General enlightenment and Formation 

 

Public Enlightenment has its ideological origins from, among others, the N.F.S. Grundtvig, who for much of his work - not least by the inspiration for the creation of folk high schools - sought to enlighten the average Dane, so this could be a knowledgeable and active participant in society. 

 

Grundtvig was a child of his time. Like many other Danish and foreign Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries, he had a positive belief in the progress of societal development. An important part of this development was the formation or enlightenment of the whole people, he believed. Grundtvig's vision was that the large low and uneducated sections of the population, not least the large rural population, should be able to participate as responsible citizens in society.

 

Therefore, the boarding schools have become a form of schooling for the youth, where they gained enough insight into society to be able to take a stand on its design and development.

 

The term formation refers partly to the process through which a person acquires a culturally determined content of knowledge, skills and attitudes, and to the result of this process, which is presumed to have led to a formation of the personality in the desired direction. The choice of teaching content in order to shape the personality - usually in accordance with a particular view of society and people and an associated educational ideal - is the original purpose of pedagogical educational thinking. The process of formation acquires its special character in that it is not a passive substance that is to be formed, but an active being of the same kind as the educator, simply with a different individuality. A good formation process is therefore not a result of coercion, but on the contrary presupposes a desire to be formed.

 

Formation is therefore a concept of acquired skills.

 

There is both a general and a professional meaning of the word formation. In general, it can mean anything from "good manners to a touch of personality.

 

 Typically, a distinction is made between these two forms of formation:

• How to behave. Eg. how you have been raised

• How enlightened you are. That is, how much one knows about many different things

That a person is educated can thus mean that he or she is polite, can eat without smacking, and keeps the door open for others. But it can also mean that the person has a broad knowledge of e.g. art, nature and history.

Formation is one of the most difficult educational concepts to pin down; but it expresses an effort to find a teaching content that forms a whole, and is thus opposed to inconsistent information and unilateral specialization aimed at business and extreme individualization. If an education, in addition to qualifying an individual as a citizen, is also to form a human being, it must live up to the requirement of coherence and wholeness in content. This is what is meant when we continue to talk about the "general" content of education and training. General formation is a term used about a particular set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The whole is delimited by what the leading figures in society at all times regard as the necessary minimum to be able to commit

General formation, a term most often used in relation to upper secondary and free education, the purpose of which is described as study preparation and general formation. The concept includes both principles for substance selection and notions of student learning. General formation can be defined as a competence that can be developed in a teaching that includes the general parts of the sciences and subjects that a society needs in order to develop the citizens' ability to reflect on the individual's own relationship to fellow human beings, nature. and society.

General formation is a singular concept, which therefore presupposes an education that constitutes a whole and a unit, and which has no specific business or study purpose. The concept thus includes many qualifications and competencies that students can acquire both in the subjects and in the interaction between the subjects.