From Reading Club to a Chinese Folk High School Community
What happens when Chinese educators and others with an interest in education come together around Nordic educational thinking and the Danish folk high school tradition? In China, our colleague Ann has helped establish the Nordic Education Reading Club – a community where books provide the starting point, but where dialogue, community and practice have gradually become just as important.
It all began with a book. Over the past six months, participants in the Nordic Education Reading Club have been reading The Nordic Secret and meeting online to discuss the book’s ideas about Nordic approaches to education and personal development. Since then, the online meetings have been complemented by in-person gatherings in Chengdu, Liuzhou and Yangshuo.
But something interesting has happened along the way. The Reading Club has begun to develop into a genuine learning community inspired by the Danish folk high school tradition.
Can we create our own folk high school?
As the participants learned more about the Danish folk high school tradition, a new question emerged: Can we create our own form of folk high school – within our own lives and educational practices? That idea is now being put into practice.
From 4–7 September 2026, up to 30 participants will gather at the Guju Art Museum in the mountains outside Chongqing. Here, they will spend four days and three nights living together in what the organisers themselves describe as “A Folk High School–Style Shared Life.”
This means that participants are not simply coming to listen to lectures. They will cook together, sing, talk, play and be active together – while sharing responsibility for communal life. Everyone is regarded as a co-creator and can contribute, for example, with a conversation, a presentation, a game, a sporting activity or something entirely different.
Reading should lead to action
The Reading Club continues to be about books and education, but reading is not intended to stand alone.
At the gathering in Chongqing, participants will continue working on a joint project on future core competencies and develop the next phase of the Reading Club’s reading programme together. Participants themselves will help decide what to read, why they are reading it, how they want to engage with the texts – and how the ideas can be brought back into their own lives and educational practice. Participants are also invited to bring their own educational projects, experiences and real-life dilemmas. The idea is that individual experiences can become a source of shared learning.
Not a copy of Denmark
From Learn For Life’s perspective, this is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the initiative.
The ambition is not to copy the Danish folk high school. Instead, participants are exploring how the ideas behind the folk high school can inspire something that makes sense within their own Chinese context. As the project material puts it, the aim is to learn from how the Danish folk high schools responded to the challenges of their own time – and then allow the folk high school spirit to take root and grow in new contexts. The Reading Club therefore describes itself as more than either a course or a traditional book club. It is a community for learning, living and growing, built around three simple principles: Reading Together + Living Together + Creating Together.
For Learn For Life, the initiative is an inspiring example of what can emerge when Danish and Chinese approaches to education meet. Inspiration does not simply travel from one country to another. It is interpreted, discussed and transformed into new communities and new ways of thinking about education and personal development.
And perhaps this is where international exchange becomes most meaningful: when we do not simply copy one another, but use the encounter to create something new.
