Week 10
Bildung in Byker
#AdultConversations #52weeks52speaks
Week 10 Garry Nicholson
‘Whatever you have learned here you can take away in your head, or in your heart perhaps, but not on a piece of paper’
Jens Therkelsen Arnfred (1882-1977)
Adult community education at its heart is about local people pursuing their own interests, in local settings, simply because they want to. It’s about people wanting to know more than how to order ‘deux cafés au lait’ when on holiday. It’s about people with a spark for learning but for whatever reason school didn’t light it. Or the light went out. It is about the ever-popular cake decoration classes and lately it’s been about learning how to up-cycle old furniture and parents wanting to know more about how to help their children with online learning. Squeezed by funding cuts and an increasing pressure to deliver courses that are deemed to make adults more economically useful, it is still very much alive and kicking, although somewhat marginalised in recent decades. Some people know that they are also coming for a chat or to escape social isolation, but for most it takes a little while for them to see the unplanned for benefits such as having grown in confidence, generally feeling good about themselves or being part of a community. Growth happens on many levels in adult community education.
One thing that you could be sure of is if you were to ask a learner or tutor in community education what the word Bildung means, they would more than likely look at you blankly, even in a German language class, unless of course the tutor was German, or perhaps Scandinavian. Literally translated this Germanic word means ‘self-cultivation’ or ‘self-formation’, even though this definition hardly does the word justice. A more comprehensive definition is given by Anderson & Bjorkman (2017, p5) in their book The Nordic Secret:
‘’Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him- or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms. It is the enculturation and life-long learning that forces us to grow and change, it is existential and emotional depth, it is life-long interaction and struggles with new knowledge, culture, art, science, new perspectives, new people and new truths and it is being an active citizen in adulthood. Bildung is a constant process that never ends.’’
The basic principle of Bildung is that if a person continually self-cultivates, self-forms and grows as a person, they will begin to fully understand themselves, and in turn have a better understanding of their role within society and the contribution they can make to it.
At this point you may well have dismissed developing Bildung in adult education as a minority pursuit, which is exactly what I thought until I started researching the concept and connecting with colleagues in Europe. They are very keen to stress that the word Bildung is hard to translate into English, which is possibly an attempt to stop us turning it into some form of examination. It is, however, far from being a concept embraced by just a minority of educators, as I realised when I recently attended an online conference entitled ‘More Bildung in Adult Education?’ organised by the European Association for the Education of Adults. Countless delegates from across Europe, and as far afield as India, plus one Englishman! There was some genuine bemusement when I turned up in breakout rooms and one person with genuine fascination asked me if English people did Bildung.
Perhaps to fully understand the concept and how it relates to adult community education in the United Kingdom, it is useful to look first at how the Scandinavian nations consider themselves to be the happiest in the world partly because they follow the principle of Bildung.
The World Happiness Report (2020) is an annual publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It contains rankings of national happiness based on respondent ratings of their own lives. The top two ranked nations are almost always made up of Scandinavian countries, with Finland and Denmark topping the most recent rankings in 2020, just as they have for the four previous reports. To understand why this is, it is illuminating to compare Denmark’s approach to non-formal education with that of England.
Denmark’s population was recently recorded as 5,790,888 (UN, June 2020). This is not a remarkable statistic in itself, as Denmark has a relatively small land mass, but what is remarkable is that according to the Danish Ministry for Children and Education website (2020), ‘There are approximately 700,000 participants each year in non-formal adult education.’ In comparison, according to equivalent statistics in England, adult community learning had 487,400 participants in 2018/19 (Department for Education, 2019) with a population of 55,977,178 (UN, June 2020). Bluntly put, an adult in Denmark is almost fourteen times more likely to take part in non-formal learning than their English equivalent. In contrast to the United Kingdom’s focus on achieving qualifications and increasing employability within adult education, the same website has a clear statement about the purpose of non-formal adult education which very much sums up the essence of Bildung, or ‘Dannelse’ in Danish, in a modern Scandinavian country, ‘The objective of non-formal adult education is, by taking a point of departure in the courses and activities, to increase the individual’s general and academic insight and skills and enhance the ability and desire to take responsibility for their own life, as well as taking an active and engaged part in society’ (DMCE, 2020). The question of why participation is so high in Denmark, and why the purpose is so clearly defined, can be traced back to the 19th Century and the vision of one man and the inspiration he drew from the concept of Bildung.
The introduction of non-formal adult education in Denmark is associated with N.F.S. Grundtvig, a Danish philosopher, poet, educational thinker and clergyman. Inspired by the concept of Bildung, he saw a growing democratic need in Danish society to enlighten the uneducated and poor (Mortenson, 2019). He had a vision of education that could be attained through dialogue, story and debate about life’s big questions. Perhaps one of his most famous sayings was ‘‘Light always comes before the life’’(Grundtvig as cited in Davies, 1931 p89). For Grundtvig education was about waking up to life and all its possibilities and not a robotic process of becoming functional. For many in Europe, Grundtvig is the person who has best applied the concept of Bildung to education. To this day the EAEA has a yearly award bearing his name which aims to celebrate innovation and excellence (EAEA, 2020).
In 1844 Gruntvig would practically apply his principles by opening Denmark’s first folk high school in Rødding. All Scandinavian countries now have folk high schools and Denmark has seventy which are attended by more than 40,000 people each year (AFHSD, 2019). Danes from the age of seventeen and a half attend can attend folk schools for on average two terms and the central aim of the schools, according to The Association of Folk High Schools in Denmark website (2019), is that:
‘’courses should be of a broad, general nature. This means that, while students of course should acquire knowledge and skills in certain subjects, the main purpose of the teaching is not to acquire a particular skill set, but to open the eyes, minds and hearts of students and teachers alike to aspects of the human existence and to shed light on the lives they are living, both individually and collectively.’’
Add into this mix that there are no fixed curriculums, grades or exams, and that they are free to design their educational practice and to plan the content of courses and activities, and you can begin to see that this is a very different conception of adult education to the one that we have. In England’s current educational landscape, it seems inconceivable that such an approach could ever be viewed with anything other than deep mistrust, especially by a government that is so insistent that exams are the fairest way to evidence educational attainment. For many of us though the Bildung approach presents a vision of what education could and should be.
There is no doubt that as a researcher of Bildung and the Danish Folk High Schools I am far from being unbiased. It is fascinating to discover a concept and education system that until recently I had no knowledge of, yet so strongly aligns with my own educational values and beliefs. To be honest I have always been trying to bring a bit of Bildung into my practice, which is apparent when reflecting back on one of my early experiences of teaching English in a community setting. It was during this time that I was to realise that education can transform the lives of adults in ways that it would be impossible to fit into the neat boxes of a learner journey document or within the neat specifications of a qualifications criteria. I was asked to teach English at a community centre in Byker which lies in the shadow of the Byker Wall housing development that dominates the area. Only a mile or so from the centre of the city, Byker regularly makes the top ten poorest wards in the North East. I was forewarned that the learners could prove to be challenging and that I had to set down firm boundaries from the start or my experience could be very short-lived. The aim was to teach them Functional English and preferably get them through a qualification within six months. I gained the impression from my new colleagues that they either pitied me or were vaguely amused that the new boy had been allocated the class that no one wanted. It would be an understatement to say that being told that it ‘wouldn’t be that bad’ and receiving pats on the back didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.
Having no idea how many learners would turn up to the first session, I arrived armed with bundles of enrolment forms, assessment materials and learner journey documents. I would never normally dream of starting a new class by bombarding the learners with paperwork but because I was new to the service I had decided that I needed to do something that I would never normally dream of doing and that is to conform.
The learners arrived in dribs and drabs, having deposited their babies and toddlers in the creche next door, until about eight young women sat eyeing me nervously and suspiciously. Having completed the dreaded, but necessary, enrolment forms with the usual scepticism about why they had to give personal details and signatures, I moved on to the individual learner journey documents resplendent with colourful literacy themed clip art. Now for some learners a good four pages of boxes and lists might not be off putting but the disdain that this group showed for the document was clear from the start. Questions about past qualifications, school experiences, preferred learning styles and the like were either left blank or received single word answers such as ‘none’ and ‘crap’. Having spent a painful first half an hour or so I then moved onto a reading assessment that I had taken straight from the functional skills resources entitled ‘Planning a holiday’. A few muttered that it would be great to actually have some money to go on holiday and half an hour of muttered expletives later the last person had finished, and I was about as bored as I have ever been in teaching. Only an hour had passed and besides the numerous requests for ‘fag’ breaks to break up the monotony, I had learned very little about them as a group and they about me. More importantly, none of the previous sixty minutes had touched on the learning journeys they had in mind. Without even asking them what they wanted to learn, I had decided that they were to become ‘functional’ and effectively hijacked their learning journeys.
I am aware that this description probably paints me in a poor light as an educator but in my defence, I would say that the desire to conform on my first assignment somewhat clouded my judgement as I would never normally start with any new class in this way. Luckily my person-centred instincts kicked in and after the fifth request for a fag break, I decided to apologise to them for how deadly dull the first part of the session had been. So far, any worries about being eaten alive had not materialised. Yes, they were loud and swore a lot, but as I was to find out over the next two years all of them had overcome multiple challenges in their lives and the fact that they were sitting in a room hoping to learn was testimony to their desire to do so.
