A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill
▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube
Lene Rachel Andersen brings the tradition of Bildung — the European, and particularly Nordic, practice of deep human formation and development — into conversation with love. She tells the largely forgotten story of how the Folk High School movement of the 19th and 20th centuries cultivated inner transformation, self-awareness and self-authority in young people, and how this empowerment from the bottom up was the quiet foundation of the strong democracies and welfare societies of Scandinavia.
She argues that modern education has made a profound error in stripping beauty, communal singing, meaning-making and spiritual development from the curriculum in pursuit of productivity — producing, she suggests, exactly the angry, frustrated and anxious young people we now see. If we have an educational system so focused on science and technology so people can go out and be producers and consumers, they will lose all the meaning-giving, purpose-giving parts of education.
The conversation explores what it would mean to recover these dimensions — to lift from the bottom and ensure that every person has access to the skills, understanding and meaning-making that allows them to thrive for themselves and for others.
Lene’s closing vision is one of narrative renewal: moving from a story of exploitation and extraction to one in which humanity reconnects with the fullness of what it has been and what it might yet become — embracing cultural and biological diversity, and the extraordinary richness of the living world we have inherited.
This is one of eleven conversations in the A Narrative of Love series, hosted by Dr Scherto Gill in preparation for the 5th Spirit of Humanity Forum, June 2021. The series was sponsored by the Pureland Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP).