Erik Nylander mono

Professor Eric Nylander from Linköping University in Sweden discusses the role of arts in adult education and the concept of folk high schools. These schools offer artistic creativity and education for lifelong learners in beautiful rural settings. They originated in the 19th century and were inspired by the arts and crafts movement. The idea was that arts education is liberating and vital for working people. Folk schools are voluntary total institutions where adults can choose to study and live. They have evolved over time to adapt to societal changes. The Danish theologian Grundtvig is considered the founding father of folk schools and his philosophy emphasizes arts, creativity, and the outdoors. The schools aim to provide education for the entire life and use the vernacular language and aesthetic elements to inspire and awaken the soul of the students. This is Teachers Talk Radio and you are listening live. Welcome to this week's episode of the Friday morning break with John Gibbs. My guest this week, Professor Eric Nylander from Linköping University in Sweden. We are discussing the role of arts in adult education and the fascinating world of the folk high schools. This is Teachers Talk Radio and you are listening live. Tune in live at TTRadio.org or to join in the conversation, download the Podbean app and search Teachers Talk Radio. Follow the hashtag TTRadio. Tune in, talk it out with Teachers Talk Radio. What were your school days like? Were they the best in your life? Were you glad to be rid of school? Did you burn your textbooks and move on? Was school the only place you'd ever been told to draw, to paint, to dance, to experiment with arts and crafts? Was all that left behind when you went into the world of work? Unless of course you're an art teacher. Or unless of course you're an artist. In Sweden, the folk high school movement offers artistic creativity and education for lifelong learners, often in settings of great rural beauty. And all of it completely free. Sometime in the early 1980s, I had a part-time job. I had several part-time jobs at the time. What was most interesting was working for the Working Man's College in Camden Town in London. This was founded in the late 19th century and was linked to the arts and crafts movement, William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, who, some of them, including Rossetti, taught art at the college. Today, it was delivering evening classes, mostly to adults. Life drawing, arts, but also maths, English, business studies, computing, and so on. Its original conception was that arts and arts education was liberating for working people and something that was vital to withstand the onslaught of industrialisation and the grim slums and working lives of many people in the mid-19th century. When I was there, the wonderfully Gothic library and interiors were all intact. And pictures of the founders and past teachers on the walls and photographs of people earnestly studying and writing and drawing and painting in the 1920s, or just after the Second World War. A long history of adult education. That's the closest thing I can think of when I think of my discussion with my guest this week, Professor Erik Nylander. We talked about something I really had no knowledge of until I'd come across the research and work done by Erik on Swedish folk high schools. I discussed with Erik not only the folk school movement, the origin of its ideas, how it spread across Scandinavia and Germany, and why today it's still a flourishing part of Swedish education and something we could all learn from. This show is brought to you in partnership with John Catt Educational, publishing professional development books and resources to support great teaching and learning in schools around the world. Have you checked out their latest releases? Use the code JCTTR2324 for 20% off your order. Don't miss out. Visit johncattbookshop.com to explore their full range of titles and advance your own professional development today. Happy reading. Bed UK is empowering the everyday wins. Cheeky grins. Big conversations. Budding aspirations. Our goal? To make edtech accessible and teaching exceptional. Join the global education community on the 24th to the 26th of January 2024 as we make education better together. Ticket off your Christmas list today. Get your free ticket before the 13th of December deadline. Visit www.uk.betshow.com forward slash visitor dash registration. And we're back and you're joining us again on Teachers Talk Radio on this Friday morning and you can find us on the podcast. So however you're listening, this week my guest, as I said in the introduction, is Eric Nylander. And I came across you, Eric, when I was looking up, well I came across you by accident really. I was just looking for people with expertise in education and I saw some writing you did and your research area of folk schools. And as I was saying before we started recording, I didn't know much about them and then I know a little more now and it sounds like a fascinating. So I'll start by asking you, can we define what folk schools are? I know they exist differently across Scandinavia and Germany. So Eric, welcome to Teachers Talk Radio. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so in Sweden we call them folk high schools, but I think in general it's difficult for us educational researchers. Educational institutions, they are very much like idiosyncratic in their name and in their history. So it makes it a bit hard with the international comparison. It's not like studying molecules or studying something which is very clearly the same. They began in the 19th century, didn't they? And they're found in, I think there's a, well I don't know if there's an equivalent in this country, but they began in the 19th century and then they're found in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark. But it's a bit of a different kind. Yeah, so I think it's really hard for an English speaking audience. I think the reason why you say folk schools is that that's more common in the English speaking universe. I mean in the U.S. you have, for example, the setup of Highlander Folk School in the 1930s, Tennessee, which was a super important school for the civil rights movement in the U.S. And that was based on inspiration from the Nordics, particularly Denmark, and the rural folk colleges that had already been established in the Nordics. And there you had, you know, you had civil rights people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks attending or teaching in Highlander Folk School. And I guess in the U.K. it's a bit more tricky to find a comparison, but literally speaking, the translation of folk high school would be higher education for the folk or the vernacular for the masters. So you have some of that in the open university idea, for example. And they were, when they emerged, they were boarding schools. And I think that too is an inspiration from the U.K., the boarding school format that is as much a residential purpose as an educational purpose, where you're living, playing, and studying in the same place. All the kind of central activities of life is congregated in a cloistered environment, like a monastery or something like that. That's interesting that you mention the monastery, because there's something, what I've discovered, there's something about the folk school, which is an adult form of education. So you go there after school. But there is something about taking yourself away from the real world. I mean, if the real world, or maybe to the real world, but it's taking yourself away from the kind of hurly-burly of city and work and industry out into the countryside. That's quite an important facet of escaping that thing. Yeah, it's a form of voluntary total institution. So it's like it's something you do by your own will, your own effort, and it targets adults so they are free to choose, right, that you can choose to go into this. I mean, historically speaking, it was only, I think, boarding schools. But eventually they also opened up so you could study in the folk schools or folk high schools only by day and then continuing to live in your normal residential place. And in Denmark, Finland, and Norway, I think there is around 70 folk schools, or folk high schools each, roughly speaking. And Denmark was the original country of this, according to their historians. German historians have another history writing, so it's a bit contested. But it was in the borders, the zone between what is now Germany and Denmark, where the first folk schools were emerging. And Grundtvig, the Danish theologian, is often considered the kind of founding father of these schools. But in Sweden we have more schools. We have 156 of these schools, and they offer both post-secondary education and art education and some vocational education. And they have actually kind of increased gradually over the years. And, of course, they had to change because, as you said, they started in the mid-19th century, and this is like a time when Sweden was quite primitive, a farming society and not a very equal country. And they evolved as society evolved and changed, obviously, radically, because the educational possibilities also changed with the development of the welfare state and the emergence of civil society. The third quality of this character, this 19th century theologian and reformer, Grundtvig, some of the listeners may have heard of Grundtvig through the Grundtvig programs and Grundtvig sponsorship that was connected to the EU. When we were in the EU, and certainly students and teachers in this country may have heard of the term Grundtvig. I didn't make that connection until I read this. He has a philosophy of education based upon arts and creativity and the outdoors. And that's why he's considered the founding father, as it were, of the folk colleges. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm not an expert on his philosophy. I think Danish historians would be better to explain. But it's a school of the entire life, was the idea, and the living world. So, instead of having this Latin, you know, fabricated language, just the language of schooling, which was the case of schools at that time, he turned to the vernacular language, so Danish. And in the case of Swedish schools, then it was Swedish. And he turned to his own history writing of Denmark as important. The living word was important. So, the way it wasn't only the dead letters and dead books, it was supposed to be something, you know, inspired, something that kind of awoke the soul of the pupils. So, but he wasn't adverse to it having instrumental values. But he also incorporated, you know, song and aesthetic elements to this. So, it was both the spiritual and the physical. That's so interesting. I remember many years ago I had a part-time job working at a college in London called the Working Man's College. And it was founded, it's still there today, actually doing exactly pretty much what it used to do. And the Working Man's College was part of a movement of working men's colleges and the working men's education movement. But it started, it was founded by Christian socialists and artists, particularly the pre-Raphaelite kind of brotherhood and that. And so people like Rossetti would turn up for an evening of art classes. And the whole structure was art and a little bit of, you know, awakening the minds of the proletariat kind of thing. You know, there was a sense of that, you say, that, you know, it wasn't, they weren't just teaching you how to be a plumber. Well, they weren't going to teach you necessarily engineering. It was definitely arts and crafts and sketching the wonderful pictures of the wall, people doing life drawing in the 1880s and so on. So there was a missionary quality to the folk schools. And the Christian element to it is the awakening, you know, that obviously transformed what kind of awakening you're supposed to cherish and work for as a teacher. It might have changed from the Christian dimension. I mean, in the Swedish case, eventually the civil rights, the social movement, like the temperance movement, the pre-religious movement, the workers' movement became important in kind of transforming it from a farmer's school to something to develop, you know, functionaries for civil society. So these schools were sort of taken over by the social movement and they had their own awakening, you know, like the worker class struggles or the temperance movement, then from alcohol and to be like… Why did you, what led you to be this? You work at a university in Sweden. And what led you to follow this research line? So you thought, what made you think this was a thing we need to look at? Yes, I get asked that a lot, actually. And most people think that I have attended the folk high school myself and that I've done a lot of research on music in folk high schools. So people tend to believe I'm a musician, having studied that. But that's not really the case. It's more serendipitous and random, I think. Because when my topic, undergraduate topic, and when I studied myself in the university, then I did sociology. And then at that time I read a lot of social theory and fell in love with these books. But then at the end of this long journey, I wanted to do like a final thesis that was more kind of looking out to whatever people in the labor market wanted me to study. So then I went into this homepage where they pitched ideas on what to study. And there some teacher of a specific folk