How we use new technologies and how our societies transform are a choice. Our choice. Technologies are man-made, they emerge as results of human choices. At least so far. It is our moral obligation to keep it that way.

As we keep developing new technologies and our societies are rapidly transforming, it is also our moral obligation that human dignity, freedom and humaneness not only are not diminished but are increased.

Nordic Bildung thus operates based on the following values and assumptions:

Rule of law, democracy and universal human rights are essential and must not be lost

• The West is in a transition from industrialized democratic nation states to something we do not know yet.
• The non-industrialized parts of the world are in an even bigger transition towards the same unknown future.
• It is crucial that we deliberately create a democratic future for our species.

The current democratic institutions are insufficient in the future

• The institutions of the industrial age, including nation states themselves, lose their potency as the economy becomes digital and global.
• Party politics as we know it (the Left-Right spectrum) is a product of the industrialized society and must be reinterpreted in order to provide viable solutions.

Bildung is the path to meaning-making matching the challenges of the future

• As technological development is transforming the economy and eventually our societies, we need to upgrade our meaning-making to match the complexity of the world around us.

Folk-Bildung previously helped the Nordic countries go through major transitions peacefully

• We need to upgrade folk-bildung to match the realities of the 21st century
• We need to develop folk-bildung around the globe to match the realities of the 21st century

Metamodernity matches the complexity of our challenges

• Indigenous, premodern, modern and postmodern cultural codes no longer suffice on their own but all of them offer crucial elements if humans, societies and the globe are to flourish.
• Metamodernity seems to be the cultural code that can allow sufficiently complex meaning-making if we integrate appropriately indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern elements.

The Nordic countries and Nordic citizens have a special obligation to drive this development

• Folk-Bildung was invented in the Nordics and we have the strongest tradition from which to develop the next generation of folk-Bildung. We also have the most resources.

A picture from one of the first Danish folk-highschools, which radically upgraded adult learning and Bildung.

Three pictures by:
chuttersnap
Daniel Tafjord
Denise Johnson