https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BRlqE14Z7YE
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Vervecky. I’m very excited about this. This meeting was too long in coming. Part of that was my fault. This is Lenny Rachel Anderson, and our paths should have crossed much sooner. She wrote, of course, a book you probably mentioned, The Nordic Secret, and she’s also written this book, Bildung, Keep Growing, and this is the one I’d like to focus in on. Although I welcome Lenny to talk about anything she wants to talk about. What we’re going to talk about today is extremely relevant to the religion that’s not a religion and awakening from the meaning crisis. I think it is perhaps in some ways central. And so just welcome Lenny. It’s great to have you here. And tell us a little bit about yourself before we begin. So I am by training by education and economist. I used to write comedy for Danish television. I studied theology for a while, but dropped out. And then I started that’s when I started writing comedy for television for real. And then I started writing books about the future and the technological development, big history and where we are in the human evolution, cultural evolution. And based on that, I, of course, started wondering how we’re going to handle these many changes, how we’re going to handle climate change and the other crisis that we’re facing. And my answer was Bildung. And it was what I realized back in, I don’t know, 2005. My first book came out in 2005 in Denmark and Danish. And then I started talking to Thomas Bjergman, who was, you talked to him a while ago. And here I started talking about this in 2012. And from 2015 to 2017, I then wrote the book The Nordic Secret, which is this brick that is about Bildung, but it’s also about how this old concept from Germany, it’s, it’s a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, Bildung. So Bild means in German. So originally it was, it was a spiritual Christian, peatistic concept of shaping yourself in the image of Christ or in the image of God. But then by the 1750s, during the Enlightenment, people kind of lost that interest, at least the philosophers and the intellectuals. And so instead, they started focusing on a secular version of Bildung, which is more in line with education, cultural heritage, cultivation, formation, and how you develop as an individual in a cultural context. And so it does, it has a lot of poetry, beauty, how you connect with nature, it was part of romanticism and the German idealism and this whole idea that we all participate in this big spirit that permeates everything that Hegel was also writing about. But this relates more specifically to how do people actually perceive the world, be in the world, how do they take responsibility, how do they act socially and evolve as individuals, how do we mature well. And so this German concept was transformed into a folk-builder movement in Denmark by Danish pastor and Danish school teacher and that is what the Nordic Secret is about. And what I found out, and I wasn’t really aware of it, but as I started researching the book and writing the book, it stood out more and more clearly that this German concept of personal development more than anything else. And so this idea of personal development more than and emotional development was really a very, very popular and very well recognized and yeah, common idea among philosophers 250 years ago and it’s the foundation under the Danish school system and it’s a foundation under these folk high schools that also came out of it. And so there’s a foundation under everything that we call education that in a lot of places we have forgotten one of the people who took it to the universities was Wilhelm von Humboldt and he was actually a minister of education from 1809 to 1811 or something like that in Prussia. So this idea that education isn’t just about transfer of knowledge, it is also how do you relate to knowledge, how do you relate to other people, how do you take responsibility and become a reasonable adult that can become a good citizen was part of it and how can you connect with culture and other people at a deeper level. And so the whole meaning crisis and the whole sense of loss of purpose and how do we navigate the time we’re in I think that really calls for this building and connection to culture, cultural heritage, and knowing where we’re coming from. So that has been my path into this and it really came from the societal tech and economic side of it and trying to figure out so what are we actually going to do about it. And once I started digging into this I realized that we do actually have an experience in the Nordic country where we went from poor agricultural, feudalistic, authoritarian societies in the 1700s and early 1800s to modern democratic industrialized open peaceful societies where everybody, or at least the majority and particularly among the rural population which in other parts of Europe at the time were still illiterate, actually managed to give people the access to the education and the building that allowed them to grasp the opportunities in the late 1800s during industrialization and the early 1900s when yeah modernity and the modern society as we know it really kicked in. And that transition did not exactly go peaceful, was not exactly peaceful and France in 1789 and in Europe in the 1830s and 1848 and 1915 to 18 and 1933 to 1945 and so forth. So, the conclusion was, was what Thomas and I were talking about and what I ended up writing was that there is a Nordic secret, and we managed to go through this transition peacefully and in meaningful ways. And the secret is this folk building and building this whole concept and the schools that we created for it. So that first of all that’s something I want to come back to