Poetry for Children: Reverie and the Demand for the Teacher’s Responsibility

Abstract

There are indications of a positive trend in education. International comparative investigations on academic achievement (Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA) and longitudinal studies on life courses prove the need for and the importance of children’s high intellectual knowledge. At the same time, new research initiatives and projects comply with the demand that aesthetic/cultural education1 be “more” than a marginal complement to intellectual education and instead be “fundamental for thinking and acting.”2 Aesthetic education is to provide soft skills, to shape children’s characters, and to improve their social competences, representing “the Other of school.”3 The text below deals with poetry for children. It argues that within the theory and practice of education, the historic and current discourse on poems for children links and challenges both desires: the need for intellectual and for emotional learning. According to Dieter Lenzen, modern pedagogy is based on the education theories and practices of the eighteenth century.4 The linguist, theorist, and optimist on education of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Joachim Heinrich Campe, edited literary texts, but he also wrote poems and prose for children. Campe was a member of the philanthropists whose influence on Western education is still enormous. He is the first German pedagogue who systematically discussed the problems and the qualities of poems within educational settings. Emotional, soul-touching knowledge and intellectual, scientific knowledge are not incompatible in both his writing and his acting. Considered separately, they refer to the presence of what is absent, thus Campe does not favor or abandon aesthetics or science but reconciles them—in poetry. His Abezeund Lesebuch, a book on poetry and on the theory of poetry in education, is an example of that, but its history also shows difficulties:5 to him poetry in education is not sentimental. It is neither a simple desideratum