How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (2 page)

It’s important not to read too much into what one class of Danes thought of one class of Scots (and it would be amusing to hear what the Scots thought of the Danes) but their thoughts are useful in that they hint at what’s different about Danish education, and, by extension, Danish society.

“When you compare us to other EU countries, our education is very badly rated,” says 17-year-old Augusta. “We’re not brought up to learn things by heart. But if you ask Danish students and Danish children about politics, we’re more reflective. We have more of our own views. We think more about our society. We sensed in Scotland that they are taught in a more old-fashioned way.”

You could argue that this approach starts from the age of six months. At this point in a Danish child’s life, state-subsidised childcare kicks in – which means that parents pay no more than 25% of the cost of sending their child to nursery (around £300 a month). If they’re low earners, they pay far less – and in turn this means that everyone can and does put their children in childcare from an early age. This has two main effects. It encourages the vast majority of women to go back to work. Over 70% of Danish mothers are in work – in Britain, that figure falls to 55%. Second, it means that children from the age of six months are a) separated from their parents for large parts of the day; and b) surrounded by kids of all backgrounds.

There are many criticisms of these nurseries; one common view is that the education they provide is not structured enough. But their many supporters argue that they teach Danish children to be more independent, and, by introducing them to other people from all walks of life, they also make them aware of the importance of society, and of cooperating with your equals – a recurrent theme in Denmark, and, in fact, this book. Only in Denmark could there be a board game – Konsensus – based around the concept of collaboration. It’s no coincidence that the name of the Danes’ most famous export – Lego toys – is derived from the Danish words “leg godt”. Play well.

This focus on independence extends outside the school gates, too. Since cycling and cycling infrastructure are so widespread, children are often allowed to roam around town at a younger age than they might do abroad. “Our parents don’t have to drive us,” says Søren, a chap with the beginnings of some lengthy dreadlocks. “We take care of our own transportation from an early age. We don’t have to have a driving licence to get around. At ten or 11, you can go to a lot of places yourself on your bike. It’s normal to do it at nine.” A quarter of children aged between seven and 14 have part-time jobs.

Teenagers can also get their hands on alcohol much more easily – and in fact they drink more alcohol per capita than youngsters in any other country. You can buy booze as early as 16, and people aren’t prompted for their ID as often as they are in other countries. Meanwhile parents often give their 14-year-olds cans of beer to take to a party – an attempt to moderate their drinking without banning it completely. Opinion is divided as to the effect this all has. Predictably some think it encourages binging; others argue the opposite – that it makes alcohol less of an issue. “I think we drink differently to how they do in the UK,” argues Benedicte, 17. “The people going out there – they were drunk. They were REALLY drunk. We tend to just get tipsy.” Some of her classmates argue that the class’s attitude to binging is unusual. But most of them claim it’s standard for Danes their age – that while Danish teens drink more often, they usually do it in moderation, and in less pressurised circumstances.

In a year or two, this class will start to think about university. The decision they face is different from that faced by students in Britain. Here, there has been a fierce debate about whether the rise in university fees from £9000 to £27,000 will prove off-putting to those from poorer backgrounds. In Denmark, that premise seems farcical. University education is entirely free. In fact, Danish students are in a sense paid to go to university: they receive around £500 a month in living expenses. It’s a different mentality. Students aren’t seen as a burden on the state, but as people whose
skills will one day support it. They’re future participants in Danish life, and they’re treated as such. Every effort is made to make them better able to participate.

In Denmark, a well-rounded personality is seen as a key component of this ability to participate, which helps explain the existence of two very Danish institutions that have few overseas equivalents: the continuation school, and the folk high school. The former is the state-subsidised boarding school where many 16-year-olds go to study in the year before they leave for sixth form. They follow a basic academic curriculum, but the main focus is on creativity. Some continuation schools specialise in sport, others centre on drama and art, and some are essentially music schools. Their sole goals are to develop the students’ extra-curricular interests, and to help them – at a pivotal moment in their lives – mature as human beings. The folk high school is a very similar concept, but it’s aimed at those who have already left school – adults of any age, in fact – and there are no exams.

“It’s part of this Danish tradition that everyone has to take part in political life, or in life in general,” says Else Mathiassen, who runs the West Jutland folk high school. “Each individual should be developed in his or her own way – but also know how to function within a group. And to do that, you need to be enlightened! You have to be personally enlightened in order to know about society today. To enable you to be part of the democracy that we have.”

It’s easy to be cynical about such idealism. As the
fictional leader of the Social Democrats admits in
Borgen
: “People don’t run anything.” But walking around the grounds of the high school, you can see why Else’s so inspired. We’re halfway up the coast of the North Sea – as far from Copenhagen as you can really get in Denmark – and the place is dreamy. At its centre is an airy hub of bedrooms and workshops that open out onto acres of gardens and woodland. A blue tit flutters about the art studio, and the vegetable patches are stuffed with potatoes and lemon balm. In the woods in the distance, sculptures made by recent students poke from the trees. The whole estate smells of spring.

