Nativist Authoritarian Far-right Flirtations with Progressive Education: Exploring the Relationship in Interwar Switzerland

Anja Giudici,Giorgia Masoni,Thomas Ruoss

doi:10.24452/sjer.41.2.8

Abstract

Progressive education is generally thought to bear little commonality with authoritarianism and nativism. However, several studies show far-right governments and movements embracing progressive tenets. This article investigates the reasons behind this phenomenon by confronting the educational ideas of key far-right parties and educators in interwar German- and Italian-speaking Switzerland. Our systematic analysis of texts produced by these actors suggests that they subscribed to progressivism not in spite of their political views, but precisely because it aligned with their authoritarian and nativist ideology. This finding calls for more scholarship exploring and theorising the relationship between political ideologies and (progressive) educational ideas and movements.

Highlights

Progressive education is generally thought to bear little commonality with authoritarianism and nativism
To move beyond the rhetorical façade and uncover the underlyingcontinuities between these actors’ political ideology and their educational ideas, we ask: how did they combine the dimensions of nativist authoritarianism and progressive educational claims in their thinking?
Our analysis shows that parties and educationally engaged representatives within the interwar Swiss far right shared some of progressive education’s most fundamental assumptions

Summary

Introduction

Progressive education is generally thought to bear little commonality with authoritarianism and nativism. Our systematic analysis of texts produced by these actors suggests that they subscribed to progressivism not in spite of their political views, but precisely because it aligned with their authoritarian and nativist ideology This finding calls for more scholarship exploring and theorising the relationship between political ideologies and (progressive) educational ideas and movements. This literature indicates that the progressive movement’s liberal, democratic, and internationalist aura did not render its ideas incompatible with nativist or racist, as well as authoritarian or totalitarian visions of society Drawing on this basis, this article aims to advance the discussion on this relationship. The section draws on political theory to classify and characterise the actors focused upon in the analysis Based on this characterisation, the following section delineates a heuristic to study the underlying (dis)continuities between these actors’ political and educational thoughts. The closing sections present the empirical analyses and the resultant conclusions

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion