A Narrative of Love

Tag: education

  • Lene Rachel Andersen — Love, Bildung and the Nordic Secret

    Lene Rachel Andersen — Love, Bildung and the Nordic Secret

    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).

  • Rabbi David Geffen — Love and the Loving Classroom

    Rabbi David Geffen — Love and the Loving Classroom

    A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill

    ▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube

    Rabbi David Geffen is the founder of the Loving Classroom — an initiative rooted in the conviction that love is not merely a worthy aspiration for education but its essential foundation. He opens by reflecting on his own formation: how the Jewish tradition’s emphasis on learning as a sacred act, and on the teacher-student relationship as one of mutual care and responsibility, shaped his understanding of what classrooms can and should be.

    The Loving Classroom begins with a simple premise: that children learn best when they feel genuinely seen, valued and loved. This is not sentimentality but pedagogy — a recognition that the emotional and relational climate of a classroom is as determinative of learning outcomes as any curriculum. Rabbi Geffen draws on decades of experience to show how teachers who lead with love create the conditions for both intellectual and human flourishing.

    The conversation explores what it means to love students across difference — across cultural, religious and socio-economic divides — and how this kind of expansive love is itself a spiritual practice. He reflects on the particular gift of the Jewish tradition’s concept of chesed — lovingkindness — as a daily discipline that can be taught, practised and embodied in institutional life.

    His closing vision is of schools as communities of love: places where every child knows they belong, and where learning is inseparable from becoming more fully human.

    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).