because this concept of Bildung has a particular heritage and is talking about certain things. And it's so moral development, civic development, you know, engaging as a citizen, character development, emotional regulation, self-regulation, all of those types of things that's going on, right? And what's really interesting is that not everywhere, but certainly within certain areas of formal education, even the work that some of the people like the OECD are doing, talking about your kind of internal compass in their Education 2030 work. There's, there's all sorts of resonances of what you've been talking about that are beginning to be talked about in education, more mainstream, as I say, not everywhere. And there are still many people just focusing on the—

There's threads popping up.

Exactly. But the horizontal development stuff is obviously still there, right? The knowledge and skills in order to pass the exams for the instrumental kind of feeding of the machine, of the economy, that's all still there. But there is this character development, the values, the moral development, the civic, you know, global citizenship, these kinds of terms are really coming in. And even actually the experiential element, you know, you were talking about the kind of transformative learning idea about pushbacks and where you would experience something where it forces you to reflect on certain things because you've had a difficult or painful experience. That may be in school, more likely it's in your life elsewhere. But there's more of that kind of, how do we simulate the kind of experiential learning in young people's lives in a school context? So what I'd love to talk about is how could, how might Bildung inform and strengthen that kind of conversation that's happening within schools? Because again, there's roots, there's deep roots that you've just described it back into history of this concept and this, this mode of development that's critically important and perhaps we've ignored.

Right. So what, what I see happening and what I see in some places, not all places, but psychology is beginning to play a huge role. Psychology is different from pedagogy and psychology is an excellent analytical tool. So psychology can make the analysis and look at the individual or look at a classroom or look at a group of people or at an entire society or as the species as a whole. And then it can say, oh, we have this kind of decision-making. We have this complexity of mind. We have these emotions are, you know, present in the decision-making, whatever. I mean, so psychology is an analytical tool that can tell us a lot about what is going on inside the individual. But it's not the teaching tool. Pedagogy has in it psychology. It also has anthropology and sociology, plus the Fingerspitzengefühl— to introduce another German word— I think the sense of, I cannot put a word on this, but I have these 25 kids in the same room and somebody's cat died, and I can say whatever I want until we're done with this dead cat. I can't do anything.

Exactly.

So pedagogy is, is fundamentally different from the nice boxes or, you know, descriptions that psychology can come up with. And I know that psychology is messy as well, I'm not saying it's not, but it's— you cannot enter the classroom with psychology and think you can teach. You can enter the classroom or any social context with psychology and learn and see what is going on, but the ability to do anything about it is different. So that's one thing. The other thing is that psychology— I don't know if it's psychology itself that does it, or if it's administrators and business leaders and business consultants and that whole side of things where it's, it's administration and we need to produce results and we need to tell our government or our stockholders, whatever it is, that we're doing the right thing and that we can measure improvement. And so the way that psychology makes an analysis, it's extremely handy for people with spreadsheets because you can set up some goals and you can define, we would like all kids or all adults or all leaders or whoever they are to have these qualities in their way of behaving. And this is radically different from pedagogy and from Bildung because once you set up a goal, first of all, it's, you want to pull everybody in the same direction or in two different directions or whatever, but you, you define where you would like people to go or what you would like them to become. And by then you're almost certain to set people up as failures. Whereas pedagogy and Bildung starts with the individual and the context and say, so here is this child or this adult, and they come with this, and that can be, you know, 3rd grade reading skills, 4th grade math skills, and a very creative mindset, or it can be, you know, different things. And you always begin with the individual and what you want is the individual to to unfold. And you want that as a teacher, you want that as a pedagogue, and you want that as a Bildung philosopher and from a Bildung perspective. And this always takes place in a cultural context, in an emotional context, in a— Schuller has a wonderful word that I just discovered because I started reading his text in German. He calls us Zeitbürger, citizens of time, time citizens.

Nice.

So we're all a product of the time that we're in, and so we all need to, you know, adjust to that and fit into that. And that's part of the building process. And with that— and that's the art of being a teacher and the craft of being a teacher— which is to see where's the— and I'll bring in Vygotsky— there's a zone of proximal learning. What is it that this particular student is just about to understand, and how do I add that one or two or 300 things that allows this particular child to, you know, move into the next zone of proximal learning. And that is what pedagogy and teaching is about. And I tend to blend pedagogy and teaching because I think good teaching is, you know, there's so much pedagogy in it. And you can do this as a psychologist, but you have to realize that now you're changing profession. Another thing that I find deeply troubling and that I see rather often is that some of these, instead of developing people's character, which would be the, the goal of Bildung, emotions are talked about as skills. Empathy, for instance, as a skill, or co-creation is a skill, or the ability to listen and listen deep. And if you see this as a skill, it's like a tool, like You know, the skill to hold a hammer and hit a nail and not your fingers. That's a skill. It is not part of your character. It's something you can learn and you can use it or not use it. It's a skill. Whereas Bildung and emotional development is an integral part of your character. And you only have it once it is you. So what we want, or what I want, what we want, what is the tradition of Bildung and of education and pedagogy? Is that we want character development so that empathy is part of who you are. It's not something you walk in and out of as a skill. It is something that needs to be developed, and so that you actually feel it. It's not just something that you recall in a situation where things are getting out of hand and you're like, I got this emotional skill called empathy, let me show some of it. Yeah, yeah, 70, because 50 was not enough. And if I really have to make an effort, I can go up to 99, but I won't go to 100, not with these people. I mean, it's not how we function as, as human beings. And so one of the things that we have lost in a lot of kindergartens and daycare is that, I mean, all mammals play and they tumble, rough and tumble play. And part of it is in order for the kids to actually hurt each other. And when they hurt each other, they can tell from the facial expression of their little peers that, ouch, and that's a pushback. It's like, oh, he started crying or she started crying. And now there's one of the adults looking at me with this very dissatisfied expression on their face, talking in a very harsh voice. I should not do this again. It actually hurts me. I feel shame. I feel emotional pain. So that is not where I want to go again. And so that is where I learn empathy. And it's a nasty and painful way of learning empathy, but that is how it becomes part of me. And if we think that we can just sort of add it later in life and tell them about it and then have them perform it as a skill, then we've misunderstood what empathy is. And one of the things that I think is so crucial with Friedrich Schiller, and we can also, I mean, bring in Robert Kegan if he's more familiar to the listeners, is that Kegan's 5 phases or stages of development, the young child, the older child, self-governing, self-authoring, and self-transforming. 2, 3, and 4 here matches Schiller's 1, 2, and 3. So what Keegan calls the older child matches the emotional adult or physical adult that Friedrich Schiller talks about. So some very immature adults in the late 1700s in Schiller's society, but I still have some of those around.

Probably still, maybe us sometimes.

I'm not mentioning not mentioning any presidents or anywhere in any countries I could get in. Exactly. I could get in trouble. But we still have adults who are caught in their emotions and who cannot transcend them. The self-governing is what Schiller called the rational person. They use different words and they focus on different aspects, but it's obvious that they've noticed the same thing. They're describing the same phenomenon. And then the free person is what Keegan calls self-authoring. And in our society, which is so focused on the individual and on individualism and autonomy, I think that we have created a culture that is so focused on individualism that it's almost looked down upon to go through that phase, which is the self-governing, the rational phase. A plus word for this phase is to be a team player. And it's crucial that children learn to become team players. And one of the best ways to do it, or one of the really good ways, is to play on teams, sports teams. And it's not just about learning to play soccer, football, whatever you want to call it, or baseball or anything else. The real learning, the real bildung, is that you learn the hard way that if you do not show up for a game and all your friends are there and they have to be 11 players on the team and they're only 10 because you weren't there, they're not going to talk to you on Monday. And they're not going to play with you for a couple of weeks because you let them down and they couldn't, you know, play that soccer game. And so that is part of what you learn to play when you play a sport. Another thing that you learn, which is also crucial, is that— so there is this, you know, green field and it has all these white stripes. On one side of the stripe, you can touch the ball with your hands. On the other side of the stripe, you can't. And so, you know, crossing that white line. Changes the rules. And that is actually a huge mental shift that you have to understand. And when they're 5 years old, they have a really hard time doing it. 6 years old, some of the kids, I think, begin to grasp it. And at 7, it's like, it's there. And then when they're 12, they should be such strong team players that they appreciate to play by rules that they have not made themselves, but they are not mature enough to be able to create rules for everybody that everybody is also capable of, of keeping. And that takes a more mature adult or young adult. Yeah.

That's the marbles, isn't it? Piaget's marbles. There's something about them developing their own rules of the game. So again, there's so much in what you've just said. And just to go back to the question about kind of holding formal education up against bildung, one of the things that I see happening, and let's go back to the OECD, and they're a perfect example of doing this, is there's almost a desire to find a way to more efficiently develop the attributes that we say that we want, right? So we say, let's say we want creative problem solving in our young people, or we want collaborative, you know, team playing, as you were talking about. So let's, we write a rubric and we define what that thing is, you know, we define the layers of it. And then we, as educators, we then support the children to work through that and to kind of get better at that. We give them feedback, we support them, and then we assess them in order to enable their more efficient growth of this. And it is often, not always, but it is often framed as a skill because it's a learnable, it becomes a learnable set of procedural knowledge that you can acquire. So then it kind of puts it back into this horizontal development stuff almost, right? Whereas what you are talking about is a much more authentic, perhaps experiential learning of the things, and therefore you can't feed it into a, exactly, and a kind of instrumentalized metric-based system with desired outcomes up here. And then you are supporting, pushing often these young people through that, what is pretty much linear journey to that place. And I think that's one of the fundamental kind of existential challenges that education has now because you've kind of got this post-neoliberal kind of spreadsheet-based mentality that it's outcome-oriented. We've gotta guarantee the outcomes and therefore We need to know what the outcomes are going to be ahead of time. And then we've got to guide, instruct, support, push children through and into those outcomes.

I think that what you risk getting, and I do not have data on this, but what you risk getting is a performance.

Exactly.

And you get, you know, young people, you get adults, you get children who know what they get rewarded for, but they don't feel it. And so they can perform a task. And I, I can use an example from, from my own life, which is that I have a rather high IQ, which means that I did not fit into the existing school system and the class that I was in. And when you're 7 or 8 years old and you, you know, do your math, you know, in a split second and everybody else has to go home and do their homework. And you're just, you know, hungry for more constantly. And the teachers get kind of fed up with you because they don't have time to entertain you for those last 20 minutes of each lesson, and you become this, you know, annoying factor in the classroom. The experience that I had was that if I underperform, I get the same kind of praise that the other kids do. So I learned a performance that fit the classroom, but I did not feel seen and respected and appreciated for all the stuff that I really contain and all the potential that I mean, I share. And so it led to a lot of frustration and led to a lot of— I mean, if I went back to my 7-year-old, or at least definitely the 10-year-old me, and said, one day you will be talking warmly about school teachers and the importance of school and education, I would have been like, you're doing what?

Yeah.

There was all these teachers who ruined my, my, you know, best hours of the day by not, you know, allowing me to unfold what was inside me and all the stuff that I wanted to show them because like all the other kids, I wanted to show them everything that I could. I wanted to show them that I was a good child, that I was, you know, could live up to their expectations, but I had to live down to their expectations instead. And if we tell kids, so this is the goal, we want you to be able to collaborate like this and we want you to be able to feel like this and we want you to be able to have the skill and the skill and this skill. You can emulate the skill, you can show the performance. I mean, I did that for 9 years when I wasn't drawing and looking out the window and spitballs and doing other kinds of stuff.

Yeah.

You don't get the emotion and you don't get that sense of commitment to the people in the room. And you don't get that sense of, I belong here. Luckily, I did feel that I belonged among my classmates and I still to this day look at these other 24 people who are now in their mid-50s as the closest I ever had to siblings because I was also an only child. So I did have the, you know, the friendship and I played a lot of soccer and I did a lot of, you know, fun stuff. But the relationship to my teachers was not honest. It was a performance. Yeah. And, and we don't want to have children performing for 5 to 6, 7, I don't know how many hours per day. For something that they don't feel. And that is why we need pedagogy and didactics and psychology and anthropology and sociology and these many other aspects of teaching and of, of bringing children up. And so we need this other aspect and we need to create room for it and we need to be willing to pay for it. And you can't measure it. I would say some of the goals should absolutely be a useful sort of, you know, leading guideline star kind of thing for the teachers. I mean, if we say all 3rd graders ought to be able to do this and that, that is a good guideline and it's good for teachers to know that, okay, that is where we ought to, you know, be at the end of the year. But for somebody to actually go in and measure or say, so, uh, half the kids are at 70% and 2 of them actually reached the goal and exceeded it, and then the rest 'No, hit the mark.' It's like, that, that's not going to create functioning young people and adults. And one more thing, there's a weird thing to talk about when we talk about kids, but if they don't get to fight, if they don't get to feel their own body together with others, if they don't get to feel their own emotions and be honest about them, if they don't get to express that, if they don't feel respected for the emotions and the desires that they have— doesn't mean that they should do anything they want to do, but it means that the adults should recognize it and reflect that this is going on. They're going to be poor lovers as adults.

Yeah.

And they're going to have a terrible sex life because once you go into intimacy sexually with another human being, you want the other human being to be able to read your, your body language. And if you cannot read body language and if you cannot, you know, have that dance back and forth in intimacy, you're not going to have a satisfying sex life. And then you're going to pursue all, you know, all other kinds of stimulus in order to, you know, connect sexually. But you're never going to have that really deep emotional connection that is also connected to, to sex and to that intimacy. I don't know how many parents are interested in hearing that about their children, but it's a crucial point because they're going to have a love life that's—

yeah, no, I mean, it's certainly the first time we've talked about Satisfying Sex Lives on the Future Learning Design Podcast. However, I completely agree with you in the sense that it's about the full development of individuals. And if we are talking about performance and dishonesty in a system that is, that is about meeting a certain set of very narrow requirements that don't speak to the fullness of your development in terms of, you know, the way that you are, the way that you care, the way that you love, the way that you, you know, are intimate with other people. Then it's incredibly narrow. And, and also to your point, it's so up in your head, right? It's so propositional that all of that embodied knowing is completely removed. So you kind of got this incredibly thin, superficial experience that is not only thin and superficial, but often is very dishonest because we're trying to fit the mold. And of course, this is not, you know, this is not to kind of damn the entire system, because there's all sorts of positive things that happens and relationships that develop between people despite the system, I would say, because it's still populated by human beings who are interested in that primarily, most of them.

But I mean, take a value like honesty. If that is not a feeling that you have and bring with you, you're just going to perform honesty and not give a damn about whether you lie or cheat or, you know, steal your peer's lunchbox or something. And you cannot, you know, dedicate 2 hours to honesty and think that the children learn it. That is where the upbringing comes in. So when a child, you know, lies or cheats or cannot figure out how to play a game or something, and they're dishonest, that is when you catch it. That is when you say, what did, what did you just do? Was, was that really what you're meant to say? I mean, you can do it in different ways and depending on the age of the child and so forth. But that is where you need to catch them, and that's the pushback you give them. And so that is where the building happens. And if they're used to, if they have a healthy emotional development, they will be disappointed with themselves that they disappointed the adults that they wanted to impress and, you know, show that they're good kids.

Can I just, can I come back on one thing? Because I think one of the challenges that we have, and I say we in terms of educators within this system, and particularly we as the people who are thinking trying to think a bit differently about how it might be. A lot of the discussion ends up being about learning and growth and development and cultivation, which all sound like great words, right? So you've got all this kind of language around that and flourishing, which, how could you disagree with that?

They're good words.

They're good words. However, I was listening to Kurt Bister again, talking today on a podcast about one of the things we miss is a viable vision of an alternative of what it means to do the things we've been talking about in this conversation. And one of the places that many people go to is kind of progressive education is like Summerhill and the, the very open, you know, choose your own education kind of experiences. And many of them have been positive in some ways, but also quite problematic in other ways, right? Quite chaotic. And, and just personally from my own judgment, not the optimal. There's been real issues with them. And one of the things that Götz talks about is this idea of that one of education's roles is to kind of direct the learning and growth and development. And that I hear you talking about in the pushbacks. He uses the word Erziehung to compare to Bildung. He talks about Bildung and Erziehung next to each other.

Erziehung is the upbringing. And Bildung, so if you go to Germany today and say the word Bildung, 99% of Germans would say, ah, education. So the current use of the word Bildung, and that may be how, how Gert Biester is using it, just means education in the most sort of horizontal transfer kind of, of meaning of the word.

Okay.

But when I talk about Bildung, I talk about it in the original sense, which is, is where the whole philosophy has its its roots.

Okay.

And I always had to sort of make that distinction in German.

Yeah. Okay.

And Erziehung is the word that Schiller uses, but he also uses the word Bildung. I see.

Maybe I've misconstrued that bit, but what he was talking about was the idea that often it's seen to be enough to just allow kids to give them the space to flourish, to grow, to develop, to learn. But his point there is one of the roles of the educator is that almost that magic that you were talking about when you respond to the dead cat, right? You don't, you know, there's this, this is extra essence that is the education piece. It's not pedagogy, it's not psychology, it's not sociology. It's this other little magic. And what he talks about there is that it's about directing attention. It's about directing the learning and growth and saying, you know, what's desirable for you to learn? What's worth learning? What direction is desirable for you to grow in? And that's a conversation. It's not the teacher telling the child what is the desirable direction, but I just found that interesting in that we are missing a viable model for what this Bildung and kind of the connection with formal education might look like. It's not progressive education, which is much more about learning and cultivation and, and growth. There's something else in there, which I feel is, is a combination of, it's the structure and agency piece coming together. It's the optimization of some of those those forces and those tensions with the role of the educator being the one who's asking those really tricky questions at the right time and directing attention just at the right time because they know the learner and they, you know, I don't know what you think about all that.

I, you know, so I would say two things. One is the soft direction learning. We did some of that in the Danish schools about 10 or 15 years ago. It was called responsibility for your own learning. And it turned out that all the kids who had academic parents thrived and learned a lot because they had parents who could help them. And all the kids who did not have parents with academic background were just lost because they had no idea how to structure their time or their learning or anything, and their parents couldn't help them. So it was actually creating a bigger gap in the educational system than was there before. We have a wonderful word in Danish that I've been told we're the only ones who have, and it's called fremdelske, which means to bring forth with love.

Nice.

Fremd is forward going, elske is love, and to fremdelske is to, you know, love a person and bring out the best in them. And so you need to do that as a teacher. You need to bring forth with love that which is in the child. And then you have to, in the moment when you have them, and that's where it becomes so tricky with whenever you have more than 24 or 25 kids in a room, to actually see all of them simultaneously, to create the sense of group feeling. And that's, that's really one of the tricks also. To get them to feel that we're all here together. And that is why this whole playing sports and listening to the same thing simultaneously with all the others is actually a skill, and it's something that you need to be able to do. And so I think that a lot of education, and particularly in the aftermath of COVID and lockdown, I think we should just spend a year letting the kids play organized sports, learn to play an instrument, listen to one another, sing in the choir, listen to stories, and have that sense of, I can connect with other people. And allow them to have this sense of, we're a group together, we can play together, we can, you know, do stupid things together. It's safe to, you know, fool around, get into a fight from time to time, and not all the adults, you know, rush and take you apart, but that you actually have a chance to resolve your own conflicts. Yeah, which goes against, of course, all kinds of safety measures and legal claims and all kinds of stuff in the modern school system, of course. But how are kids ever going to learn to solve conflicts if we don't let them?

Yeah.

And if, if they don't have this physical embodied experience of, if I cannot negotiate, if I cannot, you know, show respect Somebody's gonna get hurt. And if we just tell that to them, yeah, they're just gonna be like, so what is hurt? And then when they're 25 years old and, you know, a guy beats up another guy, it's actually dangerous.

Yeah, of course. You can't understand a transformative learning experience propositionally, right?

It's just, you have to do it. With your body.

Absolutely. But that's why I think the folk high school movement is quite an interesting one because it's post-18 and therefore you've got a bit more freedom to do some of the things you were just describing, whereas 18 and below, there's a duty of care and all of these things. There's a lot of risk aversion in the system, of course, you know, with good reason in some ways. But so the folk high school stuff I think is fascinating. I think we're running out of time to talk about it now, but it's, I can do the 3-minute version. Yeah, go on then. Okay.

So the Folk high school started in the 1850s and '60s in Denmark. And it was a deliberate effort to get the young farmhands and eventually also farm girls who had had 7 years of school to learn more and become conscientious citizens when democracy was new and when the concept of the nation state was new in the sense that we know it today. All grew up with a sense of belonging to a country and the country belonging to us. So it's not hard to say whether you're Danish or Swedish or whatever, but 150 years ago, that was the new thing. And so the folk high schools or folk colleges are boarding schools and they're still around. There are 75 of them today. Around 1900, there were 100 of them in Denmark. And back then there were 2 million people in Denmark. Now we're 5.6, but it's very popular still. And back then it was around 10% of the annual cohort. Mainly from the rural community who went there. And what they did was once they figured out the pedagogical model, it had 3 ingenious elements. The first one was that it had to be homey. So they ate together with the teachers. Nobody should be intimidated while they were there. And they were allowed to say stupid stuff and learn at their own pace. There were no exams, so there was no pressure. And if somebody asked a really good question and they needed to explore it, they explored it until they found the answer. And then there was the, uh, the storytelling. And it was a teacher named Kristin Kolk. He used to teach children and he had noticed that whenever he taught them what he was supposed to teach them, they didn't pay attention. But when he told them stories, they sort of lit up and their eyes, you know, became all alive and stuff. And so he did this with these young men at his first school. He just moved in with, I think there was like 15 or 25 of them and they ate porridge out of the same bowl because that's how they used to eat porridge out on the farms. And then he told them stories. And when he had their attention, he asked them questions. And eventually he allowed them to, or allowed, he encouraged them to ask him questions. And in 1851, that was radical.