the contrast between the Nordic transition and the French Revolution and revolutions of 1848. It points to the fact that a cultural revolution is possible, and perhaps more profound than what we have tended to focus on which are the political revolutions, but before we do that, but that’s a very important point I want to dig in to this notion of building, and in fact in the book, not trying to translate it, but just use it and then teach people the concept behind it. And I was impressed by the amount of work you put in to doing this you do a very long and but clear and concise nevertheless, you know, And I wondered if we could talk about each one of those, like, maybe the developmental psychology first and the philosophy stream and then how you see them coming together I really, I think part of what we need to do here is really enrich this notion for people so they can get a sense of how it could be a vehicle for us to be able to do that. Yeah, so when Thomas and I started the discussion about so what are we going to do about the future how society going to go peacefully through all the changes that were in Thomas kept talking about ego development and developmental psychology, and I kept talking about building, and we just, you know, And then Thomas said, read Robert Keegan, because he said Harvard that has to be scientific enough for you and I was like yeah okay that’s okay. Because I thought the ego development was going to be a very important part of the development of the world. And so I said, I think we need to do that. And then I said, I think we need to do that. And then I said, I think we need to do that. And then Thomas said, read Robert Keegan, because he said Harvard that has to be scientific enough for you and I was like yeah okay that’s okay. Because I thought the ego development was some sort of new age stuff, you know. So, not a, I mean, nothing bad about new age, it’s just not science, so I wanted something that I could, you know, dig into, and where you can document what you’re talking about. And I started reading Robert Keegan and while I did that I was reading a Swedish anthology from with Bildon texts from 1828 to 2004. And there was a text from 1840 by a Swedish Finnish diplomat, and the way that he described building was so close to what Keegan is talking about with these different stages So there are five phases that you can go through Keegan has five different phases and very short, it’s early childhood, age two to six, late childhood, age, six to 11. Then you get into what he calls self governing, which is the teenage year and it can continue for the rest of your life, but you can also become self authoring which usually happens with a personal crisis or something that tells you, oops, the way that I try to live up to everybody’s expectations so far, self governing is not how I’m going to live the rest of my life, I need to figure out what is really truly me. And then when you’ve done that for a number of years you may get to the point where you are open to actually focus on other people again not just your way of being and developing yourself. But what what snowman has his name was Wilhelm snowman this old diplomat writing about matched the way that that Robert Keegan is describing late childhood, the self governing and the self offering and I was like, are we talking about the same thing is building and developmental psychology the same. And I eventually reached the conclusion that they’re not but they’re describing the same phenomena, and they’re working in two very different ways so developmental psychology as part of, you know, the academic world. They work in a relatively systematic way there appear reviewed papers and there’s ways of making sure that you know you can document what what you say the building idea the way that people described building 250 and 200 years ago. And they, in that philosophy show an extremely advanced understanding of our psychology but it’s not modern psychology in an academic sense. And I think like hegel who wrote about the phenomenal phenomenology of the spirit. It is based on our connection to culture, how culture and humans interact, how we take up the culture make it our own and pass it on out into the world and that constant loop of us and the world and culture interacting and developmental psychology does not include the same thing. And so, I think that’s what I’m trying to explain here and what it’s saying it’s really just looking at the individual and how that individual person develops through their life. And so, they come from two very different places they describe the same phenomenon. So, it’s not just consciousness conscience, moral and emotional development, but it’s two different methods and building is so connected to pedagogy and education, even though it has psychology in it but it’s much more to the culture and pedagogy side pedagogy side of things. I think I mentioned that there is an important developmental psychologist who talks a lot about culture. I teach him but got the God ski. And it seems to me that but God ski actually to some significant degree because the God ski also does a lot on the philosophy of education. And so, go ahead. Contrary to a lot of the other psychologists. And, I mean, PSA is huge, or at least used to be but I think he still is, and that was children’s psychology developmental psychology until the age of 15. And, and the God ski describes some of the same and I think PSA is very focused on the biological development of the child and how that affects our cognition and the God ski is very focused on how culture affects that cognition. And he, that’s correct and he, and I think that is the why he so used in pedagogy and we got ski talks about the zone of proximal learning which is that learning takes place on the boundary of what you already know. And that is so he really focuses on education. Yeah, and the zone of proximal development is inherently social in nature, as well, right, and it’s dialogical in nature. And he wanted to, for me he seems like a figure that it to some degree bridges between these two. So, you think the notion of building. So, let me let me make sure I’m understanding you. Yeah, the people like Keegan and others especially the ego development people there, they’re not talking about it with a while talking about the same phenomenon but they’re not quite talking about it in the way that the building was being talked about by the philosophers. So what are the philosophers bringing in. I mean there’s, you said there’s this discussion of culture, but I noticed it going in your book in Hegel and get us so there’s ideas about, you know, spirit, there’s ideas about how intelligible the world is, there’s a lot more about making sense in, in individual and collective fashion. So what is it that the philosophers are bringing in. First of all, in 1774 I can, there are some of these numbers and dates that I remembered 1774. There are two amazing books that come out and, and one is good as better. Which causes is like a teenage phenomenon. And it’s about this young man who can’t get the girl that he loves and he screws up his life and I don’t think I revealed too much by saying that he commits suicide at the end of the story. But it’s really about the feudal society and that you have no career opportunities. As if you’re not part of the aristocracy because, I mean, there was not a real job market there was, it was only starting so the sense of, I’m young, I, there’s stuff that I want to do I can just go out and do it there was no these opportunities so so there’s a cultural context where the bush we see and particularly the young men and I guess the young women too but we don’t have too many texts from them were really frustrated and angry and they couldn’t, you know, make a life for themselves. And then his friend had her wrote a book about the building of humanity and how humanity evolved and there he draws a parallel between the onto Genesis and the philogenesis, so the personal development through life and the development of our species. And it’s not politically correct and he calls the nomadic tribes of the Middle East and biblical times for the toddlers. And then I think it’s the Phoenicians who are the young children and the Greek are the little bit older children and the Romans are the late teenager and then the adults, or the young adults which are the Christians and then the really young adults and the mature people are the Protestants because here are the Protestant. Yeah. But, but the way that he describes the seven year old and the 14 year old and so forth matches the way that we evolve today, emotionally and going through puberty and all that and how we relate to other people and what we can do. And that understanding and just building that on Russo by the way, so that understanding of who we are, and that build on relates to our emotional and moral development and that culture matches it and that within a culture. There’s a limit to and I think that is what he’s trying to say, there’s a limit to how much you can evolve and develop as a person. If the culture is not ready for it and that is what Gerdes book was about. The philosophers are bringing in sort of this reciprocal relationship between individual development and cultural development. So, they’re also normal norms. Well, yes, I mean, and I mean, and the interesting thing about morality as a term is it hangs between those two, it hangs between sort of cultural norms and individual norms and there’s a there’s a back and forth process there. But what is it like, is it fair to say, this is an oversimplification, but I’m trying to get a note. I mean, it works with Keegan it’s about it’s about ego development it’s about you know the develop. Whereas, in building especially people like good. And the way there’s the invocation often of Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. It seems much more like the development of character, and also the development of consciousness the way in which you’re sort of framing reality and making sense of it is that and that’s not typically talked about very much in developmental psychology, even today. Is that a fair sort of contrast. Yeah, and right and characters, really good. Thank you for bringing it up because that is that is also what I think a lot of pedagogy has been about. Yeah, for the past two years and also when I mean if we go back to convenience, for instance, who talks about education that is from when you say age appropriate but it’s, it’s, it has to match the cognitive capability of the children. So, one, one of my sort of building heroes is Frederick Schiller. And he says there are three different kinds of people there are the people who are in the throes of their emotions and they’re not free, because their emotions are, you know, running them. And then there’s the people who are taking their clues from society and trying to live according to good taste, and they’re not free either because other people’s expectations are dictating their life. And then there’s the free person who, and this is the interesting thing is this. The transition or the transcendence of this mode of being goes through aesthetics, so you need some calming aesthetics that can sort of align you with society and the emotions in society and once you’re there, and you live there and you’re part of society and you’re, you know, in tune with society. Then at some point you need the invigorating aesthetics that like, oh wow I have my own feelings, and so it’s it’s a connection between your own feelings and the emotions in society or the norms in society. And when you have both