When I in the early 1970s be­gan my studies in education at the regional university col­lege in Lillehammer, Norway, it was a brand new institution, borrowing ideas from the American col­lege system, including the com­munity college philosophy. Since it was a new institution, it was given an opportunity to experiment and do things dif­ferently than what was done at the old and universities, including the most prestigious University of Oslo and the teacher training colleges. The staff members who came to Lilleham­mer were often politically radical and had alternative ideas about the courses that were developed there, the first one in education, which was certainly influ­enced by the new institution’s princi­pal, Professor Hans Tangerud. Well, the old institutions didn’t allow the teach­ers in the new university college system to use the title professor, so they were only named lecturers until the Minis­try of Education gave up the whole idea about controlling and certifying such designations some years later when a private management university college, BI in Oslo, simply decided to name some staff members professors.

Incidentally, a professor didn’t need to hold a formal doctorate, and in Norway, that was a higher degree than the Ph.D. of our days, because the qualifications were decided upon scientific produc­tion of books and articles over a long pe­riod of time as a researcher or lecturer. Interestingly, too, the Norwegian min­ister of education that time, Hon. Bjart­mar Gjerde, had only the 7-year com­pulsory school, neither grammar school nor university. But he did have training within the labour union, probably more relevant for a Labour Party government minister, including visits and courses in America and other foreign countries, be­ing useful because English had already begun to become a must also in Norway; earlier German was more important, but that, too, was only taught from the lower grammar school, called ‘realskole’.

Now then, another piece of historical information about the Norwegian educa­tion sector half a century ago would usu­ally be a two-year teacher training built on the grammar school. But it could also be obtained by a four-year course only built on the seven-year primary school, with admittance through entrance tests. Many say that we therefore got a more varied group of teachers through the four-year courses, especially gifted stu­dents with rural backgrounds, also often with ordinary work experience, not only the bookish grammar school ’broilers’. Sometimes, those who went for the four-year teacher training had attended the ‘realskole’ or a year at a folk high school.

The folk high school was a unique Scandinavian type of school introduced in the 1840s, mainly for youth from ru­ral areas, who could not afford the lon­ger grammar school training. The folk high school, also referred to as the ‘school for life’, focused on literature, philosophy and nation-building con­tent, and it was part of the ideas behind it that it should be without grades and exam. It is a fact that many intellectu­als and other public figures, including writers and community leaders, had at­tended the folk high school. All the way up to ‘my time’ some fifty years ago, when the compulsory nine-year com­prehensive school was introduced and ordinary secondary and tertiary ed­ucation was expanded, the folk high school was an important education­al institution. (For further background on the folk high school, reference is made to the highly respected liberal Danish theologian and societal think­er, N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872), on whose ideas the first folk high schools were built in Denmark, soon gaining ground all over Scandinavia. This was also about the time when there were other great Danish alternative thinkers and writers such as H.C. Andersen and Søren Kirkegaard.)

At Lillehammer in the early 1970s, when I was a student there, we criti­cised most things about the existing education system and schooling of the time, especially the ways of keeping discipline, the grading system, and the ways of selection of students for further studies, which often led to the draining the local communities, notably that any training beyond primary school would be a ticket out of the rural communi­ty. We were certainly also critical to the curriculum and content of schools, and certainly the quite rigid ways the class­rooms were organized, including the use of school bells and more, with lit­tle encouragement and training in soci­etal participation and democracy. Alas, less has changed till our today than we thought, and I have written about sever­al topics that remain as relevant today as then, still remaining unchanged.

As for changing the old curriculum when I was a student, I remember one of our excellent lecturers, Trond Ålvik, likening the curriculum being ‘distilled’ like making a porridge, boiling it for too long, letting all the interesting con­tent in a subject disappear in the thin air, till we would be left with an almost inedible and boring porridge, which we then called primary and secondary school curriculum. Good and well, but I also remember that Ålvik said it was easier to criticise the existing curricu­lum and school content than to know what to replace it with.

True, and maybe some of my readers have thought so when I have had sweep­ing ideas about getting rid of much of the existing school curriculum of today, especially at secondary level. But then again, I still believe that students have to learn a lot which they soon will for­get, and a lot which will soon be outdat­ed and irrelevant. So, if Ålvik was right, he was also wrong and too cautious; we must change drastically the school cur­riculum in the years and decades ahead.

In future, the school must do less and do better what it does, and much of that has to do with life skills and learning to live, look after own mental and physical health, become prepared to handle cri­ses in life, such things that we all have to meet in the cause of our lives. Today, in­deed in the West, an increasing number of young student develop psychological and social problems at an early age, and the schools seem unable to help them properly. Yet, we know that most of such difficulties should never have risen if the education system and schools had done their work well – yes, considering all the money they have in the West, and the teachers trained at university level for four or five years whereas the teach­ers in the old Norwegian system had much less training, but were often bet­ter in helping their students in their val­ue and life development, also living in more meaningful societies. Today, the world has become more compartmen­talised and the school gets more de­manding tasks of preparing the youth to live meaningful lives and handle ex­istential problems.

A few days ago, I received an email from a Finnish friend, Tina Nunn, who lived in Pakistan for several years when her husband was a senior diplomat here. She underlined what I am saying in to­day’s article, and also drawing attention to the school also having a responsibility to teaching the students about how one can handle ones home economy in life as well as learning better other life skills. She also stressed the importance of the school focusing more on students being able to handle their psychological health. Again, we both agreed that there is much to learn from education when we went to school, several decades ago. But we must also develop new approaches rel­evant to today and the future, drawing lessons from historical alternatives.

Atle Hetland
The writer is a senior Norwegian social scientist with experience from university, diplomacy and development aid. He can be reached at atlehetland@yahoo.com