[amarant]

Damn that sounds awesome! As a Swede myself I feel like I missed out, and I wonder why I never saw anything like this in my youth?

My best theory is there wasn't much in the very rural area where I grew up. There wasn't much of anything other than nature to be fair, so that kinda makes sense I guess...

[emj]

Sure there were, but the organized study circles in Sweden are tightly knit to workers movement, usually there is an house in a village somewhere ment for this purpose. If there are at least 1000 people living there you are guaranteed find one (usually pretty big with that population). The same was (is?) available in the US, I know there where "workers education centers" in NYC where you could learn arts etc before the fifties.

This all needs people who are engaged in the movement and money, not a lot, but you do need a steady supply of money.

[progre]

>tightly knit to workers movement

Most popular movements had/has their own study orgamisation.

In rural Sweden it's just as likely to be Vuxenskolan, the study branch of the agrarian movement (Centern, 4H, hushållningssällskapet)

ABF would be the workers study org, Medborgarskolan the conservatives.

There are 10 national organsiations in all.

[dmix]

I recently came across 4H in the excellent movie Leave No Trace (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892172/

The basic premise is this Iraq/Afghan veteran father is raising his daughter homeless in the woods outside Portland, Oregan. He struggles with PTSD but clearly still takes care of his daughter, including teaching her english/math (which the social worker later says is beyond her typical grade level) and of course outdoor survival skills.

They eventually get caught by city workers/police and they end up housed via a sympathetic farmer where he gets a job and his daughters ends up finding a 4H social program for kids. She gets exposed to socialization programs, in particular a local group raising/training rabbits for competitions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-H

The biggest issue with the child in the film wasn't her lack of education, but her lack of socialization. And the (brief) 4H scene was a great demonstration of the value of these sorts of programs for kids.

The failures of the US public education system on grades and the (alleged) solutions has been talked to death in the media but these sorts of social boosting programs deserve their own hype.

It's particularly interesting that it spawned out of the agricultural agencies, not your typical urban ones.

[timonoko]

They were everywhere, but you just learned to ignore little notes on library noteboard. Unless you wanted to study dialectic marxism or everyday anti-fascism or islamic poetry or history of labour movement.

There was only one good study group ever in Helsinki, and I was actually a teacher there. I was asked to give some lectures on CNC-machines on "Computers for the elderly"-study group. But it ended, because could not make it comprehensible enough without actual CNC-machine and without legal license of Autocad.