of them inside you and you kind of, you know, struggle with them. That is when you’re free because you can choose which of them to follow. And the context for it is really interesting because he writes it in the aftermath of the French Revolution. And this big question along with all the other thinkers is, why could the French not handle political freedom why did the French Revolution become such a bloodbath. And then he says, what’s because we have all these emotional people. And so once they have decapitated or at least caught the tyrant, they want to see blood and then they just you know go for more. And then you have all these people who take their clues from other people and they just run with the people with the strongest emotions. The only people who could handle political freedom would be this free person. And so in order to have political freedom which was the big question for the bourgeoisie in the 1790s in Europe, definitely inspired by the American Revolution. And I also read what’s his name David Graeber and David Wendroce, the dawn of everything. So perhaps even inspired by the indigenous nations and tribes and people in the Americas, but definitely by the American Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. Who can handle political freedom. And if you look at Keegan and sort of see okay so where does Friedrich Schiller and Keegan fit, then we have the old child, the self governing and self authoring and without using the same words. Without using the same words, Friedrich Schiller is really saying only the self authoring can handle political freedom. He doesn’t know he’s saying that because he’s 200 years earlier than Robert Keegan. But I have not seen anybody else in political science or philosophy who make that the connection between political development, political responsibility, political freedom or democracy as we call it now. Yeah, I think it’s the same, to some extent it’s the same, and our capability of actually handling that. And what happens when you are a self authoring person or the free person as Schiller is talking about. Well, you can handle that other people want something else out of life than you do. You can handle that people are offending you without letting it eat you up. You can distinguish yourself from your emotions you can you can handle that somebody is saying something really horrible. And then you can disagree with them and you can tell them to, you know, go somewhere else with your, you know, ways of looking at people with either the wrong sex or gender or lifestyle or color or whatever it is that you don’t, you know, like that you say, you know, things about in nasty ways, but I do not allow myself to, you know, freak out about it and I can still keep a civil discourse, even when I meet stuff that’s maybe horrible that I disagree with, and so forth. But I do, I’m not just running with, with, with the crowd I can actually, you know, see, not just my opponent from the outside but also my, my in group from the outside. I mean, I think the that those connections that Schiller is making in the aesthetic education of man. Sorry for the sexist term is, but it’s deeply influenced by Plato and Aristotle the stoics, because they talk a lot about this, you know, at the T it’s only the educated are free. And this very. So, what I hear you saying is, you know, there’s maybe the three things that are being trained, there’s obviously character and then as you were describing with Schiller there’s comportments, how you are towards the world your, your orientation and stance and then consciousness, the kind of flexibility you have the ability to take other people’s perspective. It sounds to me that if you’re training all of those in an integrated manner. So as to enhance real agency, you’re talking a lot about wisdom. I think it in very important ways. So is it fair to say that there’s a deep connection between building and the cultivation of wisdom. I mean, I haven’t seen it expressed that way but I would say yes, I mean, Schiller describes the process as building you also describes the result as building. And one of the really interesting aspects of building comes from 50, who says that building happens from unstores pushbacks. So whenever you encounter something in the world that you didn’t, you know, you realize that you were wrong, or you did something that turned out to be wrong. You did something that turned out to be a really bad idea and you learn from it. That is, that is building, and that is that is when it happens that is when the world I mean you run your, you know, bump into the world and it wasn’t pleasant. You can also have really, you know, positive experiences and grow from that, but but the sense of oops. It’s actually when building takes place, and I think that, I mean, if we talk about micro aggressions, we could also talk about micro building I mean there’s all these little moments throughout the day or throughout the week where it’s like, I shouldn’t have done it that way. And so, it can feel uncomfortable but it’s part of, it’s part of being human. Well, this is what I would say I mean so one is the original sense the conformity to Christ, being in the image of, and God, that was conceived of as wisdom. And then the second one the, the notion here that the pushback this is like john’s Rusin’s work at about maturation and what he adult life that what we mean but when somebody is mature is they can take more of reality into account. And they’re more capable of responding to it than they previously could, which also sounds like it’s in building as well. And lately Schiller has. I mean, I really get very deep into it but he says something really interesting about how you can have taken up so much of the world inside yourself. That whenever you encounter change, the change sort of just, it’s almost like a sift, the change passes through you, but you don’t change with it. I mean you have, you’re still, I mean you’re very you have so much of the world inside you that you have become flexible yourself, and you can open to the change, it can sort of pass through you. And I find, I would say that would, that would be a very good explanation or description of wisdom. And so, it entails that you that you actually encounter the world that you go out there and that you make mistakes and you do stupid things and you say stupid things and you work, you know, a job that, you know, wasn’t what you were planned, what you plan to do but, but it’s a, it’s a period of your life And so there are all these encounters with the world that actually bring you to maturity, or that are necessary for that maturity to evolve. And of course, the aesthetic part which which really isn’t very, there isn’t very much focus on it and psychology. So, I did that. This, this is fascinating. We could talk about this for a long time but I think we’ve got at least a sense of build on, and now I want to turn to the astonishing claim, which is like that you know this was turned into a social educational project for multiple countries, right, because when I, you know, when I start talking about we need something like a religion that’s not religion and we need this huge, you know, educational project and people like Zach Stein are talking about it, the response what I often get is, oh, that’s a pipe dream, like, how is that ever going to happen that could never ever. Like, good luck with that. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. But now what I do is I say, have you read the Nordic secret. Have you seen building, because it’s happened to say it’s still happening. Yeah, yes, yes and that’s the point I some of the people who’ve been watching for a few years on my conversation with Jonas, he came out of the finish book high school, and we’ve had a couple conversations, and you know, and so first of all, the response to. So, the good luck with that is, it’s been done, and it’s been done to great success. We’ve done it for 175 years, and it’s still working, and it’s about a third of the annual cohort and then mark that the ghost one of these schools. And so, what we did was, we’re first there was a pastor who read all the Germans and thought, maybe we should have something of this building stuff for the rural population because I was six years old when the French Revolution happened and we don’t want such a thing. So how do we make sure that the young farm hands and he wasn’t thinking so much of the workers or the girls but definitely the young farm hands, how do we make them good citizens. And the first school that was started at folk high school or folk college was in 1844 and there was a lot of Bush or see rich farmers and so forth who who sponsored it was very fancy building for 1844. And it was a two year program is very expensive and only the richest farmers sons could afford to go there. And it was incredibly boring. So they probably did what they used to do with education and the young men didn’t care. And then there was a teacher and his name was Kristin cold, and he used to teach children, and what he realized that was that when he taught what he was supposed to teach, he didn’t teach children either, but when he told them stories they paid attention. And so he realized that he had to start with storytelling, and he bought up a farmhouse he moved in with 15 or 20 young guys aged 18 to 25. And then he started by telling them stories or reading her heroic novels. And then when they identified with these heroes and was there Hey, I’m going to be a you know proud Danish man like these Viking guys that he’s talking about. Then he had their attention and he asked them questions and then he let let them ask him questions. And for 1851 that was radical. I mean that was like, who, who would ever ask a young farmhand anything, but he did. And so they got into a Socratic dialogue, and then they got interested, and then they asked more questions and then they were interested in the answers and he And he started teaching them science and new agricultural techniques and was really hands on knowledge that was presenting at the school farmhouse they also had to grow their own food. And after three to five months, they had gone through a transformation and created that sense of, you know, courage to speak up. And they also had something to say because they had read all these stories that heard all these stories they’d have that have had all these conversations So what would be the right thing to do? How do you do that? Why could that be and so forth. And so they came home to these rural communities and became the community organizers and initiators of agricultural reforms new techniques some people got into politics. But the interesting thing about the whole movement is that the first school was really popular with the 25 first guys who went there and probably with the next 25 guys as well. And then there was a couple of other schools started, but it wasn’t really until 1864 when Bismarck took one third of what is Denmark today and the Danes were like, Oops, national trauma, how are we going to keep Denmark Danish and keep the Danish spirit alive, and then it was like, Oh, we’re going to have some more of these folk high schools. And so there was this whole movement of folk high schools from 1865 and onwards. And that’s when the first schools also began to appear in Norway and Sweden. And then it became a movement across Scandinavia. Finland was under Russian rule until 1918, I think. So they couldn’t really start the schools and be open about the national agenda and the, you know, civics and becoming a citizen part of the program. But as soon as they got out of Russia and became an independent nation, there was also movement of folk high schools in Finland. There were schools before that but that was when it caught on. And so, so this changed the Nordic countries and one of the places where this traveled was actually to the United States. Highlander folk school in Tennessee, Miles Wharton who started that was in Denmark in, I think, 1929 to 1930 or 31. And then he went back to Tennessee and started Highlander folk school and that’s where Rosa Park went for two weeks before she kept her seat on the bus and sparked the really big changes for the civil rights movement in the United States. So this has consequences and so yeah, good luck with that. That it has actually changed the United States. So, so there’s all kinds of good track records for doing something similar again, and keep doing it. So, I mean the system is still running now and my understanding, talking to Jonas is, it’s like it’s state funded, like the government actually- It’s state subsidized. It’s state subsidized. So, you still have to pay a substantial amount of money. And it is the middle class, upper middle class who can afford to send their kids. What sometimes happens is that a municipality can see that, oh, here’s a young person who is getting into trouble hanging out with the wrong people. Let’s send them to another part of the country for six months or a year and let them experience something else and find out that they prefer to play the guitar and do theater instead of smoking pot and stealing cars and something like that. And then it works. But the schools are also very adamant about they’re only taking young people actually interested in being there. They’re not a social pedagogic project that can handle other social problems. But what it does create for everybody is that if you say, so I’m going to take a gap year, people don’t say, but why would you want to do that? Then you’re just going to delay your education with a year. People will say, oh, that’s wonderful. What are you going to do? Are you going to go to a folk high school? Are you going to travel around the globe? Are you going to work? What are you planning to do? So the sense that when you’re between the age of 18 and 25, you really need a breather and you need to think about what do I actually want with my life? What would be the right thing for me to study? Where are my talents? What is it that I really enjoy doing that I can improve? Or a lot of young people go to one of these folk high schools thinking that they should apply or go to an audition for the theater acting school. And then they go to one of the folk high schools and take acting classes. And for a while they realized maybe I’m actually more interested in philosophy. I’ll never be a good actor. This was fun. But at least I didn’t spend eight years of my life going to auditions, not getting in there and then waiting tables for all those years. I realized earlier on that I should do something else. So they’re really good for, you know, not getting into the wrong territory education or realizing that I’m not ready for this. So it’s actually a sound investment if you want to look at it from that perspective. It’s definitely a personal investment in yourself. So that leads into the next question. First of all, I note that it sounds like most of the time you’re living together as a community. Yes. These schools. So we can talk in a minute about that, why that’s important. It sounds like there’s a lot of self exploration, self discovery, but also self formation going on, maturation going on, cultivation of character. And then I’m wondering, does it, because I got a sense from talking to you and I said, you know, it transfers beyond the school. These people stay in touch with each other. They form networks. So, first of all, am I getting sort of the right picture of what this looks like. I mean, imagine you’re 18 years old 19 years old, and you’re confused about things you’re still sort of in puberty. You don’t know what it means to be an adult. It’s actually kind of terrifying. Your body is not what it used to be and you’re still trying to get used to it. You really want to find somebody to kind of meet with or several to meet with but that is really where your mind is occupied and, and you don’t want to make the wrong decisions and there’s actually a lot of pressure. And then suddenly there’s an open door to either five months or full two semesters, where you live together with young other young people your your own age, very often they are two people sharing a room, same sex or if they don’t want that many of the schools are getting more open to figuring out who they actually want to share a room with. So you’re there for for five months, you get to explore only the stuff that you’re really interested in. And you have breakfast together you have lunch together you have dinner together, you hang out in the evening, you can everybody’s above the age of 18 so you can have a beer you can have wine you can party you can do whatever you want. As long as it’s not illegal. You can play ping pong, you can have deep philosophical discussions and very quickly, they begin to self organize little interest groups so there will be the card game group and there will be the online game group and there will be the playing tennis. And then there will be the after dinner group and there will be, you know, people will self organize into those interests that they have. And then, so they they also I mean, practically, learn to self organize and nobody is asking them to do it it’s just that we have all these facilities there’s the music room there’s the video editing room there’s, you know, the gym and you can go there. And then there’s the ping pong table and then there’s the assembly and then there’s the hanging out room. And