Bildung is devised to change the way students see the world. Today, Americans often think of schooling as the transmission of specialized skill sets - can the student read, do math, recite the facts of biology. It was based on the idea that if people were going to be able to handle and contribute to an emerging industrial society, they would need more complex inner lives. It means the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person. The German word they used to describe their approach, bildung, doesn’t even have an English equivalent. They look at education differently than we do. They realized that they were going to have to make lifelong learning a part of the natural fabric of society. They realized that if their countries were to prosper they had to create truly successful “folk schools” for the least educated among them. The 19th-century Nordic elites did something we haven’t been able to do in this country recently. What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. Immigration restrictionists note that until recently they were ethnically homogeneous societies.īut Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Some libertarians point out that these countries score high on nearly every measure of free market openness. Progressives say it’s because they have generous welfare states. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have high economic productivity, high social equality, high social trust and high levels of personal happiness. Almost everybody admires the Nordic model.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |