The education we need in the 21st Century is not the same as generations ago: The world is changing fast and we can all find all kinds of information online.
Yet, most education has barely changed. We still expect students to memorize content. We still expect everybody to learn the same in more or less the same way at the same pace.
Knowledge cannot be replaced by online searches. We still need a background tapestry of understanding that will allow us to filter truth and facts from nonsense.
What we need is both broad and deep knowledge, critical thinking, curiosity, and the ability to connect dots and ask good questions. This redefines what is good education.
Bildung to the Rescue
The Nordic countries have more than 150 years of experience with the kind of education we need in the 21st Century: Bildung.
Please contact us if you and your organization would like to collaborate.
The Bildung Time Journey; a pilot project K-10
There was a lot of spontaneous joy. Very often the pupils got focused very easily, and even within just the theme week, some of them improved significantly. They flourished.
Feedback from the first testing, 2024
2022-2025 we have been collaborating with the public school, Nordbyskolen, Falster, Denmark, making bildung concrete and tangible, not least to the teachers.
The school year 2022-23, we started by adding more story-telling, singing, and dancing to the lessons across all ages, and both pupils and teachers enjoyed it a lot right from the beginning. Story-telling, singing, and dancing strengthen listening, focused attention, and cultural heritage, they expand vocabulary, and promote conversation, and dancing and singing also promote coordination in time and space together with others — besides being fun and meaningful.
The other major element of The Bildung Time Journey is theme weeks through all grades K-10, beginning with hunter-gatherer stone-age in kindergarten and concluding with postmodernism and quantum physics in the 10th grade. For all grades, their exploration of their historical epoch will be designed around the Bildung Rose, so that they get to explore all 7 domains of the Bildung Rose from that historical perspective.
The first year, 2022-23, we just tested the idea on grades 1, 4, and 7, and it worked very well. 2023-24 Nordby Skolen tried the theme weeks in all grades, and it was a huge success!
Nordbyskolen is a public school with approximately 460 pupils and 50 teachers, some 100 kilometers south of Copenhagen.
Just one specific example:
Grade 4 worked on the Renaissance and had learned quadrille dancing. Grade 7 worked on the Enlightenment and had rehearsed singing Ode an die Freude by Friedrich Schiller and Beethoven. Both were performed at a morning assembly, and after having watched the 4th graders dance, the 7th graders wanted to learn how to dance Les Lanciers!
The overall idea behind the time journey throughout the grades (click on illustration for larger picture):
If you would like to read the report based on the first three years of testing The Bildung Time Journey or if you would like to test it at your school too, please write us at
Since 2020, we have been involved in the Erasmus+ project BILDUNG where we delivered the first Intellectual Output in 2021: the booklet What is Bildung? The Bildung project is a collaboration among 11 European organisations dedicated to support adult education and learning.
DVV International is the Institute for International Cooperation of the German Adult Education Association (DVV), which represents the interests of approximately 900 adult education centres (vhs); they are the project coordinator. Among the project partners are The European Association for Education of Adults (EAEA) and the Danish umbrella organization for education of adults (DFS).
FORWARD is a program under the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, RMIT, for future skills and workforce transformation. Nordic Bildung was invited on board when it started in 2022 along with contributors from around the globe.
FORWARD: https://medium.com/rmit-forward
In January 2022, we joined the #LearningPlanet Festival; 2023, Lene Rachel Andersen will be on one of the official panels, and we are exploring further collaboration. Learning Planet was started by the Learning Planet Institute and UNESCO.
Learning Planet: https://www.learning-planet.org/
2023 Festival: https://festival.learning-planet.org/
De Bildung Academie in Amsterdam was started by students who felt that university was missing something: bildung. They started in 2015, and we have been good friends and colleagues since before Nordic Bildung was started in March 2018.
https://en.debildungacademie.nl/