then there’s everything you want to do with your evenings, and, and you’re there with anywhere between 40 and 150 other young people your own age. And, and, and nobody and and they’re a number of really brilliant things about this the schools are very homie and that was part of Kristen Cole’s philosophy from the beginning, so it cannot be an intimidating space, you have to feel at home so that you dare ask questions and show the vulnerable sides of yourself. And as I think Jonas said I mean the first couple of weeks of the first couple of months, the first month. And I’ve heard that from teachers as well. Everybody is doing their makeup and the clothes and everything because they want to make a good impression and then after a month everybody’s just wearing, you know sweatpants and old t shirts and you really feel at home. And so it becomes a very tolerant open place for for making mistakes, which is, is just the right time for life to make mistakes, and to have them, you know, accepted and the adults seeing what you’re struggling with. And, and most of the folk high schools, at least some of the teachers live at the high school folk high school, so that you get to know them and you see their spouse and their kids and it does have this homie feeling. And there are no exams. And there’s a really good reason for having no exam because life is the exam so what are you going to do with your life when you get out of here. And you go back to, you know, being an adult and making serious decisions about your life and your life choices. And without that pressure, you’re actually free to appreciate what you learn, and I just spoke to somebody who is a headmaster or director of one of our universities, and she was giving feedback on it was not some folk high school students but it’s a folk high school alternative teacher education and they were writing one of their projects, and she was given feedback to that and and because it was not graded in the same way as a normal education, reading their report became a reading experience. So it does something to the way we learn if we’re not thinking about what must the end result be, and what is what how am I going to score this at the end, I can just take it I can just take it and appreciate it make it mine, and then use it for what I find meaningful and that’s when we talk about the meaning crisis, I mean we’re, we’re literally pulling kids through a system saying, we want you to end here. You’re here you’re here you’re here no matter where you are we want you to end here, and we define this goal that we’re going to pull all of you over there. And as much as you can, you know, reach that point and align with that, the better we’re going to the better we’re going to grade you. And so, there is this constant pressure, and then learning becomes more or less meaningless, whereas if you’re actually allowed to learn because you find it interesting, then you can make it your own. And, and I also think with with regards to a meaning crisis when you do live together with people like that. And it’s really like a village. It’s just everybody in the village has the same age. You really develop that sense of community. And, and that’s, that’s what we were built for. I mean we had 300,000 years as modern humans living in little hunt together tribes before we started inventing bigger societies. So, there’s something in our brain that just goes, Whoa, yeah. So I mean, yeah, I mean I can see that there’s intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic there’s lots of serious play going on. I, but I want to. These are not what I would say but I could hear people saying them. They’re saying, they’re saying, yeah, but you know these kids are just sort of gonna waste their time for the two years it’s just going to play ping pong or just you know, you know, but you know where’s all this character formation coming from and how does that work. And then, second question now this is from me, which is, how do the teachers function in this school. How do the teachers function in this school. So the. It’s not just all ping pong because you do get all those little push backs that that fixed it was talking about. And the teachers have the time, and it’s there. The purpose for them is to give them this push back. And so the pedagogy that the teaching is fundamentally was not entirely fundamentally different but it’s different, because the purpose is to actually challenge each of these young people, where they are. And to have and build that personal relationship. And one of the things that I guess all teachers say that about individual classes is like classes have their own personality. Yes, there’s an inner dynamic in each group that’s different from group to group. But at the full high school, the whole point is that your personal character is seen. And it’s that’s part of the purpose, perhaps even the main purpose while you’re there. So, the way that the teachers work. The way that they enter the school in the morning is fundamentally different from when you enter the school and know that you have 25 high school kids or university college kids who need to pass this test or exam in order to go on into the system. Because here you can start on a, on a Monday morning and suddenly it’s snowing and then you say, Why don’t we just go out and, you know, smell the fresh air and and talk about snow and and what that does to us. And then you may start talking about climate change then you may start talking about something else you may have childhood memories. And then all the stuff comes up, and there’s there’s time for it. So that sounds deeply Socratic and I mean like in a profound way not typically just like what we mean. Like typically people think Socrates has just this method of asking questions and there’s many, many, there’s a