German-Polish experience, encounter, contact and dialogue in the Europeanising pedagogy of Andrzej Jaczewski and Karl-Josef Kluge

Abstract

The shared pedagogy of Andrzej Jaczewski and Karl-Josef Kluge grew out of the political and social changes taking place in West Germany after 1968. Their pioneering work focused on international integration, participation, intercultural learning, educating the gifted, giving space to creativity, and building leadership skills. The international pedagogical interactions initiated at that time were primarily the result of Andrzej Jaczewski’s long life journey marked first by German aggression and World War II and later by his conciliatory response to the postwar West German peace impulse. More than half a thousand participants in German-Polish encounters experienced transformative contact and spaces for dialogue in the Europeanising integration current despite the Cold War. We are reconstructing the shape of this experience and its immediate and distant effects by analysing documents, recording oral histories and describing our own autobiographical encounter experience in the stream of humanistically oriented social sciences. Our exchange of ideas was carried out in 2019–2021 remotely and during study visits to Berlin, Kraków, and Andrzej Jaczewski’s home in Ropki. With this article we contribute to the critical debate on the superficiality of the currently proposed education based on behavioural control in a barren and alienated education system. We advocate a pedagogy that prioritises individual freedom, more vibrant communities, increased autonomy, and cosmopolitanism.