high school invited researchers to write the history of the folk high school. It's called Hula Folk High School. And it's perhaps forgotten today. But then I went there to their little school in the north of Sweden. And then in their closed-down library, I found a lot of song books from their history. So dating back to the late 19th century and onwards, they had been singing songs together in the school up until the mid-20th century. And through the song, what the lyrics were and what they were singing about, you could kind of trace the ideas and the norms and the values of what was cherished in the school. And that became the entry point for me to be interested in the folk high school and its history. And this particular school was also interesting because it was one of the first two schools to open its gates for women and for kids of working-class backgrounds. So it was a very liberal philosophy. And that was very controversial because they were very early in opening the gates and housing both women and men at the same boarding school. It was considered very, very controversial. Particularly the boarding school element. I mean, the working man's college, the working man's education movement. I thought, well, they're not boarding schools, most certainly. That's evening colleges. It's going there in the evening and so on. So this element of going off and staying somewhere. The closest I could think about that was something of the 20th century youth hostel movement in this country. So youth hostelling and very cheap ways of traveling to beautiful places and staying. Or the Scouts or something. Yeah, yeah. I mean, back in the day, in that time, I don't think it was the national recruitment. So it was very locally oriented. So the reason why they turned towards sons and daughters of working men is because they were set up in this coastal region where you had forestry industry booming. So Sweden didn't industrialize as fast as the UK. But then the school was set up very close to this industrialization happening. And so it targeted the local population mainly. And also it was like this particular school, because it opened its gates to women and men staying in the boarding school, their funding was withdrawn for three years because it was considered like a dangerous activity. So they were sort of considered radicals. So there's a lot of men and women going off into the countryside together to stay and study. Was the curriculum considered radical as well? I mean, taking working class people and saying, right. There was, I mean, there was a sense of that with workers education that you teach them to do things that you don't. What's the point of taking people who come out of a factory in the evening and then sketch or write or sing? What's the point of that kind of thing? So there was a sense in which that, yeah, doesn't that linger? That lingers a bit today when a school says we're going to cancel the choir and cancel the art classes because we need to concentrate on the laboratory or the science. There's always a tension there between the utility of education. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. So I think you wouldn't. I mean, also going back to these songs, I was hoping for the songs to kind of have some kind of political dimensions to it. I remember. But then they were all about, you know, nature and about, you know, generally kind of whimsy things, not about like working struggles or anything like that. And I think the curriculum also don't really appear to be very, you know, socially engaged. They studied like the law governing the municipality and, you know, like. But they studied geography, they studied, of course, Swedish and history. But I think some of it could have been radical to study the parliamentary, the laws for who is elected to local parliaments and to national parliaments in this time. So mid and late 19th century, Sweden was not a democracy. The right to vote for local assemblies were decided by how much you earned and your income. So therefore, just lecturing about this topic could in itself have been a quite radical move because that then showed that this is the way we wanted to have. So that's that strand of socialism of the left who are going, you know, that belief that if you if you can show working people the realities, you can form a political party. They can form their own political party. They can form their own unions. They can they can learn the nature of the world they live in and be, as you said earlier, the world is awakened, awakened for a very, very sort of. Yeah, the scales falling from your eyes and seeing who's in power and who isn't in power and the realities of that. But I think that in the Swedish case, the labor movement was very late to the parties. It was liberals and it was temperance movements, pre-religious movements that was setting the ground infrastructure for what was to come. Obviously, the workers movement became very strong in Sweden, but there was a later development. You're listening to the Friday morning break with John Gibbs on Teachers Talk radio. My guest this week, Professor Erik Nylander of Linköping University in Sweden. We are discussing the Swedish folk high schools and the importance of the arts in education. Talking, concentrating on the folk element, the Swedish songs, the traditions, the kind of the skills that might be lost. I mean, that's always again, you'll hear in the news or something in education. We're losing this particular skill or we're losing these particular folk tales or we're losing these particular recipes or something. That sense in which in order to in order to build a nation, in order to build a sense of us, you have to hang on to what we were. And that might get lost in all this hurly burly of national factories and industrialization. So and especially if your history is trying to define yourself as not being Danish or not being Swedish or Norwegian and trying to carve out a sense of yourself. So was there a nation building national nationalist element? Yeah, definitely. Fostering of responsibilities and cultivating people. I mean, given that you also have these gradual steps towards a full fledged democracy. I mean, people got gradually more opportunities to vote, even farmers got the right to vote for local assemblies. And then, of course, that had to be matched with more opportunities than only six year of obligatory schooling. And this was obviously also farmers moving on to gain more rights and more political power gradually. And the folk school was very much their way to extend their educational possibilities beyond six years of obligatory schooling, which is not much. That idea that you're sort of finished, your education is done at 16 or 18 and you're out there, that's