Hello, my name is Lene Rachel Andersen. I am the author of the book, Bildung: Keep Growing. I'm also the co-founder of the Think Tank Nordic Bildung and of the European Building Network. What is Bildung? Well, first of all, there's a concept that doesn't really have a word in English. The word that comes the closest is formation. But the word Bildung is a German word and it actually has 250 years of philosophical tradition behind it in the German language. That is why I prefer to use the German word because it comes with a lot of intellectual luggage and cloud to it. But what is it? Basically it's two things. It's many things, but you can boil it down to two things really. The first part of it is knowledge. All the knowledge that you can learn from others or teach others. Knowledge that can be transferred from one person to the next. It can be the formal knowledge that you learn in the school system. It can be math, science, history, geography, learning another language. But it can also be the practical stuff that you need to know in order to survive in your own society, such as how to book a train ticket online or how to fix a bicycle, things like that. Or it could be the stories that your grandparents told you about their childhood so that you know where families coming from. I mean, all this is knowledge, and we can describe it as the horizontal plane, the many areas in which we can expand our horizons. We can have knowledge in many directions. But that's just one kind of knowledge. That's just one kind of expanding our inner world, which is really what Bildung is about. The other part of it is what we could call the vertical development, the emotional depth, our emotional connection to the world, and our moral aspirations, our sense of responsibility, how we interact with other people, and what our moral compass is like an emotional development. One of the thinkers who wrote really well about this was Friedrich Schiller and he lived in the second half of the 1700s. What did Schiller say about building? Well, he said that there are three kinds of people, and in order to illustrate that, I brought my little friend here. Schiller said, there are three kinds of people. The first kind of person is the emotional person. This person is controlled by his or her own desires, urges, and emotions, feelings, and therefore, he or she is not free because he or she cannot transcend those feelings. How do you transcend your feelings and transform to a bigger person? Well, you can become a team player. Schiller used a different kind of word. He called it the rational person. The rational person has made the rationale the norms and values, moral norms and values of society his own. By doing that, he can be trusted by others. Others can rely on him. You can predict what kind of behavior he will display in certain situations because he has made the moral norms of society his own, and we need team players like that. It's really important that we become team players. Unfortunately, if you have the moral norms of society as your moral compass and you cannot transcend it and take your own perspective on things you're not free either. How do you transform and move beyond this transcend, beyond becoming this rational person, being this rational person? Well, you can become what Schiller called the moral person. I've brought another third little friend here to illustrate that. The moral person has been through this development, this first transition, and has transcended the rationale of society by reconnecting with his own emotions. By having both his own emotions as a guide for what he feels is right and wrong and the moral norms of society, he can actually take an individual moral stand in whatever situation he or she is presented. Another way of describing this is to say that the emotional person has no moral compass. The rational person has an outer moral compass, and the moral person has an inner moral compass of his or her own. This is the person who can enjoy freedom because he knows by himself, by reflecting on things and by thinking about it, what is the right thing to do or to not do. This is Bildung and according to Schiller, both the process is Bildung and the result is Bildung. His suggestion for how we can go through these transitions is through aesthetics, through the arts, through literature. That is where we can be exposed to views on the world that we have not met before, things that may offend us, things that may make us angry, things that may make us disagree, and of course also things that we like and that feel good. But we need push-backs. We need something that surprises us and makes us reconsider things in order to grow and in order to go through these transitions. This is Bildung.
