A modern school thinker from 1836 - oral, respect and conversation
The living word
In Grundtvig’s preface to his 1832 study of Scandinavian mythology, Nordens mytologi [Nordic
mythology], the first glimpses can be seen of the Danish folk high school of the future:
There will be the common centre from which the institution branches out into all the main lines of practical life, and
back to which it endeavours to gather and unite all the energies of society. Here, all the civil servants of the state who
do not need scholarship but life, insight and practical ability, and all those who wish to belong to the rank of the
educated should get the very best chance of developing themselves in a suitable direction and of getting to know one
another.6
Although Grundtvig’s ideas for a folk high school are in the merest embryonic form in ‘Nordic
mythology', nevertheless, this work does contain a full dress-rehearsal for Grundtvig’s later attacks
on the ‘Schools for Death’, as he called the Latin grammar schools. Latin is ridiculed mercilessly;
its literature Grundtvig considers to be an ‘abomination ... imitation work and unlike Greek and Old
Norse did not spring from the life of the people’.7 In Grundtvig’s contrasting of the ‘spiritless and
life-less learning of the Romano-Italian’8 with the vivid oral traditions behind Greek and Norse
mythology, there is a foreshadowing of the great importance Grundtvig was to give to oral
communication in his plans for education.
Read the whole article:
www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/grundtve.pdf -
Comments