it. You've learned that. And people will often get that sense in which people describe themselves as not very good at school or something. I remember from school as if that was a piece of their life done with and finished. So lifelong learning is an objective just in itself. I mean, it makes it makes complete sense. And also, I mean, it's also weird for us today to think of Latin as the language of schools. Right. So that is also something they were early in saying, OK, why turn to this language when you can use your own language? Just as they did with the Bible in using the right language for it to be interpreted. Yes, that's interesting. And just as the Bible was being translated into the languages of Europe, English, French, German and so forth. It was a form, it was a period of the formation of nation states. The project, the folk project, with all of its emphasis on the craft culture of a particular nation and that particular nation's own language was also a nationalistic project. Yeah, I mean, I mean, it is very much a national nationalist project. The Folk High School to a large extent, I think particularly in Denmark, because they had this very contested history with what what would become Germany. So if you read the Grundtvig, you would find really clear elements of national romantic element to it, almost like proto-fascist type of thinking. But I don't know if the Swedish folk high schools, I think there are schools which are kind of similar to that, but or were not now, but back then. But I think the historians in Sweden tend to consider them as slightly more pragmatic and enlightenment oriented than the Danish counterparts. Maybe also the civil social movement shaped the Folk High School into something else. I mean, Grundtvig has a very important part in Danish historiography, do you say that, like the history writing of Denmark as a state when they became independent, so to say, and created their own. Yeah, so one of the important for the Danish folk schools, Grundtvig and so on, there's an agenda which is making sure we're not German, as it were. So there's a sense of defining that border is going to change and shift. And there's always a sense in which Denmark is vulnerable to Germany, not just in military terms, but in the sense of just being absorbed into it. How do the folk schools in Germany differ? Yeah, so the German historians are emphasizing more the enlightenment origin from Kant and onwards to the Folk High School, so they don't emphasize the proto-fascist element to it very much. And they conceive of their first folk school was like also in Schleswig-Holstein, so the same border region between Denmark and Germany. But they tend to see it more as a cultivation of citizens, not the glorification of farmers, which was key. Yeah, so it's not a romanticization of the honest, toiling folk of the farm. No, I mean, but also you have to read the different histories coming from different countries, and often the way you write history is shaped by the way, you know, what has happened at the later stage. So there is, I think, reason to emphasize that Sweden has not been a welfare state for very long. And the way the farmers approach these schools were also very oriented towards increasing productivity in the farming household and in the small-scale farming that was going on before farming became fully rationalized. So the cultivation of vocational skills was also inherent to the curriculum of the early folk. So there's a straight sort of rural pragmatism, you know, let's learn about good husbandry, farming properly, sharing good things, and so on. When farming is enormously important to the economy, and you want to do it well, so you can alert, there's going to be a didactic quality, obviously a didactic quality. I was thinking actually that there's a long-running soap radio, it might be the longest-running soap drama in the world on British radio called The Archers. And it goes out, it's been going out since the early 1950s, and it still runs twice a week today. When it first started, this drama was all about setting rural England farming folk, and they would often in the shows say things like, well, have you discovered the latest milking method? And have you seen this new development in grain something or other? And it was actually started as a BBC project to teach farmers better farming. I don't know why that jumped into my mind, I was thinking as you said that. It's funny because a lot of these things that they were teaching back in the day had to do with the natural sciences, and with economy, you know, bookkeeping, these kinds of hard, what we consider hard sciences today. And that surprised many of the current teachers of the folk schools, because they eventually, after the 1960s and onwards, became more oriented towards social science and the arts, and a lot of art courses have come about. So then when they discovered that it was about, you know, this kind of biology or statistics and math and bookkeeping, that kind of surprised them. Have you checked out their latest releases? Use the code JCTTR2324 for 20% off your order. Don't miss out. Visit johncatbookshop.com to explore their full range of titles and advance your own professional development today. Happy reading. Bed UK is empowering the everyday wins. Cheeky grins. Big conversations. Budding aspirations. Our goal? To make edtech accessible and teaching exceptional. Join the global education community on the 24th to the 26th of January 2024 as we make education better together. Ticket off your Christmas list today. Get your free ticket before the 13th of December deadline. Visit www.uk.betshow.com forward slash visitor dash registration. This is Teachers Talk Radio, and this is Teachers Talk Radio News. The Guardian features comment on a parliamentary report which is calling for an overhaul of secondary education in England. The House of Lords report says the education system for 11 to 16 year olds is too focused on academic learning and written exams. The report also calls for the English Baccalaureate or EBAC introduced by Michael Gove during his tenure as Education Secretary to be scrapped as a school performance measure. The government ambition for 90% of year 10 pupils to be entered for EBAC subjects by 2025 is criticised for being too limiting and not allowing pupils to study a range of subjects. Criticism is also levelled at the overburdened curriculum as a result of content and the 25 to 30 hours of examinations at the end of year 11. The report echoes some concerns expressed by some teachers and school leaders. Recommendations include allowing schools to offer a more varied range of learning experiences, more opportunities to study creative, vocational and technical subjects, and that pupils should have the option to take functional literacy and numeracy qualifications that are equal in value to GCSEs in English and Maths. Former Education Minister under the Conservatives Joe Johnson says the evidence received was compelling and that change was urgently needed. Former Education Secretary Kenneth Baker said dropping the EBAC would give schools greater freedom. Unions welcomed the calls but said school funding, recruitment and retention and cutting workload were essential to making any changes a possibility. A Department for Education spokesperson said, The Observer focuses on Scottish schools dropping the PISA ratings and featured an opinion piece by Sonia Soda. The piece lays blame squarely on the curriculum reform which began under the SNP in 2010. It changed the focus from knowledge, emphasising the development of transferable skills. The approach is linked to the idea of preparing children with skills they need for jobs that don't exist yet, but the article says this is a theory based on zero evidence. The article goes on to make links to other countries which made similar changes and saw similar declines, including Sweden and France. It also focuses on the impact such a curriculum has on disadvantaged pupils, increasing, it says, the gap between the non-disadvantaged peers. As the House of Lords report levelled criticism at a so-called traditional system in England, it seems that Scotland's more progressive approach is being seen in a similarly negative light. The BBC World Service features a piece on universities in Hong Kong. Once attracting talent from around the world, now academics via Beijing is restricting academic freedom. In 2021-22, more than 360 scholars left eight public universities. The turnover rate, 7.4%, is at its highest since 1997 when Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule. Foreign student enrolments have dropped by 13% since 2019. Security guards are now a common sight in universities, ensuring that students and visitors must identify themselves. At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the democracy wall has been stripped bare and a statue of the goddess of democracy is gone. The 2020 national security law targets subversive behaviour, under-seen libraries emptied of books of bad ideologies and a ban on protests. Job applications for professors have dried up and fewer students are enrolling for PhDs in humanities and social sciences. Some academics say that even being an expert on China is a risk these days. Further details on this story can be found on the BBC News website. Pupils in Liverpool got a Shakespeare masterclass from Ralph Fiennes, which they described as weird but outstanding. The Harry Potter actor is starring in Macbeth at Liverpool's The Depot, but was supporting the Friends with Shakespeare event in a local school. The workshop included warm-up games, group work and language analysis. The star also focused on the theme of ambition in Macbeth and linked it to future plans and careers for students. Finally, GCHQ has released its annual Brain Teaser for UK school children. Its code-breaking challenge is aimed at 11-18 year olds. More than 1,000 secondary schools signed up for this year's event, according to the BBC Breakfast programme. It is the third edition of the challenge and it is designed to test code-breaking, maths and analysis skills, with each test designed to be harder than the last. There are seven tasks in total and children are encouraged to tackle them in teams, as solving puzzles needs a mix of minds. The full challenge can be found on the GCHQ website. Just in case you want to test your own skills. This has been your Teacher's Talk Radio News with Joe Fox. You're listening to the Friday morning break on Teacher's Talk Radio with John Gibbs. My guest this week, Professor Eric Nylander of Linköping University in Sweden. We're discussing the Swedish, and indeed Scandinavian, Folk's High Schools. Eric, one of the things I was wondering is, we've talked generally about the founding of the Folk's High Schools, but if I were in Sweden today, what would I study and how would I go about studying at a Folk's High School? So that's a very good question, because it's really hard for them to make a pitch on what they're for, because they do so many different things nowadays. So, after you had this tremendous expansion of education, you know, secondary education, upper secondary education, higher education, you had second chance education in other forms. So then the Folk's High Schools had to change, and they morphed and changed into various functions. So they still today have this broad plethora of different kind of subjects and programs, but they are more internally differentiated among. So you would either, maybe you didn't get the chance to finish your upper secondary school, you were struggling a bit with the forms that upper secondary school was taught, and you have a second chance to enter higher education through attaining Folk's High Schools. So that's one, like, compensatory form of Folk's High School training that is quite important. And you also have the Swedish for immigrants being important. So you have a lot of migration coming to Sweden, and then these people have to learn Swedish, and they have to both validate and learn new things in order to have something corresponding to upper secondary school certificate. So that's one part of it. But then the other side of it is more specialized courses. So you also have a tremendous growth in programs in the arts, in aesthetic realm, in music, theater, craft, textiles, you name it. And that goes back all the way to what we talked about before. But now it's been singled out more as a profile or area of expertise. Once upon a time, the curriculum was holding together holistically, but now the aesthetical dimension of it is more taught as a specialty. So if I was, I should mention, I think I'm right in saying that also the folk schools are free. There's no fee you have to pay. If I want to do an evening class at my local college in Northampton in pottery or language learning, it's going to cost me X amount of money, you know, quite a lot really. It's not an unaffordable amount, but these are free. So if I apply to do this and I say, well, I'd like to do a course in, I'm very interested in developing my skills in this area. It'll be a two-week course, a three-week course. No, no, no, a full term. You would do a full term or a year or could even do two years. And it would be tuition free, but you could do, there could be fees involved if you want to live in these boarding schools, which is still, you know, based around Sweden in a very decentralized way, because it was a farmer's school from the start. They were set up in pretty, you know, scarcely populated place. And you could have to pay money to pay for the housing and the food, which is often provided by the folk high school. But you were able to live there for a year, study craft or photography or whatever you find interesting. I was going to say, it sounds absolutely wonderful. I mean, I think if I were now in Sweden, you know, I'd be going on the website and looking up, you know, I want to go into some very beautiful, desolate sort of area and study. Well, all the things I wish I'd studied and never did. Yeah. That's what I do right now. So the only obstacle I'd face would be, how would I live? So they might charge me for the food, or I'd have to find some accommodation of my own. So how many people take it as a sort of gap year in their life, as it were? Oh, yeah, that's quite. I'll just take a bit of time out of life. Yeah, no, so that's very often the case. For those who have already sort of done their upper secondary school, they might they might not know after upper secondary. So you're 18 years old. It's a quite important decision what to study in the university. So they might take one year as a gap year instead of traveling to Thailand and do a full moon party. You do devote yourself to something that you're truly passionate about. But you might not know whether it's sort of what role it would have in your life or how, you know, how much should I devote myself to music? And while you're doing that, you then you have the time to contemplate about what to study if you want to go down that route or some other route. And another thing that is increasingly popular, I think, is that within these courses, there is more and more people of lifelong learners. So people in your age or my age goes back into school. So that could be people being burned out from their work. So they are on a sick leave or somehow they want to downshift and kind of reduce the tempo of the hectic contemporary life. So they go and use the folk high schools also to a way to kind of mitigate or kind of counter to the problems that they faced in the labor market. But it can also be a way to kind of slow things down and look for meaning through the arts or something. Is there a kind of wellness quality? I mean, if I went to a folk thing, would there be discussion groups that would say, well, why are you here, John, and so on? And I might share my experience. So if I were escaping the hurly-burly, would I feel there was a kind of, I don't want to characterize it as new age, but a sense of therapy about the folk school? Or is it still very much, you know, you're here to learn this, explore this particular area? Yeah, so I think... Because I'm going back to the idea of the monastery that you mentioned at the beginning, this kind of, you know, go there and be healthy. Like is it a mental hospital, really? Yeah, well, I was thinking more of the monastery than the asylum. So I think that different teachers approach it differently. Some kind of incorporate this kind of therapeutic kind of element, especially through the arts. I think there is a lot of commonalities there of working with yourself in the arts. So while some have a more, say, antagonistic idea about turning it into a therapy session, because it's still about schooling, it's still about, you know, improving your skills. So going full-fledged therapy, I don't know. It has its sides and also its risks. I think because it's teachers working there, it's not psychologists or, you know, people that are prepared to deal with depression or clinical states that are severe. And there is no affordances in the school to take care of really difficult psychological problems. So I think there are teachers approaching it differently, but there is definitely that dimension to it. How are folk schools, folk high schools doing? I mean, are they a flourishing area of education or are people seeing this as an anachronism or something? Or are they viewed as a vitally, you know, a very important part of Swedish life and education and recovering? You mentioned recovering the people who finished school and maybe didn't do, would like to enhance their skills. Are they seen as successful? You mean among policy makers? Yeah, policy makers and Swedish society. I mean, I don't think in general Swedish society as a whole might not have like in all areas understood what the folk high schools are and what the tremendous heritage they are in terms of possibilities for lifelong learning. I think it's likely on the ground in terms of comparing it to vocational education or higher education and so on. But that being said, currently there is a lot of budget cuts and a lot of difficulty of funding this sort of liberal arts programs and culture. And the folk high schools have gotten some budget cuts, but it's not as bad as it is, for instance, with study associations, study circles, which is one of these other types of adult educational forms that is very important in Sweden. So they have legitimacy and I think it's more that they do so many different things. So it's really hard to showcase. I mean, some of these folk high schools are providing the best education you could get in terms of creative writing, jazz music, becoming a professional cartoonist, for instance. I mean, all these very old things you can become. They are really cutting edge in some of the areas of the education system. So they do all kinds of things. They're both for an elite and for recreation and for second chance education, which makes it hard to. So what is it? Yeah, I'm sold. I'd be signing up right now if I could. The enemy of that sort of education in this country, as I've watched in my career, is I've watched a music service. I lived in a town once where there was a very flourishing music service, lots of orchestras and evening classes and such and budget cuts. Budget cuts, budget cuts, budget cuts. You can cut music and only a minority seem to suffer or complain. And you can cut the budget to the schools arts quicker than you can cut the budget to the laboratories and so on. And there's a trend also to it for an instrumentalism. And only recently our prime minister, Rishi Sunak, said that, you know, he would like all students to be studying mathematics all the way through. And he didn't mean it for the creativity of mathematics or its delightful expanding of the mind. What he meant was we need more people who are good at computers and business. So there's that sort of, is it good for the economy? Can we afford it? And it would seem to me that in this country, folk schools, if I pitched the idea, would be not really and not really. We can't afford it. And I don't see how this is going to benefit the economy. No, but I mean, it's really an empirical question. Right. So what if you would take all this away? What would happen to the economy? Do you take away the chance for second chance education for those who didn't fit into the educational system as it is currently set up? You take away the possibility of reentering the labor market by depriving people a new meaning in their life by devoting themselves to, say, arts. It's probably a really costly affair if you close this down, because the cost per student is really low in these rural folk colleges compared to what they pay to vocational educational training or higher vocational education. So it is something I mean, not with it's free, there's no fees, but being able to afford the taking the time out of your life. It ought, as it were, working class people can afford this. It's not just something of the of the middle class. Yeah, definitely. Everyone could afford it. I mean, there's very low cost even for being housed in these boarding schools. But there is this internal cleavage within this rosy folk high school family. You have the class divide running between this compensatory classes and the aesthetic arts classes. So you also have, even though they meet in the same school, they eat dinner in the same place, perhaps. And in that way, it's kind of uniquely grouping together social groups that wouldn't meet otherwise. They also have their internal divide, so to say, between the elite and masses between like, because it's obviously a lot of social underpinnings in who chooses what, who gets enrolled into what type of program and so on. Yeah. So the kind of students you're going to find doing the life drawing class is going to be a bit different to the ones who are doing the IT skills. Yeah, they'll just be there for slightly different purposes. Exactly. And you would probably be able to guess once you're in that lunchroom, which table does what type of class. I mean, that the structure of these things are quite strong in terms of selection and social, you know, the legacy of social origin. I mean, back in the 19th century, we talked a little bit earlier about this building a sense of nation. But there's another theme, it seems to me, in adult education and well, just in education, really. And that is the dealing with the problem of an industrial working class, a kind of proletariat. You know, how do you ensure that they are civilized so that there's a mission, a missionary to the working classes? And is that I mean, you mentioned immigration, Sweden, Denmark, Britain, the UK are evolving into much more multicultural societies. So is that strand of let's establish who we are as a country and let's make sure that we accept the rules. Are those are those there as well? Is that sort of enculturation kind of element to to to this kind of education? This is this is how you learn to behave in a civilized way. So I do think there are those norms and that's part of kind of the hidden curricula I talked about in the UK for a long time. But it's more clear perhaps when you look back. Right. What you said about cultivation of of of working class kids, like they had to be lifted up to understand the enormous rich and richness of Western classical music. Or they shouldn't listen to jazz music. They should listen to Beethoven or Mozart or whatever. That's also like the cultivation of how the manners and the etiquette and how to dress up, go to school and listen to your principal and your teacher. I think that's that's very clearly the case. And the fostering for also the utility of the welfare state. So they become instruments to, you know, you shouldn't be a radical socialist. You should be reformist socialist, you know, believing in parliament, believing in liberation, in how to do the meeting in a democratic manner. Today, I mean, that the that is also, I think, the case. But I haven't not done such studies myself. But but my colleagues who do study migrants and their encounters with the folk high schools raise these questions and put those kinds of problems to the table. Interesting. So if someone coming to Sweden from from a recent immigrant into Sweden or recent immigrant into Denmark went to a folk high school, are they going to find it a very Swedish sort of place, you know, in a welcome and unwelcoming sense? Would they say, well, this is this is very much for the people who think of themselves as Swedish? No. So if they would look around in their classroom, which if they attended more compensatory classes, so if they look for getting what corresponds to upper secondary school exam, then half of the classroom would probably be born outside of Sweden. So they would really feel that way if they entered the visual arts class or jazz music class or something like that. Then they would perhaps feel like, why are there so few of me here? Or how am I supposed to be at ease with it? Because it's no clear structure to it. People want to jam together and learn things in this very open, explorative way. So that would perhaps cause a bit of confusion. But I think that when it comes to the second chance education in folk high schools, then I think that that that can also be the case that some of the migrants that come, they want to have a clear curriculum. They want to have learning aims. They want to be tested on something. And then the folk high schools might have another way of doing it where more groups work, more problem based learning more. There is no right and wrong. You just should get going with things. And that might cause a bit of confusion. But a lot of people like it after a while, after an initial period of confusion. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, anyone who has encountered people, as I did in my teaching career, quite a lot of recent immigrants to the country or children of immigrants to the country, realise how what an emphasis there is from their parents on self-improvement and and and a very and a very instrumental form of self-improvement. As you say, you will become a doctor. You will. You will become an optician. You won't be choosing the sociology class this term. You'll be choosing the chemistry of the science. And quite naturally, in a sense, as well, you want you want to fit in. You also want to earn more money and be more successful as an as a sort of economic provider for your family and so on, which is a natural tendency. But then also there is folk high schools having having having set up campuses inside urban areas, impoverished urban areas. So then they have specific like destinations to target people which which which doesn't have upper secondary school exam or has to start from really basic levels of writing and reading and literacy. And there you have more. Perhaps they wouldn't even know what is the history of a folk high school because it's just like basic training and it might not have