Grundtvig and Kold: The founders of the Danish boarding schools

Grundtvig was a pastor, a theologian, a teacher, a writer and even a politician for a while.

Grundtvig lived in the 1800-hundreds in Copenhagen. He is relatively unknown internationally, but he is one of the most influential people in Danish history. He has influenced Danish society in many ways and still continues to do so. Grundtvig’s thoughts on schools and teaching profoundly altered the Danish school system. He is considered the father of the Danish Folk High School-movement, and wanted to educate the Danish youth on culture and society.

To Grundtvig, it was important to educate young people on national culture and history as well as to teach people to take active part in society. Grundtvig formulated his thoughts on folk high schools through the 1830’s and 1840’s and believed that the state should establish a high school. The state never founded a high school, but the first folk high school was built in Rødding in 1844 by a private group with Christian Kold as the principal.

The school in Rødding was only the first of many folk high schools to be built in Denmark and today there are about 80 high schools. It was important to Grundtvig that learning is motivated by curiosity and the desire to learn rather than exams or tests, and that is still the ideal for the Danish folk high schools today.

However, not just the high school, but the whole of the Danish school system has been influenced by Grundtvig’s thoughts on learning for life, not for exams.

Christen Kold lived from 1816-1870 and was a Danish educator, a free school man, folk high school principal and tutor.

As a tutor, he made his first experience as "public educator". He established the first folk high school in Denmark by Grundtvig's thinking. Kold was a personality with great skills as a public educator. He founded the independent schools and was a great inspiration to folk high school.

He wanted his school to be "a place of prayer on the life traveling". The school should enliven before the enlightened and it should awaken faith in "God's love and the Danish happiness". The story was his teaching method.

Since then, the Boarding schools also came. The boarding schools are among the free schools and blend into the school tradition, which is also high schools and independent schools. The free schools arose from peasant independence and the godly revivals in the early 1800’s.

Like the other free schools, the boarding schools were originally inspired by the thoughts about school and education, which N.F.S. Grundtvig and Christen Kold stood for.