I cannot attend an elderhostel about genealogy (see Asheville TRIBUNE: June 11 and June 18, 1998) without something unexpected jumping out and biting me. If something happens to me which I think others might like to happen to them, thenI share it. It might be a great John Sayles film like “Men With Guns.” This time it was the John C. Campbell Folk School (JCCFS). I have to write one more time about JCCFS. Otherwise I would not keep faith with Alexander Pope, who advised:

The John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown near the Western North Carolina border with Georgia, opened in 1925. It sprouted from an 18 month stay in Denmark by Olive Dame Campbell, the recent widow of Appalachian scholar John C. Campbell, and her teacher friend Marguerite Butler. These scholars learned a uniquely Danish way to educate adults. Then they searched for a site in Appalachia. Their offer resonated in Brasstown with the Scroggs family and other local people. The locals then donated land and labor to persuade Olive and Marguerite to set up their new model school among them. There the founders emphasized cooperative agriculture, adult education and community service. They introduced the area’s first rural library. Their school  nurse offered health care for miles around. JCCFS breathed money-making life into old  mountain crafts like weaving. In 1926 the school founded a credit union, and a creamery in 1928. It did pioneering work in literacy, organic farming and solar design applications. 

Today the Campbell Folk School offers 350 courses in crafts, music, dance, genealogy and the like to over 3,000 students per year. JCCFS also has a community outreach program sending crafts people, musicians and storytellers into area schools. 

Whence and what are the Danish ideas behind the educational powerhouse in Brasstown? They originated with Rev. Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872). He was the most prolific writer in Danish history and a contemporary of Hans Christian Andersen and Soren Kierkegaard. One writer argues that, without the innovations of Grundtvig, Denmark would today be a notably less cheerful and outgoing country. 

Grundtvig was a traditional Lutheran cleric who, in his late 40s, made three study trips to England. There he was impressed by Cambridge University’s Trinity College. He wanted to bring back home congenial features of English academic life, so different from the rigid German university model then dominating Scandinavia. At Cambridge Rev. Grundtvig saw professors, lecturers, tutors and students all living in the same college compound. They interacted outside classes. While dining together and during their free time they just kept on learning, but informally through discussion. Grundtvig found a spirit of easy camaraderie among teachers and students and professional equality, comrade to comrade.

In England he had a long, intense dialog with Clara Bolton, a physician’s young wife. From that conversation he was suddenly resolved to oust gloom and infuse Christian living with the sun-drenched spirit  of classical Greece. Like Francis of Assisi 600 years earlier, Rev. Grundtvig now saw this world as radiating the glory of God. People should taste and revel in the beauties and sorrows of this life for its own sake.

Today there are a hundred or so Folk Academies in Denmark, all but one residential. About 60,000 persons attend yearly: two per cent of Denmark’s adult population. The Government does not permit folk academies to teach the professional subjects of traditional universities. Nor may they issue diplomas. Learning is largely through dialog, not lecture. Physical exercise, too, is non-competitive. Many teachers live on campus. Schools educate for life, for responsible citizenship and for just learning how to cope. Their faith is that the best learning is not solitary but interactive, and not just between students and masters but among students themselves.

The Danish folk academy has been imitated in the USA, England, Germany and elsewhere. Staff and students of the Campbell School  are told the history and evolving philosophy of the Brasstown experiment.  Soon an older building will have been transformed into a museum displaying JCCFS photographs and artifacts. In May [1998] my genealogy class enjoyed a sneak preview. 

The Danish spirit of JCCFS is not heavy-handed. Neither can it be missed.  A 7:00 a.m. walk is offered daily. Preceding the 8:15 a.m. breakfast those who wish it assemble for a half hour of music, humor or philosophizing. Before each of the meals, all remain standing to recite or sing together a grace or text. Students and teachers visit the far flung campus’s craft buildings to observe and speak with other students and teachers as they weave baskets, discuss cameras, crochet a doily, carve wood and the like.  The Danish connection is also preserved by inviting interns from Denmark to Brasstown. Over the years some Danes have remained behind, married and now informally share their European perspectives with staff and visitors. 

While I was at the Brasstown elderhostel, my wife Mary was in Berlin at a seminar on theater for teachers of German. One of her 17 colleagues was a Danish woman. Years earlier, while doing graduate work at Indiana University, she had also taught the Danish language. She infected Mary with her enthusiasm for the Danish folk academy  movement. All this induces me to suggest an innovation to JCCFS: please add an intensive course in Danish for beginners, taught by a native Dane. Future JCCFS students of Danish might not ever be able to read Hans Christian Andersen or Kierkegaard  in the original. But a beginner’s command of Danish would make for a more enjoyable vacation in Copenhagen. If someone like me knew some Danish, he might even repeat the journey 75  years ago of Olive Campbell and Marguerite Butler into a Danish adult education system which brings joy and light to thousands of people around the world. 

-000-

for Asheville TRIBUNE

(revisited 07/01/2004)