Cultural capital supports the capacities of children and young people to actively participate in society. Experiences from Finland show, however, that a generous public service provision doesn’t necessarily mean equal service offering for all. Children with a minority background and children coming from lower social classes are underrepresented among the users of the cultural programs aimed for children and young people. Recent initiatives in Helsinki, the Finnish capital, may have found a new way to tackle this challenge.

A national program for Arts education

Finland was named the happiest country in the world in 2021 by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the fourth time in a row. Alongside with the other Nordic welfare states, the country is well-known for its generous public services. These services include the public school system as well as the public healthcare system, but Finland invests heavily also in children’s arts education. And for good reason: arts and culture are known to have a positive impact on children and on young people and their future.

In parallel to this research work, the City of Helsinki launched a pilot phase of the Helsinki Model of arts education that brought the activities to suburbs and, thus, closer to the disadvantaged groups. Also, an arts education project called “Art Testers”, led by the Association of Finnish Children’s Cultural Centres was launched targeting teenagers.

The pilot phase of the Helsinki Model that lasted three years (2016-18), consisted of four case studies in four different suburbs around Helsinki (Lindholm & Päiviö-Häkämies, 2020). It relied on the cooperation of the cultural department of the City of Helsinki, of neighbourhood associations and of cultural institution ranging from theatres to museums and to dance and circus companies. The pilot succeeded in improving the perceived quality of life in the pilot suburbs but it taught that the local population couldn’t be reached simply by delocalising the old model of arts education. The content needed to be adapted to the setting. And yet, the most challenging groups—socially most marginalised and minorities not speaking Finnish—were still very hard to reach. This was partly because they didn’t have any previous relation to art or had even a hostile attitude toward it. City of Helsinki continues the Helsinki Model program and keeps fine-tuning it.

Art Testers integrated cultural offerings to the school curriculum initially from 2017 till 2020. Every year, it brought all Finnish 8th graders (15-year-olds) to a visit in one or two high-esteemed art attractions across Finland, such as opera or theatre performance, a concert, or an arts exhibition (Art Tester, 2021). School groups were provided with tickets and transportation to the events. Approximately 60,000 teenagers participated in the project yearly. The project ended up being so popular and successful that in the fall 2020 the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture secured the continuation of the program.

What can universities contribute to rebuilding society by a novel mix of arts and science?

Europe is currently going through an unprecedented crisis. In addition to the economic, demographic and migratory challenges that have traditionally been part of the reform of this large territory, the last decade has seen the addition of the climate challenge and the upheaval linked to the COVID-19 health crisis. By now, Europe has moved into what is known as the 4th industrial revolution, a new way of organising by combining a networked organisation and digital and collaborative development tools with the means of production in the real world. The European society, multicultural and cosmopolitan, is facing a new deal characterised by new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the virtualisation of sensory experiences. Major scientific advances coincide with new global issues. Faced with these doubts, society must question its traditional categories and rethink its objectives and its organisation.

Access to resources becomes a fundamental issue. The liberation and concentration of energies is an essential pillar of any strategy and any initiative. The collective, the local anchoring, becomes fundamental not only to reactivate the creative forces, but also to ensure to minimise their environmental impacts and to refocus the questioning of tomorrow’s production modes on the human, on the sustainable. Towards a more inclusive, resilient society. Towards a more shared academy. Towards a meeting where several platforms, several laboratories, in direct access, cohabit and share their information, and several ecosystems come together by mixing artistic and scientific perspectives. The great thinkers of the historical Renaissance had established this spirit of rupture, this capacity to embrace both the rigour of artistic thought and the formidable intuitions of scientific rationality. What does this imply for the future of universities? How must university evolve—or be disrupted—to have relevance in the Next Renaissance as they have done so far for cultural and scientific driven development?

Such radical intersections of artistic and scientific experiences—as at U7+ Alliance of world universities and Université Côte d’Azur—should lead the whole of society to immerse itself in a reflection on otherness, on a certain form—in the aesthetic sense—of vision of the world, so that art can, at times, revive the place it once occupied in the Camerata Fiorentina. Or as it was described in Henri de Saint-Simon’s The Artist, the Scientist, the Industrialist (1824), „It is we, artists, who will serve as your vanguard: the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and the most rapid. We have weapons of all kinds: when we want to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas; we popularize them by poetry and song; we employ alternately the lyre or the galoubet, the ode or the song, the history or the novel; the dramatic stage is open to us.”

Damien Ehrhardt and Hélène Fleury recall the extent to which the great figure of Alexander von Humboldt prefigured the current challenges of history. By combining science and aesthetics, by associating observation, artistic fascination and understanding of the world, Humboldt was one of the great operators of transdisciplinarity, of the connection between the fields of knowledge, learning and art, by reviving the spirit of humanism. The place of science, art and technology in our societies is fundamental, and even more so when it is aimed at education. In a digital, globalised environment, thinking about this next Renaissance also means, paradoxically, giving meaning to local energies, to the forces that combine in proximity and in education, mutual aid, and local culture.

Today’s organisational challenge to empower novel creations in a Next Renaissance is that a global university such as Université Côte d’Azur must, first of all, interact at the level of local authorities to federate the players, to develop techniques of knowledge and education in direct access, so that everyone can access the data and the tools to transform tomorrow’s society. It is to all of these challenges that we are responding. To quote Saint-Simon again, „the power of imagination is incalculable when it takes off in a direction of public good.”

This text is a joint contribution of several colleagues at the Börsenvereinsgruppe.

„A conversation presupposes that the other person might be right.“ With this statement, the philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer formulated the basis for respectful interaction. It is a basic prerequisite for a lively culture of debate and indispensable for a democratic opinion-forming process. The book industry has set itself the task of promoting this process and making younger generations aware of its importance. Recently, the discussion about the stand of a right-wing publisher at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2021 showed that a constructive exchange of opinions cannot be taken for granted and that the current climate of debate in our society is highly heated.

This debate was triggered by the call for a boycott by the black German author Jasmina Kuhnke, who stated that she did not feel safe due to previous racist threats caused by the presence of a publisher from the right-wing end of the spectrum at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The Börsenverein Group, which consists of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels and its subsidiaries Frankfurter Buchmesse GmbH, MVB and Mediacampus, sees as one of its core tasks to defend the freedom of the word as an elementary human right and to guarantee freedom of expression as a prerequisite for freedom of publication and literary diversity. To allow different opinions and currents as long as they remain within the bounds of the law, and to argue one’s own values, is, in the view of the Börsenverein, the right way forward in a pluralistic and democratic society.

At the same time, freedom of expression is under threat from the state in many countries. In an increasing number of countries around the world—be it Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, Russia, Belarus, Egypt or Vietnam—people are persecuted, imprisoned or murdered simply because they criticise the actions of the government. But in Poland and Hungary, countries in the European Union, free reporting is also restricted.

Publishers and bookstores in Germany stand up for persecuted authors, publishers and booksellers worldwide. The Börsenverein sees it as its task to draw attention to the fate of persecuted cultural workers and to call on the political leaders in Berlin and Brussels to consistently stand up for freedom of expression.