The Folk High School in Rødding

The Exception that Proves the following Rule

Abstract

When was the first “folk high school” (or people’s college) established in Denmark? Like so much else, the answer depends on definition. It depends, among other things, on what is understood by the word “Denmark” before 1864; whether it refers to the whole state, the “Helstaten” that existed until 1864 and included the three duchies of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenborg. The answer also depends on what the term “folk high school” meant between 1842 and 1864. Useful in addressing these questions is the history of concepts, a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the relationship between changes in the meaning of words and the changes that take place in the societal context. With this model in mind, the article asks two questions: 1) Why was the school in Rødding called a “folk high school” when the phrase was not used for any of the other more than 25 schools established between 1842 and 1864 for young adults; rather, they were called higher peasant schools and the like. 2) What was the background for the change in terminology; why is it that, after 1864, “higher peasant schools” was no longer the central concept but rather the concept “folk high school”? Research consensus is that N.F.S. Grundtvig designed the idea behind the concept of folk high schools. But the Holstein jurist Carl Frederik Hermann Klenze and the Danish peasant leader and lay preacher Rasmus Sørensen who formed the foundations
of higher peasant schools. While Grundtvig contributed to shaping the national basis for the folk high school in Rødding in 1844, Sørensen formulated an anti-national ideological basis for the higher peasant school he established in Uldum in 1849. Before 1864, a minority of schools for young adults were called “folk high schools.” It was only after the collapse of “Helstaten” in 1864 that the term became common. This shift was related to the transformation of the Danish state: from a “Helstat” to a national state. As the critic Jørgen Bukdahl, Askov, has pointed out, the folk high school was the main force in “giving content to the concept of a
Danish nation state,” content that “Helstaten” did not provide.