It is a high German notion that life is explainable before it is experienced, and that it must submit itself to change according to the dictum of the learned. Wherever this fanciful idea is incorporated into the educational structure, all such schools become workshops for dissolution and death where the worms live high at the expense of life itself.  I completely reject this fanciful notion and maintain that if the school, as an educational institution, is to realize its potentialities for benefiting life, then this school, first of all, should not give the highest priority  to purely intellectual activity or to its own institutional status, but set as its chief educational goal thetask of helping to  solve life’s problems.  Secondly, the school should take a realistic approach to life, it should strive to teach about life and promote purposeful living.

N.F.S. Grundtvig, 1838. Grundtvig was the founder of Denmark’s folk high schools