Folk high school

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Folk high schools (Danish: Folkehøjskole; German: Volkshochschule; Norwegian: Folkehøgskole; Swedish: Folkhögskola; Finnish: kansanopisto) are institutions of adult education that do not grant academic degrees. They are common in the Nordic countries and in Germany. The concept was originally inspired by the Danish writer, poet, philosopher and pastor Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783 - 1872). The Condorcet report during the 1789 French Revolution was also an important milestone of popular instruction.

Despite similar names and remotely similar goals, the institutions are quite different in the German/Swedish and the Norwegian/Danish traditions. German/Swedish folk high schools are in fact much closer to the institutions known as folkeuniversitet or folkuniversitet in Norway and Denmark, which provide adult education, usually in connection with a local regular university. The Finnish työväenopisto or kansalaisopisto (called arbetarinstitut in Swedish) are also part of this educational tradition.

Other countries have also been inspired by Danish thoughts on people's involvement in education. In USA, Africa and India, a few schools have been built upon the principles of Grundtvig.

1 Features
2 Denmark
3 Norway
4 Sweden
5 Germany
6 France
7 References
8 See also
9 External links

[edit] Features

The character of folk high schools differs from country to country but usually such institutions have the following common features:

A large variety of subjects
No final exams
Focus on self-development
Pedagogical freedom
Courses last between a few months and one year

Especially in non-German speaking countries, folk high schools may be boarding schools or may mainly offer courses for adults age 18–30 only.

[edit] Denmark

The first folk high school was founded in Rødding, Denmark, in 1844, on the initiative of Kristen Kold and inspired by the educational thinking of Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig. It was sparked by a need to educate the uneducated and often poor peasantry, who could not spend the time or the money to enroll at a university.

Today there are 79 folk high schools in Denmark. The principal subjects of instruction vary among the creative (e.g., music, arts, design, writing, etc.) and the intellectual (e.g., religion, philosophy, literature, psychology, etc.). A handful of schools specialize in sports.

In recent history, globalization has exercised an increasingly important influence on the Danish schools. Many courses are open to foreigners as well as Danes, and many courses include travelling or voluntary stays in other countries as part of the curriculum.

[edit] Norway

Norway's first folk high school was founded in 1864. In 2007, there are 77 folk high schools spread across the country, 30 of which are Christian. Folk high schools provide opportunities in general education, primarily for young adults. These schools are different from secondary schools, high schools and higher education. All students are eligible for normal financial aid. Most folk high schools are connected to some sort of organization. Most courses are for one year, but there are a few that are two years.

[edit] Sweden

The first folk high schools in Sweden were established in 1868. Today, there are about 150 folk high schools throughout the country, most of which are situated in the countryside, often in remote areas. Tuition is free, and the students are eligible for normal financial aid. After graduating, the students are eligible to study at a university.

Some schools, for example Södra Vätterbygdens Folkhögskola near Jönköping, cooperate with schools in other countries and have an exchange student program.

[edit] Germany

A Volkshochschule in one of the German-speaking countries usually provides non-credit continuing adult education in:

general education
vocational education
political education
German as a second language (especially for immigrants)
different foreign languages
different forms of art
information technology
health education
preparatory classes for school exams (especially for the Abitur or Matura)

This type of folk high school is currently most widespread in Germany. Due to its offering of preparatory classes for school exams, the German Volkshochschule also fulfills the educational function of adult high schools in other countries.

[edit] France

Main article: Popular Education

Popular Education in France founds its roots in the Condorcet report during the 1789 French Revolution. These ideas became an important component of the Republican and Socialist movement. During the Second Empire, Jean Macé founded the Ligue de l'enseignement (Teaching League) in 1866; during the Lille Congress in 1885, Macé reaffirmed the masonic inspiration of this league devoted to popular instruction. Following the split of the First International at the 1872 Hague Congress between the "anti-authoritarian socialists" (anarchists) and the Marxists, popular education remained an important part of the workers' movement, in particular in the anarcho-syndicalist movement which set up, with Fernand Pelloutier, various Bourses du travail centres, where workers gathered and discussed politics and sciences. This first phase of popular education was heavily marked with the Republican, positivist and democratic ideal of the Enlightenment, which considered public instruction as a main tool of individual and collective emancipation, and thus the necessary conditions of autonomy, in accordance to Immanuel Kant's Was Ist Aufklärung? (What is the Enlightenment?), published five years before the Revolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's L'Emile: Or, On Education (1762) was another obvious theoretical influence. The Jules Ferry laws in the 1880s, establishing free, laic, mandatory and public education, were one of the founding stones of the Third Republic (1871-1940), set up in the aftermaths of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune.

Furthermore, most of the teachers, who were through-out one of the main support of the Third Republic, so much that it has been called the République des instituteurs ("Republic of Teachers"), while the teachers themselves were called, because of their Republican anti-clericalism, the hussards noirs de la République, supported Alfred Dreyfus against the conservatives during the Dreyfus Affair. One of its consequences was for them to set up free educational lectures of humanist topics for adults in order to struggle against the spread of anti-semitism, which was not limited to the far-right but also affected the workers' movement.

Popular education continued to be an important field of socialist politics, reemerging in particular during the Popular Front in 1936-38, while autogestion (self-management), a main tenet of the anarcho-syndicalist movement, became a popular slogan following the May '68 revolt.

Following the 1981 presidential election which brought to power the Socialist Party (PS)'s candidate, François Mitterrand, his Minister of Education, Alain Savary, supported Jean Lévi's initiative to create a public high school, delivering the baccalauréat, but organized on the principles of autogestion (or self-management): this high school took the name of Lycée autogéré de Paris (LAP) ^[1]. The LAP explicitly inspired itself by the Oslo Experimental High School, opened in 1967 in Norway, as well as the Saint-Nazaire Experimental High School, opened six months before the LAP. Furthermore, the secondary school Vitruve was another source of inspiration (it opened in 1962 in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, and is still active). Theoretical references include Célestin Freinet and his comrades from the I.C.E.M., as well as Raymond Fonvieille, Fernand Oury,and others theoreticians of "institutional pedagogy," as well as those coming from the institutional analysis movement, in particular René Lourau, as well as members of the institutional psychotherapeutic movement, which were a main component in the 1970s of the anti-psychiatric movement (of which Félix Guattari was an important member). Since 2005, the LAP has created contact with others self-managed firms, in the REPAS network (Réseau d'échanges et de pratiques alternatives et solidaires, Network of Exchange of Solidarity and Alternative Practices").