Nineteen-year-old Hege is stricken by all the common anxieties of her generation. She spends too much time scrolling through socials on her phone, and as a result she is obsessed with how other people perceive her, and highly stressed when it comes to interacting with real humans in the flesh. “I think a lot about what people think about me,” she says. “You get tired of it.”

The young adult from Sandnes in the south-west of Norway is one of the three teenage protagonists of Folktales, a new documentary that proposes a refreshingly simple remedy for zoomer angst: “Give yourself a fire, a dog, and the starry sky above you.”

So says one of the teachers at the educational establishment where Hege and her classmates are packed off to for 12 months: a “folk high school” in Pasvik in the northernmost corner of Europe, 200 miles above the Arctic circle. Here the students don’t sit in classes, they “wake up their Stone Age brains” by learning how to pitch a tent, keep themselves warm at minus 30C, and drive dog sleds across the icy landscape.

Hege may still be overthinking things when she dons a pair of RayBans at her first campfire, but soon she goes hours without even remembering to check her mobile, and eventually there is nothing greater in the world to her than dashing through the snow on the back of a dog sled, her body racing but her mind finally standing still.

‘The experience of complete self-reliance’ … Romain Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Everett/Shutterstock

Folktales’ directors, the US film-makers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, say they became fascinated with the Scandinavian folk high school concept because its philosophy was so at odds with the priorities of the American education system. “I think the United States is very focused on data and outcomes,” says Ewing. “You take a test and you get graded and put on some kind of curve of how you did, and therefore many high school students are just studying for the tests.

Dashing through the snow on a dog sled, Hege’s body is racing but her mind is finally standing still

“At folk high schools like Pasvik, there are no tests, written or otherwise. They are about building character, becoming a more enhanced adult, and challenging yourself internally and socially. The idea that you should do something that may never contribute to your chances of earning a living in the future was really attractive for us.”

In Europe, the folk high school philosophy may sound more familiar. Its founder, the 19th-century Danish pastor and poet NFS Grundtvig, may not be as much of a household name as other reformist educators such as Maria Montessori or the kindergarten inventor Friedrich Fröbel. But the legacy of Grundtvig’s core ideas – that education should be for everyone and not just the social elite, fostering not just abstract enlightenment but lived “enlivenment” – can be seen across the continent.

In German-speaking Europe, it fuelled the spread of volkshochschulen, publicly funded adult education centres, while in the UK its philosophy lives on in the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme. There are folk high schools scattered across the Baltics, Poland and throughout Scandinavia. The concept caught on big time in Norway, where there are still 85 of them, hosting approximately 7,000 students every year. They are fee-paying – a year at Pasvik costs the equivalent of about £10,000 – but most Norwegian students get a study loan, 40% of which is covered by the government if they complete their course.

Grady and Ewing first made a name for themselves with Jesus Camp, their controversial 2006 documentary about an evangelical Christian summer camp. It outraged secular audiences with its unflinching depiction of what appeared to be the indoctrination of minors with radical Christian ideas (in one scene, children are urged in prayer to join the fight to end abortion in America). Folktales, by contrast, is less likely to inflame tensions. Shot in a Netflix-compatible style, with an abundance of drone shots and an awe-instructing soundtrack, the film in fact has a tendency to shave the edges off the folk high school experience. Much is made of the invigorating baths in the icy Barents Sea, the age-old wisdom of trees, and campfire husky cuddling – less so of the moose-shooting courses that Pasvik’s website also advertises. Norse mythology is woven through the film, though 40% of Norway’s folk high schools are Christian establishments. And the film inadvertently shows, but doesn’t comment on, something the Norwegian government bemoaned in a recent report: that folk high schools struggle to attract students from immigrant backgrounds.

But the film does capture the kind of learning experiences that conventional schools simply aren’t designed to create. We follow Romain, an 18-year-old Dutch high-school dropout who is taught to make his own camp in the wilderness. Night is drawing in, the temperature is dropping fast, and Romain goes to the teachers’ camp to ask if he can use their fire to boil his water. “If we let you use our fire, we wouldn’t be helping you,” says the teacher. “I think you can do it”.

It’s hard not to root for Romain as he struggles to hide his frustration in front of the camera: “You think I can do it, or you want me to do it?” he asks, politely but pointedly. But in the end, the young Dutchman manages to light his own fire, and towards the end of the film there is a suggestion that the experience of complete self-reliance unlocks in him an ability to improve his connection with other young people in his class. It’s evident that he has lived through something more than a glorified gap year.

Folk high schools stress community and social interaction, in a world where there’s great emphasis on individualism

“We knew that Romain and the other students were capable of making their camp,” Iselin Breivold, Pasvik’s dog-sled instructor, tells me. “But the conditions were harsher than when we practiced, and some of the students wanted to take shortcuts. And they don’t learn anything from taking shortcuts.”

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Many of Breivold’s students are the opposite of Romain, she says: “They are very self-confident and they know that they can do this and they can do that. But then they can’t, and they have a really big downfall.” The job of Breivold and her fellow teachers isn’t to solve problems for the young people but to encourage them to solve them themselves. “These are challenges you might never have accepted in life outside a folk high school. But there are challenges that make you develop as a human being, both personally, but also in how you see the world and the people around you.”

Students are encouraged to ‘wake up their Stone Age brains’ … Bjorn. Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Everett/Shutterstock

Folktales may make instructive viewing in Norway, where folk high schools have recently fallen out of favour with political decision-makers. The government is currently debating a change to a system that, up to now, credits folk high school graduates with two points they can use on their university applications. In a drive to boost the popularity of the Norwegian army, these extra points may in the future be given exclusively to those doing military service. A cut in scholarships, from 40% to 15% of the study loan, is also being debated.

The Norwegian research centre Norce has embarked on a five-year project into whether this would all amount to the country dropping a powerful tool for social inclusion. “Like many countries across the globe, we have a growing problem with young people who are losing trust in society, and fall out of work,” says senior researcher Vigdis Sveinsdottir. “And in a world where there’s great emphasis on individualism, folk high schools stress community and social interaction in a way that often goes under the radar in mainstream education.”

Hege’s story has an ambiguous ending in the film. While a year in the wild seems to have strengthened the young woman’s personality, her return to her home town comes with new frustrations, and she eventually opts to retreat back to the high north to train as a dog handler. The line between character-building adventures and escapism looks like a fine one.

Do these young people come out of their folk high school experience better equipped to cope with the challenges of the modern world, I ask the directors? “It’s a tricky question, because of course part of the point is to evade the modern world,” says Ewing. “They’re definitely not better at managing ChatGPT or using AI. But they’re better equipped to be decent human beings who can maybe not shrink under pressure in the future.”