ABSTRACT - ONGOING PROJECT
The city has not been the most embraced social environment for pedagogical thinking. From Commenius and Rousseau in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, to pedagogical reformists like Ellen Key or Georg Kerschensteiner in the early twentieth century, the city was perceived as a dangerous and disturbing milieu for the upbringing, the social conduct and the learning ability of children. The ideal school was repeatedly set in isolation to urban development and its often harsh economic and social reality. Philosophically underpinned educational models have fostered utopian experimental institutions to pursuit not only the natural and unbiased socialization of coming generations – freed, as they were naïvely imagined, from the conformism and brutality of contemporary adult world – but also to secure a fundamental transformation of society itself. Pedagogy has frequently been philosophy’s playground and in that line of practice there was for a long time no sensible place for the city.
More seldom has the realities of social environment come to encourage pedagogical and philosophical reflections. The lecture wishes to highlight one exception from this generalized historical tradition; a field of pedagogical theory and practice that placed the city in the centre of the curriculum. The catch-word “Metropolitan Pedagogy” got a foothold in larger industrial urban areas in Central Europe in the beginning of the twentieth century. The advocates never saw themselves as belonging to one movement and the differences of influence, teaching practice and ideological stance often obscured the common features.
Emphasizing the city as a learning environment of outmost importance in modern society the metropolitan educators confronted both the established disciplinary based, passive-learning model of the nineteenth century elementary school as well as the social critical biologist reformers. The city as a learning environment could, according to the metropolitan educators’ line of attack, serve as a vehicle for democratic understanding, community awareness, and economic realism, and function as a negotiation platform to tackle the inflation of knowledge in modern society. In focus of the metropolitan educators’ practice stood pragmatism and work ethics. Several of them explicitly fused Pestalozzi’s insights of the importance of the social context for leaning achievements with John Dewey’s strivings to erase the division between theory and practice to concentrate on the child as an active learner.
Metropolitan pedagogy initially addressed questions that have had acute importance for contemporary society: What is the relationship between school as a static institution and the city as a constant transformer? To what degree must individual development adjust to economic and communal life? Does big city life cultivate a radically different ethical relationship between human beings, and if so, in what way could this promote both individual as well as public welfare?
~
The Project is financed by the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation.