Global Bildung - A Conversation with Lene Rachel Andersen

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

What is universal around the globe and in all cultures is that we have culture, the sense of being rooted where you are coming from a place, culture, heritage. And one thing that's interesting is that the more you know where you're coming from, the easier it actually is to connect with people who come from a different culture because you have similar depth.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. It's great to be able to bring you this bonus episode of another conversation that I've had with Lina Rachel Anderson about Bildung. With the upcoming Global Bildung Day and European Bildung Day, I spoke to Lina about the concept of Bildung. But if you'd like to go back to the original episode, it's episode 88, where we get into more detail about Bildung and its origins. Lina is an economist, author, futurist, philosopher, and Bildung activist with a diverse background in business, economy, economy, theology, and comedy writing. She's written 20 books and received 2 Danish Democracy Awards. Among her most known books are The Nordic Secret in 2017, Metamodernity 2019, Bildung in 2020, and Libertism 2022. You can see links to all of the books in the show notes, as well as links to the Global Building Day and European Building Day conference in Vilnius.

Thank you so much, Lina, for joining me. I wanted to kind of come back to some of the building stuff we talked about in our first episode. So I'd really encourage all the listeners to go back for a kind of an overview of what bildung is, which in our first conversation, but this is kind of a bonus episode, which particularly in light of Global Bildung Day coming up, and the European Bildung Day and the work that you're doing in Vilnius, in May around a manifesto. So I wanted to talk about those things in general because I, I think Bildung is a really important idea and it's the core of your work, and I am just really happy to be able to support with that and getting the message out more widely and more inclusively to get more educators involved. So that's something I'd love to talk to you about. But maybe just to start, just like maybe a 60-second quick recap for people who will then go and listen to the first episode, but what are we talking about? Just a super speedy overview of Bildung, and then we'll go into, I'd like to break down some of the manifesto points.

What is this German word that is sort of squeezed into the English language? In English, I guess we could say formation, but if we do that, we lose 200 years of German philosophy dealing with it. So the German word Bildung is also used in English. Some people may know it from the Bildungsroman. So that's a novel where the hero is a young adult traveling out into the world, uh, has to adjust to it and comes back and has transformed somehow and, and grown up by it. So Bildung is about emotional and moral development, but it's also relating to your culture, being socialized, civilized into a social context, and it's education. So in order to thrive in your society, you need to understand what is going on. You need to be able to provide for yourself. You need to be safe around the technologies that everybody is using. You need to know the cultural references so that you can participate in normal conversation, but also think critically when you hear something on the news or people discussing something and you have the sort of background knowledge that allows you to distinguish between, are these people, you know, just making things up? Is this fake news? Is this real? Am I encountering a conspiracy theory now or something? So it's a backdrop for thriving as a person in society. There was a Swedish bildung thinker in the late 1800s, Ellen Key, who said that bildung is what is left when you have forgotten what you learned. The way that I describe it now is that, well, the quickest way to describe it is to say that it's two different kinds of knowledge, the easily transferable kind of knowledge. So that's math, science, how to bake a bread or be safe in traffic, for instance. And there's a horizontal transfer of knowledge from person to person or one person teacher to a classroom. And then there's the knowledge that you can barely transfer at all, which we can call the vertical kind of knowledge, and that's the emotional depth. It's how you connect with your culture and it's also your upbringing. And it's interesting that we have this word upbringing because that brings in the verticality in it.

Yeah, interesting. You mean those metaphorically, right? Horizontal and vertical. I mean, obviously not deeply literally.

Sure, but we're talking about emotional depth and upbringing. And it's not like if you bring a child up, you kind of, you know, We don't see it as a different kind of status in society, but it's just interesting that the word, both in English and in Danish and in German and in Swedish also, it has this up thing in it. So there is a verticality in it. And you cannot transfer this from person to person. So life experience, you need to have it in order to know what it is. So if you fall in love and somebody breaks up with you, if I go through that and you've never been through it and I try to tell you how painful it is, you will be like, what? How can that be so hard? Then you fall in love and somebody breaks up with you, and then you say, oh, now I understand what you were talking about. I know how, so this is, is that what you were saying? So there's a resonance in the other person if we share the experience or have had the same experience. So these are two different kinds of knowledge, and together, particularly when you struggle with knowledge and sort of push yourself to learning new stuff and being curious about the world and seeing things that are surprising, learning things that you didn't expect. That is Bildung.

Yeah.

And one of the other things I think is an interesting take on it is that it's both process and outcome.

Yes, absolutely. And you're never done with it. I mean, so we have a tendency, I guess, in the cultures where we do use the word Bildung a lot to talk about whether somebody has Bildung or does not have Bildung. And that's where it can be very judgmental. And what people are usually thinking of is, oh, so do they know who Shakespeare is? Or do they know how to hold a knife and a fork in a formal dinner? Stuff like that. So very sort of old bourgeois forms and codified knowledge. And of course, that's very useful. I mean, as part of being an adult in the Western civilization, there are things that if you don't know them, other people are going to wonder, so what rock did you grow up under? How come you are not aware of what we're talking about? And I guess that's the upbringing part. So there are things that we kind of expect of one another if you're 35 or above in any given culture.

Yeah.

But it can also be things that are incredibly useless anywhere else. So, I mean, if I have all my bildung from Denmark where I grew up and where I live and go to, I don't know, Papua New Guinea or the middle of Australia, it's a flora, fauna, climate place where everything I know is probably going to be completely useless.

Yeah.

So it's very context dependent.

Yeah. But I find that interesting though, when you start talking there, well, about global building, because I mean, from what you're saying there, there's something kind of deeply rooted in culture and local culture that can be, you know, your different spheres of belonging that you talk about. And there's a local, a very specific localness to that. But as we develop and emerge into some kind of global culture, whatever that exactly means, right? But just some kind of homogeny around whatever it is.

What it means to be human.

What it means to be human. That's an interesting question there for what global building means.

So I mean, what is universal around the globe and in all cultures is that we have culture unless we stop having it because we think, oh, we just want to be global humans. And so I can't sing the traditional songs with my children or I can't tell them the Danish fairy tales in Denmark. So the sense of being rooted where you are coming from a place, a culture, a heritage, that universal, but of course the specific heritages are different. And, and one thing that's interesting is that the more you know where you're coming from in this regard, the easier it actually is to connect with people who come from a different place in a different culture because you have similar depth. And that's where the vertical thing comes in. So if you have a really deep knowledge of your own culture, you will feel more secure in that culture. You will have a bigger vocabulary. You will have a richer understanding of your own culture, of emotions that connect to this culture, words for different emotions. And so if you travel to the other side of the globe and you meet somebody who has an equal depth of understanding of their culture, you can connect in a deeper way than if you were both just brought up on, okay, let's call it the American pop culture and that's it. Because you would only have this sort of cultural veneer that was not connected to your local place and tradition, as you would have lost that, but you would also have lost a really important part of your meaning-making and what it means to be human. So culture is symbols that allow us to express how we're doing and to understand each other. And the fewer symbols we have in our— and I'm saying it vocabulary as if it's just words, it's not just that, it's tunes, it's architecture, it's ornaments. Stories. Of all kinds. So we can read that and we can tell all kinds of stuff from these symbols. And all cultures have their own sort of pool of symbols. And the interesting thing about this is that all cultures have come up with unique concepts and ways of being human. And we can all learn from that. So imagine that we just had one culture around the globe and everybody was brought up in the exact same way.

Yeah.

First of all, we would lose a lot of knowledge. But imagine what a completely boring place the globe would be.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I know, absolutely. I, I mean, there's something deeply important about that kind of the diversity and the richness that creates the resilience somehow. But also I just wanted to ask you, 'cause you're talking about this kind of shared cultural idea about being human, but there's also this very shared cultural idea about passing on what it means to be human in that context. And that's where for me it becomes educational. So it's a, it's definitely a collective thing that's happening. This is not— there's transmission happening, as you said, of kind of knowledge, of vertical, horizontal knowledge, but there's also this very shared kind of passing on, like society making and remaking itself. And that, for me, that's educational, but educational in a really, in the broadest sense of what that word means. Like, do you see Bildung and education as kind of coterminous?

Oh, yes and no. I mean, education is a crucial part of Bildung, but there's usually an intention with education. But you can learn a lot without that intention. You can learn that from dropping something on your foot and there may not be anybody else present. And it's like, oops, I'm never going to do that again because that hurt.

Yeah.

So you can say that was very educational, but it's usually not what we mean by education. And so that's why I would like to bring in that vertical and horizontal understanding of knowledge, because let's say we have a tradition. It can be the Chinese New Year or Christmas in the West.. And so as a parent and grandparent, you want to share this and bring your children up in the tradition, and they, you want to sing the songs and have the food and do the dances or whatever comes, it goes into this. If we say education, I think most people would think of schools with classrooms and somebody transferring knowledge about Christmas or knowledge about the Chinese New Year, which is completely different from actually celebrating it. The celebration together with your family does have educational elements in it because that's where the upbringing comes in. And they say, no, no, no, we'll wait with the presents until we have the food, or we'll dance around the Christmas tree before we do the presents. Or, and in China they have different, I don't know the Chinese New Year that well, so I'm not going to give any specific examples. So, and that's, that's educational, but it's also the vertical part, the deeper part where you see, oh, this is, this is such a good experience. And my grandma is really, you know, She loves me. And there will be food after the presents or after the Christmas tree or before, you know. And so there's all this emotional connection going on. And then you sing the songs and you do that every year. And then suddenly you're 35 years old and you haven't heard one of those songs in 20 years and you hear it on the radio or something and you're just all, you know, tears all over the place because it brings you back to your childhood. And that's the emotional part. And Nobody can transfer that. I mean, you— this is your experience with that song and your connection to family and tradition, to place, to Christmas and all these things.

Yeah.

So, and all of this is bildung. It's part of who you are and how you relate to your family, your tradition, your symbols, language, songs and all that stuff.

Yeah, it does get quite big and quite abstract quite quickly, right? In many ways, right? So, and that's, and that I think is one of the challenges because it becomes, it's this really expansive concept, but to bring it back down to, as you said, kind of really concrete moments. And yes, some of those might be accidental, like the rock, and others might be intentional, kind of deeply historically intentional, like a tradition.. But I think there's also, I feel like there's interventions that we make in the world all the time that maybe are responsive, not planned and intentional, but like, for example, I see my child carrying a rock that looks like they're about to drop on their foot. And I might say to them, just maybe, can I help you with that? Or do you, you know, you maybe put that down because it looks like you might gonna hurt yourself. Careful. There's, there's kind of something building and educational happening in that moment, even though it's not intentional. So I don't know. I mean, for me, I'm exploring—

We do that all the time. Absolutely. Particularly as a parent, but we also do it in the workplace. I mean, so somebody participates in a meeting and doesn't know how to say that they need to leave 5 minutes early. And so instead of saying it at the beginning of the meeting, they just leave the room 5 minutes before everybody else. And everybody in the meeting is like, what just What was that about? Did we say something wrong? And so you have this, you know, you ask the person next time you see them, say, why did you leave the meeting early? And they say, oh, I just needed to go to the dentist. I mean, it's like, and so that is where we have this Bildung moment because you say, you know what, the next time we have a meeting and you know you need to leave, just let us know before the meeting because that was really awkward. So these things happen all the time. And that's why we've, whenever we enter a new situation, there can be Bildung going on.

So it is pushbacks, right?

And the problem with Bildung is exactly that it is so fluffy and it is so big. And that is why I've really struggled to make it more tangible and concrete when I talk about it, but not make it so concrete that people will get the idea, oh, so we can, you know, grade it and measure it, and then we can put everybody in a Bildung spreadsheet and see on what aspect of Bildung we need to make a bigger emphasis.

Exactly.

And it's just That would screw it up.

But I mean, that's kind of putting it through the meat grinder of the industrial paradigm in a kind of very—

Another symbolic expression.

Yes.

Yeah, precisely. But I think there's something really fascinating in what you've just said in the sense that that's exactly what is happening in education from my observation, right? So you take build as image, right? So the word bildung is like developing in an image of originally Christ, right, as I understand it. But I think what we've taken now is a secular version of the build. And like you see what, you know, you see in many education systems or schools, they'll do something called the portrait of the graduate. So they'll create this image of the idealized graduate that they are trying to produce, in inverted commas, right? And then they will try and produce that outcome. And that's all with the best of intentions of trying to articulate what it is they're doing educationally and why they're doing it. And a lot of those things will not be horizontal knowledge focus. They will be vertical things. They will be empathy or compassion or all these, all these other social emotional competencies as they get called in the jargon. But they will be part of that, that build, that portrait that we're trying to produce. And I think that's a really dangerous track that we're going down because we are, as you said, creating a Bildungsspreadsheet. We're saying these are the competencies we want to create. These are how we're gonna measure those competencies. The OECD is driving it, you know, with PISA tests on creativity or collaborative problem solving. There's all sorts of, there's all sorts of well-intentioned moves educationally around that, but it's doing exactly what you've described of kind of squeezing this really generative and expansive personal development, formation, cultivation stuff into the kind of more industrial paradigm. 'Cause we can't quite get out of it.

I mean, for the, for the horizontal kind of knowledge transfer, math, science, all that stuff, we can absolutely measure and check whether people understood and have learned what we tried to teach them. So, and, and we need measurements for this. I mean, if somebody wants to be an airline pilot or a plumber or a hairdresser or baker, we need to make sure that before we give them the certificate or hire them, that they know and have the academic skills or the craft skills. In order to do what we ask them to do. But when it comes to that vertical part, the emotions and yes, the collaboration skills, they're sort of in between because you can demand of people that they show up on time and that they are polite and that they listen to others and that they try to play by the rules of the group. And you actually ask people to do that, but you cannot ask people to feel in a certain way and you cannot demand creativity. I mean, that's ridiculous. And so if you set up goals for people's empathy or people's social behavior in general or care or something like that, what you risk doing is that you'll just produce performance. And so you'll have people who do not have the emotions, who do not relate to other people, who do not have a sense of, am I, you know, transgressing people's boundaries here, or am I behaving in a rude manner because I kind of lost my empathy and sense of reading body language? If we, if we We set up goals for that. We'll just get people who perform and try to do it the way it looks instead of trying to, you know, really feel, why am I behaving this way? And oops, when I said that and they scolded me for it, that was really uncomfortable. I'll have to figure out what, what was it that I said that was so wrong? But it has to come from you. It has to come from your interest in actually being a sociable civil person in the social context. And part of, you know, growing older is that you have more and more of these experiences. If you keep not behaving according to expectations, you'll have more and more people who either don't want to hire you or kick you out or don't invite you to a party a second time. And then at some point you may want to, you know, start asking, why is it that I'm not, you know, re-invited? Why is it that I'm not hired? Why is it that this doesn't work for me? And whether you're going to ask friends or you're going to ask a therapist or something, you're going to have to deal with it if you're interested in it. If you're the employer or the spouse or something, you can address it, but you cannot set up a goal for how the other person is going to feel.

Yeah, because also I think what you've just described is a collective process. It's a collective process of kind of negotiation and renegotiation of pushbacks of, you know, you go out, as you say, you go out into the world and you apply for a job and you don't get the job and you get a pushback there. You might get feedback, you get feedback from a coach or a boss or a teacher There's different ways that the system, the system in this abstract sense, but just groups of people regulate each other, right? And you could say—

I'm trying to tell you what would be a really good idea right now and what would be a really bad idea. And the question is, do you pick it up?

Yeah, but who are you to tell me, right? As one individual.

Exactly.

Except when there are collective kind of negotiated agreements that aren't even necessarily explicit. There's no rule that says on a sheet of paper on the wall that you must do this, you must do that. But there are kind negotiated social norms, which in groups of people are clearly there, whether they're visible or not. And you learn them by pushing up against the edges of them. And that's what happens in school. And I mean, in, in school, people have talked about the hidden curriculum forever. And that is like, it's back to your point about what's, what's still there when, when you've forgotten everything else that you learned. It's the hidden curriculum. It's, it's the stuff that you learn about how people tick and how, what might annoy this person or how to read body language. And it's not necessarily explicit, but it's, it's collectively learned. And I think that's the danger of when we put it into this industrial and also individualized system, we try and make it all explicit and individual and measurable, which kills it.

Right.

Plus, I mean, this is where the, the first question that you asked about building around the globe and local traditions, because the norms that we then grow up with shape our expectations about, so how do I interact with other people? How do I interact with peers? How do I interact with parents grandparents, with older people. How do I show respect? How do I happen to show disrespect and stuff like that? And so that is the Bildungsreise, the journey out into the world. That's why it's so important because so, I mean, you have to generally, you would have to be at least 18 or 20 years before you do that because you will have to be so integrated into your own culture that you have the norms, the social norms and moral norms on your backbone.

Yeah.

And then you travel out into the rest of the world and stay preferably in one or two places over a longer period of time. And at first you make a complete fool out of yourself because you do all the wrong things and all these people don't want to see you again or yell at you or something like that. And then eventually you realize what they expect and you adjust to it. And that's part of, you know, your building process. And you learn that these people actually have, you know, they do things completely differently from the way that we do it at home.

Yeah.

Works here. And they do it for other reasons. And eventually you may even learn why, why their method is the better idea.

Yeah.

And then you return home and first of all, you notice that everybody else has not changed at all. And people at home are actually weird because you just learn different ways of doing things.

And isn't that—

now you have two perspectives.. And that's, that's Bildung.

Yeah. But isn't that interesting? Absolutely. Like one of the kind of in passing, you said go outside of your home, but I think that's not an insignificant detail because the more and more virtual experiences we're having from our home, or we're just sitting at home watching Netflix, you know, I don't wanna set up a physical and embodied versus virtual and, and kind of detrimental kind of dichotomy, but at the same time, there is something different about going outside, as you said, outside of your home into a new space, whether it's Girl Scouts or a religious group or a choir or all these things that, you know, different adult learning courses or whatever it is, a sport. You're in an interpersonal environment where there are all sorts of different cues and norms and things you need to pick up on, bounce up, bounce up against in order to learn, which which you don't, you can get some of that in a virtual environment, but it's a quite a superficial version of that depth, I would say.

It is. And I mean, just to take sports as the example of 5 and 6-year-olds have a really hard time understanding what the rules are about. And if so, if we talk football or soccer, just kicking the ball is like, ooh, I hit it, success. But then we come as adults, yeah, but you have to hit it in a way so it reaches the goal down there. And they, and then they just pick it up with their hands and don't get that you can't touch the ball with your hands. So one of the things, the building part of playing a sport, it's actually very complex. First of all, when you cross that white line in the grass, there's a completely different set of rules on the other side of that line, whether you're coming from the outside walking in or from the inside walking out. And learning what those rules are on the other side is really, you know, a cognitive challenge. And then there is the, uh, do I play by the rules? Because if I do, they want to play with me again. If I do not play by the rules, they do not want to play with me again. So I also learn What does it take to be a good peer? And that ability to play by the rules that other people have made, you can take that with you everywhere. And I have experienced adults who have an extremely hard time playing by rules that other people have created, kind of have to put their own little mark on the way that we do things in a meeting, in a workplace, in a social setting with, you know, I've had people join me for religious rituals. And where I can tell that they're really uncomfortable because now somebody else is defining— it's only for 10 minutes, maybe— now somebody is defining how you're supposed to behave for the next 10, 15 minutes or maybe a full hour. And part of being an adult is that you can walk in and out of those spaces, rooms where there are different rules without feeling that you're losing yourself. Yeah, you're still you. You can walk in and out of this. You can participate in the song. You can even listen to other people praying to something that you don't believe in without, you know, being deeply uncomfortable about it. Doesn't mean you have to say the prayer, but it means that you can stay in the room and actually just experience it as a learning thing. So there's so many aspects to this.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the— something you've just hinted at there that you also mentioned earlier was the kind of— there's the maturity angle to this, which can be a kind of a shadow side of building where some people take it to be like, you know, we are more mature than you, these kind of adult development stage theories that there's loads of discussion about at the moment in terms of, you know, it's a linear process towards enlightenment or maturity or all these, you know, there are not so positive ways that these can be used, I think, to set up hierarchies, right? And so that's, that's potentially one of the, the challenges around this idea as well, is to how talk about these ideas of, I'm, and one way I think you've, you've articulated is talking about Schiller and the drives and that they're kind of, they're different drives that we have. They're not necessarily different stages that you go from one to another to another. And, you know, I don't, maybe you wanna say about Schiller briefly just to give that some context, but I think that is a, a danger in some of this talk is that it gets into that more hierarchical enlightenment type language.

Yeah, I mean, Schiller talks about three kinds of people. The first kind are the people who are in the throes of their emotions, and so they're not free. The second one are the people who are living according to the expectations of everybody else, so they internalize the norms and cannot transcend them, so they're not free either. And the third kind of person has reconnected with his or her emotions and has already internalized the norms of society. So if there is a conflict between the two, they can make a personal choice about whether to follow their emotions or the expectations of others. And that is when you're a free person. He also calls it the playful person. And I've particularly started being more specific about this after one of the recent discussions I've been in with regards to Robert Keegan's stages and other stage theories.

Yeah.

Is that I actually like that Schiller talks about drives because I think that there are different drives that are dominating throughout your life, but it doesn't mean that you don't have the other drives too.

Yeah.

So I think that until your teenage years, what is one of the really strong drives is your own emotions. And that's why we need to tell children how to behave at the dinner table and not to, you know, take food before you're invited to take the food, stuff like that. You can't just sit down and start eating. So that is how we socialize children. Eventually, the drive becomes fitting in.

Yeah.

And that's really useful. You actually become a team player. And it's really important that we become team players. And it's really important that we have that drive towards adjusting ourselves to to everybody and the expectations and the community. But it's also really important that we eventually develop or, yeah, grow the drive. I don't know, um, get the drive that, um, how do you develop a drive to be able to have autonomy? I need to be able to set myself outside everybody's expectations. The drive inside me, my, my intrinsic motivation, is to do the right thing. And that may match the social expectations. It may match my feelings, but I don't know until I make a decision.

Yeah, exactly.

So I like to talk about drives and I, I doubt that an 8-year-old can have that autonomy drive, which includes, uh, the social norms and knowing what they are.

Yeah.

You can, you can know the social norms in the kindergarten, for instance, or the second grade where you are at the age of 8, but you cannot have a mature sort of consideration about whether to follow my emotions or follow the expectations.

It's an interesting dance between individualism and, and communitarianism or collectivism, isn't it? Like, I just, as listening to you talk there, that's not the first time I've thought about that. Just that the emotional part is kind of me and how do I feel. And then the social norm team playing is, is coming into collective and somehow allowing yourself to be subsumed by the important collective thing that's going on. And then there's a dance of the maturity of the free stage, the playful stage of can you navigate the individual? What do I feel and what does the thing around me need? What is the world? What's the world telling me that it needs from these other people that I'm interacting with? There's interesting dance between those two things.

Awesome. The team player drive is what allows other people to trust you. Because if you cannot play by the rules of society, I cannot expect that you, you know, keep our agreements that we can negotiate something and the deal will last, or that when you say that we'll meet in a certain place at 7 o'clock, that you'll actually be there. So playing by the rules of society is what allows other people to trust you. And so That's one of the other sort of emotions that, you know, sort of becomes a goal in itself is like trust is a good thing. Sometimes it's a really, really bad thing because people may just abuse you. So you need to be able to distinguish who can I trust? Why would I trust them?

Yeah.

So, and that is part of the socializing. And that's also why when you travel out into the world, if you cannot read the social norms, the cultural codes and so forth, you have to be really cautious about what you promise people, how you say yes and no. What kind of agreements that you have with people, because they can be understood in a completely different way.

Yeah.

And then obviously there's the additional layer of challenge of different collectives with different social norms interacting with each other. And that's, I mean, just as a segue into the Global Building Day, I think you're talking about nationhood and the imagined community of being within this one particular nation. But, you know, as we can clearly see right now, those groups of people, they're not going to agree on certain fundamental things. So they're going to enter into conflict, and how do you navigate that? So there's that extra layer of it as well, which is really important. So yeah, maybe just as a little plug for Global Building Day, what's that about?

So Global Building Day is on March 21st, and it's a Zoom tour around the globe. And you go to our website and you sign up, and we'll send you a Zoom link the day in advance, so you can join. And we're starting in Oceania, and then we're traveling via East Asia, Asia, Middle East, Europe, Latin America, North America. I hope I got all 8.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

2 speakers from each one of them. And so what we're going to be discussing is Bildung, Globalization, Nation and Peoplehood in the 21st Century. And for each of the, so there are 8 culture zones and they're grouped 2 and 2. So for each of those 2 and 2 sessions, there's an opening session where we have more of a universal approach to, so what does it mean to be a people? What? What are we going to do with this concept from a more theoretical or philosophical general point of view? And the reason why we chose this topic is because I spoke to somebody from Lebanon who said that it is so hard to get Lebanon to function as a country because we share the language with all the neighboring countries, Arabic. The religion plays a huge role. We also share that with all the neighboring countries. We have all these different fractions and factions within the country who do not identify as Lebanese before they identify as religious or something else. Tribe or clan or something, for instance. So this concept of the nation-state is really hard to make it work in Lebanon. And so I thought, well, this is definitely a cultural thing. It's a building thing. It's an educational thing. Let's have this topic. And unfortunately, the person who brought it up cannot join us on the 21st.

Oh, shame.

But there will be a lot of other people who will be addressing this.

But, ah, interesting.

Nation-states and nationalism tend to have earned themselves a really bad reputation because of the toxic nationalism or what I call national chauvinism. Chauvinism.

Yeah.

And that is where we built a collective identity based on, oh, so we're the Danes, or we're the Swedes, or we're whatever, Portuguese, whatever. And all the other nations are underlings or worse, and we're the superior people, and let's show the world how brilliant we are. And that's bad, and that's chauvinism, and chauvinism is always bad. And so the interesting thing is that, as those Lebanese person said, in order to get the country to function, the nation-state We do need to care about it. We need to identify with it. We need to even love it because from time to time you need to take one for the team on behalf of that team, which is your nation. It can be as a, as a soldier to defend it in a very sort of direct way, but it can also be all the nurses and doctors during the COVID pandemic who served the NHS in the UK and similar healthcare systems elsewhere, where you are I'm taking one for the team. I'm not just thinking about myself. I'm not just thinking about my family. I'm actually giving healthcare to people from parts of the country where I've never set foot ever. And I'm never going to go there. I have nothing to do there, but I'm still going to, you know, stand up for the system that we share. I'm still going to pay my taxes. I don't like it, but I do it with pride and joy and knowing that it goes to all of us within this group that we call the nation. It is also for, I claim, the vast majority of people who live in thriving, functioning societies that are open and democratic. The nation-state is also the biggest legal entity where the majority can speak their mother tongue and have a public debate about, can be healthcare, taxes, defense, all this stuff, roads and education. So we have nation-states where it's a certain level of governance complexity institutions that need to be there in order for us to thrive as individuals and as families and so forth. And the nation states tend to be the biggest entities where we can all speak the same language and therefore have a democracy. Yeah, we can see it in Ukraine right now where they're fighting for the right to be Ukrainians.

Yeah.

And Russia is fighting for the right to make the Ukrainians Russian, which is the toxic nationalism. Or the national chauvinism, whereas the Ukrainian fight for independence and sovereignty and the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian heritage on their own soil is the love of country that we need to have.

Yeah.

So it's two different kinds of love of country and awareness. And of course, if somebody invaded Russia, the Russians would react in the same protective way. I hope they would.

I'm sure.

And if Ukraine had a toxic Ukrainian streak, and I know there are groups in in Ukraine that have that, but it's not the policy and politics of the government or the country as a whole. That would be chauvinism as well. And we've all at some point, I guess, been through that in the struggle for the current borders in, at least in Europe. You can say the same in the United States, but as it started out as a colony, so it's different.

Absolutely. Exactly. I mean, there's phenomenal layers of complexities that aren't there because there's the kind of negotiation, the constant renegotiation of the imagined community. And as you say, and then just in relation to that idea threat coming in from the outside, you then, there's a group dynamic that maybe emphasizes the group identity like Ukraine, or even just, I was smiling as you were talking about Lebanon because I was having dinner with a friend last night who's Lebanese and she was talking about when the bomb, in inverted commas, the ammonium nitrate exploded in Beirut.

Oh yeah, that's true.

A few years ago.

Yeah.

Then when there's adversity, there's perhaps more of a group dynamic around being Lebanese than the division between Christian or Muslim or or are these other dynamics? So there's all of that dynamic. But then as you were talking about kind of the Global South and people who've experienced colonization, there's a whole different dynamic there because they didn't even get a chance to negotiate their imagined community.

Most of the world's ethnic groups in countries where Europeans drew the borders.

Exactly.

Which is horrible. I've visited Niger, I've visited Uganda, and you have all these different cultural and ethnic groups that living basically in the same villages or in two villages, like 10 meters apart. And they speak different languages, they have different traditions. And so they're mixed together. And then the official language, like in Uganda, is English, which barely anybody speaks very well. And so you have all these local languages that people speak on a day-to-day basis, and they can understand the neighboring language pretty much like Switzerland. But what they don't have is the educational system that then allows everybody to learn English well enough to actually then bridge the different gaps in economic interest, in cultural traditions and so forth.

Yeah.

So I think that's really hard, but it's also a Bildung thing to have educational systems that can handle this.

Precisely.

And how do you— so that part of, say, Uganda or Niger, that is the modern nation state and that needs to function in the global system of nation states and play by global rules with regards to human rights and the banking system and others, all these, you know, systems where large groups of people need to function as a group because otherwise you cannot use your credit card or other practicalities of being in the 21st century. The edu— and here we are talking about educational systems. What is school actually going to provide? What does it need to provide all the pupils with and students in higher education? And how do we bridge that gap between local ethnic groups and languages and heritages and the 21st century and all those institutions that you need to have in order to have things like 42 million people in Uganda? I think, how do you have inner social calm with that many people if you insist on Uganda being a sovereign and united country called Uganda?

Yeah.

When you have so many language groups and local cultures. And there is, for me, there is only one way. Either you split it up, or I didn't say that, or you educate for it and figure out what should that be like.

Or, sorry to be provocative, but or you don't do anything because there's an enabling of self-organization that drawing these straight lines on a map historically just completely ignored. And I think that as you're talking about these kind of multiple layers of identity formation and group formation and all these different things and educational process, whether that's non-formal, informal education or formal education, all of those things in most, well, in all societies will self-organize, right? But even the education system, the formal education system is to some extent a kind of colonial imposition on places like Uganda, right?

It is.

So therefore—

You have to figure out what it is you want to do and you have to deal with it.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And so you can't just say everybody, you know, every time they're, whenever they're in school, the language is English, for instance. We do not teach them the English language by singing, by dancing, by telling them stories that are meaningful to them. We start with a British language book for young English learners that does not relate to, I don't know what what it's like right now, but some of the people that I spoke to in Uganda had had that experience and they just enter a school, do not speak the language of the teacher, and then they don't understand anything for 7 years and leave school. And so it doesn't work.

Yeah. And back to your point about Lebanon, my friend discussing that last night, the same books, she's married to a French guy. They had the same books. He was growing up in Brittany and she was growing up in Beirut. They had the same educational resources because it was a French education system and Sure, that has certain benefits, but it certainly has some serious effects and maybe they're not all positive, right? No, I mean, deeply complex. We're not going to solve now, but one of my main drives, I think, is just to open up this conversation about Bildung to a more inclusive audience because I think there are so many educators, formal educators in schools, universities that are in my network, they're doing, they're listening to the podcast. That this is what they do all the time. This is why they got into education and this is why they want to enable young or older people to kind of unfold, you know, in front of them with a bit of support and help from them. Right. And so I think that's what I'm really keen to just publicize this for.

I'd like to add one more thing, which is meaning making and how do you understand the world and grasp what is going on? Because that is the part of Bildung that is also very much how do you read the cultural codes? But that is also about having artists that can produce new music, new paintings, new architecture that express where you are as a people right now. Yeah, it is about food. It's about local flora and fauna, all that stuff that the heritage that grew out of place.

Yeah.

And if you're a tribe of, I don't know, 100,000 people, it is not very likely that you have the talent mass to have a painter's community, a composer's community, a writer's community, a scientific community, all these things that are part of the modern world and creating the expressions and symbols that allow us to deal with the modern world. But when you have 10 million people or 30 million people, you have the resources and the talent mass for people to be able to focus on being the painters who create new expressions visually. Or being the composers who create new music that has an artistic quality and level that matches what we hear from other countries and other groups of people. And you may, of course, within 100,000 people have one mathematic genius and two composers who are brilliant, but it doesn't create that environment and that fruitful ecosystem of mutual inspiration and disagreement. So when you have millions of people who speak the same language and can have these discussions and disagree on what is good architecture, disagree on what is good design, then you can have a really fruitful development of that local cultural heritage so that you draw on the heritage but you also renew it and, and make it relevant to, to the time that we're in.

Yeah.

And so having a people of a certain size also allows you to have the talent mass and the resources to have artistic sort of ecosystems of people who can come up with new expressions for, for the things that we're dealing with right now. And so if we want, and that is what I really hope that we can have, all these indigenous cultures around the globe, and in that respect, the Danish culture with 6 million people is also an indigenous culture because it's a rather small people. Iceland is 350,000 people. I want those cultures to thrive and have our own expression of what it means to have the Danish heritage heritage here and the Icelandic heritage in Iceland. And the same thing with the Māori people in New Zealand and the Aborigines in Australia, for instance. So it's so important that in all of these cultures where there's language, culture, aesthetics, music, ways of expressing ourselves and creating symbols, that we have cultural richness, language, and, and resources to actually have these thriving creative environments. And, and that requires that when kids go to school, we teach them, we educate them in their own musical and aesthetic tradition, but also in others and say, oh, so this is, this is what music sounds like in China. This is the way that they do ornamentation on the cliffs in Australia among the Aboriginal peoples there. So we need to learn about our own stuff. We also need to see what's, what's elsewhere.

Yeah.

And then when you start hitting puberty and you want to score, and you wanna impress either the same or the opposite sex, then you start using all these symbols in new ways and you wanna show off how brilliant you are and how you can dance and sing and stuff.

Yeah.

And if, if you're really good at it, you can enter the creative environment and make a living out of it.

Yeah.

So really crucial.

But it has, it has to account for change. Change, right? Any, any of these concepts that we're talking about, they have to account for the evolution and the development and the change of these things without, you know, and again, it's the dance. It's like not losing the integrity of the tradition, but not just not moving forward or changing the tradition because otherwise it will die. And so there's a really important—

today.

Exactly.

Um, yeah. And of course you can, you can have some in museums and you can have celebrations where you do things as traditionally as, as you can because that's how you recall it., but it will mutate. It will, it will change.

Yeah.

But we can draw on it.

So we were intending this to be a short conversation and it hasn't ended up being. It's too hard to not talk for ages to you. But just, I can't finish without, we need to talk briefly about the manifesto and what's happening in Vilnius because we've talked a bit about the imagined community of countries and the nationalism. And then there's the idea of a European Building Day and a European Building Manifesto that you're working towards on May 7th to 9th in Vilnius. So do you want to say a little bit about that?

So originally I wanted us to have in the European Building Network, because that was what we had back in 2019, a European Building Manifesto, so we could have an idea about what is that we're going to do in Europe with building. Then came COVID, we went online with the European Building Day, the second time we had it on May 9th on Europe Day. And there were a lot of people from the US who joined online. There was one guy from India. And when we started working on the European Building Manifesto, I sensed that people wanted a global building manifesto. So we changed the text and it became more global in scope. And then we started the Global Building Network. And so that is what we have now. And there is a North American Building Network and a European one, and we would love to have it on all continents. So there is a Global Building Manifesto. And it's online and you can go there, read it and sign it from wherever you are. But we still have a situation in Europe that is different from the situation in the US that is different from Africa. And I think all continents and all countries could have, or peoples could have a building manifesto for what is it that we want to do with our heritage in the place that we are in. And if I were to suggest or think of a building manifesto for Africa, It would have to start in a completely different way than a building manifesto starts in Europe because the educational situation, the population demographics are different. There's the whole colonialization in Africa that needs to be dealt with. We'll have to deal with it in Europe from, but from the other side of colonization. So actually we have a speaker from Africa at the European Building Day to talk about, so how can Europe actually be useful? Not just to Europe, but to everybody, to other people as well. So we do not have a shared language in Europe, but we do have a political union. So how do we deal with that in Europe? That doesn't concern anybody in the United States from a building perspective. It may concern them from a political perspective, but it's none of their business really. It's a European thing.

Yeah.

So I hope that we can, when we meet at the European Building Day in Vilnius, the Sunday, May 7th, is more of a cultural experience. But May 8th and May 9th, we will be discussing what is the Bildung situation in Europe right now and what should it be and how can we as a continent deal with our own heritage and identity? What does it mean to be a continent that needs to function as a continent with all these many, many, many languages and heritages and also conflicts? And it's really interesting when you, when you travel around Europe because the educational level is rather high. We all have those sort of shared wars and historical figures that we know. And one of my Danish kings, Christian II, is called in Sweden Christian the Tyrant. And I didn't know that until maybe 10 years ago when I started going to Sweden regularly. And he was the one who orchestrated the Stockholm Bloodbath. I had learned about the Stockholm Bloodbath, but with the Swedes as the villains. And here was this Danish Swedish king that they hated in Stockholm for good reason. And so we live on a continent where these wars and conflicts, luckily until February 24th last year, basically were part of our history. We're in a, in a process of figuring out what does it mean to be European right now. And one of the interesting things about doing this in Vilnius is that we will actually have very much an Eastern European Baltic feel to the whole thing and focus because not least with a border with Russia, there's a huge need for figuring out how do we— also with a huge Russian minority in many of those countries.

Yeah, I mean, precisely to your point that it's not a fact of history that the conflict is now here and real and, you know, in our news feeds every single day makes this a really important and urgent thing to talk about. And I think the other thing I wanted to reflect on was the fact that it is I think it's a really good thing, if I can say that, to have culturally specific kind of versions of bildung because precisely to your point earlier, if it's just this bland universal manifesto of truth for everybody everywhere of all time, it means nothing really, right? It has to be rooted culturally specifically in a particular moment. Mid-conflict Russia-Ukraine and in a particular cultural context. And I think that's, yeah, that's really important.

We're going to have some traditional Lithuanian singing. We're going to have Vilnius pancakes. We're going to have a speaker from one of the Danish folk high schools where they have a program for national minorities in Europe. So that's the Danish minority in northern Germany, but it's also the Basque and the Catalan and some of those minorities who are actually keeping their own language within one of the modern European states. Some want independence, others want to remain a culture and ethnic groups within it. And I mean, this is part of Europe as well. So you have all the official languages and then you have the minority groups that were actually, I wouldn't say there first, but who have been there for at least as long as the state they're in. And that is part of the European cultural fabric as well.

Precisely. And they may disagree that that conflict is a thing of the past.

Right.

You know, because actually there's been active conflict advocating for the rights of those kind of minority groups ongoing.

There is, say, Northern Ireland. I mean, there is, there are all these conflicts. But part of what Bildung can do for us is that you as an individual can come to the point where you appreciate the differences. That does not solve the political problem. I'm not saying that, but it can allow you to have an appreciation of all these different kinds of cultures. And the fact that other people have the right to their meaning-making in the same way that you do. And if somebody else has another language, it's their right. 100%.

And I feel like that's such an— that homogenizing urge in people is a really damaging one because as you say, as soon as you acknowledge the diversity and that everyone has the rights to their own meaning-making machinery, cultural norms, values, preferences, et cetera, the individual and the collective level, diversity is a good thing for resilience for, for all these different reasons we know. As soon as you acknowledge that, you're kind of one step forward towards some negotiated accord, whatever that might look like politically.

And/or you have particularly as a minority, the double consciousness that comes from living with two cultures.

Yeah.

Which actually gives you a perspective on both cultures because you can use the one perspective, the one culture to look at the other one. German, so sort of a Bildungsreise that you grew up in because you were switching between what you speak at home, what you speak in school, or what you maybe your local church or something. But the national discourse on television is a different language. So this is also part of Europe. And that's of course also with, with regards to immigrants. I mean, how, how do we handle as immigrants and minority communities of that kind, the bigger sort of national majority culture and how does the majority culture handle these minorities and how do we create a shared sense of, yes, imagine community in each of the countries in order to remain democracies. So there's so many aspects to this. And so that is, that is what we're going to be discussing. And I hope that we can also have that as we draft the manifesto, a focus on the richness that is in Europe. I shouldn't forget to say that we also have a speaker from Belarus Belarus, which is also culturally a part of Europe but not part of EU for a number of reasons. And there will be somebody from Ukraine also. So I mean, we really think Europe as a culture, as a civilization in this, in this context. We're not addressing Russia specifically, but Russia will be our neighbor for a very long time. And at some point we will, we will look into that as well. Not this time.

Great. And just practically, people can join online as well physically in person for that one?

Yes. So the Global Bildung Day is entirely online and is free of charge, but we appreciate all donations. Not just nations, also donations. And European Bildung Day, there's a ticket price for joining us in Vilnius, but there is also a fee for joining online.

Good stuff.

It's live.

Wow.

And has pancakes.

I'll be there for the pancakes. No, I'm just, I'm really happy to be able to support. I think it's a really important movement and everything that you're doing. Well, thank you, Lena. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. A lot bit longer than we planned for, but I think it's— there's so much there. I mean, there's such big topics. And I think, as I said, my aim is to support, to bring people who don't see themselves as connected with the Bildung movement, but they deeply are. As soon as you start unpacking the concepts, they're committed, heartfelt educators doing work to help young people and everybody develop. And that's a big part of it. Of what we're talking about. So, right, yeah, exactly. Good stuff. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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