lot of philosophers and I agree with them to say Socrates doesn’t have a method he has a way Socrates compares himself to being a midwife, helping people to give birth. And it sounds like that teachers are taking in that sense of very Socratic role with the students. Is that fair to say. Absolutely. And, and there is at the school I mean first of all, it’s also very often the first time that any of these young people move away from home. So that that’s a pushback. Let’s say, how do I function without my parents around me. And how do I do the right thing. How do I, how do I make sure that I’m not, you know, making us out of myself. So I mean there’s all this tension, and you have to live with people you and we also have some, they’re called after schools but they’re for the 14 to 18 year olds. There they do have to stand because it’s the 10th grade or the ninth grade exam as part of the curriculum. But there, there are some of the schools that take away the cell phones from the kids after eight o’clock at night. Because they want them to go to bed and not be on their cell phone and actually talk to their roommate and not, you know, ruin their sleep. They, I don’t think they do that at the folk high schools because they’re 18 and adults, but there is a culture around, I’m with these people, I’m not gonna, you know, I’m not gonna be on the screen all right right right. And, and so you can’t hide. And you definitely can’t hide when you’re, when you’re when you’re sharing a room with somebody but there’s, and there is no competition which is also changing the environment of course because you can, you know, have a roommate in college but you still have that kind of competition or, you know, there’s this constant pressure on performing and performance and you don’t have that at the folk high schools. There’s a there’s a constant open door for being honest and exploring what is meaningful to you. And it’s so fundamentally different. So we’re coming close to the end of our time and I want to give this space to you now. Because, and you obviously, I mean this is coming to both books. And you’ve mentioned it here, you see this as a powerful way to respond to the meeting crisis and a powerful way, you know with Thomas of responding to what you know, the two of you called the meta crisis. So, I think we made a very good case for building as a thing. And for the possibility of this socio cultural pedagogical, you know institution. I would say to people who still nevertheless say well that won’t work that’s not going to work that we can’t. I mean, I think I think they’re, they’re coming off now is a little bit just stubborn, but what I want to, what I want to give you space to is, how can this realistically, help to respond to the meeting crisis and to the meta crisis. First step is to realize that this has happened. It is real. This true it goes on and has been going on for 175 years. It has been exported from Denmark out into three other societies where it became a movement. It has been exported across the Atlantic to the United States where it has had a huge impact, even though the format was changed in some ways because Highlander, I don’t think they ever had like five months scheduled sort of organized chunks of time they had people coming in and out. What’s her name. Bernice Johnson, and the other black teacher who was there, I just forgot her name. I mean they, they started literacy programs, reading programs for the black workers outside of the school and in Tennessee, and they started teaching them to read by having them read the UN Constitution of Human Rights, because there were adults and they needed to know about all their human rights and then they read the labels on soup cans, and they read the Sears catalog. So they were really creative about what kind of reading material was appropriate for these adults who were in the very concrete situation of not getting to vote because they couldn’t read the things that you needed to be able to read in order to register as a voter in the United States. So that’s a big part of Highlander’s program but what changed Rosa Parks was that she was at Highlander for two weeks, and it was not allowed to eat together. Black people and white people in Tennessee, in the 1950s. And she did that, nevertheless, Highlander folk school, and as far as I know it was the first time that Rosa Parks had sat down with white people at the same table, and had a meal. And so that sense of things can be different. Yeah, I count, there’s something inside me that wasn’t allowed to, you know, be exposed ever before. And I was only participating in something I couldn’t even imagine existed. And, oh, by the way, I want the same rights at all as all these other people who then happen to be white. And so, so this is powerful stuff and Martin Luther King Jr was part of it, and Pete Seeger was there and it was Miles Horton who started the school it was his wife, who took this old spiritual and created We Shall Overcome. And I mean there is so much culture coming out of Highlander folk school and it’s still there it’s called Highlander Center. And it has been through a few ups and downs, but this is part of the American history. And so, yeah, good luck with that. It has already had an impact and we can do that again. We can do it again. We can do it. It’s going to be a very good place to end. So, Lenny I wanted to thank you so much for coming and for making this eloquent, elegant presentation, and I strongly recommend both books, The Nordic Secret, Bildung. If The Nordic Secret seems too large, then read this and then I bet you’ll want to read The Nordic Secret after. So, thank you once again for coming. It’s been a great pleasure and very, very hopeful message in a lot of important ways. Thank you so very much. Thank you. Good to see you.