Welsh Journals

A POST-WAR GERMAN SCHOOL OF all the Imperialistic states of Europe, Germany has always laid more emphasis on school and university education than any of the others. All who followed the history of Germany from about 1910 to the end of the war knew that many fundamental changes were being contemplated and discussed by theorists and practitioners in nearly all the countries that make up the Empire. After the defeat of Ger- many, the reformers had most of their own way. The upholders of the old systems lost heart and gave up all really active opposition. There is a very important chapter to be written by someone on the influence of victory and defeat on the edu- cation of a country. Germany after 1815, 1870 and 1918 would provide many illustrations for that chapter, so would other countries after sim- ilar victories and defeats. No attempt will be made here to discuss the many reforms that have been tried and the many that have been found wanting. I intend giving a synopsis of the viewpoint of the leaders of a new school in the free city of Hamburg, called the Lichtwarkschule. The substance of the fol- lowing has been taken from a pamphlet issued by the school after being in existence since the Revo- lution, to explain their attitude towards the pro- blems they have tried to solve. My friends in Hamburg assert that they "would not like to be teachers in that school." The founders of the school were a group of teachers in a small Realschule in Winterhude and they decided to form a new school which should regard all traditional methods and subjects in the various kinds of German schools with a very criti- cal eye and build up a school which would give both teachers and scholars a new outlook on life. Up to the present they seem to have been very successful in the number and quality of their pupils. The Educational Ideal. To receive state recognition for their Leaving Certificate they had to conform in some respects to the traditional German Secondary School, al- though in theory antagonistic to their aims. The centre piece of the whole school was to be Deutschkunde, which is an attempt to put before the pupils an idea of the different forms of civilis- ation in particular periods statically and by pre- senting a series of periods to make a dynamic ap- peal to the post-war youth of the twentieth cen- tury. This is by no means the purely external Historismus of the last century. The foreign languages studied so extensively and well by the real gymnasium have been drastically reduced, likewise the purely technical character of the Natural Sciences studied in the Oberealschulen. The "idealistic-aesthetic idea of the classical and by David Evans romantic age of a century ago" is to be replaced by a "more dangerous, more timely and therefore a truer idea of civilisation." By civilisation is meant, not the development or growth of some form grown or transplanted, of a soul or a mentality, but always a kind of crisis, not in the disruptive sense but of creative and constructive conflict, which faces us, at times vio. lently, and must be solved. The unity, apparent or otherwise, of this so-called civilisation must be broken analysed and re-formed again. In partic- ular, the social and economic changes have to be faced boldly and bravely. When civilisation has assumed the usual aesthetic and reflective atti- tude, it is merely "education" in the worse sense, a remnant of Romanticism, and the bearers of such education have lost touch with actual real- ity. All educational work should be based on the present, and the centre of the present is the grow- ing child. He is faced with forms of civilisation which are partly living symbols of life and which mean something to him, partly empty, meaningless husks, to be analysed, understood and discarded. Why should modern man carry the emp:y husks around his neck, any more than a chicken carry the shell from which he came? It is hoped by dealing with the context of civilisation in this man- ner to build up a "responsible cultural moulding of the future on the constructive solution of the problems of the present." History in its fullest sense, political, social, economic, philosophical, mediaeval, ancient and Asiatic is utilised only for this purpose. The child is helped to face his own problems and not encouraged to rely on author- ities of any kind. The child acquires a stand- point and forms a norm, which although personal and subjective does not remain so. He develops a "responsibility for the future which is rooted in the responsibility for himself." The achieve- ment of the last decade, if any, is to refuse any literary, intellectual and speculative solutions and syntheses of civilisation. The first decade of this century was swarming with romantic and neo- idealistic ideas, and these have shown their power- lessness and futility to solve most of the problems that have confronted the peoples of the world in the second and third decade. The school aims by its methods and curriculum at facing these problems, in particular. by tackling very seriously the social questions of the day, where mere in- tellectuality, called "educational swindle," is use- less. Organisation. The School is a large co-educational school and prepares the pupils finally for their Leaving Examination.