The French Educator Celestin Freinet (1896-1966). An Inquiry into How His Ideas Shaped Education

Abstract

Célestin Freinet was an innovative French educationalist whose ideas about exchanges between schools, long-distance education and the importance of classroom printing had a large impact in interwar and post-Second World War France. Scholars have compared Freinet to Piaget in terms of the effect that his pedagogical theories had on French education. The book here reviewed is Victor Acker's third on Freinet's ideas. Freinet's innovations to education, Acker argues, were twofold: firstly, he introduced the idea of inter-school exchanges, whereby students sent their work to others from a different school, often from a different town, and received theirs in exchange. The pedagogical intent behind this idea is that, as Freinet understood it, when schoolchildren exchanged their writings, they naturally devoted greater attention to clarity, style, depth of information and content, as they become acquainted with the relationship between writer and public. A further desirable development of intellectual and cultural exchanges between schoolchildren was the intensification of a feeling of nationalism. Secondly, Freinet introduced rudimentary printing presses into the classroom. This acted as a catalyst for the project of inter-school exchange in addition to teaching children how to operate a printing press, from typesetting to the actual printing process. The skills acquired, in addition to the creation of the belief that learning can be fun, are depicted as particularly attractive in 1950s France.