This article has been brought to you by Couriers.Delivery, helping you to find the right Courier for your Delivery.
Children are running wild in the mud, climbing high into trees and playing with knives, but no one is telling them off. We are looking at life in kindergarten… Danish-style.
If you’re the kind of parent who keeps a close eye on your kids in the playground, Denmark’s forest kindergarten will come as a rude shock – they do things differently here. Johan says he’s watching from a distance. So what happens if he thinks the children are doing something dangerous? “I sometimes close my eyes, because I know I have to stop something, but I can also stand and watch it a little bit first because I think it’s exciting. And I can understand why they do it,” he says.
Whether he’s throwing rocks into the fjord with a bunch of enthusiastic three year-olds, or abseiling down a muddy slope with some determined five year-olds, Johan clearly gets a vicarious buzz from their juvenile thrill-seeking. “It’s not dangerous in my opinion. And if you don’t get a little bit of danger, what’s life worth living? Everybody needs a little bit of kick sometimes.”
At the heart of what makes Danish kindergartens so special is one word – pedagogy. In Denmark, and in many other parts of Europe, ‘pedagogy’ is an everyday word for something that’s much more holistic than ‘teaching’. It’s something that applies from cradle-to-grave – anyone in Denmark working with young children, or the mentally ill, or the elderly, requires a university degree in pedagogy.