these characteristics that I described earlier because you have to start from a very basic level. So it varies a lot. I think it's the baseline. Fascinating. And we're almost coming to an end. I've got a couple of couple of last questions for you. First of all, let me commend you on your wonderful English. And and and I said to my wife, I said, oh, well, I'm sure I'm sure it was being English today. Well, of course, he's Swedish. She said, everyone speaks English. And I thought, well, I've I've I've rather taken that for granted. I didn't at the beginning say, OK, I can't speak a word of Swedish. So I'm just assuming you'll be fine. Is there a tension there between this sort of over this overwhelming? I'm guessing that in education, in folk schools and so on, lots of students will say, well, to learn English as well as Swedish. Is there a is there any sort of tension there going back to the original idea that, you know, let's preserve ourselves from let's preserve us from being German. If you're Danish, let's preserve the Swedish identity. Is there a sense in which the big as the British worry about Americanization? Is there a sense of a sense of, you know, we are losing something here. We're slipping into the uniform world of the Anglo. So I think I want to answer your question by changing the school to university and higher education. So within higher education and the university, I can really clearly feel that tension because that's where we're working. There is such a tremendous pressure to write in English and to orient yourself towards English speaking audience, given that where what position English has kind of the new Latin or lingua franca. Yes, academia. So there you have a lot of vocabulary and words. So the concept of bildung, for instance, there is no equivalent, no translation. So all of what we've been talking about is folk bildning in Swedish. There is hardly any way of saying it like bildung to the folk. I mean, it's just lost in translation. And I think there is a real clear kind of tension between those who want to insist on having Swedish as our go to language within research and teaching. And those that are more perhaps internationally oriented and want to make a case for extending, say, the research about folk schools or second chance education into a conversation which incorporates, you know, a lot of other countries and a lot of other places, which is the obvious advantage of orienting yourself. Was there a motivation in your desire to find out more about folk schools that you wanted to find about, find out about, as it were, or research something or shed light on something that was very Swedish, very, very unique to your own country? Yeah, so I think it mirrors Swedish society to a large extent, given that the folk schools are having this, they don't have a fixed curriculum, the national, the state doesn't enforce the curriculum upon the school and its adult learners. So you have to be interested in something. That means that the folk schools always develop in kind of tandem or in relation to others, some kind of need that the state wants to encourage and cultivate or what people want to do after the 1960s. They wanted to do music and arts and whatnot. You know, so it's sort of a Lachnus paper of kind of Zeitgeist, the trends and the things transpiring in society. And because it's been around so long, you can kind of, through this one institution, look at societal changes over the long course of action. And that is very interesting. So it's a mechanism for a sort of microcosm of the bigger whole, to see the whole of Swedish society as it changes. So in the 19th century, you can see nation building and so on and socialist worries about the proletariat. And in the 20th century, something different, maybe, as it reflects those changes. Fascinating study. That's wonderful. Last question. If someone from Sweden thought, well, I'll be an instructor in a folk high school, do you have to be a qualified teacher? And is there the pay structure competitive? Or would people say, well, I do it as a sort of hobby? What is the status? Yeah, so you could be a full time teacher and you often have a teacher training background, either from the kind of normal study state teacher program. And in Linköping, we offer a specific teacher program for becoming a folk high school teacher. But because it also has these courses where it's important to recruit people with specific skills in arts or vocational trade. So not all teachers have a professional certificate with them. So some might come up really good at an instrument or a specific music genre or visual arts teachers being often themselves artists. Right. So because they need that and then they work part time as artists and part time as teachers so they can sustain a living while doing their arts. So I think that the pay, if you want to raise that question, is not super competitive in terms of if you compare them straight on with upper secondary school teachers. Or I think they would have a lesser pay in general. But the autonomy of their work is greater. So a lot of teachers choose to be teachers in folk colleges and folk high schools anyway, because they have greater autonomy, because they have greater freedom. They sense the creativity and the pleasure of being in the folk college means more than a slight pay rate. And you get to stay, to live, to work in one of the somewhere. I'm imagining somewhere overlooking a fjord or something. You could look for that school. Do you have a particular folk school that you think is the most attractive to work in? No, I mean, I'm sometimes envious of the ones working in folk high schools. But for now, I haven't really been imagining myself as a teacher. But maybe that's a retirement plan. Well, yeah, absolutely. I've been imagining myself this one as we've been talking. Well, Eric Nylander, thank you so much for that. I've learned a lot, actually. I've learned a lot not only preparing for this interview, but talking to you. So thank you very much for the opportunity for this window on something I didn't know much about. And I hope our audience, I'm sure they have, will have enjoyed it. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you so much, John. And that brings to an end this week's episode of the Friday morning break with John Gibbs. And my guest this week, Professor Eric Nylander of Linköping University in Sweden. We were discussing the folk high schools. If you've enjoyed this discussion, you can find it on a podcast on Spotify or on the Teachers Talk radio website and many other platforms. Thank you for listening. Hello. You've been listening to Teachers Talk radio. Listen back at ttradio.org. We look forward to hearing from you next time on Teachers Talk radio. Thank you.