Zwischen Selbsttätigkeit und Erziehungsbedürftigkeit: das Kind in der “Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung”

Abstract

In the history of education it is rather common to distinguish two opposing ideas of childhood: the romantic image of the innocent child on the one hand and the image of the evil child that has to be rescued on the other. According to historiography at the beginning of the twentieth century this dichotomy has gained a particular shape in German pedagogy: the exponents of Progressive Education recover the child and founded their pedagogy on trust in its good nature. Their agenda tries to overcome the prevailing Herbartian pedagogy. Those “conservative” educators stress the importance of the technological aspects of education. They are said to have no explicit understanding of the child as they would regard it only as the negative counterpart to an education that aims to overcome its nature. This article claims to prove that such a simple dichotomy is not sufficient to describe the complex image of the child in the German pedagogical debates at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. For this purpose the article concentrates on the first volumes of the “Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung” (Journal of Child Studies) that was founded in 1896. The ideology of the main editors of the journal is attributed to Herbartianism. In the “Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung” those Herbartians aim to bring together pedagogy with child studies as well as with medicine and psychiatry. Moral education is an important topic within the journal’s discussion but the child is usually not morally judged itself and therefore regarded neither as evil nor as good. Instead the knowledge of natural research and child studies is adapted to learn about the nature of the child and its development. According to the journal’s authors the results of child studies form a crucial background for professional education in general. Later on, those children that do not develop as scientifically expected can be declared the object of special pedagogical care. Should the deviating development be classified as pathological, this “treatment” will be inspired by medicine and psychiatry. Thus the religious or ethical categories of “good” and “evil” are partly replaced by scientific ones such as “normal” or “pathological”. Nevertheless pedagogical theorising remains highly moral in its goals – and setting these goals is regarded as the duty of adults. Although the child is understood as an active being, the educational authority has to be borne by the grown‐up generation. Altogether the educational programme of the “Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung” conforms to the attitude of the Wilhelminian era. In contrast to most of the “progressive” movements, the ideas are not utopian – they aim neither for a republican society nor for the improvement of the German race as the basis for a new nation. The editors explicitly neglect the notion of a child as a political subject with its own rights. Later they remain highly sceptical about the character of human nature itself and do not believe that a new society can be built only upon the faith in it. Nevertheless some of the key authors are regarded as representatives of Progressive Education today – for example Karl Wilker, who acted as an editor of the journal and was also engaged in the New Education Fellowship later on. Also the journal authors’ claims for a renewal of education resemble those of the “progressive” movements: They also call for a turn to the child as the basis of pedagogy. These findings lead to the result that a history of childhood and education may not start out from a distinction between a child‐centred progressive education on the one hand and a conservative education on the other. Phrases like “the child” or “child‐centred” are to be found in very different pedagogies and hence are not sufficient to characterise a particular educational programme. In fact a great number of very different pedagogues recovered “the child” at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century and founded their model on this idea. In consequence “the child” turns out to be more like a metaphor. This insight does not mean that “the child” was an empty and useless phrase for historiography. On the contrary: as a medium of education it may help to gain a deeper understanding of the contrasts and similarities between different pedagogical approaches – regardless of whether they turn out to be more “progressive” or “conservative”. Therefore it is necessary to analyse in which contexts within the pedagogical discourse “the child” arises and which special functions it is meant to contain.