Yeah.

And so these young men identified with the heroes of the stories and thought, I'm going to be like one of these Danish heroes. And so he said, first enliven, then enlighten. So first wake people up and then you can start teaching them. If they don't care, if they're not alive, forget about it. And so that was the trick. And today the schools are not just for the rural youth, it's the middle, upper middle class people who can afford to send their children there. I just checked the price for 6 months, it's around €10,000, but it's with room and board. And some of the schools are, you know, all-round, so you can have history, philosophy, dancing, filmmaking, and river rafting. Some of them are focused on sports, so you can really dedicate yourself to sports. Some of them are dedicated to theater, some are dedicated to something else. And so there's a huge variety. But the main point is that when you're between the age of 18 and typically before 25, so after high school, maybe one year of university where you realized you chose the wrong thing, or before you choose the wrong thing, yeah, you, you take a gap year. And so maybe you work for the first 6 months, save up some money, and then go to the Folkhighskole, or your parents pay for the Folkhighskole And after the Folk high school, you work, but you go there and the culture in Denmark around the gap year is that it's a normal thing to do, even if you don't go to Folk high school. And it's almost expected that you take time out to figure out, so what is it that I really want? Who am I?

What should I do?

Yeah. And with the more tests and, you know, measurements that we have in the official school system, the formal school system, the more popular the folk high schools become. And we also have a 9th grade and 10th grade folk high school kind of thing, uh, with many of the same principles, but they do have exams and a diploma at the end because—

okay. And that is that in 10th graders, that's the alternative to mainstream schooling or is that in education?

So, and so that's for the 14 to 18 year olds. And so, and they're hugely popular and I think it's about a third of the annual cohort who goes to one of these schools.

Wow.

Because the kids are just so fed up with all the measuring and they really want to figure out what is important. And it's, it's a good time for, you know, the first experience with moving away from your parents when you're motivated to do so. It's not perceived— it's fundamentally different from a boarding school. It is a boarding school, but it's not, you know, a boarding school in, in the typical sense. Yeah. And it is very homey. And one of the things that happens particularly at the, at the Folk high schools, is that when they arrive, so they're anywhere between 40 and 150 young people at, at these schools. They all wear the best clothes and the girls wear makeup and it's like everybody wants to make a, I don't know, a good impression. And then after a couple of weeks they sort of slack a little bit and after a month they all wear sweatpants and old t-shirts because now they just feel at home.

They're at home.

And they get together and yes, exactly. So it's their new family. And so they eat together. I was about to say they sleep together, but some of them probably do. But it's, I mean, when they're, you know, over 18, they can do whatever they want and they're only there because they want to be there. And the schools are very adamant about, we're not taking in, I mean, we can take in a few kids that are troubled kids, but we're not a social working institution, but it's still there. And that sense of I'm learning because I want to explore what life has to offer and who I am.

Yeah. In a relatively safe space. Not completely safe, but in a relatively safe space.

Completely safe. Well, yeah, but with freedom to unfold. Yes. And the teachers are definitely going to challenge you and they're going to ask you tough questions and they eat with you and they see you over the course of 5 months. And so after a while, they, you know, they can tell if you're, if you're doing well, if you're not okay, if you don't talking to the other kids, if you get into fights all the time, or if you, you know, what happens when you're young and you live with a lot of other young kids.

But I imagine that relationship is also crucial because you're developing a relationship as a young person, you're developing a relationship with an adult who is not your parent or your relative.

Exactly.

That's a really interesting and different dynamic going on there that you could be a mentor, you know, it's kind of a mentor mentee relationship potentially. Hopefully, you know, obviously you have to connect, but I think that's a crucial part of the success of these folk high schools is that, absolutely, that relational point.

Plus, whenever they— so I mean, if you take the philosophy class and the teacher has maybe prepared Nietzsche for 3 weeks, then something happens on the news and you're free to change the topic and read something else or discuss something else or, you know, bring up a question that is, you know, bothering you.

Yeah.

And so that freedom and that sense— and that's where the dead cat comes in, because there may be something in the room that we need to be done with before we go back to Nietzsche or whatever it was that we were—

you can respond, right? You can respond in a way that is genuine and authentic rather than saying, sorry, we've got to push on, we've got to get curriculum to get through.

Exactly. We've got to check off these boxes in the spreadsheet. Otherwise, the bureaucrats won't be happy. Exactly. We'll lose to the Finns and the Koreans in the PISA test. And we can't let that happen.

But we'll be unfolded and grown-up, mature individuals. Yeah. Interesting. Now, this is, I mean, this is fascinating. Thank you. And so just two things to say to finish. One is, The impact of that is not insignificant. So we're talking about individual impact, but in your Nordic Secret book with Thomas Björkman, you talk about how much of a national kind of economic impact those folk high schools had on a set of countries, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and maybe Finland as well. I don't, I'm not sure. But the other thing to say, which maybe is a, is a future podcast, but one of the things I find so interesting is why and how this is coming up now. And I've kind of connected it to some of the discourses that are going on in, in education, but I think there's this whole other conversation about meta-modernity, which we haven't touched on, but you've also written a book about meta-modernity, which I, and I think is an incredibly important development right now. And this situates right in the heart of that, I think, because it's talking about, you know, that acknowledgement that we have to find a way to integrate things that mean things, beauty, truth, goodness, et cetera, and our own kind of character and emotional development with some of the more critical narratives that postmodernism brought us to question power and question, you know, dominant meta-narratives and all of these things. I think there's a reason why we're having more conversations about Bildung now, and I think it connects to that. So we haven't got necessarily time to talk about it, but I think it's, it's such an interesting and important development that's happening.

Just quickly say two things. One is that the conclusion in The Nordic Secret about these folk high schools is that we managed in the Nordic countries to lift our societies from the bottom. And so the schools were not state financed, but they were state subsidized. And the bourgeoisie was happy to see the local farmers get and develop a national sense of self and identity. And they realized that The last thing we need is uneducated peasants. So that was, that was a really good contribution from the bourgeoisie and the government and the people with money. And then with regards to the metamodernity and where we are right now, I see a generation of young people who have grown up in a postmodern world where nothing really mattered and where you were not allowed to connect deeply with, you know, other people, culture, heritage. All the stuff that's really important and that makes life meaningful. And where there's been a tendency to— whenever you said, I— if you said, I love my country, then somebody would say, yeah, but other countries are nice too. I was like, yeah, but they're not my countries.

Yeah.

So if, if you're constantly met with that relativizing of everything you feel, life becomes a very unpleasant place, and you're never really allowed to, you know, just dig in and say I love this, I crave this, and this is who I am.

Yeah.

And, and I need to dedicate myself to this. And actually that is what you can do at one of the Folk High Schools. You can really dedicate yourself to something that is deeply meaningful to you and nobody's gonna pester you day in and day out. Yeah. You know, patting you on the shoulder saying, hey, but you could also study or you could also do, no, no, no, no, no. You're here because you wanna do this.

Yeah.

And you should keep doing it.

And it's deeply honest, right? It's it's that you're not performing. It's deeply honest. And I think that's one of the crucial things, that kind of sincerity around metamodernism. It is important to question the big meta-narratives and, you know, talk about power and talk about the fact that other people have different perspectives, hold those multiple perspectives. It's all of that is really important. But if you lose then your own foundations and your own basis for sincerity, what do I actually care about? And can I express that honestly? Without performing what I expect society to be expecting of me in relation to my values and beliefs about other people.

Yeah.

You lose that sincerity and that honesty and you get back to performing, which is where we were in the, in the classroom, right? And that's not healthy either. And I think, yeah, there's a really interesting conversation going on and I would very much hope to continue it with you.

We'll do that some other time.

Exactly. Not right now.

Definitely.

Thank you, Lena. No, that's brilliant.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for your time. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.