There are 70 of these places in Denmark, and one in ten Danish adults – with half of their fees paid for by the state – will spend a spell at one at some point in their lives. Most people tend to come in their twenties, but parents and pensioners often enrol too. In fact, the schools hold such a special place in the Danish identity that Else thinks that the very elderly sometimes come here to pass away. “Sometimes older people die here, and I have to ring up the family to break them the news,” she explains. “Often they’ll say: ‘Oh, that’s nice, he obviously wanted to die in a folk high school.’ ” Each school has its own specialism – West Jutland is particularly known for its focus on eco-living – but all of them will teach dancing, writing, ceramics, painting, acting, cooking, gardening, debating and philosophy. The last two are particularly important because the ability to articulate an argument is a key part of being an active citizen.

This highly democratic approach to education is not a recent Danish phenomenon. It can be seen in the context of a wider drive towards social democracy that began in Denmark around 150 years ago. The roots of Danish educational ideology, like many Danish concepts, can be traced to the mid-1800s, when the country was in the process of losing much of its southern (and historically German) territory to a newly belligerent Prussia. In 1864, Denmark finally surrendered its two southernmost provinces, Schleswig and Holstein, to Prussia, a defeat which saw the country lose 40% of its population. It was a moment of huge national trauma. Until that point, Denmark still rather optimistically saw itself as a relatively powerful, multinational
commonwealth, despite having regularly lost large parts of its empire since the 1500s. But in 1864, with the loss of their last significant annex, the Danes had finally to accept that their once-vast medieval empire – a Baltic sprawl that had housed several states and a babble of languages – was in fact now just one single, tiny monoculture. This prompted a national identity crisis, and forced Danes to reassess the values that united them.

The debate was heavily influenced by the ideas of a man called Nikolai Grundtvig, who is now considered a Danish national hero. By the late 1840s, Denmark had finally made the transition from absolute monarchy to parliamentary monarchy. In very simplistic terms, Grundtvig – a priest, thinker, and sometime politician active from the 1830s onwards – felt that the new democratic system would work only if every Dane was able to participate in political life, and if, by extension, Danish society was made more egalitarian. From 1838, as the campaign for democracy gathered pace, he gave a series of lectures promoting the concept of what he coined
folkelighed
, or what the historian Knud Jespersen translates as a “mutually committed community”. Grundtvig, writes Jespersen in his highly recommended
A History of Denmark
, “was particularly concerned with the question of how to transform the hitherto inarticulate general public into responsible citizens in the coming democracy – in other words, to turn the humble subjects of the king into good democrats”.

His arguments had a huge effect. “In virtually every area
imaginable,” says Jespersen, “the ideas developed by Grundtvig and his circle at a particular historical point in the middle of the nineteenth century have left a deep and long-lasting impression on the Danish psyche and on the way in which Danish society operates today. This is not necessarily because any of these ideas were in themselves especially original, but because at a critical crossroads in the history of Denmark, he was able to formulate his thoughts in such ways as to create a great impact and a comprehensive programme of action able to change the humble subjects or an absolute monarch into more mature members of a democratic society and at the same time unite the inhabitants of the remains of the Oldenborg state [the once mighty Danish empire] as one people, a Danish nation. The key concepts in this were
folkelighed
, tolerance, openness and liberal-mindedness: the means were enlightenment and committed dialogue.”

Indeed, Grundtvig was (and is) so revered in Denmark that when he died, a whole new suburb of Copenhagen, with a gargantuan church at its centre, was designed in his honour. The church (built, as it happens, by the father of Kaare Klint, whom we will meet in two chapters’ time, and filled with chairs by Klint himself) is quite a shock at first sight. You reach it by winding through several quiet residential terraces before – bam! – you’re hit by this vast jukebox of a building, a triangular man-made cliff-face that is three or four times the height of its po-faced neighbours.

Grundtvig’s first practical aim was to give all Danes
access to a thorough, humanist education, particularly in isolated areas traditionally ignored by the Copenhagen elite. Thus Grundtvig set about founding what became known as folk high schools – liberal arts colleges for the rural poor that now survive in the more arts-focussed form described above.

“The goal,” writes Jespersen, “was to offer young people the chance to stay in a school during the winter, where inspirational teachers and the living word could awaken their dormant spirit and sharpen their perceptions. In short the intent was no less than to transform the inarticulate masses into responsible and articulate citizens in the new democratic society which was slowly taking shape.”

The first folk high school was built in 1844 in a village in south Jutland. By 1864, there were 14 – and in 1874 there were 50. Now there are 70.

As Denmark sought to redefine itself in the years following 1864, concepts like the folk high schools and
folkelighed
began to take root in the Danish psyche. Danish farmers and dairymen – many of whom went to a folk high school and had consequently been imbued with a sense of both their own worth and their responsibility to society – clubbed together to form agrarian cooperatives that shared expensive materials, machinery and profits. For the first time in Danish history, these co-ops – inspired by a system pioneered by some weavers in Rochdale, Yorkshire – enabled the farmers to create meat and dairy products that were of a standard consistent enough to be exported. In time,
Denmark’s farming community became not only one of the world’s most prolific producers of bacon and butter (think: Lurpak), but also the foundation stone for the massive welfare state that gradually emerged in Denmark from the late 19th century onwards.