Højskole i 150 år

Resumé

150 Years of the Folk High School- Books around a Jubilee

By Hans Henningsen

With the book »Rødding Folk High School 1844 - 1994«, Käthe Z. S. Pedersen and John Pedersen have provided an interesting contribution to the history of the folk high school. Thanks to Chr. Flor, the man behind the initiative to establish the school, Rødding Folk High School became an attempt to realize Grundtvig’s folk high school ideas from the 1830s more than any other school in the first hundred years of the folk high school movement. Among successive principals at Rødding it was above all Sofus Høgsbro who tried to continue Flor’s socially oriented line, but came up against difficulties from several sides. After the war in 1864, the principal and teachers decided to carry on the school at Askov, north of the new border.

Another publication from the jubilee year is »Knowledge and Spirit - Ask Folk High School 1869 - 1994« by Thorkild C. Lyby, Doctor of Divinity. After the national disaster in 1864 folk high schools sprang up everywhere, some of them sustained, first and foremost, by the need of the peasants for education and social and political equality, others also by the revivals and the educational ideas of Grundtvig and Kold. The schools that were named after Lars Bjømbak, Viby near Aarhus, belonged to the first category. The »Bjømbak« schools did not have the spirit of the time on their side, as the Grundtvigians had. But politically, the »Bjømbak«s were more class-conscious than the Grundtvigians.

The goal was the uprising of the peasantry. As this goal was gradually being approached, the justification for this type of folk high school disappeared. The Association of Folk High Schools in Denmark celebrated the jubilee with a publication by Professor Gunhild Nissen, Doctor of Pedagogics: »Challenges to the Folk High School«. The main view is that the folk high school, which should concern itself with universal matters, was hampered by the alliance with the peasantry and allowed itself to be restricted culturally by the Christian world picture as determined by the revivals. The folk high school proved incapable of opening up towards the young people of modem urban culture, and it failed when the democratic wave of the 60s included the question of student influence, which for example showed itself in the Askov controversy around 1970, which is dealt with in detail in the book.

An important post-war innovation within the folk high school was Krogerup Folk High School, established in 1946. This is the subject of the book »Hal Koch and Krogerup Folk High School«, written by the former Minister of Economic Affairs, Poul Nyboe Andersen. Krogerup was a modem attempt to create a folk high school on the immediate inspiration of Grundtvig’s folk high school model. But Krogerup turned out to be a disappointment to its founder and first principal, Professor of Theology Hal Koch.

In the political associations and youth organizations that Hal Koch had appealed to, tbe belief in the importance of a national community spirit and the enthusiastic faith in dialogue as the mainstay of democracy did not for long survive the War and the Occupation.

However, nothing has contributed more than Hal Koch’s Krogerup work to the transplantation of Grundtvig’s idea of the dialogue and the national community feeling to the modem democratic society.