Once the conversation got going about why they had come, I soon found that their motivations were much more creative than the functional English that I had planned. The consensus was that they wanted to write stories and poems and read books together. So that is what we did. From that point on each week was planned around what we had agreed the week before. We went with the flow. Think a meandering road trip through Europe rather than a two-week all-inclusive package holiday. Two lessons particularly stand out, neither of which would ever find their way into a functional skills curriculum. The first was when I asked them to write the story of a time when life had been difficult. You could have heard a pin drop as they wrote with real enthusiasm and emotion about their experiences. This writing proved cathartic for many of them, something that writing a functional letter requesting a refund is certainly less likely to achieve. The second activity was a group read of ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ by Roald Dahl (1953). The slightly macabre story about how a police detective’s wife murders him and feeds him to his bemused colleagues nearly caused a riot in the room and led to a huge debate about whether or not the crime could be justified. I know that afterwards copies of the story were being shared all over Byker. Both activities connected with their real lives and captured their imaginations in a way that functional English that is geared to employment can never do. What was so powerful about both activities was that they allowed the learners to reflect on their own lives and experiences. Not only did they look inwards at who they were but also outwards at where they were with other people close to them and society in general. They did achieve the qualifications that they needed and some of them gained employment afterwards, but we had forged our own path and undoubtedly, we were happier and more motivated because of it. Over time they also swore less and asked for less fag breaks. After nearly two years with them they had bonded, settled and even established accepted behaviours that were explained when new people joined. They had gone from nerves and antipathy to being relaxed and cheeky in a good way, frequently telling me that I was ‘alright because you’re not stuck up’. Rather than driving the motorway of functional skills we had driven along the scenic backroads and in doing so had developed our Bildung along the way. A parting shot from one learner on the last day summed up the humour when, pushing her buggy off, she turned back and shouted, ’I’ve quite liked coming to English with you, but you do know I only ever came so I could put my kids in the creche and have a break!’
Recently I found myself engrossed in conversation, conducting what can only be loosely called a research interview on Zoom. It was more coffee and philosophising to be perfectly honest. Kaare the Danish Folk School teacher was explaining that ‘it isn’t so important what we learn but more how we learn and what we learn about ourselves and each other along the way’. He went on to elaborate on how his recent course entitled ‘Coffee, Cake and Big Ideas’ had started as a philosophy course discussing current issues in the world but the learners enthusiasm for coffee had led them in a whole new direction and ended up being a course about coffee and ‘one of the best courses I have ever taught’. They had learned how to analyse, discuss, debate and wonder. And as he pointed out, the course could just as easily have been about cake! I asked him how he knew they had made progress and after some thought he smiled and remarked, ‘how can you measure a person’s ability to wonder about life?’. Perhaps the person to sum up this stance best was the head teacher at Askov folk high school, Jens Therkelsen Arnfred (1882-1977), who explained to a departing American student in 1948 that ‘Whatever you have learned here you can take away in your head, or in your heart perhaps, but not on a piece of paper’ (Arnfred as cited in Borish, 1991, p387). Certainly, for me the time I spent teaching in Byker has stayed very much in my head and heart ever since. Teaching them wasn’t just about their Bildung journeys, but also mine. We had all developed some Bildung in Byker!
References
Anderson, L. & Bjorkman, T. (2017) The Nordic Secret: A European story of beauty and freedom. Copenhagen: Fri Tanke.
Borish, S. (1991) The Land of the Living. Nevada City: Blue Dolphin Publishing.
Danish Folk High Schools. (2020) About Folk High Schools. Available at: https://www.danishfolkhighschools.com/about-folk-high-schools/what-is-a-folk-high-school/. (Accessed: 8th June 2020).
Danish Ministry of Children and Education (2018) Non-formal adult education. Available at: https://eng.uvm.dk/adult-education-and-continuing-training/non-formal-adult-education (Accessed: 7 June 2020).
Davies, N. (1931) Education for Life. London: Williams & Norgate.
Department for Education. (2019) Community Learning. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fe-data-library-community-learning (Accessed: 15 Feb 2021).
Helliwell, J., Layard, R., Sachs, J. & De Neve, J.E. (2020) World Happiness Report 2020. Available at: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/ (Accessed: 21 Feb 2021).
Mortenson, S. (2019) Danish Folk High Schools. Copenhagen: FFD.
United Nations. (2020) World Population Prospects 2019. Available at: https://population.un.org. (Accessed: 8th June 2020).