Schulreform, Pädagogik und Psychologie: Zur Geschichte des Wiener Psychologischen Instituts

Abstract

The founding of the Vienna Psychological Institute in 1922 seemed to offer great opportunities for developing a disciplinary field in empirical pedagogy. Organizationally, the new institute was closely related to the Vienna Pedagogical Institute, which was the central teachers’ training college in Red Vienna and therefore the institutional centre of the socialdemocratic educational reforms. Besides their lectures at the university, Karl and Charlotte Bühler were lecturing psychology for teachers at the Pedagogical Institute. Despite their initial programmatic promise to build up an international centre of pedagogical psychology in Vienna, they and their co‐workers largely refrained from applied research in pedagogical fields during the following years. In view of the good occasions for cooperation it is surprising that contact between the research interests of the Bühler‐School and the work of the educational reformers was rare. The most important person in this context was Karl Reininger who dedicated his own social‐psychological research to the problems of group‐forming in school classes. Shortly after her arrival in Vienna, Charlotte Bühler conducted research on the reading preferences of Viennese school pupils. Getting money from the Rockefeller Foundation, she turned away from applied research and contributed substantially to elaborating a biological theory of mental development.