Daily Life at the Folk High Schools

You will find, that the life at the Folk High Schools is often compared with the life at boarding schools.
This is both true – and not!

…and of course life at the schools varies from folk high school to folk high school.  

To Live Together

At a Folk High School you live together and experience each other in a multiple number of situations.

Many folk high schools offer both shared and single rooms.
You usually have big joint meetings and smaller group meetings every week.

During your stay at a folk high school, you live, eat, study, party and clean together with the other students. Everybody has the same duties and the same rights – no matter sex, social range, religion, nationality, ethnicity etc.
As the students often represent a wide range of backgrounds and you live close together in both good times and hard, everybody has to do theirs to get the best out of the day for the school as a whole.   

Teachers and Students

Respect, equality, cooperation, dialogue and tolerance are some of the keywords in making daily life at the Folk High Schools work. 
This is not only the case among the students. One of the core-ideas of the folk high schools is equality and mutual learning between teachers and students. The classes are characterized by the free word, dialogue and an open curriculum which can be changed during the course.    

Singing

The song and singing together is a strong part of the culture at the Folk High Schools. It is a tradition reaching back to the birth of this type of school. The founder, Grundtvig, wrote 1585 psalms himself.
You often sing every morning - and whenever there is an occation.
The Folk High Schools have their own songbook. The songbook contains both some of the psalms written by Grundtvig and many other songs.     
A new edition of the songbook was published in 2006 now containing 572 songs - both old and new, danish and english, pop, rock and psalms.