On the 15th January 2026, many of us gathered both in person and online to connect and celebrate the book launch of “Perspectives on the Global Folk High School Movement and Peoples Future Lab”. The book is the culmination of many years of global collaborations through the International Folk High School Movement. Firstly, through the Peoples Future Lab project https://danishfolkhighschools.com/peoples-future-lab and then the work of the GNFR to produce the anthology which captured perspectives and learning from the project and the wider movement. This took us a total of over four years of work.
As we gathered, there was standing room only at Vartov and we had many people engaging online. Over the afternoon, we sang (of course) led by the wonderful Rasmus Skov Borring and heard from many of the chapter authors. We started with the question, Is the folk high school global? We heard global perspectives on the research process, the connections of writers including Freire and Tagore to Grundtvig’s own perspectives and a glimpse into the global history of the Danish Folk High schools over one hundred years. Reflecting the truly global aspect of the folk high schools, we heard about a Japanese perspective of establishing a folk high school, and movingly, the challenges of establishing a folk high school in a warzone, from our friends in the Ukraine, literally presenting in a recently bombed house. This gave a great overview from an historical, research based and present-day global establishment of the folk high schools.
We then moved to the second part of the symposium which focused specifically on the Peoples Future Lab project. This session explored what learnings had emerged from the project itself. The first three presentations, which included my own, had a captivating synergy which emerged. This was particularly from the perspectives of the educators who were involved in the project. What came across very powerfully was the importance of the community of educators that the project had both developed and cemented and also what we had learnt from each other. This was reinforced with an online presentation on the theme of developing global political friendships. Finally, we heard how Fircroft College has introduced singing to the school as a result of their involvement in the PFL project.
We concluded the symposium with a panel discussion, taking questions and reflections from the participants. The theme of the session was, “The Folk High school is Global -what does it matter?” Our conclusions from the symposium and the anthology is that is that it matters very much. My first encounter with the global folk high school movement was in London in 2018, closely followed by the International Folk High School Summit in 2019, where the idea and inspiration for the PFL project came to be. Many of the people I have encountered through those years and participated with in these events and projects were in the room at Vartov. It was a reminder, should we have needed it, that the global movement folk high schools, of learning, connection and collaboration continues on, and perhaps matters even more now and in the futures we all face together.