Reimagining Teaching in Early 20th Century Experimental Schools [1st ed.] 9783030509637, 9783030509644

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GLOBAL HISTORIES OF EDUCATION

Reimagining Teaching in Early 20th Century Experimental Schools Alessandra Arce Hai Helen May Kristen Nawrotzki Larry Prochner Yordanka Valkanova

Global Histories of Education

Series Editors Diana Vidal University of São Paulo São Paulo, Brazil Tim Allender University of Sydney Camperdown, NSW, Australia Eckhardt Fuchs Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research Braunschweig, Germany Noah W. Sobe Loyola University Chicago Chicago, IL, USA

We are very pleased to announce the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. The International Standing Conference for the History of Education has organised conferences in the field since 1978. Thanks to our collaboration with Palgrave Macmillan we now offer an edited book series for the publication of innovative scholarship in the history of education. This series seeks to engage with historical scholarship that analyses education within a global, world, or transnational perspective. Specifically, it seeks to examine the role of educational institutions, actors, technologies as well as pedagogical ideas that for centuries have crossed regional and national boundaries. Topics for publication may include the study of educational networks and practices that connect national and colonial domains, or those that range in time from the age of Empire to decolonisation. These networks could concern the international movement of educational policies, curricula, pedagogies, or universities within and across different sociopolitical settings. The ‘actors’ under examination might include individuals and groups of people, but also educational apparatuses such as textbooks, built-environments, and bureaucratic paperwork situated within a global perspective. Books in the series may be single-authored or edited volumes. The strong transnational dimension of the Global Histories of Education series means that many of the volumes should be based on archival research undertaken in more than one country and using documents written in multiple languages. All books in the series will be published in English, although we welcome Englishlanguage proposals for manuscripts which were initially written in other languages and which will be translated into English at the cost of the author. All submitted manuscripts will be blind peer-reviewed with editorial decisions to be made by the ISCHE series editors who themselves are appointed by the ISCHE Executive Committee to serve three to five-year terms. Full submissions should include: (1) a proposal aligned to the Palgrave Book Proposal form (downloadable here); (2) the CV of the author(s) or editor(s); and (3) a cover letter that explains how the proposed book fits into the overall aims and framing of the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. Proposals and queries should be addressed to [email protected]. Preliminary inquiries are welcome and encouraged.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15390

Alessandra Arce Hai · Helen May · Kristen Nawrotzki · Larry Prochner · Yordanka Valkanova

Reimagining Teaching in Early 20th Century Experimental Schools

Alessandra Arce Hai Universidade Federal de São Carlos São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil Kristen Nawrotzki Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg Heidelberg, Germany

Helen May College of Education University of Otago Wellington, New Zealand Larry Prochner University of Alberta Edmonton, AB, Canada

Yordanka Valkanova Canterbury Christ Church University Canterbury, Kent, UK

Global Histories of Education ISBN 978-3-030-50963-7 ISBN 978-3-030-50964-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50964-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Somyot Techapuwapat/EyeEm/gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without help and support from friends, colleagues, archivists, and librarians in many locations around the world. We appreciated the editorial support at Palgrave Macmillan. Thanks to the series editors of Global Histories of Education for their helpful comments. We thank our copyeditor, Leslie Prpich, for her editorial and writing support. Research for this book was supported by grants from The Froebel Trust, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Contents

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1

New Education: An Experimental Era

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The Dewey School, USA

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Caetano de Campos Kindergarten, Brazil

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The Experimental Stations and Psychoanalytic Laboratory, Soviet Russia

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The Malting House School, England

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The Hietzing School, Austria

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Transcontinental Reflections

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Index

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About the Authors

Alessandra Arce Hai is an Associate Professor in the Education Department, Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. She has published books and articles about early childhood education and the history of education in Brazil. Her most recent book, published in Portuguese, is Educação Infantil: alimentaçao, neurociencias e tecnologia (Early Childhood Education: Food, Neuroscience, and Technology). She coordinates the research group História da Educaçao e Educaçao Infantil. Helen May is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Following an early career as a teacher in early education, she has had a long engagement in political advocacy, policy and curriculum development, and historical research in the fields of early years care and education. She has published widely across these fields, including the books Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods with Baljit Kaur and Larry Prochner and Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education with Kristen Nawrotzki and Larry Prochner. Kristen Nawrotzki teaches at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Heidelberg, Germany. She has published numerous works in the history of education and care, including Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education with Helen May and Larry Prochner and The Development of Early Childhood Education in Europe and North America with Harry Willekens and Kirsten Scheiwe.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Larry Prochner is Professor of early childhood education and Head of the Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research centres on the historical, comparative, and international dimensions of teaching and curriculum in early education. He has published 13 books, including several with co-authors of this volume. Yordanka Valkanova is senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University in England. She has published numerous articles and chapters on early learning and development and history of childhood, including Cognitive Development in Children and Block-building and Design for Children Under Seven, and is co-editor of Accession and Migration: Changing Policy, Society, and Culture in an Enlarged Europe. Her current research is concentrated on block play in autism, the Froebel Hebrew teacher training in Russia, and psychoanalytic pedagogy in Soviet Russia.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

The cover of The New Era 8, no. 32 (October 1927) School children during recreation at the Dewey Laboratory School in Ellis Ave. house. The stable used as gymnasium and carpentry shop is on the left (Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library) Open-air drawing class with the Ellis Ave house in the background. The school playground with seesaw can be seen to the left of the house (Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library) Kindergarten building as pictured in Album do Cinquentenario do Jardim de Infância, Acervo Histórico da Escola Caetano de Campos, Centro de Referencia em Educaçao Mario Covas, Escola de Formaçao e Aperfeiçoamento de Professores/Secretaria do Estado de São Paulo Shatsky’s view on research-informed pedagogy (Source Stanislav Shatsky, Izbrannye Pedagogicheskie Sochineniy [Selected Pedagogical Works ] [Moscow: Pedagogika, 1980], 65) Malting House, Cambridge Susan Isaacs and children

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126 156 161

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5

Susan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence with children Science laboratory Drill press in the carpentry workshop

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CHAPTER 1

New Education: An Experimental Era

In the early twentieth century, social reformers in many parts of the Western world, particularly psychologists and educational reformers, hoped to achieve better societies by guiding children’s socialisation according to new principles based on science and an optimistic view of the possibility of social change. The term progressive is often used to describe this educational movement, which came to dominate twentiethcentury Western pedagogical policy and practice. While “progressive” has often been used as a synonym for “new,” the precise meaning of the term when applied to education has varied widely across cultural, political, and even individual institutional contexts.1 Our colleague, the late Kevin Brehony, likened progressivism to the notion of enlightenment in earlier centuries and viewed it as an unstable, amorphous concept.2 For this reason, we, the authors of this book, also prefer the less-freighted term new. In describing the “new education” of the early twentieth century, educational historians William Boyd and Wyatt Rawson explain that it held the personality of the child and human betterment as central

1 William J. Reese, “The Origins of Progressive Education,” History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2001): 2. 2 Kevin Brehony, “From the Particular to the General, the Continuance of the Discontinuance: Progressive Education Revisited,” History of Education 30, no. 5 (2001): 428.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. A. Hai et al., Reimagining Teaching in Early 20th Century Experimental Schools, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50964-4_1

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concerns, with an overall aim of bringing about “a New Era.”3 The ideas and practices of new education included both a reformist attitude and an interest in experimental curriculum and pedagogy. This book explores the ideas of new education, including the networks and knowledge transfer that allowed them to travel, by tracing how the ideas were manifested in five experimental schools that reflected them to different degrees. In “the century of the child”,4 much pedagogical attention was paid to reimagining the “new child” of the “new era”; focus on the “new teacher” was less explicit, although the role of a new teacher was assumed, for example, in child-centred pedagogy.5 The schools we highlight illustrate how teachers practised—and were thought of—in new ways.6 Using both within-case analysis7 of individual schools and transnational analysis, we consider how educational ideas developed within contexts, travelled across boundaries, and were adapted in new contexts. A network approach8 allows us to consider relationships across cases, identifying historical actors and the formal and informal relationships among them. Our aim is to understand the structure and context of the network(s) by examining connections, circulations, relations, and resulting formations9 of, for example, teaching identities, pedagogies, materials, and curricula.

3 William Boyd and Wyatt Rawson, The Story of the New Education (London:

Heinemann, 1965), viii. 4 Ellen Key, The Century of the Child, 1900, trans. Ellen Key (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909). 5 William H. Kilpatrick, “The Project Method,” Teachers College Record 19 (1917): 319–35. 6 Jürgen Schriewer, “Deweyan Thought Refracted Through Time and Space: Studies on the Transcontinental Dissemination and Culture-specific Re-contextualization of Educational Knowledge,” Chapter 1 in The Global Reception of John Dewey’s Thought: Multiple Refractions Through Time and Space, ed. Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jürgen Schriewer (New York: Routledge, 2012). 7 Barbara L. Paterson, “Within-case Analysis,” in Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, ed. Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, and Elden Wiebe (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2010). 8 Eckhardt Fuchs, “Networks and the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 2 (2007): 185–97. 9 Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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Our specific focus on how teaching and learning meanings were pedagogised, or ascribed to materials, relationships, or settings,10 provides insights into the transfer of educational ideas through a close study of practice in historical classrooms. Ideas about teaching and learning in the international movement for education reform included some common elements: teacher professionalism and autonomy, learning based on students’ interests and participation, active learning, protection of local languages, and education that promoted both social justice and students’ active participation in determining social and political change.11 These components took on unique characteristics in each of the schools we explore in this book, reflecting the particular social locations of the teachers, students, place, and time, as well as the theorists who were most influential in each school, such as Friedrich Froebel, John Dewey, or Sigmund or Anna Freud. Of the theorists associated with new education, Dewey is clearly the most prominent. His international influence informed the work of subsequent education theorists and researchers,12 and the second chapter of this book is devoted to his University of Chicago laboratory school. While others have explored the international movement of new education through these lenses,13 our work stands apart due to its primary focus on teachers. It is unique as well in its range of international settings and, in several of the case studies, in its attention to intersections between psychoanalysis and progressive education. Alan Lester’s review of the concepts of circuits and networks between Britain and its colonies serves as a useful frame for our study, allowing us to consider the settings

10 Bob Lingard, “Towards a Sociology of Pedagogies,” Chapter 15 in The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education, ed. Michael W. Apple, Stephen J. Ball, and Luis A. Gandin (New York: Routledge, 2010). 11 Joel Spring, Globalization of Education: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2015), 145. 12 John M. Heffron, “The Transnational Context of Schooling,” in Educational Leaders Without Borders: Rising to Global Challenges to Educate All, ed. Rosemary Papa and Fenwick W. English (New York: Springer, 2015), 167–92; Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education—An Introduction,” in Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Travelling of Pragmatism in Education, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3–36. 13 Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jürgen Schriewer, eds., Dewey’s Thought: Multiple Refractions Through Time and Space (New York: Routledge, 2012).

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as multiple projects appearing as bridgeheads that took shape through connections with a set of new education ideas. Thus, we examine the circuits among the settings, including the layering of newly constructed networks onto existing ones.14 Two main questions guided our study: How were the child and the teacher reimagined, and how were adults’ role in relation to children, childhood, and education reimagined in different contexts? Through the course of our research, we expected to learn about teachers’ development, identity, beliefs, and practices as they underwent their training and put progressive pedagogies to work in their classrooms. Many of the teachers in the schools had prior teacher training, including as kindergarten teachers, and the literature on the history of kindergarten and nursery school teacher education was relevant for our study, particularly research documenting its transnational history.15 The schools we studied, which were mainly private institutions serving children of the elite, and with staff recruited for their compatibility with new education ideas, differed from public schools in almost every way, yet they offer a window onto how teachers brought new education ideas into their practical work with children. New education ideas shaping our exemplar school experiments emerged amidst a backdrop of turbulent political and economic times, manifested in diverse ways across the geographies of the respective school settings. With underlying discontents and causes seeded in earlier times, the slaughter of the First World War (1914–1918) hastened revolutions and new political movements: fascist, socialist, and Marxist, yielding both dictatorship and democracy, including resistance to both. The 1930s worldwide economic depression also fuelled political discontent,

14 Alan Lester, “Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire,” History Compass 4, no. 1 (2006): 124–41. 15 Kristen Dombkowski, “Kindergarten Teacher Training in England and the United States, 1850–1918,” History of Education 31, no. 5 (2002): 475–89; Helen May, The Discovery of Early Childhood, 2nd ed. (Wellington: NZCER Press, 2013); Kristen D. Nawrotzki, “‘Like Sending Coals to Newcastle’: Impressions from and of the AngloAmerican Kindergarten Movements,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 2 (2007): 223–33; Larry Prochner, A History of Early Childhood Education in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009); Kay Whitehead, “Women Educators and Transnational Networking in the Twentieth-Century Nursery School Movement,” Women’s History Review 23, no. 6 (2014): 957–75.

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including a range of political solutions towards recovery. The new education movement stretching across the turbulence of the times crossed these political borders and differences, offering education pathways as solutions to support and/or undermine new political systems and reform existing structures. New education ideals, for example, underpinned both Dewey’s child of democracy in the USA and experiments towards creating the new Soviet citizen in Russia, while in Vienna, Anna Freud’s school was a small haven amidst the rise of Austrofascism. The focus of our study is on education pathways rather than political ones, but the respective school experiments also reveal the interplay of new education ideas and practice amidst new political times.

Our Conceptual Framework A transnational perspective allows us to examine the networks that enabled ideas of new education to travel, to adapt, to be translated, and to become, along with their authors, “indigenous foreigners” in the manner described by Thomas Popkewitz, in which ideas were “brought into new contexts in which the ‘foreignness’ of the ideas are seen as indigenous or ahistorical and ‘natural’ to that situation in which they are positioned”.16 Popkewitz used the concept to highlight the role played by a “hero” discourse, such as the one surrounding Dewey’s ideas, in bringing global reforms into relation with discourses representing the values of a society.17 A “travelling library” of concepts—in this case, whether Dewey’s or Froebel’s or Freud’s—are added to or reinscribed by local teachers and authors, contributing to indigenisation. Our study aims to illuminate the space between the local and the global, to demonstrate how the objects of educational science research were “constructed at the crossroads between international trends and local concerns”,18 as described by Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs.

16 Popkewitz, “Inventing the Modern Self,” ix. 17 Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Globalization/Regionalism, Knowledge, and the Educa-

tional Practices: Some Notes on Comparative Strategies for Educational Research,” in Educational Knowledge: Changing Relationships Between the State, Civil Society, and the Educational Community, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 10. 18 Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs, “Introduction,” in The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (Global Histories of Education series), ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia R. Vera (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 16.

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This means that travelling ideas change in meaning as their relations shift across space. By space, we not only mean the sites where events occur and time passes. Rather, we draw upon geographer Doreen Massey’s poststructural spatial theory to understand space as built through interactions in which the coexistence of ideas is key to understanding their heterogeneity and different trajectories.19 For Massey, “without space, [there can be] no multiplicity; without multiplicity, no space.”20 In this view, the space of school is continually under construction within relations and through objects; its multiplicity and coexistence are brought to life by material practices, and we can “imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far.”21 In this book, we endeavour to reimagine spaces, especially schools, through glimpses of their material practices personified in objects—teachers’ diaries, logbooks, notebooks, and the like. Our main tool in this process is language, which is used to broaden concepts and meanings and thereby build new relations for that space. As Vera and Fuchs explain, “We are not simply describing something that exists; we are making an experience of reality intelligible and simultaneously constructing an abstract reality.”22 In the process of reimagining teaching, we can approach reality, but capturing multiplicity in its full spectrum is not possible. We therefore employ the concept of space in between, which brings important methodological tools to the study of the movement of ideas and practices in a school. Specifically, our attention is on the space in between practical discourses and the “grammar of schooling,” which is what David Tyack and William Tobin called the largely hidden and unexamined governing structure that resists change and ensures its own continued existence.23 In the case of the newly invented schools that are the focus of our study, it was not so much an unexamined existing governing structure as it was

19 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005). See also Jonathan Murdoch, PostStructuralist Geography: A Guide to Relational Space (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2006). 20 Ibid., 9. 21 Ibid. 22 Vera and Fuchs, “Introduction,” 2. 23 David Tyack and William Tobin, “The ‘Grammar’ of Schooling: Why Has It Been

So Hard to Change?” American Educational Research Journal 31, no. 3 (1994): 453–79. See also David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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unexamined existing expectations and assumptions about schooling that inflected even the private, experimental schools. The hidden structure reverses and subverts what is usually taken as truth—namely, that discourses directly reach to the level of classroom practices, altering those practices, for better or worse. However, as Larry Cuban described 35 years ago, teachers have tended to persist with practices that worked in the past rather adopt new methods.24 And to the extent that teachers incorporated new discourses into established practices, it resulted in entangled practices reflecting discourses in between the new and those which had been previously in use. As Marc Depaepe and his colleagues have observed, discourses about practice produced both for teachers by academics and by teachers themselves gain life in material practices through the methodologies used.25 Examining material practices helps us understand how those educators adapted and translated methodologies and concepts, and even distorted them, to use in their classrooms. In other words, the practical discourses of pedagogy—of child study, assessment, and so on—were created from material practices. According to Depaepe and his colleagues: The practical discourse has to adapt these [new] concepts to normal classroom life—an adaptation that [is] never wholly innocent. There was always something beneath the surface, a pattern of thinking that was sufficiently powerful to twist or distort the terms of pedagogical correctness. The practical discourse not only wished to influence practice, it also partially embodied it.26

Practical discourses therefore exercise an intensive appropriation involving adaptation, transformation, reproduction, and creation to bring methodologies and theories to fit certain realities or to build a new reality through a discourse calling for innovation. A new image of teaching and learning forms out of the dynamic relation that is created as aspects of

24 Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1980 (New York: Longman, 1984). 25 Marc Depaepe, K. Dams, M. De Vroede, B. Eggermont, H. Lauwers, F. Simon, R. Vandenberghe, and J. Verhoeven, Order in Progress: Everyday Educational Practices in Primary Schools, Belgium, 1880–1970 (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2000). 26 Depaepe et al., Order in Progress, 43.

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ideas travel and are fitted into a complex educational space.27 The coexistence of a multiplicity of ideas in the school space meant that our analysis needed to go beyond the apparent obviousness. When we add in the idea of travelling for knowledge—to international forums, for study tours, or for graduate degrees—the space opens up beyond the nation to gain relations from distant places around the globe. A transnational approach looks across borders to gain insights into a national position within a space beyond it, where the complexity of world relations brings a dialectic movement for diversity together with diffusion, assimilation, adaptation, homogenisation, and pluralisation.28 The transnational space is, however, as temporary as the personal networks, political objectives, and uses made of international forums.29 As we study how actors in a nation put the travelling ideas to work and the processes they used in appropriating them, we are mindful not to make “the boundaries of the nation-state … an analytical cage” as Daniel Rodgers cautioned in his study of progressive era international networks.30

Historical Contexts of New Education The new education ideas underpinning the experimental case studies in our book, illustrated first by the new-century Dewey kindergarten, can be understood in part as a rejection of “old education” practices evident in many school classrooms of the day. But there was no neat progression or timeline. The nineteenth-century movement towards public schooling for more children—and indeed all children in some countries—had travelled and transformed enlightenment ideals of new education that had 27 Alessandra A. Hai, Frank Simon, and Marc Depaepe, “From Practice to Theory,

Ovide Decroly for Brazilian Classrooms: A Tale of Appropriation,” History of Education (2016): 1–20. 28 Eckhardt Fuchs, “History of Education Beyond the Nation? Trends in Historical and Educational Scholarship,” in Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and CrossCultural Exchanges in (Post) Colonial Education, ed. Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 21. 29 Dorena Caroli, “Day Nurseries in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Challenge of the Transnational Approach,” in The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (Global Histories of Education series), ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia R. Vera (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 74. 30 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2.

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been seeded in the eighteenth century into national education systems that could economically school the masses in an industrial age. Thus Rousseau’s child-centred ideals of learning and freedom, which inspired early-nineteenth-century educators such as Johann Pestalozzi in Switzerland, Frederic Oberlin in Alsace, and Robert Owen in Scotland, were quickly moderated by the reality of teaching groups of actual children.31 In turn, the new education practices trialled in these experimental outposts, which were visited by many travelling education and social reformers, were further moderated as others blueprinted aspects of the experiments into standardised formats. For example, Rev. Charles Mayo and his sister Elizabeth established a school in England using Pestalozzi’s conversational methods with real objects, adapting them to foster evangelical principles and practices. Elizabeth Mayo’s manual for the school, Lessons in Objects (1830), popularised a highly regimented version of Pestalozzi’s teaching across the burgeoning teacher training institutions and classrooms, including the far-reaching Home and Colonial Infant School Society they formed in 1836.32 By the end of the century, the Mayos’ standardised object lessons had become the subject of rote-learned lessons for large groups of children in overcrowded classrooms. Similarly, Samuel Wilderspin adapted Owen’s New Lanark model of infant school, with its informal mix of indoor and outdoor activities, dance, and music, into a standardised method and curriculum that could be replicated by others and would be more easily accepted by workingclass parents, social reformers, politicians, financial backers, and churches. Wilderspin’s many manuals and classroom plans supported the establishment of evangelical infant schools across Britain, America, and beyond, including the new missionary ventures fanning the globe.33 A lasting 31 Rebekka Horlacher, “Schooling as a Means of Popular Education: Pestalozzi’s Method as a Popular Education Experiment,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 1–2 (2011): 65–75; Loïc Chalmel, Oberlin, Le Pasteur des Lumières (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue, 1999); Ian Donnachie, Robert Owen: Owen of New Lanark and New Harmony (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 2000); Richard J. W. Selleck, The New Education: The English Background 1870–1914 (Melbourne: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1968). 32 Elizabeth Mayo, Lessons on Objects: As Given to Children Between Six and Eight in a Pestalozzian School in Cheam, Surrey (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1830). 33 Phillip McCann and Francis Young, Samuel Wilderspin and the Infant School Movement (London: Croom Helm, 1982); Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner, Empire Education and Indigenous Childhood: Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014).

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feature was Wilderspin’s gallery, which pinned large numbers of infants into tiered seating. Although he never intended it for the whole day, the idea was adopted by many schools that soon placed children in tiered benches and desks all day. The dismantling of the classroom gallery during the early decades of the twentieth century became a symbolic indicator of the infiltration of new education ideas into public school settings. The large class sizes, however, frustrated attempts to introduce the so-called modern methods of new education.34 Caught between old education practices and new education methods was Friedrich Froebel. The kindergarten he founded in Bad Blankenburg, Germany, in 1837 was a clear rejection of the regimentation and harsh discipline of much schooling, but also included Pestalozzi’s kindlier conversational model of schooling, which Froebel had earlier introduced with his pupils in Yverdon between 1808 and 1810. Froebel wanted something for younger children that was livelier and child centred. This difference developed into the view that activity, rather than observation (i.e. Pestalozzi’s object lessons), must be the basis of learning for young children. What started as a small-scale innovation co-opting the natural play of children in a home-like environment by a visionary but elderly educationalist became, in the space of fifty years, a successful blueprint for the early education of young children in many countries.35 As Brehony points out, kindergarteners in the late nineteenth century were already promoting Froebel’s methods as the new education.36 Moreover, Froebel’s kindergarten, with its mix of music, movement and games, gardening, “occupation” crafts, and graded block “gifts,” was already infiltrating many school settings with younger children, although again constrained by the physical infrastructure of public school settings, large class sizes, poorly trained teachers, and the cost of Froebel’s equipment. But, as with the earlier expansion of infant schools, the Froebel kindergarten was also blueprinted, regimented, and standardised, supported

34 Helen May, ‘I Am Five and I Go to School’: Early Years Schooling in New Zealand

1900–2010 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2011). 35 Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, and Larry Prochner, eds., Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education: Transnational Investigations (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 36 Kevin Brehony, “A New Education for a New Era: The Contribution of the Conferences of the New Education Fellowship to the Disciplinary Field of Education 1921–1939,” Paedagogica Historica 40, no. 5–6 (2004): 733–55.

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by the mass circulation and production of kindergarten manuals and equipment. By the turn of the new century and the birth of new education, the kindergarten, on the one hand, was still upheld as an expression of unrealised new education ideas. On the other hand, the late nineteenthcentury public school iteration of Froebel’s kindergarten was under attack as a model of early education in need of reform and even to be rejected, or at least modified in relation to already established educational traditions, as in the case of the Jardim de Infância da Escola Caetano Campos in Brazil described in Chapter 3. The crossover and ambivalence about kindergarten were evident in other nations as well. Far from Brazil in New Zealand, George Hogben was appointed as the inspector general of schools and he embarked on reforming the primary school syllabus. When he introduced the new syllabus in 1904, Hogben reported to the New Zealand Parliament: We now believe with Froebel, and others of the most enlightened of the world’s educators, that the child will learn best, not so much by reading about things in books as by doing—that is, exercising his natural activities—by making things, by observing and testing things for himself; and then afterwards, by reasoning about them and expressing thoughts about them.37

Hogben was also embracing the ideas of Dewey, and he became one of many visitors to Dewey’s laboratory school at the University of Chicago. In 1897, Dewey had organised a kindergarten conference at which he was critical of both the mechanical nature of the Froebelian games and the predetermined sequence of child’s play with the gifts and occupations. He wanted to set the scene for moving forward with “the spirit” of Froebel.38 In 1900, Dewey published Froebel’s Educational Principles to clarify his own views of play and learning, and he emphasised the social context of learning.39 Collectively, the case studies in our book reflect the debt the

37 Education: Conference of Inspectors of Schools and Teachers’ Representatives, 1904. Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, New Zealand. 1904, E–1C, 2. 38 Ibid. 39 John Dewey, “Froebel’s Educational Principles,” Elementary School Record, 1 (1900): 147–55.

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new education owed to Froebel’s kindergarten while moving well beyond its earlier methods. The five experimental sites embraced a widening range of philosophical and theoretical premises, including the emerging ideas of Sigmund Freud and the educational methods of Maria Montessori. Cumulatively, new education ideas offered possibilities for individual (psychological, intellectual, and behavioural) and collective (sociological and philosophical) transformation, promising pathways to various new social orders. Dewey’s philosophical conceptions of the relationship between education and society became a core strand of new education; elaborated in Chapter 2’s case study, they best represent the collective pathway to transformation. A pathway to individual transformation was made possible through the radical insights of Sigmund Freud, who claimed that behaviour could be understood only by reference to what had gone before, particularly by probing for its causes buried in childhood experiences.40 These insights are seminal to three of our experimental case studies, spearheaded in the first instance by Anna Freud, as described in Chapter 6, who understood the possibilities her father’s ideas held for education and child rearing and who subsequently pioneered the new field of child analysis.41 Maria Montessori and her book The Montessori Method took the international educational community by storm in the early twentieth century.42 While her educational experiment at the Casa dei Bambini in Rome is not included in the book’s case studies, aspects of her education method for young children and her collaborations with Anna Freud weave through several of the case studies.43 Some of the settings used Montessori’s designed apparatus for children and aligned with her suggested role for teachers as an observer and guide. However, none of our case study experiments would have wanted the constraints of the sternly applied Montessori blueprint. While Dewey admired her scientific approach to developing a pedagogy to support “activities of the

40 Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, 1905, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966). 41 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud (London: Macmillan, 1989). 42 Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method (London: Heinemann, 1915). 43 Anna Freud, “Foreword,” in Maria Montessori: A Biography, ed. Rita Kramer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), 5–6.

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body”,44 he criticised her as a faculty psychologist.45 His view was also coloured by reports from his wife and daughter, who visited Montessori at her school in Rome. Alice Dewey wrote to her husband: “Montessori gave us a card to visit the school on Via Giuste. ‘Please sit still and be quiet’ is its motto.”46 New education ideas spread and were trialled in many ways and across many sites, fostered through travel and personal contacts, as our case studies illustrate, and promoted by a flourishing publication market. Acting as a kind of international clearinghouse, one noteworthy meeting place was the New Education Fellowship (NEF).47 A group of educators met in 1915 in the midst of the First World War keen to establish an international organisation with the optimistic view that educational reconstruction would need to be an essential part of a post-war environment.48 The concern was that “problems threatening our civilization were basically problems of human relationships which demanded a new type of education more responsive to the requirements of a changing world.”49 The NEF was established in 1921 at the first International Congress of New Education in Calais as an organisation to promote new educational ideas and as an international rallying point that attracted likeminded educators in Britain, Europe, the Americas, the Antipodes, Asia, Africa, and at times the new Soviet Union. Most of the country sites in the respective case studies in our book, and some of the people involved in the experimental schools, had links to the NEF. A strong view they held in common was the NEF claim that the

44 John Dewey to William H. Kilpatrick, 3 July 1913 (09132), in The Correspondence of John Dewey [electronic resource on CD-ROM] (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004). 45 John J. McDermott, “Introduction,” in Spontaneous Activity in Education, ed. Maria Montessori (New York: Shocken), xii. 46 Alice Chipman Dewey to John Dewey, 31 January 1914 (02048), The Correspondence of John Dewey. 47 Brehony, “A New Education”; Richard J. W. Selleck, English Primary Education and the Progressives, 1914–1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). 48 Boyd and Rawson, The Story of the New Education. 49 “New Education Fellowship: Its Purposes and Activities,” undated pamphlet,

WEF/A/11/91 World Education Fellowship records, Institute of Education London Archive.

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mishandling of children of school age has been responsible for much of the failure of men and women to find their feet in the modern world— failure leading to apathy, resentment, lack of foresight and flexibility, aggressiveness, and lack of initiative.50

Our case study schools, albeit with differing agendas and emphasis, were established amidst this rejection of old education ideas and practices. The NEF embraced both the political and the psychological—that is, both collective and individual pathways to change—by promoting ideas of social reform and education and supporting the view that education must release individuals’ creative powers and awaken their social conscience. The NEF encompassed diverse strands, but there was a common agenda to support experimental schools and to promote ways of introducing the principles of progressive education into public school systems. Our case studies showcase a continuum of commitment to this agenda at the time, but the impact of new education ideas on public schooling demonstrates its long-lasting legacy. This is not to suggest that the NEF was at the forefront of the case study experiments; rather, the NEF exemplifies the milieu and networking that fuelled the ideas of those involved. Overall the NEF was successful in connecting lay enthusiasts for educational reform with the key ideas, for example, of Dewey, Freud, and Piaget that were shaping the pedagogies of new education.51 That early childhood educators such as Maria Montessori, Margaret McMillan, and Susan Isaacs saw new institutions for early childhood education as a conduit for the ideals of the NEF is evident in the cover graphic on its magazine, The New Era (see Fig. 1.1). For several decades The New Era was a key disseminator of ideas for innovation. Its first issue, published in January 1920, included an article devoted to the Montessori method.52 From the fledgling Soviet Union, education leader Stanislav Shatsky contributed an article in a 1928 special issue titled “Pioneer Education in Russia,” which outlined some Soviet laboratory school initiatives that are also featured in our case

50 “What the Fellowship Is and Does,” undated pamphlet, WEF/A/11/91 World Education Fellowship records, Institute of Education London Archive. 51 Brehony, “A New Education.” 52 Education for the New Era 1, no. 1 (1920). Subsequent issues were renamed The

New Era.

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Fig. 1.1 The cover of The New Era 8, no. 32 (October 1927)

study in Chapter 4.53 Similarly, in July 1928 The New Era published a special edition on British new education that included the Malting House School,54 featured in Chapter 5. Across the many countries in our five case studies was a network of magazines associated with The New Era, as well as affiliated NEF branches and sister organisations such as the US Progressive Education Association, established in 1919, and its Progressive Education journal.55 The NEF sponsored regional and international conferences that attracted a growing following among those who could travel, with educators attending from afar, including from Brazil. But drilling down into the NEF’s archived correspondence files, particularly during the heyday of the1930s, yields evidence of NEF branch activities of mainly classroom teachers and teacher educators who were devouring the

53 Stanislav Shatsky, “The First Experiment Station on Public Education of the People’s Commissariat of Education, U.S.S.R.,” The New Era 9, no. 33 (1928): 13–15. 54 “Malting House School,” The New Era 9, no. 34 (1928), 72. 55 Helen L. Horowitz, “The Progressive Education Movement After World War I,”

History of Education Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1971): 79–84.

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debates and reports of experimental ventures from afar and were trying to enact new education ideas in their various classroom settings.56 Another noteworthy institution, with members linked to several case studies, is the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and its various country affiliates. Unlike the NEF with its broadly based international membership, affiliations, and activities, the IPA was small scale, with selected membership of those involved in psychoanalysis. The association with its respective affiliates was a key site for debate, scientific exchange, and the sharing of research findings, but also aimed to manage and regulate the rise of the practice of psychoanalysis. The IPA was dominated by particular personalities and was sometimes brutal in its conflicts around the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, including the emerging field of child analysis that found a home under its umbrella. This was the domain that intersected across new education ventures, including the NEF, with the field of child analysis attracting lay analysts to its work, rather than those with a background in medicine. The IPA began in 1902 when Sigmund Freud formed a small group that met on a regular basis to discuss his work. With a membership of fourteen in 1908, the group became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and attracted guests from other countries, including Carl Jung in Zurich and Ernest Jones in London. A first congress was held in Salzburg in 1908 at which the idea of an international association was proposed. The IPA was formally founded in 1910 and Jung was elected as its first president, a role later held by Jones.57 Anna Freud was elected as general secretary in 1927, the first of her various roles on the executive board. She brought an educator’s perspective to the IPA and, as a lay analyst herself, was caught in debates about the role of non-medical people in the field of psychoanalysis. She also represented the views of Sigmund Freud about hotly contested issues.58 The NEF and the IPA with their affiliate organisations are cited as exemplars of international networks through which the ideas of new education spread. While the respective organisations provided formal conduits through conferences, meetings, and publications, interpersonal 56 Section Papers, WEF/1/A2, World Education Fellowship records, Institute of Education London Archive. 57 International Psychoanalytic Association, “History of the IPA,” https://www.ipa. world/IPA/en/IPA1/ipa_history/history_of_the_ipa.aspx. 58 ElisabethYoung-Bruehl, Anna Freud (London: Macmillan, 1989).

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relationships across international divides contributed significantly to the level of cohesiveness in the new education message across diverse settings.

The Chapters Ahead Experimental schools, strictly defined, are established to provide a programme of education aimed at developing or testing new knowledge about curriculum or pedagogy in which the results are not completely known or predictable. However, schools that were called experimental in the progressive era did not follow empiricist research methods. In his history of education research, Gilbert de Landsheere explains that new education ideals could never be experimental for the reason that, in his view, “philosophy took precedence over science, and life experience over experimentation.”59 Instead, the schools’ activities were undertaken within a bounded “experimental system”60 in which a “specific, materialsemiotic field is distinguished from the rest of the world,”61 which is how the term experimental is defined in this volume. The discourse surrounding experimental schools over the past 150 years has been imprecise, vague, and inconsistent, oftentimes combining “experiment” with terms such as practice school, demonstration school, observation school, model school, and laboratory school. The imprecision is evident in descriptions of schools that were specifically established for education research, like the ones associated with graduate schools of education, such as at Teachers College, Columbia, in 1887 and at Stanford in 1892. The school at Teachers College, called the Horace Mann School, was planned as a pedagogical laboratory in which students might “observe the organization and conduct of a model school, and, under certain restrictions, have the privilege of practicing.”62 After its first few years, the Horace Mann School gained a reputation as an elite

59 Gilbert de Landsheere, “History of Educational Research,” in International Encyclopedia of Education, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985), 1588. 60 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 61 Sönke Ahrens, Experiment and Exploration: Forms of World-Disclosure (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2014), 82. 62 Brief Circular of Information of the Horace Mann School (New York: Teachers College, 1893), 9.

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preparatory school, a role that students’ parents believed was inconsistent with aims for experimentation and practice. A separate “experimental school” called the Speyer School was established in 1902 for research, though it was also used for practice teaching and “quickly evolved into a demonstration site rather than a setting for experimentation.”63 The schools described in this volume range from programmes that were called laboratories, such as the Dewey School, to the Jardim de Infância da Escola Caetano de Campos (Caetano de Campos Kindergarten) attached to the normal school that adapted modern, scientific methods to build the new Brazilian citizen and bring in a new era. In the Brazilian case, the idea of experimentation, reflecting new education, was central to the work of the kindergarten and the normal school from 1897 to the 1920s, but it went far beyond the period analysed in this book, extending to 1950. Our book focuses on the period from about 1895 to the 1930s, when new education reached its greatest prominence in much of the West. The schools are located in five countries and on three continents. We selected these schools as exemplars of an international movement to address social and economic challenges, using approaches borrowed or adapted from other contexts; the schools also created their own approaches, which others similarly borrowed or adapted. Although the São Paulo school continues today, none of the others lasted more than a decade. However, they endure in historical memory as “symbols of the possible,” a phrase from Dewey scholar Albert Balz64 —namely, of education’s promise to be individually and socially transformative. Moreover, insofar as the schools also functioned as stages for practising the possible, their legacy endures in the programmes that others established later. The first case is John Dewey’s school (1896–1904) at the University of Chicago, created as a laboratory for scientific research on Dewey’s ideas of curriculum. The school had a short duration but a wide influence, including on many of the other schools described in this book. The school was the basis for the practical expression of Dewey’s ideas on education, and the published reports of the school’s work were part of the communication network of his ideas, along with Dewey’s writings, his 63 Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 115. 64 Albert G. A. Balz, “A Letter to Mr. Dewey Concerning John Dewey’s Doctrine of Possibility,” The Journal of Philosophy 46, no. 11 (1949): 328.

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visits abroad, and the work of students at the University of Chicago and Columbia University who returned home to promote and adapt Dewey’s ideas. Chapter 2 traces these networks and circuits, drawing on correspondence, teachers’ work reports, school plans, and photographs held at the University of Chicago and at Cornell University, as well as on Dewey’s publications. Next, in Chapter 3, is a study of the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten (1896–1926) in São Paulo, Brazil. The Kindergarten was the first public kindergarten in Brazil and was affiliated with the São Paulo Normal School. It was established as a space for new methodologies and teacher training, bringing what was considered the best in the world to the new Brazilian republic. The chapter describes how ideas, practices, spaces, and relationships were intertwined in the transnational movement of new education and discusses the shift from what was considered “old” education towards innovations in Brazil education. In doing so, it focuses on traces of pedagogical practices present in a magazine, “Revista do Jardim de Infância”, produced by the school, as well as the teachers’ logbooks to give life to teaching and teacher education as a means to provide a glimpse into the “black box” of classroom practice.65 Chapter 4 analyses the opytnye shkoly (1921–1929) in Moscow. Progressive ideas of child development were accommodated within the Marxist labour school philosophy. Soon after the Russian Revolution, Stanislav Shatsky and his fellows promoted their view on education reform among Soviet bureaucrats and teachers and garnered support for a network of laboratory schools called experimental stations. The chapter profiles the psychoanalytic kindergarten project, a boarding school called the International Solidarity Children’s Home-Laboratory. The chapter draws on a range of material, including trainers’ notes and trainees’ reflective diaries, commentaries in books and journals, and children’s drawings and recorded learning logs located in archives in Moscow. Chapter 5 traces the history of the Malting House School (1924– 1929) in Cambridge, England, a brief scientific experiment shaped by the fledgling disciplines of early education, child development, and psychoanalytic pedagogy. The school is best known through the research and writings of Susan Isaacs. Scant archival information has survived, excepting a few personal recollections and photos. Nevertheless, Malting 65 Larry Cuban, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice: Change Without Reform in American Education (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2013).

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House is characterised by its far-reaching legacy in terms of geography and longevity. This chapter reexamines this material through a lens that appraises the new kind of teacher imagined in an experimental learning environment framed around Freudian psychoanalytic understandings of children’s social and emotional development and sparked by an interest in the possibilities of fostering scientific inquiry with very young children. The final case is the Hietzing School (1927–1932), founded in Vienna by Dorothy Burlingham, Eva Rosenfeld, and Anna Freud. It was modest in scale, existing only for about five years and educating fewer than two dozen children at any given time. Nevertheless, it has gained renown as an incubator of sorts for the psychoanalytic vision(s) of the school’s founders and teachers, including Freud and Burlingham as well as Erik Erikson and Peter Blos. Chapter 6 builds on the extant body of critical literature by focusing on the culture of teaching and the role of teachers in the school, which it analyses on the basis of published and unpublished memoirs, correspondence, and curricular materials produced by the school’s teachers and pupils. It investigates the social, linguistic, and material environments of teaching, as well as the unique and changing natures of the teacher and the learner, which at times overlapped with the roles of therapist, parent, and patient in this most unusual school. Ultimately, the chapter situates the findings in the context of Deweyan and other new educational philosophies, early attempts at psychoanalytic pedagogy, and the transnational and transcultural spread of innovative educational ideas. Our analyses of these case-study schools are based on wide-ranging primary and secondary historical and historiographical sources in at least six different languages. Although our research did not involve living human subjects, it was nevertheless guided by ethical considerations that govern educational and historical research more broadly, including issues of privacy and consent. Wherever possible, we have relied on teachers’ and children’s own voices as they were expressed in institutional records and personal papers. Much of our data has come from publicly accessible archival sources made available by their authors and/or copyright holders for research purposes. Given the sensitivity of some of the data—that related to school performance or psychoanalytic treatment, for example— we have been careful to protect the identities of individuals except where their consent is explicit or where they have already been identified by name in other authors’ published accounts. The breadth and depth of our research and the diversity of source materials we uncovered have allowed us to identify and draw together threads of pedagogical prescription

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and practical possibility, the ways that teaching was instantiated through ideologies, institutions, and individuals, and the new education’s existence as a transnational, local, and interpersonal phenomenon.

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Kilpatrick, William H. “The Project Method.” Teachers College Record 19 (1917): 319–35. Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Lester, Alan. “Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire.” History Compass 4, no. 1 (2006): 124–41. Lingard, Bob. “Towards a Sociology of Pedagogies.” Chapter 15 in The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education, edited by Michael W. Apple, Stephen J. Ball, and Luis A. Gandin, 12 pp. New York: Routledge, 2010. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780203863701. “Malting House School.” The New Era 9, no. 34 (1928): 72. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. May, Helen. ‘I Am Five and I Go to School’: Early Years Schooling in New Zealand 1900–2010. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2011. May, Helen. The Discovery of Early Childhood, 2nd ed. Wellington: NZCER Press, 2013. May, Helen, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner. Empire Education and Indigenous Childhood: Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. May, Helen, Kristen Nawrotzki, and Larry Prochner, eds. Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education: Transnational Investigations. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016. Mayo, Elizabeth. Lessons on Objects: As Given to Children Between Six and Eight in a Pestalozzian School in Cheam, Surrey. London: Seeley and Burnside, 1830. McCann, Phillip, and Francis Young. Samuel Wilderspin and the Infant School Movement. London: Croom Helm, 1982. McDermott, John J. “Introduction.” In Spontaneous Activity in Education: The Advanced Education Method, authored by Maria Montessori, xi–xxviii. New York: Shocken, 1965. Montessori, Maria. The Montessori Method. London: Heinemann, 1915. Murdoch, Jonathan. Post-Structuralist Geography: A Guide to Relational Space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. Nawrotzki, Kristen D. “‘Like Sending Coals to Newcastle’: Impressions from and of the Anglo-American Kindergarten Movements.” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 2 (2007): 223–33. Paterson, Barbara L. “Within-case Analysis.” In Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, edited by Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, and Elden Wiebe. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2010. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412957397. n357. Popkewitz, Thomas S. “Globalization/Regionalism, Knowledge, and the Educational Practices: Some Notes on Comparative Strategies for Educational

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Research.” In Educational Knowledge: Changing Relationships Between the State, Civil Society, and the Educational Community, edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz, 3–27. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. Popkewitz, Thomas S. “Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education—An Introduction.” In Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education, edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz, 3–36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Prochner, Larry. A History of Early Childhood Education in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009. Prochner, Larry. “‘Their Little Wooden Bricks’: A History of The Material Culture of Kindergarten in the United States.” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 3 (2011): 1–21. Reese, William J. “The Origins of Progressive Education.” History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2001): 1–24. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000. Saunier, Pierre-Yves. Transnational History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Schriewer, Jürgen. “Deweyan Thought Refracted Through Time and Space: Studies on the Transcontinental Dissemination and Culture-specific Recontextualization of Educational Knowledge.” Chapter 1 in The Global Reception of John Dewey’s Thought: Multiple Refractions Through Time and Space, edited by Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jürgen Schriewer, 20 pp. New York: Routledge, 2012. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780203333624. Selleck, Richard J. W. The New Education: The English Background. Melbourne: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1968. Selleck, Richard J. W. English Primary Education and the Progressives, 1914–1939. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Shatsky, Stanislav. “The First Experiment Station on Public Education of the People’s Commissariat of Education, U.S.S.R.” The New Era 9, no. 33 (1928): 13–15. Spring, Joel. Globalization of Education: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2015. The Correspondence of John Dewey [electronic resource on CD-ROM]. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004. Tyack, David, and Larry Cuban. Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995.

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Tyack, David, and William Tobin. “The ‘Grammar’ of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change?” American Educational Research Journal 31, no. 3 (1994): 453–79. Vera, Eugenia Roldán, and Eckhardt Fuchs. “Introduction.” In The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (Global Histories of Education series), edited by Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera, 1–47. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Whitehead, Kay. “Women Educators and Transnational Networking in the Twentieth-Century Nursery School Movement.” Women’s History Review 23, no. 6 (2014): 957–75. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Anna Freud. London: Macmillan, 1989.

CHAPTER 2

The Dewey School, USA

The Dewey School, which operated at the University of Chicago from 1895 to 1904, is well known over a century later for being a laboratory for John Dewey’s curriculum ideas. Less attention has been paid to its role as a “pedagogical laboratory” for ideas of teaching and learning, which is the focus of this chapter. Writing about the school’s history holds the challenge of telling a too-familiar story—the characters, plot, and their significance are assumed to be known within a narrow range of interpretations.1 This chapter aims to tell a different story about how ideas about the teacher and child were reimagined in the experimental work. The chapter is organised into three parts. The first describes the experimental school as it was imagined, along with a review of Dewey’s approach to experimental educational research and ideas on teaching and the child. The second part tells the story of the school as revealed through Dewey’s blueprint for it and the experiences of its first principal, Clara Isabel Mitchell, and the corps of teachers who subsequently developed the school as an educational laboratory. The final section describes some of the ways the Deweyan teacher and child were reimagined after the experiment ended.

1 Thomas Fallace and Victoria Fantozzi, “The Dewey School as Triumph, Tragedy, and Misunderstood: Exploring the Myths and Historiography of the University of Chicago Laboratory School,” Teachers College Record 119, no. 2 (2017): 1–32.

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Dewey’s Imagined Experimental School John Dewey arrived at the University of Chicago to head its philosophy department in 1894, two years after the institution was founded.2 The university’s president, William Rainey Harper, had recruited him from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where Dewey held a similar position. Dewey had resigned from the University of Michigan once before. In 1888, he left to head the philosophy department at the University of Minnesota, where he was the only professor. But when his friend and mentor George Sylvester Morris died the following year, Dewey returned to Michigan to replace Morris as chair of the philosophy department. Five years later, when Dewey departed to Chicago, he was “yet in the very prime of his usefulness.”3 With ten years’ experience in academic positions, he was a highly regarded scholar, a popular teacher, and by all accounts an able administrator of his small department at Michigan, where at the start there was only Dewey and his assistant, James Tufts. When Tufts resigned to take a position in the University of Chicago’s philosophy department, Dewey hired George Herbert Mead to direct the laboratory and instruct. Dewey’s interest in researching curriculum started during his time in Ann Arbor. There, he had been a founding member of the Michigan Schoolmasters’ Club, which was devoted to studying high school and college education.4 He also made regular visits to high schools accredited by the University of Michigan to assess the quality of teaching.5 Nevertheless, while education interested him while he was at Michigan, his scholarly work was entirely in psychology and philosophy.6 2 George Dykhuizen, “John Dewey and the University of Michigan,” Journal of the History of Ideas 23, no. 4 (1962): 513–44. 3 “It Is Ann Arbor’s Loss,” Detroit Free Press, 2 April 1894, 1. 4 Leslie A. Butler, The Michigan Schoolmasters’ Club: A Story of the First Seven Decades

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 20. Dewey gave a talk at the club’s first meeting in 1886 in which he expounded on the benefits of teaching psychology to high school students. 5 Brian A. Williams, “Thought and Action: John Dewey at the University of Michigan,” Bentley Historical Bulletin 44 (1998): 1–31; Robert J. Gough, “High School Inspection by the University of Wisconsin, 1877–1931,” History of Education Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2010): 263–97. 6 Milton Halsey Thomas, A Bibliography of John Dewey 1882–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).

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Dewey took the position at Chicago for two reasons: It offered a chance both to develop philosophy in a new direction and to earn a higher salary to support his growing family. By 1894, Dewey and his wife, Alice Chipman Dewey, had three young children: seven-year-old Frederick, five-year-old Evelyn, and two-year-old Morris, named after his Michigan colleague. John Dewey arrived in Chicago in July without Alice, who was in Paris with Frederick and Evelyn for a year-long sabbatical. Morris stayed with his father until December, when the two rejoined the family in France. John Dewey’s many letters to his wife while she was away during his first months in Chicago are an important source on his impressions of the University of Chicago and his developing ideas about an experimental school. The correspondence shows he had both professional and personal reasons for planning a laboratory school, including wanting a school for his own children, which might suggest a conflict of interest. But rather than being in conflict, his attention to his children’s development and the school were complementary, and both contributed to his theory building.7 In Chicago, Dewey organised the philosophy department before he left for Europe. For staff, he drew from his personal and professional networks. Many of his colleagues were close friends of the Deweys, including George Herbert Mead and his wife, Helen Kingsbury Castle. Dewey convinced President Harper to bring in Mead from Michigan— even though Harper believed he was a poor teacher8 —and to hire his former graduate students James Rowland Angell and Frank Addison Manny. Manny would work as Dewey’s administrative assistant in the experimental school, while Dewey put Angell and Mead in charge of a new psychology laboratory similar to the one Dewey helped set up at Michigan. Mead was assigned to teach a course in comparative psychology.9 7 Jeremiah Dyehouse and Krysten Manke, “The Philosopher as Parent: John Dewey’s Observations of His Children’s Language Development and the Development of His Thinking about Communication,” Education and Culture 33, no. 1 (2017): 5. 8 John Dewey to William Rainey Harper, 10 March 1894, in The Correspondence of John Dewey [Electronic resource on CD-ROM] (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004), 00503. 9 Forrest A. Kingsbury, “A History of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago,” Psychological Bulletin 43, no. 3 (1946): 259–71; Walter B. Pillsbury, “The Department of Psychology,” in The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey, Vol. 4, ed. Wilfred B. Shaw (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1944), 709.

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Dewey’s approach to combining his professional and personal relationships was consistent with the “intimate character of the community of academics and administrators” in this era.10 In Dewey’s case, his network was complex and long-standing. Angell’s father, James Burrill Angell, was president of the University of Michigan and had known Dewey from the time Dewey was a child in Vermont. Frank Manny’s mother, Mary Bloom Manny, was also a student of Dewey’s, both at Michigan and Chicago, and she taught at the high school in Moline, Illinois, which Dewey visited as part of his accreditation duties. Dewey’s religious associations also intersected with his network. During his time at Michigan, he was a member of the Congregationalist Church, as was James Tufts, who recommended Dewey to Harper for the department head position at Chicago. Mead, too, was a Congregationalist, both Tufts and Mead were sons of Congregationalist ministers,11 Tufts’ daughter married Mead’s son, and so on. Dewey’s network at Michigan and later at Chicago’s Hull House12 played an important role when he staffed the experimental school in its second phase in the fall of 1896. In addition to Dewey’s duties as professor and head of Chicago’s philosophy department, Harper asked him to create and head a pedagogy department.13 Harper wanted the department to have a practice school for teachers of the sort found in American normal schools, or one similar to Wilhelm Rein’s practice school at the University of Jena in Germany, where teachers learned about Herbartian theory and practice.14 Dewey convinced him the school should be truly experimental.15 He wanted it to open for the 1895 school year to be available for Frederick and Evelyn 10 Larry A. Hickman, “Introduction,” Correspondence of John Dewey, Vol. 1. 11 Jared Stallones, “Struggle for the Soul of Dewey: Religion and Progressive

Education,” American Educational History Journal 33, no. 1 (2006): 19–28. 12 Hull House was an American version of the British reform institution called social settlements, which aimed to bring middle-class standards of sanitation and of cultural and social life to poor children and their families. College-educated volunteers, including charity workers, teachers, and artists, lived communally in residence at the settlement house (and were thus settlers). See Hull House Maps and Papers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1895). 13 John and Morris Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 9 August 1894, Correspondence, 00239. 14 Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) was a German philosopher and psychologist who is considered by many to be the founder of the discipline of pedagogy. 15 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 22 November 1894, Correspondence, 00236.

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to attend. Because he would be in Europe for the first half of 1895, there was little time to plan. The University of Chicago trustees had planned to start a pedagogy department earlier, when funding was available.16 In preparation for a department, Parker had hired Julia Ellen Bulkley as an associate professor of pedagogy in 1892.17 Apart from Dewey, the only new appointment to the pedagogy department in its first year, 1895, was Charles Herbert Thurber. Mead and Angell, Dewey’s staff from philosophy, were listed as pedagogy instructors, but neither taught in the department.18 Bulkley came to Chicago from New Jersey, where she had worked for over twenty years as a teacher and administrator. She was well regarded for her intellect: A journalist noted that she had an “unusual gift of being able to make use of all her mental capital. Her mind seems to be catalogued, and she loses no force by indecision or unprecision.”19 Bulkley was nevertheless worried that she lacked academic preparation for her new job in Chicago. Immediately after she was hired, she took a leave to study for a doctoral degree at the University of Zurich.20 When she returned to Chicago with a PhD three years later, in 1895, she found that Harper had recruited Dewey to head the new pedagogy department, with plans for a laboratory school well underway, a situation Harper had not shared with her beforehand. For the next few years, she taught courses in pedagogy and seminars on Herbart, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, which were the focus of her studies in Europe. However, Dewey marginalised Bulkley within

16 While the university was funded by the industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Harper’s ambitious expansionist plans created a deficit almost from the start. See the University of Chicago, Annual Register 1892–1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1893), 27; John W. Boyer, The University of Chicago: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 17 Kathleen Cruikshank, “In Dewey’s Shadow: Julia Bulkley and the University of Chicago Department of Pedagogy, 1895–1900,” History of Education Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1998): 373–406; Chicago Tribune, 9 March 1892, 8. 18 The University of Chicago, Annual Register 1894–1895 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1895), 49–50. 19 “Something About Miss Bulkley,” The Courier-News (Bridgewater, New Jersey), 13 February 1893, 3. 20 Margaret W. Rossiter, “Doctorates for American Women, 1868–1907,” History of Education Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1982): 159–83.

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the department due to his patriarchal approach to administrative work and what he perceived as her difficult personality.21 In contrast to his relationship with Bulkley, Dewey had many constructive relationships with female colleagues. Indeed, as Cunningham and his coauthors have argued, Dewey sought out and learned from “women and weirdoes,” by which they meant people outside the usual philosophical groups.22 One such person, who was also influential in Dewey’s thinking about a school, was Jane Addams, who had cofounded Hull House in a poor immigrant district in Chicago in 1889. Dewey’s experience at Hull House was his main connection to the reformist agenda of the progressive movement, and it influenced his writings during this time, which, as Lawrence Cremin described, were within a “genre of urban Progressivism.”23 Dewey met Addams in 1892 when he came to Hull House to give a lecture and stayed in residence for several days. Afterwards, Dewey wrote to Addams that he believed her approach to developing democratic community was “the right way.”24 Addams, in turn, as she described in Twenty Years at Hull House, valued Dewey’s theorising, for example, on the value of craftwork, which helped children “see that the complicated machinery of the factory had evolved from simple tools.”25 During his first term at the University of Chicago, Dewey lectured at Hull House and he and Morris visited at other times. Dewey even contemplated living near Hull House when he and Alice returned from Europe the following year.26 The idea was partly motivated by young Fred’s empathy for the poor after he met a blind beggar in Paris. Alice wrote to John: “I told him what Miss Addams is trying to do in Chicago and that when we get there we would try to help her then.” Fred replied:

21 Kathleen Weiler, “The Historiography of Gender and Progressive Education in the

United States,” Paedagogica Historica 42, nos. 1–2 (2006): 161–76. 22 Craig A. Cunningham, David Granger, Jane Fowler Morse, Barbara Stengel, and Terri Wilson, “Dewey, Women, and Weirdoes: or, the Potential Rewards for Scholars Who Dialogue Across Difference,” Education and Culture 23, no. 2 (2007): 27–62. 23 Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 238. 24 John Dewey to Alice Chapman Dewey, 27 January 1892, Correspondence, 00475. 25 Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1910),

237. 26 John Dewey to Jane Addams, 11 September 1894, Correspondence, 00187.

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“No Sir! you just go yourself and get a house in the poor quarter.”27 Dewey located a house in a “good” neighbourhood adjacent to the settlement, but he expressed mixed feelings about such a move in a letter to Alice: “To go there would be a way to sponge all the advantages of Hull House and skin out of its most pressing problem.” In the end, he concluded it was too far from the University of Chicago, requiring a one-hour commute for Dewey by bicycle.28 Dewey made a similar case for locating the laboratory school near, rather than at, the university, as Harper wanted. He told Harper he “had no desire to have an aristocratic school or to help train the children of the higher classes—, but I can’t quite get over the argument of convenience myself.”29

Dewey Explores Local Teacher Training Schemes Dewey’s first term at Chicago was extraordinarily busy, so planning the experimental school was delayed. In addition to heading two departments, Dewey taught a class in the summer term, four more in the fall, including one which was offered downtown, and he gave a separate series of lectures at Hull House and Cook County Normal School. He also visited kindergarten training colleges and private schools to familiarise himself with local training schemes. He was unimpressed with what he saw. At Alice Putnam’s training school,30 he objected to the teachers’ use of the Froebelian31 symbol system, telling Putnam that “the symbol was a very dangerous thing as a symbol of an idea or an emotion, instead of an action.”32 When Putnam, who was a prominent member of Chicago’s Swedenborgian New Church, replied that she thought “the symbol was a great thing,” Dewey dismissed it as a Swedenborgian idea.33 His rejection of symbols was partly due to his objection to what he regarded 27 Alice Chipman Dewey to John Dewey, 29 June 1894, Correspondence, 00167. 28 John Dewey to Alice Chapman Dewey, 22 November 1894, Correspondence, 00240. 29 John Dewey to Alice Chapman Dewey, 22 November 1894, Correspondence, 00236. 30 Chicago Froebel Association Training School for Teachers. 31 Friedrich Froebel established the kindergarten system of education in Germany in

1839. 32 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey & Children, 18 October 1894, Correspondence, 00210. 33 Ibid.; see also Rudolph Williams, The New Church and Chicago: A History (Chicago: W.B. Conkey Co., 1906).

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as “religious beliefs and practices associated with earlier forms of social life and utterly separate from the affairs of contemporary civilization.”34 His religious thinking at this time was influenced by Hegel’s claim that “philosophical theology is the purest form of theology as well as the highest expression of religion”—in other words, theology is philosophy.35 Dewey’s move to Chicago coincided with his break from the Congregational Church. His involvement had declined in his last few years at Ann Arbor with the church’s turn to evangelical Christianity. In Dewey’s visit to the Chicago Kindergarten College teacher training programme, he found a mix of Hegelian ideas and his own psychology being taught; he had published a popular psychology textbook in 1887.36 He centred his criticism of the college on what he observed of their training regime for teachers, which was based largely on learning via imitation, a Froebelian principle applied to teaching adults as well as children. Student teachers learned by using the materials—handling what were in some cases toys for babies—and by making the crafts and listening to and telling the stories they would later teach the children. Dewey observed the college’s principal, Elizabeth Harrison, teaching a class in the college’s summer school for local teachers. It was one of Harrison’s “Morning Talks in the Kindergarten,” which were planned to be “conversational, [with] questions and answers forming a part of each.”37 He shared his assessment of the talk in a letter to Alice: Heavens! I wonder if grown people have to become as little children in brains as well as in spirit to enter that particular branch of the kingdom of heaven. Miss Harrison told a kindergarten story to that class of grown people just as if she were telling it to children; and all the oh’s and ah’s and holy tones into duly impress them. I don’t doubt she does lots of good, but it strikes an outsider as drivelling idiocy.38 34 Stephen C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 539. 35 Rockefeller, John Dewey, 136. 36 David I. Waddington, “Uncovering Hegelian Connections: A New Look at Dewey’s

Early Educational Ideas,” Education and Culture 26, no. 1 (2010): 67–81; John Dewey, Psychology (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1887). 37 “Summer School of Pedagogy Opens,” Chicago Tribune, 17 July 1894, 12; Chicago Kindergarten College Summer School of Pedagogy, Monday, 16–31 July 1895, Series 01/001, Course Catalogues, 1849–present, File 011001, Box 1, Elizabeth Harrison Papers, Archives and Special Collections, National Louis University, Chicago. 38 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 2 August 1894, Correspondence, 00168.

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Dewey was more favourable towards teacher education at the Cook County Normal School, where he gave a series of lectures in the autumn of 1894. The school’s principal was Francis Wayland Parker, who was well known in education circles for his experimental approach to teacher education that combined observation and practice with developing expertise in subject matter.39 Parker’s methods were based on his theory of education, which he called a doctrine of concentration. It drew on ideas from the occult beliefs of François Delsarte on correspondences and the integration of mind, body, spirit, and nature, the transcendentalist philosophy of Froebel, and the educational theory of Johann Friedrich Herbart.40 In Herbartian theory, which Dewey also endorsed, the child was positioned at the centre of the educational experience, with traditional subjects—geology, biology, history—considered pathways to understanding the natural law of the world.41 In the style of most American scholars, Dewey referred to “correlation of studies” to mean a “concentration of studies” in the Herbartian sense.42 The teacher education students at Cook County Normal School were trained in these ideas by Francis Wayland Parker—he taught a course in the psychology of his theory of concentration, and his students impressed Dewey with their ability to connect theory with practice. After one of Dewey’s lectures in the autumn of 1894, Parker asked them to give examples of how they used the “psychological principles” Dewey had described. In a letter to his wife, Dewey enthused, “I guess I learned more psychology from their illustrations than they did from my principles. … I sometimes think I will drop teaching phil—directly, & teach it via pedagogy.”43 Dewey continued by reflecting on his beginning ideas for the programme for an experimental school:

39 Jack K. Campbell, Colonel Francis W. Parker: The Children’s Crusader (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967). 40 Francis W. Parker, Talks on Pedagogics: An Outline of the Theory of Concentration (New York: E.A. Kellogg & Co., 1895), iii; Bruce A. Ronda, The Fate of Transcendentalism: Secularity, Materiality, and Human Flourishing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). 41 Parker, Talks on Pedagogics. 42 William T. Harris, “Correlation, Concentration, Coordination, and Unification,”

Journal of Education 41, no. 17, 279–80. 43 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 1 November 1894, Correspondence, 00218, emphasis in original.

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There is an image of a school growing up in my mind all of the time. … The school is the one form of social life which is abstracted & under control—which is directly experimental, and if philosophy is ever to be an experimental science, the construction of a school is its starting point.44

While the Cook County Normal School’s approach to “methods” appealed to Dewey as similar to his own ideas, it was exceedingly difficult to replicate. Francis Wayland Parker was beloved by his teachers. However, Parker was a practical person and had difficulty explaining his ideas. The Cook County Normal School’s success was very much influenced by Parker’s leadership in a school organised as a charismatic bureaucracy. As Michael Katz describes this process, “an intelligent charismatic leader placed in a bureaucracy would refine the necessary formal elements of that organization and simultaneously remove the deadening effect of systematizing on its spirit.”45 Parker achieved this feat through his dispersed approach to leadership that was collectivist and cooperative and by using traditional elements of school organisation in new ways. For example, the morning exercise, normally a time for chapel, was used by students and teachers to present ideas for discussion.46

Dewey’s Ideas About Educational Research Just as there were various types of experimental schools, as described in Chapter 1, different approaches were taken to education research. Despite their name, little experimental work was undertaken in experimental schools in the 1890s. Instead, researchers favoured using naturalistic methods to collect “facts” about children for interpretation by experts and subsequently for use by parents at home and teachers in the classroom.47 Since this research typically had large sample sizes, it was more common for it to occur outside the confines of an experimental school in homes, schools, and communities. For this reason, researchers sought

44 Ibid. 45 Michael B. Katz, Reconstructing American Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1987), 88. 46 Flora J. Cooke, “The History of the Morning Exercise,” Francis W. Parker School Year Book 2 (June 1913): 1–3. 47 Robert B. Cairns and Beverley D. Cairns, “The Making of Developmental Psychology,” Chapter 3 in Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 1, ed. Richard M. Lerner (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006), 125.

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help with data collection from parents and teachers. Stanford University education professor Earl Barnes, for example, whose lectures were sponsored by school districts throughout California, collected masses of data from teachers in this way. His aim was to gain insights into “the natural history of child life,” but he also used the events to recruit graduate students to Stanford, including Genevra Sisson, who was teaching in a school in Santa Cruz when Barnes lectured in that city.48 His strategy was to engage teachers as researchers in an entire school district, such as in Santa Rosa where they collected classroom data on children’s imagination, understanding of numbers, and writing. Barnes trained the teachers for their task by travelling to Santa Rosa every two weeks for several months, giving a Friday evening lecture and a Saturday workshop. He collected thousands of pages of observations and children’s stories from teachers in this way.49 Granville Stanley Hall used a similar approach in questionnaire research he called “topical syllabi,” in which teachers or parents recorded their observations of children or responses to questions and mailed them to Hall at Clarke University.50 Dewey admired Hall’s approach, viewing it as an opportunity for research but also a means to recruit graduate students to the new pedagogy department. In his second year at the University of Chicago, he conducted a survey involving kindergarten teachers as data collectors.51 Through a notice in The Kindergarten Magazine, Dewey invited teachers to send him reports of children’s spontaneous play and their own reminiscences of their play as a child.52 No report on the study has been found. However, Dewey’s approach to education research used some of the same strategies as his colleagues Hall and Barnes, but within a single classroom. As we will see, he engaged teachers as researchers— there is no record of him ever collecting data himself—using descriptive or observational rather than experimental methods. 48 Earl Barnes, “Methods of Studying Children,” in Studies in Education, ed. Earl Barnes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1897), 14; “Our Schools,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, 17 December 1893, 2. 49 Sonoma Democrat, 2 September 1893. 50 Jacy L. Young, “G. Stanley Hall, Child Study, and the American Public,” The Journal

of Genetic Psychology 177, no. 6 (2016): 195–208. 51 John Dewey to Frank A. Manny, 15 April 1896, Correspondence, 01868. 52 John Dewey, “A Pedagogical Experiment,” Kindergarten Magazine 8 (June 1896):

739–41.

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Experimental psychology research at this time was dominated by physiological studies of the nervous system, with which Dewey was familiar.53 He had completed courses in physiological psychology and assisted in a physiological laboratory during his graduate training with Hall at Johns Hopkins.54 He explained to his mentor at the University of Vermont that there were two studies, “one set to determine, if possible, what effect fixing attention upon one thing very strongly, has upon a ‘remainder’ in consciousness, and the other the effect attention has in producing involuntary muscular movements—something after the ‘mind’ reading fashion.”55 The experiment Dewey was describing was likely similar to those Hall conducted at the Harvard Physiological Laboratory and reported on in 1883, involving the attention of a hypnotised subject. In his account, Dewey sounded unimpressed with his experience in experimental research in what was the first psychology laboratory in the USA. The research Dewey planned in his laboratory school was not experimental in the manner of his training in psychology.56 And while the children who were students in his school would be participants in studies by researchers from other departments, Dewey did not study children.57 For Dewey, a scientific approach was based on rational principles; it did not adhere to a particular method other than “objective observation” in a cultural setting (e.g. a school) rather than in a laboratory modelled on the natural sciences.58 Emily Cahan described Dewey’s school as “an experiment in the possibilities of human development in arranged circumstances.”59

53 D. C. Phillips, “James, Dewey, and the Reflex Arc,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 4 (1971): 555–68. 54 George Dykhuizen, “John Dewey at Johns Hopkins, 1882–1884,” Journal of the

History of Ideas 22, no. 1 (1961): 103–16. 55 John Dewey to H. A. P. Torrey, 14 February 1883, Correspondence, 00422. 56 John Dewey to Frank A. Manny, 15 April 1896, Correspondence, 01868. 57 As part of their course work in Professor Thurber’s child study course, graduate

students tested children’s sensory and motor abilities in 1896. The aim was to determine defects in order that they might be corrected. “Child Study Congress,” University Record 1, no. 9 (1896): 166. 58 Emily D. Cahan, “John Dewey and Human Development,” Developmental Psychology 28 (1991): 206. 59 Cahan, “John Dewey and Human Development,” 208.

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Dewey placed a large importance on the school as a social context of learning, and the school as a laboratory was planned to maximise social engagement. On a practical level, children participated in cooperative projects and activities, including useful occupations such as cooking and woodworking. On a psychological level, children undertaking such activities were meant to develop habits of democracy, meaning dispositions that influence the development of thought. Thus, the focus of the experimental school was on creating the conditions for an optimised learning environment to develop democratic thought and practices through attention to the programme of study, the materials, and instruction. Dewey’s curriculum research was distinctive for its theory-based approach. His ideas on how children grow and learn, and on education, developed during his time in Chicago. He theorised that play in infancy was based in motor and intellectual development and the increased coordination and discrimination that were purposefully aimed at “gain[ing] new experiences.”60 A second stage, called the play period, involved exploration of objects. It began at about age two and lasted to age six or seven. Dewey described the start of this stage as characterised by a “growing freedom of activity”; however, a child’s repetitive actions and the “comparative poverty of the idea” placed it, for him, “on the borderland of play.”61 Activities with objects became more purposeful over time and were often taken up through participation in productive activity in the family, for example, by helping with baking, carpentry, or gardening. Dewey reasoned that because such productive opportunities were limited for children in cities, kindergartens and other institutions were developed to “compensate for the limitations.”62 However, he believed that “in more favored surroundings the child is often relatively stunted because adults are not willing to take the time and effort required; or have not the intelligence necessary to supply proper conditions.”63 His school and his teachers would help to remediate this situation. Dewey’s ideas contrasted with those of Froebel, who believed that children were complete beings from birth, capable of higher-order thinking 60 John Dewey, “Principles of Mental Development as Illustrated in Early Infancy,” in The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, electronic edition [first published in Transactions of The Illinois Society for Child Study 4 (1899): 65–83], 185. 61 Dewey, “Principles of Mental Development,” 196. 62 Dewey, “Principles of Mental Development,” 199. 63 Ibid.

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but requiring guidance. While development unfolded naturally, it was preset, having been ordered by God. Froebel’s philosophy of education was influenced by his religious beliefs, his studies in mathematics, physics, and architecture, and his observations at Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s school in Switzerland. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Froebel believed in the innocence of childhood. Like Pestalozzi, he understood the importance of connecting learning to real-life experiences, but he used materials with a much more symbolic and spiritual purpose. Central to his approach was his religious belief in the unity of all things. While unfoldment theory has a deep spiritual basis, the related recapitulation theory reflected in Dewey’s ideas is a biogenetic approach to child development in which each child’s growth and development repeat the evolution of the species. Froebel’s theory, which was established on a racialised notion of child development, was the underlying principle for Dewey’s experimental education programme.64 While Dewey’s ambitions for the laboratory school were large, the funds Harper allotted to support it were meagre, and it depended on tuition fees to supplement its modest operating grant. In Harper’s rush to start a pedagogy department with a school as a laboratory, the way was set for Dewey to have increasing administrative demands placed on him, despite his lack of experience in this area, and for new initiatives to commence before there was a commitment for sustained funding. However, the rush to open the school was partly Dewey’s doing. The Deweys wanted an alternative education for Frederick, Evelyn, and Morris when they returned from Europe. John wrote to Alice: “If the Univ. can be utilized as a means of educating Fred & Evelyn Mr Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co would have some justification finally.”65 In one historian’s cynical view, John Dewey sought to “build an experiment around a school for his own children.”66 Alice Dewey had taken Frederick and Evelyn to France to learn French as part of a plan for their education through travel. While Frederick had attended school in Ann Arbor and been happy there,

64 Thomas D. Fallace, Race and the Origins of Progressive Education, 1880–1929 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2015); Thomas Fallace, “Repeating the Race Experience: John Dewey and the History Curriculum at the University of Chicago Laboratory School,” Curriculum Inquiry 39, no. 3 (2009): 381–405. 65 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 12 June 1896, Correspondence, 01247. 66 Cruikshank, “In Dewey’s Shadow,” 687.

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Evelyn disliked her time at kindergarten, and her father was highly critical of her teacher.67 John Dewey underestimated the complexity of operating a school. He believed his role was to direct its research and that after he appointed a principal, she would take charge of setting up and running the school.68 This plan’s success relied on the principal’s ideas aligning with his. Dewey’s opportunity to scope out potential principals was restricted by his short time in Chicago before leaving for Europe and his limited knowledge of the local scene. In the end, he offered the position of principal to Mary Alling-Aber, a woman he had only recently met and about whom he had serious misgivings concerning her esoteric beliefs. Esotericism is the revelation of a radical spiritual reality that has been made available to a few individuals. In Alling-Aber’s case, this reality was revealed to her through her visits to the spirit world. Mary Alling graduated from Oswego Normal School in 1869 at age eighteen. As a teacher, and later as a teacher educator, Alling was dissatisfied with formalised object lessons on subjects such as thimbles and chairs that were detached from children’s experience of the materials. She developed an alternative curriculum “organized around real-world observations” and fieldwork, similar to Dewey’s understanding of nature study.69 She worked out her ideas in an experimental class in Pauline Agassiz Shaw’s small private school in Boston from 1881 to 1884. After hearing criticisms from teachers who visited the school that its methods were only successful due to the “comparatively small number of children from cultivated families,” she trialled her approach in the Lewis Street School in Englewood, Illinois, a public elementary school associated with Cook County Normal School.70 The Lewis Street experiment was led by Oswego graduate Frances MacChesney, who started with a single classroom in 1886 supported by the principal, Katherine Starr Kellogg, and superintendent Orville Bright. MacChesney taught her grade 1 students reading through lessons that were based on nature study, which was later extended to science and other 67 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 12 June 1896, Correspondence, 01247. 68 John Dewey to William Rainey Harper, 6 December 1897, Correspondence, 00567. 69 Sarah Anne Carter, Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to

Make Sense of the Material World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 57. 70 Mary Alling-Aber, An Experiment in Education (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897), 29.

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subjects. Other teachers at the Lewis Street School adopted the methods, including Clara Isabel Mitchell, who taught there in 1887.71 Mitchell is described later in the chapter as the first principal of Dewey’s experimental school. By 1890, Alling-Aber’s approach was being used by every firstand second-grade teacher in the Cook County Normal School District. By this time, although she continued writing about education, Alling-Aber had left teaching to pursue her interest in esoteric philosophies. In 1893, Alling-Aber published an account of her spiritual travels to other times and worlds in a self-published book titled Souls.72 Dewey met her the next year when she came to Chicago, where she took a course in the philosophy department with George Herbert Mead. Dewey had already gained an appreciation for Alling-Aber’s educational ideas before reading Souls, which he found disturbing. He wrote to his wife in France: “It rather dashed me, as after reading her Educational articles I had dreams of getting her to start a school again, thinking the problem for Fred-Evel.-Morris might be solved. But this thing on ‘Souls’ is absolutely unreal.”73 Dewey wished his wife were there to offer her opinion. He consulted instead with his colleague at the university, dean of undergraduate women Marion Talbot, who agreed with his positive assessment of Alling-Aber’s educational ideas but remarked on her “queerness”: Talbot found her to be “so very strange.”74 Nevertheless, while Alling-Aber’s beliefs gave Dewey pause, he was so influenced by her educational philosophy that he asked her to be principal of his experimental school.75 He even suggested she give a course for teachers at Hull House “to give them some pointers.”76 Alling-Aber wrote to Dewey declining his offer of the principalship: Her attention was likely focused on what she believed to be the end of physical life on earth. In Souls, she prophesied the day of judgement to come by 1901. Her letter reached Dewey while he was travelling

71 Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois, Twenty-Second Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois, 1 July 1896–30 June 1898 (Springfield, IL: Phillips Bros., State Printers, 1898), 60. 72 Mary Alling-Aber, Souls (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1893). 73 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 18 November 1894, Correspondence, 00231. 74 Ibid., 00229, emphasis in original. 75 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 16 May 1895, Correspondence, 00505. 76 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 22 November 1894, Correspondence, 00236.

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in Europe with his wife and their children. Dewey’s thoughts about a school were set aside when a tragedy occurred. Soon after the family was reunited in Europe, all became sick en route to Italy, where Morris died. The Deweys returned to Chicago in October, grieving Morris’s death. John resumed his administrative and teaching duties, while Frederick and Evelyn attended the practice school at the Cook County Normal School.77

Dewey’s Teachers Test His Theory of Inquiry When Dewey turned to Parker for help to find a principal, Parker recommended one of his graduates, Clara Isabel Mitchell, who had been a second-grade critic teacher in his practice school.78 Mitchell was relatively inexperienced. After completing her training at Cook County Normal School in 1885, she taught at the Lewis Street School in Englewood during the time of Alling-Aber’s experiment and for one year at a private girls’ school on Staten Island. She had no experience as a principal. However, principalship of the experimental school would have held little interest for Parker’s more experienced teachers. Dewey started his search in November 1895, with the school set to start early in 1896. At that late date, he had no staff or students and no programme, building, furnishings, or materials. Moreover, the country was in the midst of a severe economic depression. The Chicago World’s Fair and Columbian Exposition in 1893 coincided with massive unemployment in the city totalling 20% of the labour force.79 The more experienced teachers at the normal school would have been wary about leaving their positions for employment in a school with an unknown future. And while Cook County Normal School itself was operating on borrowed time—the commissioners were in the process of transferring it to the city of Chicago in 1896 to save costs—its teachers were intensely loyal to Parker. By

77 Gail L. Kroepel, “Flora J. Cooke and the Francis W. Parker School,” in Founding Mothers and Others, ed. Alan R. Sadovnik and Susan F. Semel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 125–45. 78 Course of Study of the Cook County Normal School (Chicago: J. M. W. Jones, 1893); for Mitchell’s background, see the University of Chicago, Annual Register July 1906–July 1907 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1907), 23. 79 Douglas Steeples and David O. Whitten, Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 169.

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recommending Mitchell as principal, Parker may have been trying to help her as much as Dewey, believing her prospects were better in the fledgling university school than as a teacher with low seniority at the normal school. Dewey wrote a series of letters to Mitchell over the six weeks leading up to the school’s opening to plan its operation and to orient her to his ideas on the programme. Because Mitchell worked at a practice school, which Parker called experimental, Dewey needed to distinguish it from his own understanding of an experimental school. Hence, he described it as “primarily a school of methods, only secondarily a school of practice— That is, its primary intention is to attempt a systematic organization of the school curriculum, testing & developing methods both from the psychological & the practical sides.”80 He projected that there would be about twenty-five children aged six to nine, and that she would teach classes in the morning and reserve one or two afternoons each week for field trips. While the location had not yet been established, he was negotiating with a Baptist church to use the Sunday school rooms during the week. Dewey wrote to Mitchell on matters large and small, describing his thoughts on sewing and cooking, the materials needed for each, and ideas he had read about or seen in action at Cook County Normal School. As he had described to Alice the year before concerning his image of a school, he believed “the material & methods for such a school all exist now lying ‘round loose in scattered form. There are the kindergarten methods, the manual training, the nature study, the ‘coordination of studies’ &c. &c.”81 His aim was to bring the different ideas together in an experimental context, one that was “naturalistic” while at the same time affording a direction for learning. This was accomplished through the teachers’ “proper selection and adjustment of materials,”82 which is what Dewey meant by methods. In his letters to Mitchell, he did not show that he had developed a separate theory of pedagogy. Dewey gave Mitchell his notes from lectures at the normal school (she could not attend herself because she was not living in Chicago at the time) and an outline of his philosophy of education.83 In it, he

80 John Dewey to Clara I. Mitchell, 6 November 1895, Correspondence, 00268. 81 John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 1 November 1894, Correspondence, 00218. 82 The University of Chicago, Annual Register July 1895–July 1896 (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1896), 52. 83 John Dewey to Clara I. Mitchell, 14 November 1895, Correspondence, 00270.

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explained his approach to the classification of studies and the philosophy of the correlation of studies in the manner of Herbart. As a sign of his continued admiration for Alling-Aber, he sent Mitchell a list she prepared for him on outfitting a school.84 Of course, Dewey would have had other sources for information on furnishings, including his colleague Julia Bulkley, but their relationship had deteriorated over their few months together in the pedagogy department, and each had made complaints to President Harper about the other’s ill treatment of them.85 For her part, Bulkley told Harper she was concerned that an experimental school under Mitchell’s direction would have “no more distinctive feature than the Cook Co. Normal School, whose lack of organization it may represent,” and suggested it would become “no more than a private school undertaken by Miss Mitchell herself.”86 Little can be gleaned from Dewey’s letters about what Mitchell thought about the school. She did, however, have knowledge of industrial arts and encouraged Dewey to purchase a loom.87 He hesitated, writing that he was unsure whether the children could operate one or if the budget would allow for it. However, he thought they could perhaps cut back on other equipment. The items he believed to be essential on Alling-Aber’s list were the carpenter’s benches and tools, equipment for cooking, sewing materials, and tables and chairs. Items to be purchased later were the window garden and aquarium.88 In Dewey’s final letters to Mitchell in late December 1895, just a few weeks before the school was set to open, he added further detail on his ideas about curriculum and correlation studies. He concluded by inviting her to use her own judgement in exercising his ideas, telling her they were “purely suggestive”89 and that he believed “the one thing this Laboratory of Education ought to stand for is sufficient slowness of operation to

84 John Dewey to Clara I. Mitchell, 24 November 1895, Correspondence, 00271. 85 John Dewey to William Rainey Harper, 11 January 1896, Correspondence, 00509. 86 Julia Bulkley to William Rainey Harper, 28 December 1895, Files 14, 15, Box 24,

University President’s Papers, 1889–1925, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library. 87 John Dewey to Clara I. Mitchell, 14 November 1895, Correspondence, 00270. 88 John Dewey to Clara I. Mitchell, 14 December 1895, Correspondence, 00273. 89 John Dewey to Clara I. Mitchell, 24 December 1895, Correspondence, 00276.

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secure maturity through growth.”90 Dewey’s wish for a slow approach to the school’s development was not borne out. Apparently dissatisfied with its progress, he relieved Mitchell of her duties as principal at the end of her first term. He thus established a pattern of undertaking sudden acrimonious changes in the school’s leadership that would continue over its brief history. Mitchell would have agreed with a more tempered approach, similar to what she would have experienced in her work at the Cook County practice school. Frank Wayland Parker designed his school to be “an indispensable means of close and careful study and investigation” where “every well worked-out theory which met with general approval must have its final test in the schoolroom.”91 The entire normal school faculty met for two or three hours each week to review lessons and discuss issues that had arisen. Each teacher “was asked to present suggestions, new plans, and devices which, in his opinion, would improve the school.”92 Teachers also had daily meetings with colleagues in their division or department. As Parker explained, “each teacher was expected to penetrate and permeate the whole faculty and the whole school with the intrinsic value of his subject and its relation to all other subjects, and to discover in what manner his specialty might enhance the value of the rest of the work. Our aim was to establish perfect unity of action.”93 Mitchell opened the University Primary School, which would be popularly known as the Dewey School, on 13 January 1896, with twelve students and herself as the sole teacher. On the first day, she gave a lesson about cotton in connection with a sewing activity in which children hemmed towels. She was later assisted by Frederick Warren Smedley, a former school superintendent and a graduate student in the pedagogy department who had taken coursework with John Dewey. Smedley taught carpentry and, as well, completed a series of physical tests and measurements on the children using anthropometric devices he had designed and

90 John Dewey to Clara I. Mitchell, 12 December 1895, Correspondence, 00275. 91 Francis W. Parker, “An Account of the Work of the Cook County and Chicago

Normal School from 1883 to 1899,” The Elementary School Teacher and Course of Study 2, no. 10 (June 1902): 756. 92 Parker, “An Account of the Work,” 754. 93 Ibid.

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made.94 Mitchell used the measurements creatively in her writing and arithmetic lessons. Nine-year-old Fred Dewey, who had started at the school with his sister Evelyn, aged six, recorded: “I am 51 inches tall; my legs are 29 inches long; my shoulders are 11 ¾ inches wide; my arm stretch is 48 inches.”95 While not much else is known about the school’s first six months, it appears there were rough spots. Julia Bulkley’s opinion that instruction in the experimental school would be similar to that at the Cook County Normal School was likely borne out. Mitchell would logically have taught in the manner of her training and experience. She was, after all, Parker’s protégé. Historian Ronald Kellum put it this way: “It seems likely that Clara Mitchell transferred Parker’s pedagogy to Dewey’s laboratory school on literally the inaugural day of the school.”96 Mitchell’s contributions to Dewey’s experimental school have been largely criticised in historical accounts and by her former colleagues. Former teachers Mayhew and Edwards concluded in their history of the school that the first six months were “chiefly indicative of what not to do.”97 Indeed, Katherine Camp Mayhew, who had worked with Mitchell, was still talking about it more than thirty years later. In 1928, she recalled, “Miss Mitchell found it very easy to do what she had always been doing—teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. [She] found it difficult to grasp the intellectual implications of programmes Dewey outlined.”98 Yet Dewey’s ideas on the correlation of studies would have been familiar to Mitchell. They resembled Parker’s concentration theory, which Parker

94 Smedley, Frederick W., “A Report on the Measurements of the Sensory and Motor Abilities of the Pupils of the Chicago University Primary School and the Pedagogical Value of Such Measurements,” Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study 2 no. 2 (1896): 85–95. 95 “University Primary School,” 24 January, 3 February, 4 February 1886 [previously: Series 1: Laboratory School Records, Vol. 8] Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers, Box 3, Edwards Family Papers, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. 96 Ronald Kellum, “The Influence of Francis Wayland Parker’s Pedagogy on the Pedagogy of John Dewey,” Journal of Thought 18, no. 1 (1983): 77–91. 97 Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago 1896–1903 (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1965), 8. 98 Katherine Camp Mayhew, notes taken at mothers’ luncheon, 15 October 1928, Box 12, Katherine Camp Mayhew Collection (6561), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

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also taught to students in the University of Chicago pedagogy department in a course on the science and art of teaching during the same term the experimental school was underway.99 And Dewey’s ideas were consistent with statements on correlation in the 1895 report of the Committee of Fifteen on Elementary Education: The work of the Sub-Committee on the Correlation of Studies was comprehensive, including the order of topics, the focus on the “whole of learning” rather than individual branches, the “whole of mind” rather than one type of cognition, and learning in relation to the child’s spiritual and natural environment.100 While Dewey’s ideas about correlation were progressive for the time, they were not unique to Dewey. As Herbert Kliebard observed, “Ideas do not arise ab initio, and it was from the educational and social conceptions of people like [sociologist] Small as well as from his reconstructions of the concepts of Harris, Hall, and the Herbartians that Dewey began to forge the basis of what ultimately became the theory of the Laboratory School.”101 Three months into the school’s first term, Dewey was on the lookout for new staff for the next year.102 Mitchell remained as a teacher until spring 1897, when she resigned after learning that Dewey would not hire her for the 1897–1898 school year. In a telegram to her colleagues, she wrote, “Thanks, for my release!!!”103 Dewey moved to recruit teachers aligned with his idea that teachers should be subject specialists. Their work was evidently successful: In 1899, when the school had completed its

99 The University of Chicago, Annual Register July 1895–July 1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1896), 356. 100 National Education Association of the United States, Report of the Committee of Fifteen on Elementary Education (New York: National Education Association and The American Book Co., 1895). 101 Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958 (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004), 54. 102 John Dewey to Frank Manny, 16 March 1896, Correspondence, 00519. 103 Katherine Camp to family, n.d., Box 10, Camp Family Collection (891), Division

of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Soon after Mitchel left the Dewey School, Parker hired her to teach at the Chicago Normal School, a decision that prompted the Chicago Board of Education to complain that he was offering a post to his friend (Chicago Tribune, 15 October, 1897), 7.

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third year, Dewey declared, “The period of experimentation is practically at an end.”104 There were reasons for his confidence. First, Mayhew and Edwards observed in their history of the school that it was owed to the “combined experimental efforts of trained specialists”105 who were college-trained content area experts, not, for the most part, trained teachers like Mitchell. Second, Dewey’s desire to have a building suitable for educational experiments, similar to a physics or chemistry laboratory, was finally met in 1898.106 After moving the school three times in the first two-and-a-half years, he located a house to rent near the university (see Fig. 2.1). The house was grand, with twenty-three rooms, three bathrooms, a stable (initially used for carpentry and gym), and “every other convenience known to modern architecture.”107 Mayhew and Edwards noted it had the added advantage of being “sufficiently like the children’s own homes to give a sense of familiarity to their first away-from-home experience.”108 The move coincided with the opening of the school’s kindergarten, which enrolled eight children aged four to five gathered in the living room, which was to be their classroom.109 Because the experiment needed to have a sufficient number of participants across a range of ages to test Dewey’s theory, a third reason for the school’s success was that parents supported the school by sending their children. By 1898–1899, there was a group of eight-year-old children who had been in the school for three years. Returning children were familiar with the methods and were better able to make use of the environment and engage with the experiment. Faced with rising costs for teachers and materials, more students, and thus more fees, also placed the school in a better financial position. Because, as Kliebard described, “the organizational features of [a] school are often controlling factors in what gets taught,”110 Dewey

104 John Dewey, “University Elementary School, Report for Year 1898–99,” in The President’s Report (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1899), 197. 105 Mayhew and Edwards, The Dewey School, vi. 106 John Dewey, “The University School,” The University [of Chicago] Record 1, no.

32 (6 October 1896): 1. 107 Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 April 1898, 10. 108 Mayhew and Edwards, The Dewey School, 56. 109 John Dewey, “University Elementary School, Report for the Year 1897–98,” 232. 110 Kliebard, Struggle for American Curriculum, 74.

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Fig. 2.1 School children during recreation at the Dewey Laboratory School in Ellis Ave. house. The stable used as gymnasium and carpentry shop is on the left (Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

attended to his school’s organisation (e.g. the way children were grouped, the qualifications of teachers, the approach to planning and student assessment). Dewey wanted teachers to work with small groups of children of approximately the same age to maintain laboratory conditions.111 He used the term groups to refer to classes or grades. The number of groups increased over the years as enrolment increased. By 1898–1899, the school’s eighty-two students were organised into eleven groups. Groups 1 and 2 (for children aged three to five) comprised the “sub-primary department,” also called the kindergarten, which was new that year.

111 John Dewey, School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899), 128.

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Instruction for groups 3–11 (aged six to fifteen) was organised according to departments (e.g. textiles, history, science). The school followed a year-long programme of study, with ideas for units and lessons worked out by teachers in weekly meetings. The programme was organised as discipline-based inquiries in relation to general “educational ideas” and in consideration of children’s experience. General ideas were sustained for the year (e.g. “the relation of a child’s life to heat as a form of energy”). Weekly plans were then developed around specific ideas (e.g. “heat as furnishing warmth in a house”) with specific lessons within subjects (e.g. a study of fossils and coal in geology).112 Teachers met separately with department colleagues (though some departments had a single teacher).113 Teachers’ plans, along with their assessments of the groups’ progress recorded in structured “work reports” that detailed the subject matter, learning objectives, and teaching approach, were the main data for Dewey’s experiment.114 They were also a bureaucratic element similar to Herbartian-type lesson plans common in many schools and a signal that the laboratory was evolving its dual purpose: children’s learning and educational experiment. The school organised a homeroom system for students to start their day with an assigned “group teacher” before shifting from room to room for different subjects. The “home room” idea would become common in large secondary schools in the twentieth century as a guidance strategy in which “the student himself becomes the subject studied, worked with, and learned about.”115 Homeroom teachers at the laboratory school reviewed the day’s plans with students before they were dispersed for their lessons. Group teachers met together every two weeks to coordinate lessons and discuss individual children, and they were mainly responsible

112 “School Plan and Notes, No. 1,” The University Record (16 October 1896). 113 Daily Administration, Autumn 1899, The University of Chicago, Laboratory

Schools, Work Reports, Box 2, Folder 2, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library; Teacher’s Circular No. 1, 1899, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers, Box 4, c. 1 [previously: MG 10: Series 1, Vol. 12, Milbank Memorial Library Special Collections] Cornell University Library. 114 “Scheme for Reports,” October 1898, The University of Chicago, Laboratory Schools, Work Reports, Box 1, Folder 2, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library. 115 Harry C. McKown, Home Room Guidance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946), 22.

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Table 2.1 Timetable: children six to seven years-1898

9:00–9:30

9:30–10:00

10:00–10:30 10:30–11:00 11:00–11:30

Monday

Tuesday

Chorus with other groups

Gym

Wednesday

Science (could be outdoors, e.g. garden) Manual Domestic Handwork training in science connected shop (cooking) with science Social occupations and history Science Science Sewing and weaving Games and Games and Music handwork handwork

Thursday

Friday

Lesson not listed

Science

Drawing

Drawing

Science

Sewing and weaving Games and handwork for 30 min. and luncheon, one hour, are both listed for this period

Luncheon in large dining hall

for communicating with parents. The youngest students, those in subprimary class, remained with their teacher in their rooms for the day; specialised teachers in art, music, and math occasionally came to their class to give lessons. Table 2.1 shows the timetable for the six- and seven-year-olds.116 A departmental organisation with specialised classrooms and teachers was common in secondary schools but not elementary schools, and the system was not needed at the laboratory school at the start when there were few groups. Alice Dewey recalled that when the system was implemented a few years later, parents were firmly against it. However, John 116 “The University Elementary School,” The University Record 3, no. 30 (21 October 1898), 185. The timetable is discussed in detail in “School Record, Notes, and Plan, No. 9,” The University of Chicago School (17 December 1896), Series I, Box 1, Volume 11, Katherine Camp Mayhew Collection (6561), originally held at Teachers College now held at Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. In the 1896 scheme, there were longer periods planned for gymnasium and sewing. However, later reports described 30 min for sewing. Older groups were more likely to have longer (45to 60-minute) lessons or extended time for special projects. See “School Record, Notes, and Plan, No. 13,” The University of Chicago School, 3 February 1897.

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Dewey and the teachers believed it was better for children to shift from class to class and be taught by subject experts than to remain in a single classroom with “one mothering teacher” with the chance that she might present incorrect information due to her unfamiliarity with the content.117 The departmental organisation was supported by an elaborate system to manage students’ movements. A “captain” was appointed for each group who was responsible for ensuring, by signalling with a gong, that its members successfully moved from one lesson to the next throughout the school; children were directed to go up one staircase and down another; the daily plans were posted in the hallway for all to see and also “pinned” to the captain for the information of their specialist teacher when they arrived at their classroom. At the end of each lesson, teachers helped the group create a report on their work, which was dictated to the teacher or written by the students, depending on their abilities. Afterwards, teachers prepared a typed version of the report to the group for them to review and revise in subsequent meetings. The entire programme was planned to be correlated across subject areas. However, as one visitor noted, this was “not made a fetish,” and lessons included a mix of correlated and other studies. In one week in April 1899, for example, group 3 (the six- and seven-year-olds) had lessons with six different teachers. While the focus was gardening, the work was varied: Students had a math drill, planted seeds, read the names of the seeds their teacher had written on the blackboard, made labels for the seeds in the shop, made a loom and tried weaving (“some made a failure of it and some did it all right” noted their teacher), studied mines and quarries and made a model of a quarry in the sandbox, learned about postal delivery and made mailboxes, and created a bas relief of a tulip.118 All of this occurred over five days in the three hours before noon: Groups 1–5 attended school in the morning only. An afternoon session for other groups ran for one hour, from 1:15 to 2:15 p.m., leaving teachers planning time at the end of the day.119

117 Alice Chipman Dewey, “The University Elementary School,” Box 12(2), Katherine Camp Mayhew Collection (6561), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. 118 “Here is a Novel School,” The Sunday Chronicle (Chicago), 15 April 1900; The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Work Reports, 13 April 1900, Box 2, Folder 29, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library. 119 “The University Elementary School, General Information,” The University Record 2, no. 38 (17 December 1897).

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Dewey had been keen for inquiry learning to include firsthand experiences in nature. In their history of the school, Mayhew and Camp noted that excursions were frequent, and this was the case in the first year. In 1896–1897, students visited a farm, the Walker Museum on the University of Chicago Campus, and quarries on two occasions, and they had ninety-minute visits to the Field Museum each week for several months. By contrast, there were just two excursions in 1898–1899: one to the Walker Museum and the other to a cotton mill in a nearby suburb.120 Although the change in the frequency of excursions is not explained, it may have been due to the larger number of students and the more commodious school facilities. The grounds of the house on Ellis Avenue covered an entire city block and were heavily used for lessons out of doors, particularly in the spring. In April 1899, students gardened, made tents from small sticks in the style of a wigwam, fired clay dishes in a kiln they had made, and had art lessons. On one occasion outdoors, children in group 2 drew a cow they had observed “tethered in the lot near.”121 The photograph in Fig. 2.2, taken in the same period, shows a drawing lesson with the Ellis Avenue house in the background.

How Dewey Reimagined the Child Dewey was among those educators espousing new forms and philosophies of education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; many others are described in this volume. For some, including Dewey, the aim was to bring about a new era by improving societies that they believed had eroded through the nineteenth-century shift from familybased production to industrialisation. Proponents of the new education in Europe and North America believed society could be improved by applying the latest scientific thinking from allied disciplines—mainly psychology and medicine—to education. They blamed what they called old ideas for blocking progress towards social improvements, and they typically described old education in entirely negative terms. Dewey, for

120 The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Work Reports, Box 1, Folder 5, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library; The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Work Reports, 13 April 1900, Box 1, Folder 26, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library. 121 The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Work Reports, Group II, 21 April 1899, Box 1, Folder 25, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library.

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Fig. 2.2 Open-air drawing class with the Ellis Ave house in the background. The school playground with seesaw can be seen to the left of the house (Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

example, portrayed it as marked by passive attitudes, uniform curricula and methods, and a “mechanical massing of children.”122 Ideas of the new education were based on new ideas of the child. The problem with the old education, as Dewey elaborated, was that knowledge and understanding of the subject matter were emphasised, placing “the center of gravity … outside the child.”123 In the new, where the holistic development of the personality was paramount, “the child becomes the sun about which the appliances of education revolve; he is the center about which they are organized.”124 In the new education 122 Dewey, School and Society, 35. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid.

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enacted at the Dewey School, teachers engaged children in meaningful learning experiences based on activities such as cooking, carpentry, and gardening. Learning via occupations was particularly important for children in cities who were growing up cut off from the opportunities to participate in family life that might have connected them to such productive activity. Schools based on new education principles were therefore needed for children to learn through “directed living” in a “miniature community, an embryonic society” within a classroom family.125 New ideas of education were coupled with images of the child as agents in their development of “the habits of inquiry” as a means to “educate for democracy.”126 For Dewey, children were future citizens. Their participation in the social world of home and school was education for citizenship through the development of habits of industry, discipline, and social responsibility. With democratic citizenship as the aim, Dewey developed and tested his theory of inquiry-based learning. As a genetic psychologist, Dewey believed “intelligent activity begins with biological activity” through the interaction of the organism (the child) and its environment (the home or school).127 Thus, his central research question was how to arrange the stimuli (people, programme, materials, and relations) for the child to interact with so as “to further consecutive and orderly growth.”128 Nevertheless, while Dewey was influenced by a genetic approach, he was critical of psychologists such as William Preyer who portrayed children’s growth as compartmentalised into developmental “pigeonholes.”129 Dewey viewed development as

125 Dewey, School and Society, 15. 126 Thomas Fallace, “The Mind at Every Stage Has Its Own Logic: John Dewey as

a Genetic Psychologist,” Educational Theory 60, no. 2 (2010): 129–46; James Scott Johnston, Inquiry and Education: John Dewey and the Quest for Democracy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 192. 127 Edward Seltzer, “A Comparison Between John Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry and Jean Piaget’s Genetic Analysis of Intelligence,” The Journal of Genetic Psychology 130, no. 2 (1977): 324. 128 “The University Elementary School, General Outline of Scheme of Work,” The University Record (30 December 1898). 129 John Dewey, “Principles of Mental Development,” 178. Also see Trevor Pearce, “The Origins and Development of the Idea of Organism-Environment Interaction,” in Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences, ed. Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins, and Trevor Pearce (New York: Springer, 2014).

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continuous and integrated, matching the way he believed children experienced the world and forming the basis for his stages of infant play, described earlier in this chapter.130 Dewey drew on teachers’ and children’s experiences in the experimental school to develop his ideas about older children’s learning. By 1898, he had identified three stages of inquiry learning. The stages were related to age but not explained as functions of specific developmental processes, referring mainly to the increased differentiation of subject matter over time.131 Learning in stage 1 (aged four to eight-anda-half) focused on connecting school with home life and centred on social rather than intellectual activity. The techniques of handwork and science were undeveloped, and children did not care to learn them. Learning in stage 2 (aged eight to ten) focused on skills such as reading, writing, and numeracy and developing correct technical methods for undertaking work. In stage 3 (aged ten to thirteen), children applied their developed inquiry learning skills to the study of particular problems. Whereas learning in stages 1 and 2 was correlated (e.g. history and science were integrated), learning in stage 3 was differentiated (e.g. inquiries in history or science were treated as distinct). The child in this scheme was thus active in its own growth, which was considered to be the result of biological and social processes. As a biogenetic approach, it was underpinned by recapitulation theory, in which each child’s growth and development repeated the evolution of the species. Cultural recapitulation was called culture-epoch theory when it was applied to educational contexts by followers of the German educator Johann Friedrich Herbart. For Dewey, who was influenced by Herbart, as were many nineteenth-century educators, this meant a cultural recapitulation in which children progressed from “primitive” towards higher abilities.132 Dewey used the theory as the framework for the history and social studies programmes at the school which were pursued practically through occupations. As Dewey’s colleague George Herbert Mead wrote in his essay on play and education, “The problem of educating the child 130 John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902), 10. 131 “The University Elementary School, General Outline of Scheme of Work,” The University Record (30 December 1898). 132 John Dewey, Lecture XX, Lectures in the Philosophy of Education: 1899 (New York: Random House, 1966).

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is almost as large as that of accomplishing the full development of society, representing an earlier stage in the accomplishment of the latter.”133 The laboratory school teachers’ perceptions of the children at the school showed a mix of Dewey’s theory of inquiry with more general ideas about pedagogy and child development. In 1899, teachers completed a questionnaire in which they identified children’s behaviours in five areas: manifestations of self-consciousness; communication; and interests in objects, investigation, and form. Self-consciousness was conceptualised in child psychology of the time as self-awareness brought about as a function of ego and linked to self-regulation.134 The group 4 (aged seven) teacher’s reports on children’s self-consciousness centred on their ability and willingness to engage in their lessons. One child was observed to possess “little power of attention”; some others (boys) “occasionally try to be ‘smart’” while most were judged to be “ready to attempt almost anything asked of them.”135 Consistent with stage 2 inquiry learning, the children in group 4 showed strong interest in directly handling objects rather than talking about them and had only a mild interest in investigation unless it was social in nature. Most favoured “direct” ways of communication, for example, through physical contact or simply taking what they wanted from others (e.g. grabbing).

How Dewey Reimagined the Teacher In Dewey’s view, the teacher’s role was to mediate a child’s experience and the subject matter. While he wrote little that was specific about pedagogy, he was certain that teachers were central to inquiry learning. In his 1902 pamphlet The Child and the Curriculum, he explained that the child and curriculum were in relation rather than opposition (i.e. child vs. curriculum) to one another.136 The teacher is concerned with subject matter “as representing a given stage and phase of the development of

133 George Herbert Mead, “The Relation of Play to Education,” The University Record 1, no. 8 (22 May 1896): 144. 134 William Preyer’s child psychology textbook, Mental Development in the Child (D. Appleton and Co., 1897) included an entire chapter on self-consciousness. 135 “Child Study,” Scrapbook, Box 2, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers, Edwards Family Papers, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. 136 John Dewey, Child and Curriculum.

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experience.”137 The teacher psychologises the subject matter, by which Dewey meant she transforms it by developing it “within the range of and scope of the child’s life.”138 To achieve this, the teacher establishes “what there is in the child’s present that is usable with reference to it; how such elements are to be used; how his own knowledge of the subject-matter may assist in interpreting the child’s needs and doings, and determines the medium in which the child should be placed in order that his growth may be properly directed.”139 The teachers’ work is supported by the course of study, which enables them “to determine the environment of the child, and thus by indirection to direct. … It says to the teacher: Such and such are the capacities, the fulfilments, in truth and beauty and behavior, open to these children.”140 In establishing conditions for learning based on what they know about their subject and the child’s existing experience, teachers should consider children’s interests, which Dewey also described as impulses and desires: “The interest in conversation or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in making things, or construction; and in artistic expression—we may say they are the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child.”141 Teachers then frame their lesson around these interests, for example, by asking questions or making suggestions to support interest in communication, which would also support interest in inquiry, and so on. Dewey used “interest” in another way to refer to the attitude towards subject matter as a starting point to learning rather than an end in itself. As he explained, interests are not meant to be the subject matter for study; rather, they should be made “the leverage to move the child to the desired end.”142 This point is often misinterpreted as a call for teachers to identify children’s individual interests and plan learning on these topics. Teachers therefore needed to have in-depth knowledge of subject matter, individual children, and child development ideas. To apply culture-epoch theory in educational settings, teachers needed knowledge 137 Dewey, Child and Curriculum, 30. 138 Dewey, Child and Curriculum, 38. 139 Dewey, Child and Curriculum, 30. 140 Dewey, Child and Curriculum, 40. 141 Dewey, School and Society, 61. 142 John Dewey, Lecture XIV, Lectures, 140.

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of child development, which was imagined to correspond to the history of the human race. As Dewey described, teachers needed to speed this process up by using “short cuts” as a “point of economy,” taking care to prevent the child from spending too much time on “periods of civilization which are, relatively speaking, too low, which are not of greatest importance with reference to his permanent interests.”143 Dewey believed that teaching and research were connected activities and that teachers required an “intellectual thoroughness,” by which he meant taking responsibility for thinking and actions. He also identified “flexible intellectual interest,”144 or open-mindedness, as an essential quality for teachers, who, Doris Santoro explains, “will look for examples of intelligence, thinking, and interest that may differ from their own or what they understand intelligence, thinking, and interest to be.”145 Dewey wanted his teachers to work as researchers in a way similar to scientists. Regarding the school as laboratory, he explained, “Like any such laboratory it has two main purposes: (1) to exhibit, test, verify and criticize theoretical statements and principles; (2) to add to the sum of facts and principles in its special line.”146 He was convinced that “scientific recommendations could only be assessed by being applied in practice and [he] saw the teacher as a research worker testing out educational theory.”147 However, some of Dewey’s colleagues at the University of Chicago disagreed with his view of his teachers as researchers and, by extension, his idea that the school was a laboratory on the same footing as one in the physics or chemistry departments.148 Their opposition came to a head when a committee that was formed to publish research papers commemorating the University of Chicago’s ten-year anniversary in 1902 refused to include contributions by the laboratory school teachers. In the approach common at the time, complaints of all sorts went right to 143 John Dewey, Lecture XX, Lectures, 202. 144 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of

Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 210–11. 145 Doris Santoro, “Method: Intelligent Engagement with Subject Matter,” in John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook, ed. L. J. Waks and A. R. English (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 122. 146 John Dewey, “The University School,” 444. 147 Martyn Hammersley, “On the Teacher as Researcher,” Educational Action Research

1, no. 3 (1993): 425. 148 John Dewey to William Rainey Harper, 7 March 1902, Correspondence, 00766.

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the university president. The committee chair, classics professor Edward Capps, wrote to Harper, “They are mainly teachers of children, not investigators in psychology and pedagogy. If they gather valuable data for scientific work, it is for the trained investigator to use.”149 Capps argued that their proper classification was as laboratory technicians, making their work similar to “the person who counts the pigeons in Zoology.”150 He noted that he did not mean this as criticism, because “able teachers are good observers.”151 In the end, the laboratory school teachers’ contributions were not included in the 1903 decennial publication.

The Dewey School’s Ending and Its Afterlife The period from 1900 to the school’s end in 1904 was a time of turmoil for the Dewey School. In 1899, Chicago philanthropist Anita Blaine created a private school of teacher education called the Chicago Institute, headed by Frank Wayland Parker, whom she had recruited from the Chicago Normal School.152 The institute included a practice school, and Parker brought along many of his teachers from the normal school, including Clara Mitchell, who had returned to her position as a critic teacher in the practice school. University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper convinced Blaine to bring the institute into the university. From 1901, there were two elementary schools: the Dewey School, which was renamed the Laboratory of the Department of Education, and the Francis W. Parker School at the School of Education, which was the new name of the institute. Dewey resisted pressure to merge his school with Parker’s, and with financial support from his school’s parents, he was able to convince Harper to continue the laboratory school. In June 1901, Dewey appointed his wife, Alice Dewey, as principal. Following Parker’s death in 1902, Harper appointed John Dewey head of the School of Education, while Dewey also continued as head of the Department of Education. The next year Dewey merged the two elementary schools, with Alice Dewey as principal. Teachers’ complaints about Alice Dewey, 149 Edward Capps to William Rainey Harper, 11 November 1902, Correspondence, 06411. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 152 The Chicago Board of Education took over the Cook County Normal School in 1896, renaming it Chicago Normal School.

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which included her firing of Clara Mitchell and other Parker School staff, caused Harper to force her resignation, triggering John Dewey’s move to the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University in 1904.153 The laboratory school’s experimental work, however, had ended several years before the school closed: Dewey had reported on its contributions to research in his book The School and Society in 1899 and in a series of articles on its methods written by the school’s teachers that he edited and published in the Elementary School Record in 1900. The enduring popularity of both publications was substantial and contributed to the spread of a “Deweyan approach” to education. The School and Society became a bestseller for a scholarly book and was reprinted many times and in different versions over a period of decades.154 While the issues of the Elementary School Record on the Dewey School soon went out of print, they were republished in England and given a new life by education professor Joseph John Findlay in 1906. Findlay’s effort shows how ideas about the experiment were transferred outside the USA at a time when they were not well known internationally. However, as Kevin Brehony described, Dewey’s ideas had a minimal impact on British education, with the notable exception of Susan Isaacs’ work at the private Malting House School, described in Chapter 5.155 There was a further effort to spread the word about Dewey’s experiment in England in 1913, when the Froebel Society reprinted the Elementary School Record articles from 1900 pertaining to the youngest classes in a volume titled The “Dewey” School, and again in 1929 in a revised edition including all classes and with an introduction by teacher Janet E. Payne. The 1929 version coincided with British Froebel teachers’ burgeoning interest in the project method, an approach popularised by Dewey’s former student, professor of education William Kilpatrick, at Teachers

153 Michael Knoll, “John Dewey as Administrator: The Inglorious End of the Laboratory School in Chicago,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 47, no. 2 (2015), 203–52. 154 Noah W. Sobe, “Illustrating American Progressive Education: The Cover Illustration of John Dewey’s 1899 School and Society,” in Images of Education: Cultuuroverdracht in Historisch Perspectief , ed. Hilda Amsing, Nelleke Bakker, Mineke van Essen and Sanne Parlevliet (Groningen, The Netherlands: Uitgeverij Passage, 2018), 141–54. 155 Kevin J. Brehony, “An ‘Undeniable’ and ‘Disastrous’ Influence? Dewey and English Education 1895–1939,” Oxford Review of Education 23, no. 4 (1997): 427–45.

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College, Columbia University.156 Payne wrote, “The Elementary School Record was published nearly thirty years ago, but the work described might have been planned today for the most modern school.”157 Yet, again, as Brehony pointed out, “the influence of Dewey’s ideas on English schooling” through these and other efforts “has been greatly exaggerated.”158 Dewey’s influence on public schooling in the USA was similarly slight. Dewey never planned for his curriculum experiment to be replicated. He wrote that “while it does not aim to be impractical, it does not aim primarily to be of such a character as to be immediately capable of translation into the public school.”159 What Dewey called the “machinery” of administration and instruction—what historians Tyack and Tobin called the “grammar of schooling”160 —was a largely hidden and unexamined governing structure that resisted change and ensured its own continued existence. George Pliny Brown, president of the Indiana State Normal School, who visited the Dewey School in 1897, was impressed by what he saw but cautioned that however interesting the approach was, it had no relevance for public schools. He concluded that the Dewey School “is not a school in the prevailing meaning of the term. It is an educational experiment station of a great university.”161 For Brown, the salient features of a laboratory were true for the Dewey School: “It seeks to discover new truth” through testing of theory, theory development, and exploring new educational practices; it should be small in scale with few students but many teachers; it should not aim to be either practical or 156 Many educators have advocated teaching through projects. The project method associated with Kilpatrick originated with his colleague at Columbia, David Snedden. See Walter Drost, David Snedden and Education for Social Efficiency (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). 157 The Froebel Society, The “Dewey” School. Reprinted from The Elementary School Record, Rev. ed., 1900 (London: The Froebel Society, 1929). 158 Brehony, “An ‘Undeniable’ and ‘Disastrous’ Influence?”, 429. 159 John Dewey, “The University School,” The University Record 1, no. 32 (1896):

418. 160 John Dewey, The Educational Situation, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904), 22; David Tyack and William Tobin, “The ‘Grammar’ of Schooling: Why Has It Been so Hard to Change?” American Educational Research Journal 31, no. 3 (1994): 453–79. 161 George P. Brown, “Dr. Dewey’s Educational Experiment,” Public School Journal 16 (1897): 536.

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replicable.162 Brown put particular emphasis on the last point: It was not meant to be a model to be replicated elsewhere, in the same way that an “agricultural experiment station … will not be a farm in the farmer’s sense of the word.”163 Brown grimly warned that if anyone were to attempt to replicate it they “would probably meet with dismal and deserved failure”164 —the school was not to be a school in the teacher’s sense of the word. According to Herbert Kliebard, “the paradox of John Dewey’s reputation is that, although he gained worldwide recognition during his own lifetime and has unquestionably earned a place in the panoply of the world’s great educators, his actual influence on the schools of the nation has been both seriously overestimated and grossly distorted.”165 There is simply no basis for claims such as the one made in a history of progressive education that “Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago became a model emulated throughout the country.”166 While the Dewey School’s influence on schools that were not experimental was limited, its impact on academia and ideas about schooling— and, in particular, on critiques of traditional approaches to education— was significant. The experiment had a short life but a long afterlife through its contribution to discourse about teaching in American schools of education. David Labaree attributed this longevity to Dewey’s focus on the processes of teaching and learning, the low influence schools of education had on public school curriculum, and their subordinate status within universities.167 As David Waddington put it, with Dewey, schools of education had “one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century having been seen to play for the sad-sack home team.”168

162 Ibid. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid. 165 Kliebard, Struggle for American Curriculum, 27. 166 Brian Holmes, “The Origin and Development of Progressive Education in England,”

in Progressive Education Across the Continents, ed. Hermann Röhrs and Volker Lenhart (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995), 52. 167 David F. Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 168 David I. Waddington, “Schools of Education and John Dewey: The End of a Romance?” in The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education: Mapping the Decline

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Dewey’s ideas about children, teachers, and curriculum were a greater influence on practice in some small-scale private progressive schools in the 1920s and 1930s, a decade characterised by openness to educational experimentation, as described in the case studies in this book. Four California schools, described below, exemplified his ideas while focusing more on children’s self-expression than Dewey would have approved of. Thomas Popkewitz developed the metaphor of the travelling library, referring to the circulation of ideas and concepts, with Dewey in mind. As Dewey’s ideas were circulated, they met with other views to create local understandings of Deweyan education. This phenomenon is seen in the similar and intersecting histories of the four Deweyan schools in California operating in the 1920s and 1930s: two were in the San Francisco Bay area and two in Los Angeles. The schools highlight the role of interpersonal relationships in circulating ideas from the east coast to the west, the part played by the parents who founded the schools as a way to provide a progressive education for their children, the importance of connections with Teachers College, Columbia, and with Dewey himself, as well as connections across the schools. The John Dewey School in Berkeley operated from 1921 to 1924. It was small in scale and is now mostly forgotten, but it exemplified an outlook on the Deweyan teacher and child consistent with Cremin’s child-centred type of progressivism that was dominant in the 1920s, as opposed to social reformist progressivism that characterised the thinking behind Dewey’s laboratory school.169 It was established by Harriet Judd Eliel to provide a progressive education for her two young sons. Eliel went to New York with her children in 1920 to learn about new education at Teachers College, Columbia, enrolling them at the Lincoln School. When she returned, she recruited Teachers College graduate Marion Turner to direct a school in Berkeley. Turner, who had studied with Patty Smith Hill and William Kilpatrick, helped make the school an early adopter of the project method in California. As described earlier, Dewey’s idea of inquiry relied on teachers who were subject experts to guide children’s learning and provide them with scientific facts and truths. While the John Dewey School’s teachers followed this tenet, they also emphasised

and Its Consequences, ed. Andrew Colgan and Bruce Maxwell (New York: Routledge, 2020), 28. 169 Cremin, Transformation of the School.

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children’s free expression through art and play, prompting a newspaper reporter to conclude there were “no don’ts” and there was “no boss.”170 The John Dewey School closed when Eliel’s children grew too old for the programme, and Turner was appointed director of the Presidio Open Air School in San Francisco. The Presidio School was started in 1918 by the poet and painter Helen Salz, who had a school built for her children in her backyard.171 The first director was Marion Beaufait, an education student at the University of California, Berkeley, who had studied with Maria Montessori at her San Francisco training class in 1915. While the Presidio School’s teachers held a “project attitude,”172 the programme’s emphasis on self-directed learning, its basis in unfoldment theory, and aim of “perfecting of the human spirit” reflected Beaufait’s training with Montessori and her interest in theosophy rather than Deweyan ideas.173 Academic learning was not neglected: Teachers also taught “the 3 Rs” with a focus on mathematics, aiming for children to achieve “absolute mechanical accuracy in the combinations and a maximum of speed.”174 Turner brought a Deweyan flavour to the school with a focus on cooperative activity and democratic education, while continuing attention to academics. The school, which still operates, highlights its Deweyan foundation under Turner in its official history.175 The Progressive School of Los Angeles was established in 1927 by parents in the motion picture industry. Journalist Frank Mankiewicz was a Progressive School student for six years. He attributed the school’s connection to Dewey to the social class privilege and celebrity status of its founders:

170 “No Don’ts, No Boss in New Plan School,” Oakland Tribune, 18 September 1921, 5B. For Dewey’s conception of the role of problems in developing thinking, see John Dewey, How We Think (New York: D.C. Heath, 1910), especially Chapter 6. 171 Helen A. Salz, Sketches of an Improbable Ninety Years: Oral History Transcript, 1973–1975 (Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley, Regional Oral History Office). The Presidio Hill School continues to operate and to highlight its Deweyan foundations in its history. See Presidio Hill School, “History.” 172 “Presidio Open-Air School Fills Unique Place in City,” San Francisco Chronicle, 31 July 1921, 2. 173 E. Harrison, “The Individual Training System in Our School,” The Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, 30 March 1922, 4. 174 Marion Beaufait, as cited in Harrison, “The Individual Training System,” 4. 175 Presidio Hill School, “History.”

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When my mother and a group of her friends wanted to start a private school for their kids, they simply picked up the telephone and called the country’s leading educational authority, John Dewey. … So, they asked Dewey to come out to Los Angeles and put a school together. Alas, Mr. Dewey was nearly seventy and thought such a task … was beyond his physical capability, but he offered to help these nice ladies. Dewey had, it seems, some ex-students and even protégés in Los Angeles, and he volunteered to see if, together, they could come up with a faculty and a new school for “the group.”176

Dewey recommended his student Dr. Meredith Smith as the school’s director. Smith had come to Los Angeles from her position as education professor at the University of Pittsburgh and director of its experimental School of Childhood.177 She had recently completed her doctoral studies with Dewey at Teachers College. Her dissertation, Education and the Integration of Behavior, was one of the last Dewey supervised before he retired in 1930.178 It was based on physiological psychology and Dewey’s ideas of inquiry and occupations; it also reported on Smith’s five-year study of project work on a community theme at the School of Childhood. Smith explained the occupation-based project work in a way similar to Dewey’s explanation in School and Society in 1900. Namely, due to the separation of city life from industrial production in modern times, it “becomes the function of the school to give children an insight into the industrial processes that are essential to our civilization.”179 Also similar to Dewey’s ideas circa 1900, Smith used culture-epoch theory as the framework for project work, which was pursued through occupations.

176 Frank Mankiewicz with Joel L. Swerdlow, So As I Was Saying …: My Somewhat Eventful Life (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2016), 20. 177 “Advanced Type of School Formed,” The Los Angeles Times, 28 August 1927, 68; “Los Angeles New Idea in Teaching a Success,” The News-Herald (Franklin, PA), 15 August 1929, 4; “School Grows Rapidly,” The Los Angeles Times, 25 August 1929, 51; “New School to Abandon Traditions,” The Los Angeles Times, 22 August 1927, 32; Rosalind Shaffer, “Unique School Found Success,” The Los Angeles Times, 3 July 1928, 35, 36. 178 Meredith Smith, “Education and the Integration of Behavior,” PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, 1927. 179 Smith, “Education,” 90.

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The Progressive School was located at a former Hollywood estate and motion picture studio. It was described in a newspaper report as “Hollywood’s first independent educational laboratory.”180 Smith developed its programme as Deweyan with a focus on teaching via occupations: The school’s motto, “Learn by Doing,” was on a sign at the school’s entrance, with its designation as “A John Dewey School” written below.181 The children’s project work was elaborate. For a study of farming, the children toured a dairy farm, cultivated individual plots of land on the school grounds, each with a barn, tended to cows they had “sawed and carved out of wood and painted as Jerseys and Holsteins,” tanned an actual cowhide and made crafts from the leather, and designed and built an irrigation system.182 Formal teaching of the 3 Rs was also part of the school programme. Mankiewicz recalled that even as a first-grade student he needed to complete a fifty-question timed arithmetic quiz before moving to other activities. Smith left the Progressive School in 1930 to lead another school named for Dewey. The John Dewey School in Los Angeles was founded by a group of affluent parents and located in a Sunset Boulevard mansion. Another Teachers College graduate, Eleanore Field, took Smith’s place at the Progressive School. One of the John Dewey School’s founders was Helen Greeley, who had been a student at the University of Chicago laboratory school.183 Greeley believed her laboratory school experience gave her useful insights as a parent: “I was understood by my teachers. … I know what it means to be a child and guided from that premise. Instead of being forced into an adult imitation I was definitely allowed to be a child.”184 Dewey endorsed the Los Angeles school: He consented to its being named after him and gave a talk to the parents when he was in the city to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of California

180 Shaffer, “Unique School,” 24. 181 Frank Mankiewicz, So As I Was Saying, 20. 182 Shaffer, “Unique School,” 23. 183 “John Dewey School to Open Soon,” The Los Angeles Times, 31 August 1930, 30. 184 Helen Russell, Edwards Family Papers, File 44-5, Box 44, 1485, Carl A. Kroch

Library, Cornell University.

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at Los Angeles.185 While there, he also visited the Progressive School, in which he had played a part by recommending its director.186 Surprisingly, Dewey did not protest the child-centred focus and classist basis of the California Deweyan schools.187 Art education at the John Dewey School in Los Angeles followed the free-expression style of the Austrian teacher Franz Cižek,188 which Dewey had disparaged in a 1926 essay, claiming it left children “listless and finally bored, while there is an absence of cumulative, progressive development of power and of actual achievement in results.”189 Dewey criticised what he perceived was a trend in progressive education for child-led learning in the absence of teacher guidance, writing, “Now such a method is really stupid. For it attempts the impossible, which is always stupid; and it misconceives the conditions of independent thinking.”190 Yet, the work of teachers in Deweyan schools was complicated and often contradictory: It emphasised children’s self-expression and freedom alongside unobtrusive, even invisible, guidance and scrutiny. And, as noted, it sometimes included formal teaching of the 3 Rs. With reference to the cover illustration of the 1927 issue of The New Era described in Chapter 1, the throng of protesting babies were right to claim that “freedom through method” had not yet been achieved.

185 John Dewey to Louise Romig, 28–29 March 1930, Correspondence, 08230. 186 “Mind Educated through Handicraft,” The Los Angeles Times, 28 September 1930,

47. 187 R. B. Westbrook, “Schools for Industrial Democrats: The Social Origins of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education,” American Journal of Education 100, no. 4 (1992): 401–19. 188 “‘Cizek’ Classes Here,” The Los Angeles Times, 9 November 1930, 49. 189 John Dewey, “Individuality and Experience,” in The Collected Works of John Dewey,

the Later Works, Vol. 2: 1925–1927, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 55. 190 John Dewey, “Individuality and Experience,” 59.

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Bibliography Archival Sources Camp Family Collection. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Edwards Family Papers. Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. Elizabeth Harrison Papers. Archives and Special Collections, National Louis University, Chicago. Katherine Camp Mayhew Collection. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. University of Chicago, Laboratory Schools, Work Reports. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. University President’s Papers, 1889–1925. Special Collections, University of Chicago Library.

Print and Electronic Sources Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1910. Alling-Aber, Mary. An Experiment in Education. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897. Alling-Aber, Mary. Souls. Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1893. Barnes, Earl. “Methods of Studying Children.” In Studies in Education, edited by Earl Barnes, 5–14. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1897. Boyer, John W. The University of Chicago: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Brehony, Kevin J. “An ‘Undeniable’ and ‘Disastrous’ Influence? Dewey and English Education 1895–1939.” Oxford Review of Education 23, no. 4 (1997): 427–45. Brown, George P. “Dr. Dewey’s Educational Experiment.” Public School Journal 16 (1897): 533–37. Butler, Leslie A. The Michigan Schoolmasters’ Club: A Story of the First Seven Decades. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958. Cahan, Emily D. “John Dewey and Human Development.” Developmental Psychology 28 (1991): 205–14. Cairns, Robert B., and Beverley D. Cairns. “The Making of Developmental Psychology.” Chapter 3 in Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 1, edited by Richard M. Lerner. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006. Campbell, Jack K. Colonel Francis W. Parker: The Children’s Crusader. New York: Teachers College Press, 1967. Carter, Sarah Anne. Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

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“Child Study Congress.” The University [of Chicago] Record 1, no. 9 (1896): 165–67. Cooke, Flora J. “The History of the Morning Exercise.” Francis W. Parker School Year Book 2 (June 1913): 1–3. Course of Study of the Cook County Normal School. Chicago: J. M. W. Jones, 1893. Cremin, Lawrence A. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962. Cruikshank, Kathleen. “In Dewey’s Shadow: Julia Bulkley and the University of Chicago Department of Pedagogy, 1895–1900.” History of Education Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1998): 373–406. Cunningham, Craig A., David Granger, Jane Fowler Morse, Barbara Stengel, and Terri Wilson. “Dewey, Women, and Weirdoes, or, the Potential Rewards for Scholars Who Dialogue Across Difference.” Education and Culture 23, no. 2 (2007): 27–62. Dewey, John. “A Pedagogical Experiment.” Kindergarten Magazine 8 (June 1896): 739–41. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Dewey, John. How We Think. New York: D.C. Heath, 1910. Dewey, John. “Individuality and Experience.” In The Collected Works of John Dewey, the Later Works, Vol. 2: 1925–1927, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 55–61. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. Lectures in the Philosophy of Education: 1899. New York: Random House, 1966. Dewey, John. “Principles of Mental Development as Illustrated in Early Infancy.” In The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. Electronic edition. First published in Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study 4 (1899): 65– 83. Dewey, John. Psychology. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1887. Dewey, John. School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899. Dewey, John. The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902. Dewey, John. The Educational Situation. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904. Dewey, John. “The University School.” The University Record 1, no. 32 (6 October 1896): 417–22. Dewey, John. “University Elementary School, Report for Year 1897–98.” In The President’s Report. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1898. Dewey, John. “University Elementary School, Report for Year 1898–99.” In The President’s Report. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899.

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Drost, Walter. David Snedden and Education for Social Efficiency. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Durst, Anne. Women Educators in the Progressive Era: The Women Behind Dewey’s Laboratory School. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Dyehouse, Jeremiah, and Krysten Manke. “The Philosopher as Parent: John Dewey’s Observations of His Children’s Language Development and the Development of His Thinking about Communication.” Education and Culture 33, no. 1 (2017): 18–34. Dykhuizen, George. “John Dewey and the University of Michigan.” Journal of the History of Ideas 23, no. 4 (1962): 513–44. Dykhuizen, George. “John Dewey at Johns Hopkins, 1882–1884.” Journal of the History of Ideas 22, no. 1 (1961): 103–16. Fallace, Thomas D. Race and the Origins of Progressive Education, 1880–1929. New York: Teachers College Press, 2015. Fallace, Thomas. “Repeating the Race Experience: John Dewey and the History Curriculum at the University of Chicago Laboratory School.” Curriculum Inquiry 39, no. 3 (2009): 381–405. Fallace, Thomas. “The Mind at Every Stage Has Its Own Logic: John Dewey as a Genetic Psychologist.” Educational Theory 60, no. 2 (2010): 129–46. Fallace, Thomas, and Victoria Fantozzi. “The Dewey School as Triumph, Tragedy, and Misunderstood: Exploring the Myths and Historiography of the University of Chicago Laboratory School.” Teachers College Record 119, no. 2 (2017): 1–32. Gough, Robert J. “High School Inspection by the University of Wisconsin, 1877–1931.” History of Education Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2010): 263–97. Hammersley, Martyn. “On the Teacher as Researcher.” Educational Action Research 1, no. 3 (1993): 425–45. Harris, William T. “Correlation, Concentration, Coordination, and Unification.” Journal of Education 41, no. 17, 279–80. Hickman, Larry A. “Introduction.” In The Correspondence of John Dewey, Vol. 1 [Electronic resource on CD-ROM]. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004. Holmes, Brian. “The Origin and Development of Progressive Education in England.” In Progressive Education Across the Continents, edited by Hermann Röhrs and Volker Lenhart, 51–70. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995. Johnston, James Scott. Inquiry and Education: John Dewey and the Quest for Democracy. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Katz, Michael B. Reconstructing American Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Kellum, Ronald. “The Influence of Francis Wayland Parker’s Pedagogy on the Pedagogy of John Dewey.” Journal of Thought 18, no. 1 (1983): 77–91.

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Kingsbury, Forrest A. “A History of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago.” Psychological Bulletin 43, no. 3 (1946): 259–71. Kliebard, Herbert M. The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958. 3rd ed. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004. Knoll, Michael. “John Dewey as Administrator: The Inglorious End of the Laboratory School in Chicago.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 47, no. 2 (2015): 203–52. Kroepel, Gail L. “Flora J. Cooke and the Francis W. Parker School.” In Founding Mothers and Others, edited by Alan R. Sadovnik and Susan F. Semel, 125–45. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Labaree, David F. The Trouble with Ed Schools. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2006. Mankiewicz, Frank, with Joel L. Swerdlow. So As I Was Saying …: My Somewhat Eventful Life. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2016. Mayhew, Katherine Camp, and Anna Camp Edwards. The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago 1896–1903. Piscataway NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1965. McKown, Harry C. Home Room Guidance. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946. Mead, George Herbert. “The Relation of Play to Education.” The University [of Chicago] Record 1, no. 8 (22 May 1896): 140–45. National Education Association of the United States. Report of the Committee of Fifteen on Elementary Education. New York: National Education Association and The American Book Co., 1895. Parker, Francis W. “An Account of the Work of the Cook County and Chicago Normal School from 1883 to 1899.” The Elementary School Teacher and Course of Study 2, no. 10 (June 1902): 752–80. Parker, Francis W. Talks on Pedagogics: An Outline of the Theory of Concentration. New York: E.A. Kellogg & Co., 1895. Pearce, Trevor. “The Origins and Development of the Idea of OrganismEnvironment Interaction.” In Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences, edited by Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins, and Trevor Pearce, 13–32. New York: Springer, 2014. Phillips, D. C. “James, Dewey, and the Reflex Arc.” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 4 (1971): 555–68. Pillsbury, Walter B. “The Department of Psychology.” In The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey, Vol. 4, edited by Wilfred B. Shaw, 708–14. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1944. Presidio Hill School, “History.” https://www.presidiohill.org/about-us/history. Preyer, William. Mental Development in the Child. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1897. Residents of Hull House. Hull House Maps and Papers. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1895.

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Rockefeller, Stephen C. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Ronda, Bruce A. The Fate of Transcendentalism: Secularity, Materiality, and Human Flourishing. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Rossiter, Margaret W. “Doctorates for American Women, 1868–1907.” History of Education Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1982): 159–83. Salz, Helen A. Sketches of an Improbable Ninety Years: Oral History Transcript, 1973–1975. Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley, Regional Oral History Office. Santoro, Doris. “Method: Intelligent Engagement with Subject Matter.” In John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook, edited by Leonard J. Waks and Andrea R. English, 117–23. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Seltzer, Edward. “A Comparison between John Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry and Jean Piaget’s Genetic Analysis of Intelligence.” The Journal of Genetic Psychology 130, no. 2 (1977): 323–35. Smedley, Frederick W. “A Report on the Measurements of the Sensory and Motor Abilities of the Pupils of the Chicago University Primary School and the Pedagogical Value of Such Measurements.” Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study 2, no. 2 (1896): 85–95. Smith, Meredith. “Education and the Integration of Behavior.” PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, 1927. https://hdl.handle. net/2027/mdp.39015076601296. Sobe, Noah W. “Illustrating American Progressive Education: The Cover Illustration of John Dewey’s 1899 School and Society.” In Images of Education: Cultuuroverdracht in Historisch Perspectief , edited by Hilda Amsing, Nelleke Bakker, Mineke van Essen and Sanne Parlevliet, 141–54. Groningen, The Netherlands: Uitgeverij Passage, 2018. Stallones, Jared. “Struggle for the Soul of Dewey: Religion and Progressive Education.” American Educational History Journal 33, no. 1 (2006): 19–28. Steeples, Douglas, and David O. Whitten. Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois. Twenty-Second Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois, 1 July 1896–30 June 1898. Springfield, IL: Phillips Bros., State Printers, 1898. The Correspondence of John Dewey [Electronic resource on CD-ROM]. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004. The Froebel Society. The “Dewey” School. Reprinted from The Elementary School Record. Rev. ed., 1900. London: The Froebel Society, 1929. “The University Elementary School.” The University Record 3, no. 30 (21 October 1898), 185.

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“The University Elementary School, General Information.” The University Record 2, no. 38 (17 December 1897), 185. “The University Elementary School, General Outline of Scheme of Work.” The University Record 3, no. 40 (30 December 1898), 253–54. The University of Chicago. Annual Register 1892–1893. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1893. The University of Chicago. Annual Register July 1895–July 1896. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1896. The University of Chicago. Annual Register July 1906–July 1907 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1907. Thomas, Milton Halsey. A Bibliography of John Dewey 1882–1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939. Tyack, David, and William Tobin. “The ‘Grammar’ of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change?” American Educational Research Journal 31, no. 3 (1994): 453–79. Waddington, David I. “Uncovering Hegelian Connections: A New Look at Dewey’s Early Educational Ideas.” Education and Culture 26, no. 1 (2010): 67–81. Waddington, David I. “Schools of Education and John Dewey: The End of a Romance?” In The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education: Mapping the Decline and Its Consequences, edited by Andrew Colgan and Bruce Maxwell, 20 pp. New York: Routledge, 2020. Weiler, Kathleen. “The Historiography of Gender and Progressive Education in the United States.” Paedagogica Historica 42, nos. 1–2 (2006): 161–76. Westbrook, R. B. “Schools for Industrial Democrats: The Social Origins of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education.” American Journal of Education 100, no. 4 (1992): 401–19. Williams, Brian A. “Thought and Action: John Dewey at the University of Michigan.” Bentley Historical Bulletin 44 (1998): 1–31. Williams, Rudolph. The New Church and Chicago: A History. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Co., 1906. Young, Jacy L. “G. Stanley Hall, Child Study, and the American Public.” The Journal of Genetic Psychology 177, no. 6 (2016): 195–208.

CHAPTER 3

Caetano de Campos Kindergarten, Brazil

Educational innovation has been a central component of Brazilian political and cultural transformation over the last two hundred years, with radical political change accompanied by notable efforts in pedagogical expansion and experimentation. This was true after the Empire of Brazil won independence from Portugal in the 1820s and continued well after the monarchy was overthrown and the first republic was declared in 1889. During the decades-long transition from colony to empire to the declaration of the first Brazilian republic in 1889, generations of Brazilian leaders and intellectuals argued in favour of a system of mass education to eradicate ignorance and poverty in the country. For various reasons, such a system was a long time coming, and when its implementation was discussed during the first republic, it reflected the priorities and ideologies of the (then-declining) monarchy. With the overthrow of the monarchy in 1889, Brazilian scholars unsurprisingly called for innovation in education as a vehicle to advance republican ideals. Schooling and school were seen, by educationalists, scholars, and politicians as the foundations of the new republican society, with the power to overcome the imperial past and bring a luminous future. Between these visions of the past and the future lay educational experiments that sought to enact the transformation. This chapter presents a case study of one pioneering kindergarten in

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São Paulo and its affiliated teacher training institute, in an effort to understand the practical discourses1 built in between the grammar of schooling2 presented in teacher education in the 1890s, and the arrival of innovation discourses and practices through Froebelian pedagogy to Caetano de Campos Kindergarten (Jardim de Infância Caetano de Campos ) in order to promote republican ideals. In the period this chapter analyses—1896–1926—transnational networks connected Brazil with the world and enabled ideas to travel, to be adapted, to be translated, and to become, along with their authors, “indigenous foreigners.”3 Through the movement of these travelling ideas, a great kaleidoscope of educational philosophy and pedagogy was built in São Paulo in the manner captured by Doreen Massey’s poststructural spatial theory described in Chapter 1: namely that the space of school is continually under construction within relations and through objects; its multiplicity and coexistence are brought to life by material practices, and we can “imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far”.4 This chapter explores a “simultaneity of stories-so-far” that occurred when Caetano de Campos Kindergarten opened in São Paulo in 1897. The kindergarten came into being during a time when Brazil’s first kindergarten initiatives were few and were directed at the country’s high social classes. São Paulo state enjoyed a privileged economic position in Brazil due to its abundance of coffee plantations. It was a pioneer, in many senses, trying to achieve a republican way of educating its population creating new citizens for a new Brazil. The Caetano de Campos Kindergarten served a select group of children in São Paulo city, Brazil in its early years. The kindergarten operated in a majestic building for thirty-three years before it was demolished in the early 1940s.

1 Marc Depaepe et al., Order in Progress: Everyday Education Practice in Primary Schools —Belgium, 1880–1970 (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2000). 2 Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms 1880–1990 (New York: Longman, 1993). 3 Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education—An Introduction,” in Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Travelling of Pragmatism in Education, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), ix. 4 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005). See also Jonathan Murdoch, Poststructuralist Geography: A Guide to Relational Space (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2006), 9.

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The awareness that a grammar of schooling exists leads us to recognise that the daily life of a school is not as permeable as one might imagine and is sometimes much more rigid. In the case of the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten, the school’s teachers and technical staff constructed a pedagogical practice that mixed discourses present in their own training with the innovations that came from abroad as the fruit of visits to and information about kindergartens in Europe and the USA. As they incorporated these new discourses into the practices already established in primary school classrooms and even at the São Paulo Normal School, the teachers ended up creating entangled practices, or practices that in between the discourses, which were usually about innovations and the grammar of schooling that existed inside the São Paulo Normal School and its Model School, although kindergarten was something new for Brazilian education. Because our analysis in this chapter is based on materials that were used to inform teachers’ preparation and practice, it is necessary to underscore the assertion made by Marc Depaepe and colleagues that discourses about practice produced for teachers (by scholars, intellectuals, and other teachers) do not just present words from an abstract idea of classroom practice; rather, they were created from material practices through the methodologies used.5 Thus, taking a transnational perspective to explore an in-between Institutional/Pedagogical space, this chapter describes, analyses, and reimagines teaching in the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten from 1897 to 1926. The chapter is divided into three parts. In the first, we present the historical background that led to the kindergarten’s opening. To contextualise the education of the kindergarten’s teachers, we breathe life into the São Paulo Normal School—the normal school to which the kindergarten was attached. The second part of the chapter focuses on traces of the kindergarten’s pedagogical practices presented in a periodical produced by the school, as well as the teachers’ logbooks. Those materials help us to reconstruct teaching methodology and teacher education, and to reimagine teaching inside the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten. In the third part, we present our conclusions.

5 Depaepe et al., Order in Progress, 44–45.

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Reimagining Teacher Education for the Brazilian Republic After Brazil declared its independence in 1822, a series of debates arose regarding educating citizens according to the principles of the Enlightenment. At that time, Brazil did not have an established educational system. The economy was based mostly on agriculture, especially on coffee plantations. Slavery was at its peak, and for a long time the enslaved population was disregarded in any discussion about education. Slavery was abolished in 1888, several decades after the declaration of Brazil’s independence, and although scholars were beginning to discuss a liberal state, the liberation process was slow: A controlled transition ensured a supply of labourers for the plantations. Medical discourse of the day emphasised the need for education as a way to civilise citizens and eliminate illiteracy, which was considered a disease.6 Many well-known Brazilian scholars participated in the educational debates, which were enhanced by discussions from Europe and the USA. This situation inspired the idea that Brazilian education should mirror itself on methodology used mainly in Europe but also in the USA. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, various Brazilian politicians and scholars proposed laws with the intention to create a national educational system. Amid this set of clashes and debates, the Froebelian kindergarten gained space. The Leôncio Carvalho Reform, a federal legislation, no. 7.247, which passed on 19 April 1879, called for the creation of kindergartens for children aged three to seven years. The reform argued in favour of the need for education to broaden moral and hygienist development within Brazilian society. It was argued, that education and hygiene would not only end the country’s greatest sore, illiteracy, but would civilise the population.7 Although that Reform maintained compulsory primary education for children from 7 to 14, broad and unrestricted access to public education for children at that age did not happen. As a result, kindergarten creation was reduced to private entrepreneurship. Among the few educators who experimented with and

6 José G. Gondra, “Higienização da Infância no Brasil”, in José Gonçalves Gondra (org.) História, Infância e Escolarização (Rio de Janeiro: 7 letras, 2002), 110–33. 7 Dermeval Saviani, História das Idéias Pedagógicas no Brasil (Campinas: Autores Associados, 2007), 137.

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debated intensely with Brazilian society about the need for kindergartens, as well as their goals and purposes, was Joaquim José de Menezes Vieira. In 1875, Menezes Vieira, a former physician, set up Brazil’s first kindergarten at Colegio Menezes Vieira, a private school in Rio de Janeiro.8 This kindergarten was based on Johann Pestalozzi’s methodology and Friedrich Froebel’s and Marie Pape-Carpantier’s (1815–1878) materials. All the kindergarten furniture was made in Rio de Janeiro according to the models adopted in French nursery schools. While Menezes Vieira’s trips to Belgium, France, and Italy seem to have influenced the eclecticism present in his kindergarten, the programme incorporated practices circulated by others in the Brazilian educational community, such as the Pestalozzian intuitive method. Analete Schelbauer pointed out that although the intuitive method was not totally unknown in Brazil before 1870, it started to gain currency that year in Brazilian educational discourses and isolated initiatives.9 The Leôncio Carvalho Reform, which occurred after Menezes Vieira’s kindergarten opened, determined the adoption of the intuitive method, materialised in object lessons in the nation’s primary schools.10 Importantly, object lessons were adopted not as a methodological didactic procedure, but as a discipline. The main manual used by teachers was Norman A. Calkins’ Primary Object Lessons,11 translated by Rui Barbosa,12 and published in 1886. Along with this new methodology, and thanks to the intense trade in teaching materials which emerged in the second

8 For more about Menezes Vieira’s educational work, see Maria Helena Camara Bastos, Pro Patria Laboremus: Joaquim José de Menezes Vieira 1848–1897 (Bragança Paulista: EDUSF, 2002) and “Jardim de Crianças: O pionerismo do Dr. Menezes Vieira 1875– 1887,” in Educação da Infância Brasileira: 1875–1983, ed. Carlos Monarcha (Campinas: SP, Autores Associados, 2001), 31–80. 9 Analete R. Schelbauer, “A Constituição do Método de Ensino Intuitivo na Provincia de São Paulo 1870–1889,” PhD diss. (Universidade deSão Paulo, 2003), 81. 10 See Schelbauer, “A Constituição; Valderamrin, Estudando as Lições de Coisas.” 11 N. A. Calkins, Primary Object Lessons for a Graduated Course of Development: A

Manual for Teachers and Parents with Lessons for the Proper Training of the Faculties of Children (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1861). 12 An analysis of that book and its uses was made by Vera T. Valderamrin in Estudando as Lições de Coisas (Campinas: FAPESP/Autores Associados, 2004).

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half of the nineteenth century and spread through international exhibitions,13 many of the materials inside Menezes Vieira’s kindergarten classrooms were already circulating on Brazilian soil and were incorporated in Leôncio Carvalho’s proposals. Menezes Vieira thus was immersed in an intense movement of appropriation of practices, didactic materials, and knowledge circulating within Brazil and abroad. As a result of the intensive movement triggered by the Leôncio Carvalho Reform, and imbued with this same context, in 1883 the eminent Brazilian intellectual and politician Rui Barbosa analysed the Carvalho reform together with Thomaz do Bonfim Espindola and Ulysses M. Pereira Vianna of the Public Instruction Commission. Barbosa, as rapporteur, presented the conclusions of their study in the famous report Reforma do Ensino Primário, Secundário, e Superior (Reform of Primary, Secondary, and Higher Education).14 This work combined a study of the international scene with inferences for the national constitution of an educational system from kindergarten to higher education. The study was presented as the result of readings about kindergartens in Europe and the USA and the importance the institution for children’s education. The report sought to prove that kindergarten was necessary in a nation guided by principles of liberalism.15 To make this case, the author described the benefits kindergartens had brought to these countries, especially to the USA, which, according to the report, was the best place for kindergarten to grow and blossom.16 Because the report considered the American kindergarten to be the best model for Brazil’s future schools, it included information from the US Bureau of Education on the benefits

13 See Moysés Kuhlmann, Jr., As Grandes Festas Didáticas: A Educação Brasileira e as Exposições Internacionais 1862–1922 (Bragança Paulista: EDUSF, 2001). 14 For more about Rui Barbosa and the report, see Najla M. Mormul; Maria C. G. Machado, “Rui Barbosa e a Educação Brasileira: Os Pareceres de 1882,” Cadernos de História da Educação 12, no. 1 (January/June 2013). 15 Vera T. Valdemarin, O Liberalismo Demiurgo: Estudo Sobre a Reforma Educacional Projetada nos “Pareceres” de Rui Barbosa (São Paulo: Cultura Acadêmica, 2000). 16 Rui Barbosa, Obras Completas de Rui Barbosa: Reforma do Ensino Primário e Várias Instituições Complementares da Instrução Pública, Vol. 10, Tomo III (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Saúde, 1883).

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received by children who attended kindergarten.17 To justify the importance of kindergarten, the report also presented Froebel’s educational principles.18 Rui Barbosa’s report was emblematic of a shift in models for Brazilian education. Because Brazil was transitioning from empire to republic, attaining what was considered modernity was one of the most important objectives for policymakers. While Europe still played an important role in Brazilian cultural life, it was no longer a vital source of political and philosophical ideals. Brazilian scholars started looking to the USA as an ideal model where progress, liberty, and democracy fulfilled all the desires of a new world. Brazilians’ interest in the USA was apparent at all levels and correlated with US campaigns for pan-Americanism. Brazil’s second emperor Dom Pedro II visited the USA in 1876 to join President Ulysses S. Grant in opening the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. He spent two weeks in Philadelphia, where he contacted many distinguished personalities and emphasised the importance of commercial relations between Brazil and the USA.19 Since the end of the 1870s, the USA had been working with the idea of pan-Americanism20 in order to create a favourable environment to guide Latin American countries to prosper. Brazilians agreed that pan-Americanism would help Brazil become a modern nation concerned with civil rights, public health, and early childhood education. Until then, Brazil had not had a national educational system to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Consequently, Rui Barbosa’s arguments in defence of kindergarten did not result in national kindergartens because the provision of primary schools was a higher priority at that time.21 After the proclamation of the Republic in 1889, the aim of some of the educational reformers in São Paulo state, fruits of the discussions presented above, was to create public kindergartens. In 1896, São Paulo city established the 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.; see also Rui Barbosa, “Jardins de Creanças,” A Eschola Publica 1 (São Paulo, 15 December 1896): 341–62. 19 Moysés Kuhlmann, Jr., Infância e Educação Infantil: Uma Abordagem Histórica (Porto Alegre: Mediação, 1998), 210. 20 Ibid. 21 Moysés Kuhlmann, Jr., “A Educação Infantil no Século XIX,” in Histórias e Memorias da Educação no Brasil, Vol. 2, ed. Maria Stephanou and Maria Helena C. Bastos (Petropolis/RJ: Vozes, 2014).

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first public kindergarten in Brazil, the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten attached to the São Paulo Normal School.22 To understand how teaching was carried out in the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten, it is necessary to understand how teachers were educated at the São Paulo Normal School. The latter was founded in 1846—before Brazil became a republic—and for a long period it served as an epicentre of debates in São Paulo state about the formation of republican citizens.23 Its graduates included several scholars and intellectuals who actively influenced educational debates and policies, elaborating theses about social, educational, and cultural realities in Brazil.24 Some of those graduates occupied prominent posts in the government and established transnational networks connecting Brazil to Europe and especially to the USA. These connections, and the related circulation of materials, were influential in shaping relationships and modelling ideals about children, ways of teaching, and school settings. It was in this normal school that the republican ideals and the grammar of schooling already vivid in Brazilian classrooms intermingled with an energetic new movement towards spaces based on foreign ideas that were harnessed in attempts to create the new Brazilian citizen. The normal schools were imbued with political and social importance. The idea of schools as spaces of homogenisation was central to normal school training during Brazilian first republic. Social change, according to the historian Reis Filho, had to start with teachers’ education.25 Normal schools were envisioned by educationalists, intellectuals, and politicians as “the keystone” of an efficient education system.26 It was necessary to create schools attached to normal schools so that future teachers could practice and be formed in new methodologies. Not only were normal schools supposed to create excellent future teachers, the buildings that 22 During its existence, it became the famous “Escola Normal da Praça da República,” the “Instituto de Educação Caetano de Campos,” the EEPSG Caetano de Campos and the current EE “Caetano de Campos.” Due to its several nominations the São Paulo Normal School is known as “Escola Normal da Praça da República.” 23 Carlos Monarcha, Escola Normal da Praça: O Lado Noturno das Luzes (São Paulo: Editora Unicamp, 1999); Leonor M. Tanuri, O Ensino Normal no Estado de São Paulo: 1889–1930, Série Estudos e Documentos, Vol. 16 (São Paulo: FE/USP, 1979). 24 Monarcha, Escola Normal da Praça, 343. 25 Casemiro ReisFilho, A Educação e a Ilusão Liberal (São Paulo: Cortez, 1981). 26 Tanuri, O Ensino Normal.

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housed them, as well as the buildings for primary schools, were expected be monuments to the purpose of teaching: beautiful, well-built temples of knowledge. As Marta Carvalho has explained, well-designed schools projected progress, allowing people to see the importance of education for the republic.27 Their architecture purposefully included features considered to be the vanguard at the time: vast spaces, natural light, facilities furnished with the best child-appropriate desks and diverse didactic materials from abroad (or at least copies thereof). The keys to a school’s success were thought to include teachers educated in foreign countries (especially from the leading schools in the USA), imported modern materials, graduated classrooms according to age, curriculum based on children’s natural development, and teaching methods grounded in reality.28 The São Paulo Normal School, which had reopened twice (it opened in 1846, closed in 1867, reopened in 1875, closed again in 1878, and reopened in 1880), was located in an inadequate building, and the model school was installed in an old house also inadequate for its needs. The substandard buildings, insufficient materials and furniture, and teachers usually not properly prepared for working in the classrooms reflected the precarious conditions of the schools in São Paulo state at the turn of the twentieth century.29 At the end of the monarchic regime, 77% of São Paulo state’s population was illiterate and 26% of the population between six and fifteen years old were slaves. Those children who got into the precarious schools studied only reading, writing, and arithmetic and also had religious classes.30 In contrast, upper-class families continued to hire tutors for their children, either from Brazil or from foreign countries. A German teacher named Ina von Binzer taught in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo

27 Marta C. de Carvalho, “A Caixa de Utensilios e a Biblioteca: Pedagogia e Práticas de Leitura,” in Tópicas em História da Educação, ed. Diana G. Vidal and Maria Lucia S. Hilsdorf (São Paulo: Ed. da USP, 2001), 139. 28 Ibid., 140; see also Marta M. C. de Carvalho, “Reformas da Instrução Pública,” in

500 Anos de Educação no Brasil, ed. Eliana M. T. Lopes, Luciano M. Filho Faria, and Cynthia G. Veiga (Autêntica: Belo Horizonte, 2000), 226. 29 Rosa Fatima de Souza, “Espaço da Educação e da Civilização: Origens dos Grupos Escolares no Brasil,” in O Legado Educacional do Século XIX , ed. Rosa Fatima deSouza, Vera T. Valdemarin, and Jane Soares deAlmeida (Araraquara: UNESP, 1998), 34. 30 Reis Filho, A Educação e a Ilusão Liberal, 132.

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from 1881 until 1883. She described her everyday life and education in Brazil in letters to a friend.31 To scaffold the new era, a monumental building housing the São Paulo Normal School and the model school was built and opened in 1894. Monarcha argues that the building was immersed in symbolism: it stood for “sciences over faith, rational organisation of the physical and social space, and victory of progress over chaos. Power and optimism were reunited in its architecture.”32 According to Monarcha, with this monumental building, republicans erected an image of the ideas they were disseminating for education.33 The São Paulo Normal School was at the epicentre of republican debates in São Paulo state and broadened liberal ideals in its teacher education course.34 After its second reopening in 1880, the São Paulo Normal School started to change its methodological approach. This stimulated debates between the “old” practices centred in a religious view of the world and methods centred in memorisation, and the “new” liberal ideas based on rational and scientific views of the schooling; the latter gained prominence with the proclamation of the Republic. Normal school training developed along the lines of the “art of teaching” described in a 1911 Portuguese translation of Emerson White’s The Art of Teaching.35 White described the book as more than “a manual of methods and devices”; rather, It is increasingly clear that what is needed to attain higher success in teaching is not the copying of pattern methods, but a clear grasp by teachers of the fundamental principles of their art and a more intelligent and conscientious application of these guiding principles in practice.36

31 Ina von Binzer, Os Meus Romanos: Alegrias e Tristezas de Uma Educadora Alemã no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2017). 32 Ibid., 190. 33 Ibid., 191. 34 Monarcha, Escola Normal da Praça. 35 Emerson E. White, The Art of Teaching: AManual for Teachers, Superintendents,

Teachers’ Reading Circles, Normal Schools, Training Classes, and Other Persons Interested in the Right Training of the Young (New York: American Book Company, 1901); Carvalho, “A Caixa de Utensilios e a Biblioteca.” 36 Ibid., 4.

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Building on the educational ideas of W. T. Harris, John Stuart Mill, William James, and G. Stanley Hall, White argued that the art of teaching should be grounded on a scientific and practical basis.37 It had to be derived from psychology and facts living behind philosophy. Teachers should understand that children’s physical and psychological development had stages that must be respected. “The vital question,” White wrote, “is not what pupils can be forced or trained to do in the successive grades, but what they ought to do in their physical and psychic condition.”38 Teachers thus needed to learn about children’s nature through knowledge gathered by the field of child study if they were to master the art of teaching. White presented the art of teaching as an innovation, contrasting it with the “old” practices of teaching through rote memorisation without regard to practical applications and activities. Carvalho argues that the São Paulo Normal School’ embrace of White’s concept of the art of teaching meant that its programme of teacher education understood Pestalozzian principles of activity as fundamental bases for educating children.39 After the Portuguese translation of White’s manual was adopted by the São Paulo Normal School in 1911, observation and imitation were presented as ways to learn the art of teaching. Trainees needed to both acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge and observe the best teachers applying methodologies in classrooms. The secret to learning the art of teaching was close imitation of these models, which were implicit in teachers’ practice, in the materials, and in the lessons. Carvalho writes: The art of teaching, just as it is conceived by modern pedagogy, is a practical pedagogy. In this pedagogy of the soul’s faculties, teaching is practice materialized in other practices; practices in which the art of learning was effected as a well-established and observable exercise in given school uses. As arts of knowing/doing, teaching and learning are practices closely connected with the materiality of the objects used as support. The practices resulting from the usage of such materials bear a direct relationship to a pedagogy in which such art is prescribed as a good imitation of a model. The countless lesson plans published in journals aimed at teachers

37 White, The Art of Teaching, 18. 38 Ibid., emphasis in original. 39 Carvalho, “A Caixa de Utensilios e a Biblioteca,” 141.

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show the evidence of this pedagogical concept. Even the minor prescriptive details of the matters listed in the pedagogy manuals on teaching skills keep those marks alive. Within the scope of this pedagogy, teaching how to teach is to provide such models, be it in the form of lesson plans, be it in the form of exemplary practices whose visibility is certified by strategies of teaching development, preferably exhibited in the Escola Modelo, attached to the Escolas Normais.40

In the same way as the teacher learned by observation and imitation based on reality, so did the children. The intuitive method and object lessons were present in teachers’ education in the São Paulo Normal School, and the art of teaching reinforced these ideas.41 The new teaching methods, which were based on ideas of evolution and recapitulation theory,42 were important for leaving behind Brazil’s monarchy and all its darkness.43 This movement was materialised in São Paulo state on 12 March 1890, through decree 27 on the reform of the São Paulo Normal School.44 Antônio Caetano de Campos, a physician and an eminent intellectual in São Paulo society who was the principal and also a teacher in the normal school at that time, conducted and implemented the reform. Caetano de

40 Marta M. C. de Carvalho, “School and Modernity Representations as Pedagogical Models: A Study of their Circulation and Usages in Brazil,” in Paedagogica Historica 41, nos. 1–2 (February 2005): 264. 41 Traces of the use of intuitive method in teacher preparation were found in teachers exams during its first reopened from 1875 to 1878, according to Analete R. Schelbauer, “A Constituição do Método de Ensino Intuitivo na Provincia de São Paulo 1870–1889,” 169–70. 42 Monarcha, Escola Normal da Praça, 173. 43 It is important to note that republicans worked with the idea that the imperial period

in Brazil was a dark one and the republic brought light to Brazilian society and education. But as demonstrated by the circulation of the intuitive method, there was a continuum in the education movement and in the precarious conditions of Brazilian education and the normal school. For more about that movement, see Rosa Fátima Souza, Templos de Civilização: Um Estudo Sobre a Implantação dos Grupos Escolares no Estado de São Paulo 1890–1910 (São Paulo: EDUNESP, 1999); Marcia H. Dias, “Escola Normal de São Paulo do Império: Entre a Metáfora das Luzes e a História Republicana,” in As Escolas Normais no Brasil do Império à República, ed. Antônio de P. Lopes Gonçalves, Annamaria G. B. de Freitas, and José Carlos S. Araujo (Campinas: Alínea, 2008); and Maria Lucia S. Hilsdorf, “A Escola Normal de São Paulo, Entre Nós e o Outro,” in As Escolas Normais no Brasil do Império à República, ed. Antônio de P. Lopes Gonçalves, Annamaria G. B. de Freitas, and José Carlos S. Araujo (Campinas: Alínea, 2008). 44 Ibid., 174.

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Campos together with Miss Marcia Priscilla Browne, an American teacher hired to be the principal of the escola modelo (model school) attached to the São Paulo Normal School, and Maria Guilhermina L. de Andrade,45 a Brazilian teacher who graduated in the USA, conducted the changes required in the teacher education. With the building of the São Paulo Normal School the major pedagogical discussions of the era were brought to life. The normal school’s library contained the latest treatises and scientific manuals brought from Europe. Through the titles of those books it is possible to visualise the encyclopaedic curriculum; they included Gabriel Compayré’s Psychologie appliquée à l’éducation; Jules Steeg’s L’honnête homme: Cours de morale théorique e pratique; Auguste Comte’s Traité d’astronomie populaire; Charles Briot’s Cours de cosmographie ou éléments d’astronomie; Charles Seignobos’ Histoire de la civilisation au moyen âge et dans le temps modernes; Gaston Bornier’s Anatomie e physiologie animales; Claude Bernard’s Leçons de physiologie opératoire; Leroy Beau Lieu’s Précis d’économie politique; J. Langlebert’s Histoire naturelle; and Eléments de zoologie by P. Gervais.46 In October 1893, Gabriel Prestes, a graduate of the normal school who was a congressman and a member of São Paulo’s Republican Party, quit his post to become the principal of the São Paulo Normal School. As principal, Prestes reinforced what had already been established for teacher education. Its basis was scientific and propaedeutic, without an explicit pedagogical content. The pedagogical content was meant to be learnt through observation and practical exercises in the model school. Prestes completed the normal school building complex and opened the Caetano

45 Maria Guilhermina L. de Andrade stayed in the USA from 1883 to 1887. According

to Carla Simone Chamon, Guilhermina arrived at the moment of intense diffusion of the Froebelian kindergarten in the USA. This moment was also marked by controversy among advocates of this type of care, because the 1880s brought the Americanisation of kindergartens, an attitude criticised by authors who sought fidelity to Froebel’s proposals. Guilhermina chose to adhere to the Froebelian principles. Back in Brazil, she asserted herself in the intellectual scene as someone with credentials to talk about and write about kindergartens because she had seen, heard, and practised Froebelian ideas inside American kindergartens. See Carla Simone Chamon, Escolas em Reforma, Saberes em Trânsito: A Trajetória de Maria Guilhermina Loureiro de Andrade 1896–1913 (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2008), 141. 46 Ibid., 206.

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de Campos Kindergarten in 1897. Monarcha described the building in the São Paulo Normal School: Its 940-square-meter interior is brightly lit and contains four classrooms and a large, double-height central hall of 15 by 16 metres covered by an octagonal dome: an admirable metal structure with frosted glass encased in artistically crafted iron. On the outer face of the dome four triangular terraces overlook different points of the city; the inner face of the dome is surrounded by a gallery for people attending school ceremonies held in the central hall. Just below the gallery are oil portraits of Froebel, Pestalozzi, Rousseau, and Mme. Carpantier. The building’s premises are surrounded by a balcony allowing communication among all rooms and facilities, which include four compartments for bathrooms, living room, work cabinets, and small, covered recreational pavilions sitting on columns and set within verdant gardens and paved spaces reserved for children’s games.47 (see Fig. 3.1)

Prestes was the mentor of the kindergarten and followed Froebel’s and Pestalozzi’s educational ideas, mainly as interpreted in the USA. The kindergarten teachers helped him to translate parts of the German and American educational manuals to apply Froebel’s ideas. Prestes also had to deal with controversy surrounding the opening of the kindergarten, for although the creation of the kindergarten was desired by educationalists, intellectuals, and scholars, it led to a series of debates in which there was opposition to the kindergarten, such as the argument that children under five should stay with their mothers rather than attend kindergarten.48 Some critics, including João Kopke, a writer and school principal, publicly expressed fears that kindergartens would destroy families by usurping their role in society. Prestes travelled several times to the USA to bring back books with exercises and curriculum proposals to guide the work in the kindergarten. Edward Wiebé’s (1816–1885) The Paradise of Childhood: A Manual for Self -Instruction in Friedrich Froebel’s Educational Principles (first edition 1869) was his bible in this work, and he translated and modified parts of it. The kindergarten enrolled children from upper-class families, most of 47 Ibid., 197, translated by the authors. 48 Carlos Monarcha, “Revista do Jardim da Infância: Uma Publicação Exemplar,” in

Educação da Infância Brasileira: 1875–1983, ed. Carlos Monarcha (Campinas: SP, Autores Associados, 2001), 81–120.

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Fig. 3.1 Kindergarten building as pictured in Album do Cinquentenario do Jardim de Infância, Acervo Histórico da Escola Caetano de Campos, Centro de Referencia em Educaçao Mario Covas, Escola de Formaçao e Aperfeiçoamento de Professores/Secretaria do Estado de São Paulo

them sons and daughters of members of the Republican Party. It is important to point out that the kindergarten, as the whole complex attached to the normal school, materialised the educational ideals of São Paulo’s Republican Party.49 Due to the model kindergarten’s high cost, it was not duplicated throughout São Paulo state, but remained a unique institution. The opening of the kindergarten was announced in A Schola Publica (Public School ),50 the periodical produced by the teachers from the Caetano de Campos model school, in an article by Oscar Thompson, an important São Paulo intellectual and politician. In describing the Caetano 49 Kuhlmann,“A Educação Infantil no Século XIX,” 75. 50 A Schola Publica (Public School) released its first issues in 1893 and stopped in

1894, publishing 11 issues. Then it restarted publication in 1896 finishing its activities in 1897.

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de Campos kindergarten, the keyword Thompson used was “adaptation.” In his view, although the kindergarten and its curriculum were based on models imported from abroad, it was genuinely Brazilian. Thompson wrote: The work of Gabriel Prestes becomes even greater, more meritorious, if we mention that the kindergarten was created based on Froebelian models and the gifts were translated and adapted from foreign authors. But the kindergarten is neither German nor Swiss nor French; it is genuinely Brazilian. And the work of this adaptation was effectively carried out by Mrs. Maria E. Varella, inspector; Rosina Soares, a teacher in the normal school; and Zalina Rolim, an inspired poet who willingly gave her whole heart to the kindergarten. All their written works, poured into our soul, demonstrate what we just mentioned.51

Maria Enerstina Varella, Zalina Rolim, Joana Grassi, Ana de Barros, and Isabel Prado were nominated to work in the kindergarten; all but Rolim were alumnae of the Caetano de Campos normal school. Rolim was one of the first Brazilian writers and poets for children. Her most famous children’s book, Livro das Crianças (Book for Children), was based on Froebelian ideals.52 The children in the kindergarten were grouped in three periods according to age, from four to six years old. For each period there were specific teachers: Joana Grassi for the first period, Ana de Barros for the second, and Isabel Prado for the third. Varella worked as both inspector of the kindergarten and a teacher in the normal school. Rolim worked with her and was also responsible for the language classes in the kindergarten. Students from the normal school assisted the teachers in the kindergarten and learned by observing them exercising the art of teaching. Rosina Nogueira Soares, a teacher of manual works in the normal school who had been a kindergarten teacher in Belgium, helped training the kindergarten teachers to work with Froebelian materials.

51 Oscar Thompson, “Jardim de Infância,” in A Schola Publica 1, no. 3 (15 September 1896): 223, translated by the authors. 52 Fernanda N. Santos, “Representação da Infância em Zalina Rolim: Entre a Arte Poetica e a Educação.” Master’s thesis (Guarulhos/SP: UNIFESP, 2017).

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The curriculum that Varella and the teachers prepared remained as the official curriculum from 1896 until 1925.53 The movement for the creation and implementation of Caetano de Campos Kindergarten described above brought more continuities, appropriations, and resignifications than disruptions with the pedagogical practices and discourses already presented inside the São Paulo Normal School and the model school. The discourses presented here intended to make a clear distinction between the education practises used before the Proclamation of Republic and the adoption of Froebelian methodology as embraced and prescribed by Gabriel Prestes and his team, but when we look within those practices, the distinction is blurred. The Froebelian methodology, for example, focused more on practical issues, in contrast to past practices, “old” ones based on memorisation and exercises. But evidence suggests “old” practises were not completely abandoned; instead, they were appropriated through a process of resignification, in which exercises were used as a source of learning and motivation for example. A reframing occurred in the introduction of observation as the starting point for the exercises, which were based on models whose motivation came, not from the intellectual curiosity aroused by reading classical texts as used before, but from being in contact with real objects or practices. Those exercises of observation were already present in the “object lessons” as a way to materialise the intuitive method inside schools. We thus agree with Diana Vidal, who argued that the arrival of those new education ideals in the 1920s and 1930s in Brazil did not erase the movement for modern republican education described here, but rather resignified observation through exercises that centred the idea of experimentation.54 We see a slow, continuous movement of decentralisation of the base for learning, from content as a source of motivation and curiosity for the students, to direct action in the real world: observing, experimenting, and exercising. This movement put teachers in-between

53 Moysés Kuhlmann, Jr., “O Jardim de Infância Caetano de Campos,” in Caetano de Campos Fragmentos da História da Instrução Pública em São Paulo, ed. Maria Candida D. Reis (São Paulo: IECC, 1994), 67. 54 Diana G. Vidal, “Escola Nova e Processo Educativo,” in 500 Anos de Educação no Brasil, ed. Eliana M. T. Lopes, Luciano M. Faria Filho, and Cynthia G. Veiga (Belo Horizonte: Autentica, 2000), 510.

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the practices that constituted the grammar of schooling and the practical discourses constructed to innovate. With this picture in mind, how can we reimagine teaching in the classroom of the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten? How was Froebelian methodology appropriated by those teachers?

Reimagining Teaching in Jardim de Infância da Escola Caetano de Campos To reimagine the work in the classroom of the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten, we focused on two types of documents: the magazine Revista do Jardim da Infância produced by the kindergarten and its logbooks. The magazine is a unique source rich in traces and signs of how this institution translated Froebel methodology. It was published in two volumes during 1896 and 1897. The first volume has 292 pages and the second 394; both volumes are filled with illustrations. Gabriel Prestes defined the magazine’s aims in the first volume, as follows: Our aim is exclusively practical. We deliberately avoid discussions about pedagogical advantages and disadvantages of the methodology presented here in the pages of this magazine. We do not want to take up space with merely theoretical appreciations. We will only publish suggestions that could guide practices. We certainly do not intend the published suggestions to be followed exactly as described. On the contrary, we would like to see them be transformed, to be experienced with our teachers’ individuality. Only in that way will the kindergarten be able to adapt to our environment. Not just a copy should be made, but rather a real way in which kindergarten principles can blossom according to our customs, our beings, and our temperament.55

The first volume included contributions by Prestes, as well as by Zalina Rolim, Maria Ernestina Varella, Rosina Nogueira Soares, Isabel Prado, Joanna Grassi, and Anna Barros, all kindergarten teachers. Rolim, Prado, Grassi, and Barros wrote original texts other than translations or adaptations of foreign works. The volume consists of short stories, songs, programmes, and presentations of how the teachers carried out activities 55 Gabriel Prestes, “Revista do Jardim de Infância,” in Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1 (São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896), 5–6, translated by the authors.

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with the children, interspersed with short texts about Caetano de Campos Kindergarten. The kindergarten’s opening hours and the children’s daily activities were also presented. Texts from American and German publications were translated and adapted. Importantly, descriptions of the Froebelian gifts, as well as songs and stories, were translated based on North American programmes. Adaptations of the German publications used were limited to songs, hymns, and toys. In the second volume, the same authors returned to the scene and structured the texts in a similar way. Added to the American and German translations and adaptations were translations of the work of the Italian educator Amalia de Rosa, as well as a biography of Froebel extracted from English educator Courthope Bowen’s book. The Froebelian gifts were presented in both volumes through translations of parts of Edward Wiebé’s “The Paradise of Childhood.” The first volume included the part where Wiebé56 presented all the necessary materials to set up a kindergarten, together with a description of how to work with gifts one through six. In the second volume, the work with gifts seven through twenty were translated, together with a synthesis made by Prestes of the Froebelian principles in Wiebé’s book. In 1898, Espindola, Siqueira & Company, the publisher of the magazine, released a book that put together all the parts of Wiebé’s book that had been published in the magazine. That book’s title, A Guide to Kindergarteners: Translated from “The Paradise of Childhood” by Edward Wiebé, clearly signalled that it was not a simple translation of the original. The book opened with a disclaimer saying that the publisher took full responsibility for the publication and that the translator of the texts, Gabriel Prestes, had authorised the publication but had not involved himself in it.57 The North American kindergarten movement inspired more than translations. According to Maitê Aird, the Froebelian materials presented in the kindergarten were purchased directly from the American company Milton Bradley.58 Barbara Beatty stated that Milton Bradley himself 56 Gabriel Prestes, “Guia para Jardineiras (do Paradise of Childhood, de Edward

Wiebé)”, traduzido com modificações, In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1, São Paulo (1896), 69–132. 57 Gabriel Prestes, Guia para Jardineiras: Traduzido do “Paradise of Childhood” de Eduard Wiebé (São Paulo: Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1898), 1. 58 Maitê Aird, “O Jardim de Infância Publico Anexo à Escola Normal da Praça: Um Estudo Sobre Gênero,” Master’s thesis, Pontifícia Universidade Católica, São Paulo, 2015.

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became interested in producing materials for the Froebelian kindergartens in the USA after listening to a class by Elizabeth Peabody.59 In response to the Americanisation (and vulgarisation) of kindergartens in the USA, and the growing trade surrounding them, Bradley’s firm began to alter the Froebelian materials.60 Larry Prochner, seeking to understand the trajectory of the Bradley Company, came to the conclusion that at the end of seventy years of production, the Froebelian gifts had been incorporated into kindergarten practices in such a way that their origins were lost.61 The daily pragmatism and reiterative practice remained, perpetuating the idea that the materials were necessary because of their effectiveness for children’s active learning. When we read the two volumes of the kindergarten magazine, we find practical discourses built on the idea of the necessity for teachers the model lessons/scripts. The magazine is filled with model lessons/scripts for readers. If we compare its structure with the journal published between 1896 and 1897 by the model school attached to the normal school, A Eschola Publica, we notice similarities, since both publications present model lessons/scripts in the form of suggested dialogues between teachers and students, interspersed with graduated content. The structure of both publications reveals the logic indicated by Carvalho: that they would constitute a toolbox for teachers who read them. The model lessons/scripts contained a pedagogical conception with rules that did not need to be spelled out because they were already in motion to be applied by the teachers. Since exercise was the main device for children’s learning, it was presented and constituted as “a kind of musical score that modulates, doses, enhances and imprints the natural activity of the child.”62 Both the journal and the magazine presented object lessons that drew on teacher-student dialogues based on questions and answers, object manipulation, and presentation of them to students as a teaching procedure. Within Calkins’ methodology as expressed in his 1886 book on object lessons, observation was privileged; it was dialogue that would arouse the children’s interest by “teaching with and through things and 59 Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (New York: Yale University Press, 1995), 55. 60 Beatty, Preschool Education, 69–70. 61 Larry Prochner, “Their Little Wooden Bricks: A History of the Material Culture of

Kindergarten in the United States,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no.3 (2011): 365–75. 62 Carvalho, “A Caixa de Utensilios e a Biblioteca,” 146, emphasis in original.

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not about things.”63 These exercises were presented in both periodicals, giving teachers a script to teach, and making theoretical explanations about methodology and the philosophy behind it dispensable. Maria E. Varella, in the introduction to the magazine’s first volume, presented a report on the kindergarten’s operation in its first year, informing the readers that parts of foreign works had been translated and adapted for the kindergarten: For language exercises—Practical Suggestions for Kindergarteners by Jeanette R. Gregory and In the Child’s Word by Emilie Poulsson. For gymnastics, toys, songs and hymns—Music for the Kindergarten by Eleonore Heerwart and Die Bewegungsspiele und Lieder des Froebel’schen Kindergartens by Friedrich Seidel.64

The magazine’s translations transformed the songs, toys, and play into “tools” ready to be used by anyone who read them. Varella explained that the kindergarten’s daily programme of four hours was divided into ten- to fifteen-minute intervals. The children entered the school at 11 a.m. Upon arrival, they gathered in the garden and marched into their classrooms in their groups chanting the daily greetings. Three breaks were taken during the day: two partial and one general. As Varella described, Partial breaks are ten minutes for the second and third period, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. For the first period it is fifteen minutes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The general playground break is thirty minutes, with fifteen minutes for lunch, when the teacher takes the opportunity to correct certain defects that are natural to every young child. The remaining fifteen minutes are spent in the garden. The children are given every freedom possible under the supervision of the teachers.65

Following Varella’s brief description of the general activities of the kindergarten, the magazine presents a language lesson in the form of a 63 Vera T. Valdemarin, Estudando as Lições de Coisas, 120. 64 Maria E. Varella, “O Jardim da InfânciaAnexxo à Escola Normal,” in Revista do

Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1 (São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896), 8–9. 65 Ibid., 12.

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dialogue between the children and the teacher. The next text is a tale. Both texts were adapted by Zalina Rolim without specifying where they were translated from. Next is the kindergarten programme organised by Varella. This programme remained in place until 1925, when New Education ideas started gaining ground. In it, the Froebelian gifts appear as a separate exercise, an activity like the others to be done with the children. Manual work is emphasised, as the programme subtitle indicates: “Exercises in language, memory, object nomenclatures, and manual work in the three periods of kindergarten attached to the normal school.”66 Below we transcribe the programme for the first period: Language: Children’s conversations: Children in the family and kindergarten. Major parts of their body. Beings and objects that are useful to children and most often attract their attention. Parents and close relatives. Domestic animals. Brief and simple expositions on engravings. Children’s poetry. Brief hymns. Froebelian gifts: First gift: the ball, little balls; shape and colour; confronting the shape and colour of other objects present; positions; movements. Second gift: sphere, cube, and cylinder. Manual work: Graduated preliminary exercises. Simple jobs. Colour paper shapes. Some ornaments, etc. Interlacing: Easy exercises of interlacing with rods. Folding: Square, sides, angles, diagonal, and median. First folds: Imitation of common objects. Modelling: Ball, cylinder, cube. Design: Rods; knowledge of the object. Exercise with one, two, three, and four sticks done in space and giving an idea of the positions of the lines, angles, triangles, and squares. Chopsticks, lentils, or lathes: Vertical, horizontal, and combinations. Application to the design of simple geometric shapes and common objects. Numbers: Counting from one to ten with balls and then separated into groups of two, three, four, and five. Varied exercises up to ten chopsticks: numbering and addition and subtraction exercises. Cards: exercises of addition and subtraction, distinguishing groups, colours, and quantities up to ten. Knowledge from one to ten by printed numbers. Colours: Primary and secondary colours graded by paper squares forming the entire colour map presented to the class. Music: Little hymns.

66 Ibid., 20.

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Gymnastics: Movement of the head and fingers, accompanied by easy melodies. Hand movement indicating already known body parts. Toys: Movement, imitations, etc., on the march and accompanied by easy melodies.67

The programme for the first-period children (aged around four years) focused on exercises as a source of learning. Froebelian gifts and parts of the occupations were present. However, this programme carried practice prescription marks which belonged to the grammar of schooling for the work with this age group. If we look to Comenius’s The School of Infancy (1631), we also find “to do” actions as the main elements, with the idea that natural things and things in children’s immediate environment should be taught in their first six years of life. Comenius also described the idea that in early education, the teacher should work with the notion of quantity through counting exercises up to 20 or 60, besides teaching music centred on hymns to be memorised.68 The concept that children enjoy being busy was also presented in the magazine’s practical discourse: “Boys always delight in being employed in something, for their youthful blood does not allow them to rest. … Let them be like ants, continually occupied in doing something, carrying, drawing, constructing, and conveying, provided always that whatever they do is done prudently.”69 The important role of imitation during play was also highlighted, such as drawing, construction, and geometry based on exploration of circles, lines, squares, etc. While these practices did not start with Froebel’s methodology, Froebel deepened, resignified, and transformed them. The maternal heart of the teacher desired in Froebel’s approach is here, but it is also in Comenius’s work. However, the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten was expected to form a Republican Brazilian child, and the political discourse inside the kindergarten intermingled with the practical discourse and grammar of schooling. We can see that the grammar of schooling remained, even inside the new education movement—it emphasised work with small children based on actions, observation, and exercises under the protective, mothering guidance of the teacher.

67 Ibid., 20–21. 68 John A. Comenius, The School of Infancy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1956), 73. 69 Ibid., 91.

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But what was the daily life of the kindergarten like? Below we present the timetable for the first period. 11:00 to 11:10—Singing, greeting 11:10 to 11: 25—Conversation 11: 25 to 11: 30—Marching 11: 30 to 11: 40—Rest 11: 40 to 11: 55—The first gift: the ball accompanied by proper singing 11: 55 to 12: 10—Recreation 12: 10 to 12: 25—Discs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; counting with balls on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays 12: 25 to 12: 30—Preparing for lunch 12:30 to 12:45—Lunch in the living room 12:45 to 13:00—Garden playground 13:00 to 13:15—Review, singing, and calling 13:15 to 13:30—Chopstick drawing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; contours or lentils on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays 13:30 to 13:40—Singing march 13:40 to 13:55—Manual work: Folding on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; interlacing rods on Tuesdays and Thursdays; mosaic on Saturdays 13:55 to 14:05—Recreation 14:05 to 14:20—Colours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; singing on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays 14:20 to 14:25—Rest 14:25 to 14:40—Toys 14:40 to 14:55—Teachers’ closing thoughts; awards; goodbye music 14:55 to 15:00—Leave.70 The kindergarten timetable revealed a rigidity in the activities. At the same time, this timetable, as well as the way the magazine, was organised, aligned with the work carried out in the model school, as a result of the teacher education in the normal school. On the other hand, we can argue that the timetable was necessary for teachers around the country, in order to visualise how daily work would be carried out inside a kindergarten. 70 Comenius, The School of Infancy, 26.

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The novelty of this kind of institution demanded a structured presentation in order for it to be fully understandable to teachers encountering it for the first time. We, too, can imagine from the timetable a busy day of tasks for children and teachers, with specific times allotted for activities and complex transitions from one activity to the next. The kindergarten programme in movement within Varella’s timetable was formed by the reading of several different programmes/curriculum proposals for kindergarten. The two volumes of the magazine translated them. For example, the first volume translated parts of the 1893 Cook County Normal School kindergarten programme formulated by Francis Parker, and the Lowell Kindergarten programme devised by Anna W. Devereaux, both in the USA. In translating those programmes, Prestes pointed out that they were models for understanding the distribution of works, following the premise in his address in the magazine’s introduction. So, Varella’s programme could be seen as one that combined parts of different programmes while adding her original ideas. How did the teachers conduct their work inside the classrooms? Did they also use model lessons/scripts? In the same volume of the magazine, we find texts authored by the teachers. A text by Isabel Prado includes a detailed lesson on how to conduct the first drawing exercise.71 Prado briefly explained the use of slate and pencil and described in detail how the teacher should separate the class for the various activities and what she should talk about. The dialogue to be engaged in with the children was presented to demonstrate how to draw their attention to activities centred in the presentation of various objects related to what was being taught. Prado’s text instructed teachers how to work with lines: straight, horizontal, vertical, and inclined. She wrote, “After we have spoken extensively with the children on this point, we will then begin to draw stickers, starting with combining 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and even 12 lines. This not only entertains children a great deal, but is also very useful in the constructions.”72 A text by Anna de Barros entitled “Drawing” followed the same structure as Prado’s, exploring the use of dialogues with the presence of

71 Isabel Prado, “Primeiro Exercício de Desenho Feito no Terceiro Período do Jardim de Infância,” in Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1 (São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896). 72 Ibid., 248.

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objects as a guide for performing the exercise.73 “Object lessons” were also highlighted. Teacher Joanna Grassi’s text “Kindergarten Toy” had a different tone.74 It began by exhorting the relationship between children and teachers as something maternal that would only flourish in kindergarten via music and toys, which were described as being inseparable. Following the explanations, Grassi demonstrated a way of working with the “windmill” toy, presenting it as a lesson model. It is interesting to observe that the teachers tried to present Froebel’s gifts not in an idealised form but in the way they actually worked with them inside their classroom. Varella described this in another text, “Practical Exercises Playing Ball—The First Gift.”75 Her explanation was more detailed than the translations and was full of dialogues with children, presenting their names and giving life to them. Before explaining how to play with the gift, she explored the object of the gift, in this case the ball, using the children’s body, senses, and observation in a manner that resembles object lessons. At the end of the text, to demonstrate that this model lesson/script really happened in her classroom, she stated, “I finish here every practical exercise of the ball game, as it is done in kindergarten.”76 In the second volume of the magazine, other teacher-authored texts also made clear that the exercises presented were really done in the kindergarten. In “From My Notes,” Zalina Rolim let the reader know that the teachers listened to the children when she described how children’s interests shifted during their kindergarten education.77 She reported a dialogue the children had initiated with her in which she tried to understand what they wanted to say and to be very clear in her answers to them. Isabel Prado, in “Exercises with Rings Done in the Third Period

73 Ana de Barros, “Desenho,” in Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1 (São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896), 250–51. 74 Joana Grassi, “O Brinquedo no Jardim da Infância,” in Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1 (São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896), 253–55. 75 Maria E. Varella, “Exercicios Praticos do Jogo da Bola: Primeiro Dom,” in Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1 (São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896), 257–84. 76 Ibid., 284. 77 Zalina Rolim, “Das ‘Minhas Notas’,” in Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 2 (São

Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira& Co., 1897), 59–61.

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of the Kindergarten” argued that Froebel’s widow presented a new set of objects to teach: a set of rings.78 Prado described the work done in the kindergarten with that set of rings. Her description followed the model lesson/script mode already presented in the magazine, including dialogue to be held with children. That text is followed by a language lesson (it appeared in the first volume, too), transcribed by Zalina Rolim, which was used in the first, second, and third periods of the kindergarten: “Tiny Snippets of Language Lessons with Proper Accentuation as a Simple Means of Giving Children the Necessary Ease in Speaking.”79 Those exercises were constituted by small phrases to be repeated by children, such as these phrases for the first period: “Men speak; cats meow; dogs bark.”80 Varella’s text “Second Gift—Practical Games of the Sphere, Cube, and Cylinder for the Various Periods of Kindergarten” described the work done in the kindergarten with the same text structure for the second gift as for the first.81 The exploration of the objects again resembled the guidelines in Calkins’ book on object lessons. It is important to note that in the first gift explanation, Varella used many songs to explore the ball with children’s bodies. Here, the exploration was based only on dialogues about touching and observing the object. Again the lesson model/script was described in detail and ready to be applied. When we read the kindergarten work logbook of 1903, we find the same regimentation expressed in the magazine. This 152-page handwritten book contains the following contents, as shown in the summary at the end of the book: morning hymns—pages 1–22; afternoon hymns— pages 23–38; march—pages 37–54; morning greetings—pages 55–60; verses to lunch—pages 61–62; and verses—pages 63–152. No explanation was given for the application of the set of verses, songs, marches,

78 Isabel Prado, “Exercicios com Aneis, Executados no Terceiro Periodo do Jardim de Infância,” in Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 2 (São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira& Co., 1897), 74–82. 79 Zalina Rolim, “Trechos,” in Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 2 (São Paulo:

Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1897), 83–85. 80 Ibid., 83. 81 Maria E. Varella, “Exercicios Praticos do Jogo da Bola: Segundo Dom – Jogos

Praticos da Esfera, Cubo e Cilindro para os Diversos Periodos do Jardim de Infância,” in Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 2 (São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1897), 119–68.

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and greetings. Interestingly, all the materials contained moral and ethical precepts that were desired components of the Brazilian Republican child’s education. We will not analyse them here, but we would like to highlight the presence of the idea of educating children through diligent work using toys and the moral precepts of charity, honesty, obedience, and love for the country as demonstrated through the worship of its symbols, such as the national flag. The verses also presented domestic animals, such as cats and dogs, to children, along with useful animals (e.g. chickens, bees, horses, and cows), handicrafts and children’s toys. The verses and greetings were marked by gender distinctions, such as references to “Daddy” and “Mammy” and their roles in life and in their children’s lives.82 The introduction to the 210-page handwritten kindergarten logbook of 1899 stated that it contained translations, adaptations, and compositions of songs and toys for the kindergarten of São Paulo by Zalina Rolim. The book seems to have been written by two people, however, because two distinct writing styles were used, and it also contained notes from a third person. The book features activities in 1899, 1897, and 1898, in that order. This book is a little different from the previous one because it indicates that the verses, toys, and songs were translations without specifying the original authors but only noting the language from which the translation was made. Compositions by the kindergarten teachers were presented, including various compositions by Varella. Here the toys were always followed by an explanation or a way of playing with them. Interestingly, sometimes in this book there are notations of the author’s perception. For example, a two-line note shortly after the verse “Birthday” stated: “Above all else teach children to stay clean and polite”; the remarks were attributed to D. Harris, without further explanation.83 A note on morality attributed to Mme. Carpantier stated that the strength of the teacher’s example as the founder of children’s trust in her appeared to be fundamental in driving evil out from children.84 At the end of the book is a note from Alice W. Rollins, an American author 82 Livro de registro dos trabalhos do Jardim de Infância 1903 (Manuscrito do Jardim de

Infância Caetano de Campos, São Paulo, 1903). For more about gender distinction in the kindergarten through toys, see Aird, “O Jardim de Infância Publico Anexo à Escola Normal da Praça.” 83 Livro de registro dos trabalhos do Jardim de Infância—1899 (Manuscrito do Jardim de Infância Caetano de Campos, São Paulo, 1899), 25–27. 84 Ibid., 27.

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who wrote children’s poetry: “Education is not about teaching facts, but producing good and strong impressions.”85 Unlike the previous logbook, this one was marked with pencilled notes in distinct hands, either to complement the explanations or to divide parts of the songs and theatrical performances. The notes give the impression that the book was used and discussed by the kindergarten teachers. Many of the toys were presented, such as role-play toys. The themes were no different from the previous logbook, and some chants and marches were repeated. As with the magazine, the logbooks made it possible for the teacher to read and apply the texts directly in the classroom as model lessons/scripts. The magazine and the logbooks contained many translated works. Had the kindergarten kept the originals of those translated books and materials? The handwritten inventory book from 1896listed all the materials that were part of the kindergarten building and its pedagogical work, including the following list of the books86 : 1. La Educacion del Hombre—Friedrich Froebel 2. Lectures in the Training Schools for Kindergartners —Elizabeth P. Peabody 3. The Kindergarten—Emily Shirreff 4. Froebel and Education through Self -activity—Courthope Bowen 5. Child and Child Nature—Baroness M. von Bulow 6. Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel —Baroness M. von Bulow 7. The International Educational Series (2 vols.)—edited by W. T. Harris 8. The Kindergarten and The School 9. Outline of a Year’s Work in the Kindergarten—Miss Anna W. Devereaux 10. The Boston Collection of Kindergarten Stories (J. L. Hammett Co., 1897) 11. Froebel’s Letters on the Kindergarten—Emilie Michaelis and H. K. Moore 12. Home Education in Relation to the Kindergarten—Emily Shirreff 13. Law of Childhood and Other Papers —William N. Hailmann

85 Ibid. 86 Inventário do Jardim de Infância 1896 (Manuscrito do Jardim de Infância Caetano de Campos, São Paulo, 1899).

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14. The Kindergarten—K. Douglas Wiggen 15. Kindergarten and Child-culture Papers —Henry Barnard 16. The Paradise of Childhood (quarter century edition)—Milton Bradley Co. 17. Froebel’s Square—Albert E. Maltby 18. The Kindergarten Blackboard—Marion Mackenzie 19. Instrumental Sketches for Kindergarteners —Katharine Mortz 20. Myths and Mother Plays —Sara E. Wiltse 21. Songs, Dances, and Rhymes for the Kindergarten and Primary School —W. N. Hailmann 22. Songs for Little Children from the Kindergarten and Primary School —Eleanor Smith (2 vols.) 23. Elementary Colour—Milton Bradley (3 vols.) 24. The International Education Series Friedrich Froebel Pedagogies of the Kindergarten—translated by Josefine Jarves 25. In the Child’s World—Emilie Poulsson (2 vols.) 26. Fingers Plays —Emilie Poulsson 27. Music for the Kindergarten—Eleonore Heerwart 28. Stories for Kindergarten and Primary School —Sara E. Wiltse 29. Mothers’ Songs, Games, and Stories —Frances and E. Lord 30. Hand Work for Kindergartens and Primary Schools 31. Children’s Old and New Singing —Mary R. Hofer 32. Merry Songs and Games —Clara B. Hubbard.87 This list includes important titles of the kindergarten movement in the USA and England. Most of the books are practical ones. Some of the books translated for the magazine were in a collection at the kindergarten. The last entry in the inventory book was made in 1908, and we could find no later information, but it is interesting to mention that the first five of Froebel’s gifts were present in the inventory in all the entries about materials for the three periods of the kindergarten until 1908. Because the normal school did not prepare teachers to actually work in the kindergarten, the books described here, as well as the magazine produced by the kindergarten, were a precious source of inspiration for the kindergarten teachers.

87 Ibid., 7–8.

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A New Kind of Teacher Was Built Inside the Jardim de Infância da Escola Caetano de Campos In this chapter, we have sought to reimagine teaching in Caetano de Campos Kindergarten. For this purpose, we described how teachers were educated in the normal school. After our analysis of the kindergarten teachers’ magazine and the kindergarten’s logbooks, we described how the work in the kindergarten was conducted. The practical discourses presented in the magazine and the logbooks brought a grammar of schooling already alive in Brazilian teacher education together with an innovation call that came from transnational ideas, mostly Froebelian ones. Teachers were formed and worked “in between” the two. Although the archival records of the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten included few authorial works and plenty of translations, mostly from Froebelian authors, those lesson models/scripts entangled the methodology presented in the late nineteenth-century Brazilian teacher education based on the intuitive method and object lessons as a way to materialised it, with reminiscences of Froebelian principles and the use of Froebel’s materials, where practice came first without a clear theoretical frame. How was that possible? Prochner has argued that as the idea of the Froebelian kindergarten travelled, practice always arrived before theory.88 Because Froebel wrote so little and in a very difficult style, and his philosophical texts received criticism, his potential readers were kept away from reading his texts, thus “the kindergarten concept left without a definitive text depended more on Froebel’s materials for its meaning.”89 As Prochner points out, this focus on Froebel’s materials had a huge impact on teachers’ preparation for the kindergarten, where practice was in the spotlight, often without theory behind it. However, Froebel’s romantic and idealistic child concept was perpetuated inside the kindergarten classroom even without being studied, mostly because a certain determinism attributed to infancy was also present in the early child study theories influential in Brazil.90 This 88 Larry Prochner, “Tracking Kindergarten as a Travelling Idea,” in Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education, ed. Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, and Larry Prochner (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), loc. 403. 89 Ibid. 90 Alessandra Arce, Pedagogia na Era da Revoluções: Uma Analise do Pensamento Educacional de Pestalozzi e Froebel (Campinas: Editora Autores Associados, 2002).

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determinism, together with the idea that the child should act through play with objects, was part of the birth of modern education, as in Comenius’s work on infancy or even as early as 1575 when Michel Montaigne wrote about play as an important action for children to learn.91 A continuum is evident here. As we argued in this chapter, a grammar of schooling already existed before Froebel. This grammar was broadened by the idea that, to work with young children, a teacher should base teaching on acting on objects and exploring them, educating children’s senses through play, music, exploring nature and spaces close to children’s bodies. The travelling of Froebel’s methodology to Brazil through the lenses of the American kindergarten made the appropriation of Froebel’s principles and materials more diffused and facilitated their use as a “box of tools” to establish a kindergarten practice here. Immersed in the grammar of schooling already vivid in teacher education, together with a movement away from the previous kindergarten model in Brazil, a new kind of teacher was born: a teacher whose education was encyclopaedic, propaedeutic; a teacher being capable of learning how to teach by seeing the best practices in action, being able to follow lesson models and scripts in an inventive way, and being prepared to adapt and transform them. This new kind of teacher was encouraged to base her view of the child on the evolutionist ideals looking to forge a moral and ethical child. It is important to highlight that in the USA, according to Kristen Nawrotzki, kindergarten “was accomplished almost exclusively by women.”92 Ann Allen states that the Froebelian kindergarten owed its spread and development to the women who worked in it and for it, taking it on as a female mission. She explains, “It belonged to what was called the ‘women’s movement,’ which included a wide variety of women’s organizations and initiatives.”93 Being a kindergarten teacher was one of the first occupations for women, and it gave them the opportunity to develop 91 Kevin J. Brehony, “Working at Play or Playing at Work? A Froebelian Paradox ReExamined,” in Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education, ed. Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, and Larry Prochner (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), loc. 715. 92 Kristen Nawrotzki, “Such Marvelous Training: Grand Rapids, Michigan, as a Kindergarten Centre,” in Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education, ed. Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, and Larry Prochner (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), loc. 2382. 93 Ann Taylor Allen, The Transnational Kindergarten: Education and Women’s Movements in Germany and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 6.

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theories and resignify methodologies, even though the women presented themselves as disciples of Froebel, Pestalozzi, and other male educators. Throughout the founding of the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten, men led the process while women were invited to participate as collaborators. Many other women were actively involved in the everyday work in the classrooms. However, in the Brazilian case, we did not find any affiliations or other evidence to indicate these women were engaged in women’s movements. The kindergarten opened a debate about the education of children under seven years old in Brazil. This debate ended up being reduced due to the urgency of installing a public primary school system, and the containment of health problems linked to the high rates of infant mortality in the country. The science that supported hygienist discussions also supported pedagogical issues. Thus, according to Kishimoto, protection and assistance ended up being the axes to guide the care of children under 7 years of age in Brazil.94 It can be said that, although the project of the first historical republicans included the kindergarten within the first reform of education, the practice only endorsed the primary school and the training of teachers. The marginalization and the repudiation of early childhood education were manifested in the predominance of values such as, for children from zero to six years old, domestic education was enough, or when institutionalized, only required religious or moral education, plus hygienic care, and there was no question of its integral development, in suitable institutions, in partnership with the family and society.95

On the other hand, the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten’s set of materials, rituals, and methodologies paved the way for the sedimentation of a grammar of schooling for this age group, bringing with it an image of the child as a being who learns through action in the surrounding world. This idea, although still carrying a certain determinism, endured throughout the entire twentieth century in Brazil.

94 Tizuko M. Kishimoto, “Educação Infantil integrando pré-escolas e crèches na busca da socialização da criança”, in Tópicas em História da Educação, ed. Diana G. Vidal and Maria Lucia S. Hilsdorf (São Paulo: Ed. da USP, 2001), 225–40. 95 Ibid., 236.

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Bibliography Archival Sources These archival sources are all stored at Acervo Histórico da Escola Caetano de Campos, Centro de Referencia em Educação Mario Covas, Escola de Formação e Aperfeiçoamento de Professores/Secretaria do Estado de São Paulo. Inventário do Jardim de Infância1896. Manuscrito do Jardim de Infância Caetano de Campos. São Paulo, 1899. Livro de registro dos trabalhos do Jardim de Infância 1899. Manuscrito do Jardim de Infância Caetano de Campos. São Paulo, 1899. Livro de registro dos trabalhos do Jardim de Infância 1903. Manuscrito do Jardim de Infância Caetano de Campos. São Paulo, 1903. Revista do Jardim da Infância. Vol 1. São Paulo, Typographia a vapour Espindola, Siqueira & Comp. 1896. Revista do Jardim da Infância . Vol 2. São Paulo, Typographia a vapour Espindola, Siqueira & Comp. 1897.

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Grassi, Joana. “O Brinquedo no Jardim da Infância.” In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1, 253–55. São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896. Hai, Alessandra A., Frank Simon, and Marc Depaepe. “From Practice to Theory, Ovide Decroly for Brazilian Classrooms: A Tale of Appropriation.” History of Education (2016): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2016.115 4191. Hilsdorf, Maria Lucia S. “A Escola Normal de São Paulo, Entre Nós e o Outro.” In As Escolas Normais no Brasil do Império à República, edited by Antônio de P. Lopes Gonçalves, Annamaria G. B. de Freitas, and José Carlos S. Araujo, 91–106, Campinas: Alínea, 2008. Kuhlmann, Moysés, Jr. “A Educação Infantil no Século XIX.” In Histórias e Memorias da Educação no Brasil, Vol. 2, edited by Maria Stephanou and Maria Helena Camara Bastos, 68–77, Petropolis/RJ: Vozes, 2014. Kuhlmann, Moysés, Jr. As Grandes Festas Didáticas: A Educação Brasileira e as Exposições Internacionais 1862–1922. Bragança Paulista: EDUSF, 2001. Kuhlmann, Moysés, Jr. Infância e Educação Infantil: Uma Abordagem Histórica. Porto Alegre: Mediação, 1998. Kuhlmann, Moysés Jr., “O Jardim de Infância Caetano de Campos.” In Caetano de Campos Fragmentos da História da Instrução Pública em São Paulo, edited by Maria Candida D. Reis, 61–72, São Paulo: IECC, 1994. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Monarcha, Carlos. Escola Normal da Praça: O Lado Noturno das Luzes. São Paulo: Editora Unicamp, 1999. Monarcha, Carlos. “Revista do Jardim da Infância: Uma Publicação Exemplar.” In Educação da Infância Brasileira, 1875–1983, edited by Carlos Monarcha, 81–120. Campinas: SP, Autores Associados, 2001. Mormul, Najla M., Machado, Maria C. G. “Rui Barbosa e a Educação Brasileira: Os Pareceres de 1882.” Cadernos de História da Educação 12, no. 1 (January/June 2013): 227–94. Nawrotzki, Kristen. “Such Marvelous Training: Grand Rapids, Michigan, as a Kindergarten Center.” In Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education, edited by Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, and Larry Prochner, loc. 2382. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Popkewitz, Thomas S. “Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education—An Introduction.” In Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Travelling of Pragmatism in Education, edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz, 3–36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Prado, Isabel. “Exercicios com Aneis, Executados no Terceiro Periodo do Jardim de Infância.” In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 2, 74–82. São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1897.

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Prado, Isabel. “Primeiro Exercício de Desenho Feito no Terceiro Período do Jardim de Infância.” In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1, 245–48. São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896. Prestes, Gabriel. Guia para Jardineiras: Traduzido do “Paradise of Childhood” de Eduard Wiebé. São Paulo: Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1898. Prestes, Gabriel. “Revista do Jardim de Infância.” In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1, 5–6. São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896. Prochner, Larry. “Their Little Wooden Bricks: A History of the Material Culture of Kindergarten in the United States.” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 3 (2011): 365–75. Prochner, Larry. “Tracking Kindergarten as a Travelling Idea.” In Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education, edited by Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, and Larry Prochner, loc. 403. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Reis Filho, Casemiro. A Educação e a Ilusão Liberal. São Paulo: Cortez, 1981. Rolim, Zalina. “Das ‘Minhas Notas’.” In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 2, 59–61. São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1897. Rolim, Zalina “Trechos.” In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 2, 83–85. São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1897. Santos, Fernanda N. “Representação da Infância em Zalina Rolim: Entre a Arte Poetica e a Educação.” Master’s thesis, Guarulhos/SP: UNIFESP, 2017. Saviani, Dermeval. História das Idéias Pedagógicas no Brasil. Campinas: Autores Associados, 2007. Schelbauer, Analete R. “A Constituição do Método de Ensino Intuitivo na Provincia de São Paulo 1870–1889.” PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2003. Tanuri, Leonor M. O Ensino Normal no Estado de São Paulo: 1889–1930 (Série Estudos e Documentos), Vol. 16. São Paulo: FE/USP, 1979. The Jesuit “Ratio Studiorum” of 1599, Conference of Major Superiors of Jesuits, Washington, DC, 1970. Thompson, Oscar. “Jardim de Infância.” A Schola Publica 1, no. 3 (15 September 1896): 221–36. Tizuko M. Kishimoto, “Educação Infantil integrando pré-escolas e crèches na busca da socialização da criança.” In Tópicas em História da Educação, edited by Diana G. Vidal and Maria Lucia S. Hilsdorf, 225–40, São Paulo: Ed. da USP, 2001. Valdemarin, Vera T. Estudando as Lições de Coisas. Campinas: FAPESP/Autores Associados, 2004. Valdemarin, Vera T. O Liberalismo Demiurgo: Estudo Sobre a Reforma Educacional Projetada nos “Pareceres” de Rui Barbosa. São Paulo: Cultura Acadêmica, 2000.

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Varella, Maria E. “Exercicios Praticos do Jogo da Bola: Primeiro Dom.” In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1, 257–84. São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896. Varella, Maria E. “Exercicios Praticos do Jogo da Bola: Segundo Dom – Jogos Praticos da Esfera, Cubo e Cilindro para os Diversos Periodos do Jardim de Infância.” In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 2, 119–68. São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1897. Varella, Maria E. “O Jardim da Infância Anexxo à Escola Normal.” In Revista do Jardim da Infância, Vol. 1, 9–13, São Paulo: Typographia a Vapor Espindola, Siqueira & Co., 1896. Veiga, Cynthia G. História da Educação. São Paulo: ática, 2007. Vidal, Diana G. “Escola Nova e Processo Educativo.” In 500 anos de educação no Brasil, edited by Eliana M. T. Lopes, Luciano M. Faria Filho, and Cynthia G. Veiga, 497–518, Belo Horizonte: Autentica, 2000. von Binzer, Ina. Os Meus Romanos: Alegrias e Tristezas de Uma Educadora Alemã no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2017. Warde, Miriam J. “Americanismo e Educação: Um Ensaio no Espelho.” São Paulo em Perspectiva 14 no. 2 (2000): 37–43. White, Emerson E. The Art of Teaching: A Manual for Teachers, Superintendents, Teachers’ Reading Circles, Normal Schools, Training Classes, and Other Persons Interested in the Right Training of the Young. New York: American Book Company, 1901.

CHAPTER 4

The Experimental Stations and Psychoanalytic Laboratory, Soviet Russia

Introduction The question addressed in this chapter is a simple one: How was research conceived and practised in the laboratory kindergartens founded and supported by the Bolsheviks’ Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) after the Revolution of October 1917? The Bolsheviks who came to power in Russia in 1917 sought to unify all schools through labourfocused education, communist morality, and aesthetic experience that “altered” nature. Progressive ideas of child development were accommodated within the Marxist labour school philosophy. The eugenics, or social engineering intentions of the Bolsheviks, contributed to a fashionable enthusiasm for an education of the new man and woman. However, when Russia’s newly designated commissar of enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky (1975–1933), a philosopher, writer, and ardent admirer of Nietzsche and Plato, cryptically announced in 1918 that Narkompros was looking at developing a “new human species” in opytnye shkoly (laboratory schools), the news provoked fiery debates among teachers about the lack of resources available to support a quest for nature’s secrets in the post-war time.1 The liberal thinking condemned the laboratory 1 Editorial notes, “Postydnaya stranica v istorii russkoy shkoly” [“A Shameful Page in the History of the Russian School”], Proceedings of the All-Russia Conference, Profesionalny Uchitelskiy Jurnal 3 (10 March 1918): 2–3.

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schools because of raised fears of conveying any misunderstanding of the schools’ experimental nature if the project were to be taken up by the Ministry of Education. The idea that laboratory schools might be viewed as a prototype of the newly introduced unified schools was rejected vigorously.2 Nikolay Rumyantsev insisted, “We need no demonstration schools—they should be established only when we find the best possible form of schooling that represents our ideals, but schools devoted to research that informs pedagogy, like the experimental schools Immanuel Kant proposed.”3 Kant’s point that experimental schools should precede any radical reforms in education was vital.4 However, with a great sense of urgency, twenty-seven laboratory schools were founded in 1919, thirty-one in 1920, and one hundred in the beginning of the 1920– 1921 academic year. All were run by the Narkompros laboratory schools department and were represented at an annual all-Russian conference.5 To understand the nature of investigation in the schools, it is necessary to understand how teachers identified themselves with the process of change. Importantly, the fervent loyalty the provisional government’s liberal reforms enjoyed fuelled a massive teachers’ strike that commenced in December 1917 and lasted until the summer of 1918. The laboratory schools’ initiators, therefore, were amply endowed with political courage when the authors proclaimed that new kinds of teachers were urgently needed to satisfy both the political demands and a recently

2 See Elena Bykova, “Reformirovanie sistemy shkolnogo obrazovanya v SSSR v 1917 –1930 gg. organizacionnye i ideologicheskie aspekty” [“Reforming the School System in the USSR 1917–1930: Organizational and Ideological Aspects”], Bulletin of Tomsk State University: Filosofiya. Sociologiya. Politologiya 1, no. 13 (2011): 179–89. 3 Nikolay Rumyantsev, “Revolucionnye idealy vospitania i ‘opytnye shkoly’ ” [“The Revolutionary Ideals of Education and ‘Laboratory Schools’”], Izvestiya Uchitelskogo Soyuza, Profesionalny Uchitelskii Zurnal 30, no. 2 (15 February 1918): 5. Translated by the authors. See also Immanuel Kant, Uber Pedagogik [Kant on Education] (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1900). 4 For Kant, the Philanthropinum, a progressive school opened by Johan Bernard Basedow in Dessau in 1774, stood as an exemplary experimental school (Uber Pedagogik, note 9, 451). 5 Fyodar Korolev, Timofey Kornejchik, and Zahar Ravkin, Ocherki po istorii sovetskoy shkoly i pedagogiki 1921–1931 [Essays on the History of the Soviet School and Pedagogy 1921–1931] (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Akademii Pedagogicheskih Nauk RSFSR, 1961).

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initiated giant extension of kindergarten provision to underprivileged children.6 In 1918, the new establishment transformed the existing teacher training institutes, courses, and seminars into in-house retraining and higher education courses. They all bore the imprint of a profound shift in how teaching was understood in Russia. Conceptions of giving children and teachers equal importance in the learning equation gained popularity in the aftermath of the Revolution. The teachers had to encourage the children to initiate activities and lead the learning in classrooms where no rigid timetables were permitted, according to the first Guide to Managing Crèches and Kindergartens.7 Many of these perceptions were associated with the fascination of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, with John Dewey’s vision of school and new teachers, in a variety of ways, leading to an emphasis on the challenge to improve education.8 Images of early childhood teachers as creative, politically active, self-reflective, and knowledgeable individuals with an interest in research, arts, and technology pervaded the pedagogic writing and enabled a holistic view of education to be built up, while the conceptualisation of children and childhood was based on necessary links between the view of a communist future and the advanced status of natural sciences and psychology.9 The growing authorities of neuroscience discourse in the new state, shaped by the arrival of Vladimir Bekhterev’s reflexology and Ivan Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity enabled devotees 6 See Vladimir Lenin, Speech at the All-Russian Education Session 28 August 1918, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete Writings of Vladimir Lenin] (Moscow: Moskva Progress, 1965), 84–87. For a discussion of the implementation of the reform, see Yordanka Valkanova, “The Passion for Educating the ‘New Man’: Debates about Preschooling in Soviet Russia, 1917–1925,” History of Education Quarterly 49, no. 2 (2009): 211–21. 7 Instruktsiya po vedeniyu ochaga i detskogo sada [Guide to Managing Crèches and Kindergartens ] (1919), geprinted in Istoriya Sovetskoy Doshkolnoy Pedagogiki [History of Soviet Preschool Education] (1988): 54–57. 8 Yordanka Valkanova, “Constructions of Nature and Emerging Ideas in Children’s Education and Care: The 1600s to 1900,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophies and Theories of Early Childhood Education and Care, ed. Tricia David, Kathy Goouch, and Sacha Powell (London: Routledge, 2015), 35–42. 9 See I. O. Eleferenko, “Teoretoko-metodologicheskoe osmyslenie roli i kachestva uchitelya na pervyh etapah razvitiya sovetskoj shkoly” [“Theoretical and Methodological Understanding of the Role and Quality of the Teacher in the Early Stages of the Development of the Soviet School Izvestiya Uralskogo Universiteta”], Ser. 1, Problemy Obrazovanya, Nauka i Kultury [Problems of Education, Science, and Culture] 6, no. 85 (2010): 22–33.

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of “experimental” studies of the child, or pedology, a relatively new movement strongly supported by G. Stanley Hall and Ovide Decroly to carve out a space for themselves within education in the new laboratory schools.10 Rational knowledge based on empirical information was viewed as the best foundation for the transformative processes of bringing up a “new man” who would fight for communism. Drawing on archived interviews and observations with children that were recorded by trainees and novice teachers in the laboratory schools in Moscow and Moscow district between 1913 and 1928, this chapter looks at the evolving images of teachers, teaching, and children in post-revolutionary discourses and demonstrates how research in the Narkompros-endorsed laboratories was interpreted and enacted in everyday experiences. The study concentrates on how educators, by engaging directly with their social-political environment and especially with the hegemonic scientific discourse, became contributors to a new research model in the study of child development, which was defined as “romantic science” and was partly given voice by Alexander Luria in his memoir The Making of Mind.11 In his book, Luria resembled the attempt of his collaborator Lev Vygotsky to explain the shift away from traditional methods in the child development sciences. This study will therefore suggest that the politicised reaction to the scientific work and the laboratories’ general rejection of the scientific method did much to nurture the sense that these were major arenas of conflict and struggle. The tension was partly due to Narkompros’s strong involvement with eugenics.12 Such observations challenge the established scholarly interpretations. Recent research on scientisation in the realm of psychology and education in early Soviet Russia tends to explain scientisation as a component of Russian modernity, a form of resistance towards the orthodoxy of the 10 See Vladimir Bekhterev, General Principles of Human Reflexology: An Introduction to Objective Study of Personality (London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1933). Ivan Pavlov and William Gantt, Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes: Twenty-Five Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity (Behaviour) of Animals (New York: Liverwright, 1928). For a detailed analysis of scientisation, see Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe, eds., Beyond Empiricism: On Criteria for Educational Research (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2003). For reflexology, see Articles on Children’s Reading and Children’s Literature 1920–1923, Arhiv Academii Nauk, op. 1, ed. hr. 19. 11 Alexander Luria, The Making of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 12 Valkanova, “The Passion for Educating the ‘New Man’.”

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Enlightenment. For instance, Daniel Beer and Michael David-Fox defined the ideological role of scientisation as an essential phenomenon of the reforms, tracing its origin to the work of some Russian Marxists such as the members of Aleksander Bogdanov’s group, who viewed Marxism as a “scientific discovery” and socialism as a unique research programme.13 In addition, historians of John Dewey’s pragmatism in education are particularly concerned with the changing meaning of the modern self and with ways of interpreting the material such metamorphoses generated.14 On the contrary, this chapter intends to redirect this paradigm towards a new line of inquiry with an in-depth study of the research carried out at the laboratory preschools. We draw our examples principally from two cases. The first depicts the research work undertaken at units associated with Stanislav Shatsky’s (1878–1934) First Laboratory Station, consisting of a set of laboratory schools and institutes, whose transformative agenda was fed by two intellectual traditions— pragmatism and Russian utopianism. The second looks at the preparation of teachers for the psychoanalytic kindergarten in Moscow. In the latter, kindergarten teachers employed systematic observations of infantile sexual behaviour to produce psychoanalytic knowledge and implement new psychoanalytic approaches in their pedagogy. We put Dalibor Vesely’s notion of common ground in conversation with Zygmund Bawman’s conceptions of liquid modernity to investigate the connection between the generation of knowledge in the laboratories and the demands for prompting modernisation processes in early childhood education.15 Ultimately, the common ground—the tough intersection between the hegemonic discourse of scientisation of early childhood education, powered by the Bolsheviks, on the one hand, and the research culture developed and employed by educators, on the other—was divergent, as we shall see from the recorded research work in

13 See Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008) and Michael DavidFox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). For Aleksander Bogdanov’s group, see Zenovia Sochor, Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 14 Thomas S. Popkewitz, ed., Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Travelling of Pragmatism in Education—An Introduction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 15 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (New York: Wiley, 2013).

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the laboratories, but no doubt it was intricate, because of its relationship with postmodern thinking. Further, the trajectory of the influence of the Western new education and theories, including Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and John Dewey’s pragmatism, on the Bolsheviks’ laboratory school architects was never a simple linear continuum, because of the political imaginaries in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, since the reform was institutionalised by Narkompros and strengthened with a fresh reformist movement that deployed novel politically aware anti-bourgeois rhetoric pregnant with radical possibility. Nonetheless, the Russian as well as the Western historiography tends to view the influence primarily as a one-way expansion.16 This chapter employs the metaphor of cultural hydraulics to trace the association between the inspirations gained by the Russian reformers from the sciences of the liberal new education and the borrowings from the Bolshevik laboratory school culture that are observable in some Western contexts.17 The metaphor of cultural hydraulics derives from Peter Brown’s discussion on the flow of culture from east to west in the Middle Ages and reminds us that the notion of influence alone does not possess the capacity to explain the complexities of such associations and how they were shaped by the spread of ideas.18 Treating new education and Dewey’s work as a superior source of inspiration might not allow, as we shall see, the very durable reception of the Russian socialist progressivist practices in the West to be uncovered. The resources to conduct an inquiry about the grounds of epistemological references do not presently belong to any one academic discipline, and our determination to examine this issue rests apparently in the social constructivist realm. Our argument is laid out in two sections. In the 16 For examples, see Yulya But, “Translaciya evropeyskih obrazovatel’nyh praktik v Rossiyskuyo imperiyo v XIX v.: osnovnye kanaly i refleksiya elit ” [“Broadcast of European Educational Practices in the Russian Empire in the 20th Century: Main Channels and Reflections of Elites”]. Quaestio Rossica 7, no. 1 (2019): 68–84 and William Partlett, “Breaching Cultural Worlds with the Village School: Educational Visions, Local Initiative, and Rural Experience at S. T. Shatskii’s Kaluga School System, 1919–1932,” The Slavonic and East European Review (2004): 847–85. See also William Partlett “Bourgeois Ideas in Communist Construction: The Development of Stanislav Shatsky’s Teacher Training Methods,” History of Education 35, no. 4–5 (2006): 453–74. 17 See Peter Brown, “Eastern and Western Christendom in Late Antiguity: A Parting of the Way,” Studies in Church History, 13, 1–24. 18 Ibid.

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first, we show how the phenomenological tendencies in the research work undertaken in the school units associated with Shatsky, such as the Shenyavsky university teacher training courses and Institute of Children’s Reading, distanced Shatsky’s team from the dominant normative scientific expectations. In the second section, we analyse how the political appeal derived a search for an epistemological ground, focusing primarily on the Bolshevik party involvement in the implementation of Freud’s theory in the context of power relations and, more specifically, concentrating on how psychoanalysis could be applied to transform consciousness. We highlight the scientisation and the critical possibilities for developing a new epistemological frame. In the final section, we discuss some of the implications of the work undertaken in the laboratory schools for contemporary epistemological discussions. A variety of primary sources are used, including documents from the Archive of the Academy of Education Sciences in Moscow, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvenny Arhiv Rosiyskoy Federacii [GARF]), the Museum of Maxim Gorky in Moscow, and the archives of Moscow State Educational University.

Negotiating Scientisation in the Laboratory Schools: The First Laboratory Station Originating Factors for Experimental Education in Stanislav Shatsky’s Progressive Education Project The basic idea of the laboratory schools was not new by any means. Indeed, experimental schools had been an essential part of the work of Stanislav Shatsky, an ardent advocate of new education, who was named “the Dewey of Russia” by Western visitors and was recognised as one of the greatest educational geniuses on the pages of the organ of the New Education Fellowship, The New Era.19 It came as no surprise, therefore that in 1918 Shatsky and his collaborators Aleksander Fortunov, Elena Fortunova, Valentina Shatskaya, and Boris Vsesvyatskij offered Narkompros an interpretative framework within which to view the nature of the

19 For examples of visitors’ accounts, see Sydney Strong, “Educational Need,” Russian Information and Review 2, no. 33 (1923): 527 and Carleton Washburne, “The Good and Bad in Russian Education,” The New Era 33 (1928): 9.

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Bolshevik laboratory schools.20 The way Shatsky developed his proposal shows at once the impact of his early reflections on the definition of research and his departure from some of the views he held during his university studies. Effectively, he drew on approaches and methods developed in conjunction with Alexander Zelenko (1871–1953), a successful North Modern architect; Luisa Schleger, an early childhood educationist and their fellows, who jointly founded a Dewey-inspired settlement, Children’s Work and Leisure, for working-class children in Moscow’s Butyrsky-Maryinsky district in 1905.21 Alexander Zelenko advanced his idea of settlements during a visit to the USA between about 1903 and 1905.22 Before his return to Russia, Zelenko contacted Luisa Schleger, and the venture commenced in 1905. Shatsky was reluctant to join in the beginning, because he was developing a career in agricultural science at the prestigious Agricultural Academy, where he enjoyed many hours of laboratory work. Nevertheless, soon Schleger and Zelenko convinced him to join in. Although Shatsky was a stranger to education, he had two enthusiasms—research and music—which were to become of great significance for his progressive education project. Slowly, other devotees united with them and they all formed a team known in Russia and beyond as Shatsky’s circle.23 By 1906–1909, when their reformist views were crystallising, their interests centred on motivating children’s efforts and engagement through music, drama, agricultural labour, and natural scientific inquiries. However, the main tendency in the work in the settlement that Shatsky recounted in his memoirs was investigation, the researchbased work that focused on the search for new, effective approaches to teaching and learning.24 Shatsky’s circle concentrated on two areas: 20 Here, they were joined by Flyorina, Zelenko, Masalitinova, Rozanov, Rumer, Skatkin, Schleger, Shabad, and Prudnikova. See Dina Bershadskaya, Pedagogicheskie vzglyady i deyatelnost S. T. Shatskogo (Moscow: APN RSFSR, 1960). 21 Ibid. 22 Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, l. 2. 23 The other members of the circle were V. N. Damyanova (who became Shatsky’s wife

in 1906), A. A Fortunov and E. A. Fortunova, E. Y. Kazimorova, and others, who all combined an interest in education with music and literary culture, and often gave classical music concerts together. 24 Stanislav Shatsky and Sergey Cherpanovym, “Pervaya opytnaya stanciya po narodnomu obrazovaniyu pri Narkomprose RSFSR” [“The First Experimental Station for Public Education Under the People’s Commissariat of the RSFSR”], in Pedagogicheskaya Enciklopediya, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshteniya, 1930).

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(1) exploring pedagogy as the “child’s kingdom” where the teacher is a friend and spiritual leader and (2) studies of children’s “social instincts” in their social environment. Shatsky maintained that children should be studied as social beings, and therefore, professionals who work with children should develop qualities needed for social workers.25 In their words, the members of the circle drew extensively on John Dewey, from whom they adopted the connection of learning to real-life experience and children’s interests (named by them “Dewey’s culturalhistorical approach”), as well as on Friedrich Froebel and Maria Montessori and on the rural utopian thinking that underpinned Leo Tolstoy’s kindergarten in Yasna Pollyanna.26 Interestingly, through the study of the settlement’s early childhood project—kindergarten for children from 3 to 7 years of age, led by Luisa Schleger—we can reconstruct some resonance of the challenges the deployment of Froebel’s philosophy experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century due to the huge popularity of the gifts and occupations, taken as a substitute for Froebel’s system by some primary schools at the time.27 Consequently, as Schleger admitted, the team regrettably misunderstood Froebel’s philosophy.28 However, they later became caught up in the excitement of the hope that the vast expansion of American early childhood education brought to professional early childhood expertise in Europe, and chose to follow the model of Jenny B. Merrill, supervisor of the kindergartens of the New York City public schools.29 Although the team received considerable support from philanthropic funds, the settlement had a troubled history and ceased to exist no longer after it was launched. In 1908, the police penetrated the settlement,

25 Ibid. 26 See E. Gorbunova, “Labour School,” Journal of Free Education and Free Labour School 11, no. 6–7 (1918), 11–23 and Shatsky and Cherpanovym, “Pervaya opytnaya stanciya.” 27 See Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond N 1, op. 1, ed. hr. 203. For the

reception of Froebel’s pedagogy in Russia, see Yordanka Valkanova and Kevin J. Brehony, “The ‘Gifts’ and ‘Contributions’: Friedrich Froebel and Russian Education from 1850 to 1920,” History of Education 35, no. 2 (2006): 189–207. 28 Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, ed. hr. 203. 29 See Jenny B. Merrill, “Methods in Village and Rural Schools,” The Kindergarten-

Primary Magazine 25, no. 1 (1912).

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arrested Zelenko and Shatsky, and accused the team of spreading subversive socialist ideas.30 Nonetheless, from 1909, the work of Shatsky’s team continued but under another arrangement and name, Bodraya Zhizn (the invigorating life), which consisted of a kindergarten, a school, and clubs, this time with a stronger emphasis on studies of developmental characteristics and children’s interests. Generally, since 1912, Shatsky and his followers worked to establish schools as experimental. They associated modern ways of teaching with desirable new professional qualities, such as knowledge of how to organise a child’s life, enthusiasm about research, and critical thinking.31 However, Shatsky and his collaborators always maintained that there was no simple connection between teaching and investigation. While the meaning of research-based teaching could be ambiguous among them, Shatsky’s visits (1913–1914) to schools in Italy and Scandinavian countries, as well as to Kerschensteiner’s school in Munich, Ecole Decroly in Belgium, and Rousseau Institute in Geneva, provided reassurance that yielded considerable dividends.32 Shatsky was always alive to the importance of networks, as he noted in his letters to Luisa Schleger during his visits, and he enjoyed connections with prominent promoters of the progressive schools. At meetings in Switzerland, he provided Edouard Claparède, Adolphe Ferrière, and Pièrre Bovet with an account of the work at the Bodraya Zhizn schools and gave them a copy of his monograph under the same name. The volume elicited their interest and Claparède offered to publish it because he found the experiment extraordinary. The reaction to Shatsky’s work in the European context further firmed his views on social engagement, designated as social behaviourism by Dewey when he visited Moscow in 1928.33 However, the experimental school project had to wait for better times.

30 Stanislav Shatsky, “Na puti k trudovoy shkole” [“On the Pathway to Labour School”], Izbrannye pedagogicheskie sochineniya [Selected pedagogical works ] (1980): 7–38. 31 Stanislav Shatsky, “Pervaya opytnaya stanciya po narodnomu obrazovaniyu pri Narkompros RSFSR” [“The First Experimental Station for Public Education Under the People’s Commissariat of the RSFSR”], in Izbrannye Pedagogicheskie Sochineniya [Selected Pedagogical Works ], ed. Stanislav Shatsky, 324–32 (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1980). 32 Shatsky, “Na puti k trudovoy shkole,” 75. 33 John Dewey, “Impressions of Soviet Russia (1928),” In John Dewey: The Later Works,

1925–1953, vol.3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 228.

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Nonetheless, the idea once again found its place in the list of preliminary theses developed by Zelenko, who was employed as chair of the Commission of Preschool Education at the Ministry of Education during the Provisional Cadets government in February 1917.34 The theses suggested immediate development of privately funded laboratory schools for practical high-quality training of newly qualified early childhood teachers. The early childhood professionals, however, were of a more sceptical cast of mind. Shatsky was criticised at the First AllRussian Congress on Preschool Education held in February 1919 as rather obsessed with experiments and observations and reluctant to think about theories.35 Nevertheless, Narkompros issued an order to establish the first laboratory—Shatsky’s “First Laboratory Station for People’s Enlightenment”—on 19 May 1919.36 The station consisted of a club, a library and reading room for teachers, an educational exhibition in Moscow, four kindergartens, 16 schools, and a commune, all located in Moscow and in rural areas in Moscow district. Furthermore, in 1921, Shatsky, under the direction of Nadezhda Krupskaya, with whom he became fairly close, developed the new school curriculum for the united schools. Bringing Evidence into Teacher Education Soon after it was founded, the First Station offered training courses that were transformed later into a Pedagogical Technikum (college), where Zelenko, Schleger, Evgeniya Flyorina, and Shatsky taught. The modules were run as a series of practice-based sessions and included music, analysing children’s drawings, language development (consisting of general and children’s linguistics), social and material environment, and

34 Komisii po Doshkolnomu Obrasovaniyu [Preschool Education Commissions ], Pervy opis

predpolozhennyh tezisov [The First Description of the Alleged Theses ], Arhive Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond N 1, op. 1, ed hr. 203, ll. 2–3. 35 See Irina Mchitarjan, “John Dewey and the Development of Education in Russia Before 1930: Report on a Forgotten Reception,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 19, no. 1 (2000): 109–31. 36 Gosudarstvenny Arhiv Rosiyskoy Federacii, fond 2306 op. 1, d. 180, l. 87.

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Fig. 4.1 Shatsky’s view on research-informed pedagogy (Source Stanislav Shatsky, Izbrannye Pedagogicheskie Sochineniy [Selected Pedagogical Works ] [Moscow: Pedagogika, 1980], 65)

the role of the preschool leader (rukovoditelnitsa).37 The early childhood historiography and the archival materials show that the early childhood professionals were named either educationalists, leaders, or froebelichki (Froebelists) in Russia.38 Schleger maintained that the theoretical training had to follow the empirical work because experience and activity both were the best means of gaining understanding of new knowledge.39 Shatsky too was interested in the capacity of the teachers to generate knowledge from lived experience. The diagram presented in Fig. 4.1 is an excerpt of Shatsky’s description of research-based training, which focuses on reflective teaching. He asserted that professional knowledge should pertain to relationships between the teacher and the child, not to essences.40 It is important to acknowledge that Shatsky’s attempt to transcend the division between theory and practice by developing a unified teaching training through inquiry derived from his democratically oriented progressive epistemology, grounded, as he admitted, in his own training in scientific research received in the Agricultural Academy. 37 The First Station Technikum was opened in 1925; see Arhive Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk [Archive of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences], fond 1, op. 1, 1927–28, ed. hr. 155. 38 Arhive Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, l. 2. 39 Ibid. 40 Stanislav Shatsky, Izbrannye Pedagogicheskie Sochineniya [Selected Pedagogical Works ] (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1980), 65.

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His epistemology entailed a personal search in his relations with others. Certainly, Shatsky’s philosophy offered the early childhood professionals ways of thinking about the voice that stands behind experience. They, as well as the specialists working at Narkompros, found these ways of thinking appealing, since the new edition of the Guide to Managing Crèches and Kindergartens insisted that every early childhood educator should study the children in depth by analysing their own work and therefore by keeping diaries of observations and collecting and analysing children’s drawings and products of children’s activities that reflected children’s interests.41 However, the approach was rooted in the work undertaken at Bodraya Zhizn before the Revolution. Indeed, similar courses, named Open Courses on Preschool Education and led by Luisa Schleger, were offered in conjunction with A. L. Shenyavsky University from 1915 to 1918.42 They were attended by more than 1200 practitioners and became even more popular than the courses provided by the Froebel Institutes in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Schleger defined her approach as autodidactic, where the teaching sessions were organised around discussions of reflective diaries. Indeed, the team centred on the importance of researching and generating knowledge about children’s psychological, biological, and social characteristics, without which it was “impossible to create an effective system for preschool education.”43 The lecturers intended to experiment through an intervention in which the trainees had to feel through themselves how their strategies would work with children. The emphasis was on the personal aspects of the single pedagogic examinations. For example, in the excerpt below, a trainee named Irina described working with clay: I will speak about myself. I think, during the [clay] modelling, I experienced absolutely the same that a child would experience: On the first day I was in despair because absolutely nothing went well, but Luisa Schleger encouraged me to continue by saying, “We will see how this will go next time.” During my second attempt, when I was sculpting a

41 “Instrukciya po vedeniyu detskogo sada” [“Instructions for Kindergarten”], Obshtie principy vospitaniya detej doshkolnogo vozrasta [Guide to Managing Crèches and Kindergartens ] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo Tipografiya 7, 1921). 42 Arhive Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, ed. hr. 203. 43 Ibid.

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bird, Luisa Schleger reminded me not to give up, but to carry on. That day I went home full of hope. Today, from very early in the morning, I started thinking about the clay, and when I arrived here, things finally started to come together. Now I am certain that when I get home, I will be modelling with joy.44

Schleger underlined a deliberate absence of systematic ordering in the syllabus. The discussions began in the concrete situations of the classroom rather than deriving from prior theoretical statements, such as in the example below: The day today was somewhat noisy and loud. The children were engaged with many things, but quickly transitioned from one to another, especially during play. Their activities lacked consistency, making it difficult for me to conduct the observation. Girls restarted their play building a cardboard house. After a short pause, they said they wanted to build a house with a roof. Then they said they wanted to sleep, but soon returned to their building again. From time to time they were limping using a stick, imitating somebody. Manya was earnest and was running around less than Nadya and Tanya.45

Clearly, the training was grounded in the lived reality of the classrooms by using a “trying to be who teaches” model.46 On this basis, the trainees aimed to develop their own method rather than “following previously established pedagogical systems such as those created by Froebel or Montessori,” as Schleger suggested in her discussions with the participants.47 “The history of our early childhood education endeavour,” she continued, “was by itself a history of studying the child and a history of studying our own growth.”48 In addition, the trainees had the opportunity to take part in various research 44 Zapisy besed rukovoditelnicy [Leader’s Conversation Notes ] 1917–1918, Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, ed. hr. 45, l. 7, 10 November 1917. 45 For a discussion on the “trying to be who teaches” model, see Zapisy besed rukovoditelnicy [Leader’s Conversation Notes ] 1917–1918, Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, ed. hr. 45, ll. 8, 9 December 1917. 46 David E. Denton, Existentialism and Phenomenology in Education: Collected Essays (New York: Teachers College Press, 1974). 47 Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, l. l.2. 48 Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, 2, ed. hr. 203, l. l.12.

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activities in which members of Shatsky’s team were involved, such as in the research of Evgeniya Flyorina (1889–1952). Flyorina, a trainee and tutor at the First Station, developed criteria for studying child development based on 50,000 children’s drawings and 15,000 clay models; she communicated her findings through a 1924 book entitled Children’s Drawing.49 The scientific work undertaken at the station provided some valuable explorations in children’s understanding of the world from the teacher’s perspective. Given the historic context, it is clear that Shatsky had every reason to be attracted to the use of the scientific method. However, he denied some very important elements of modern thinking at the time, such as the hegemony of expert knowledge, if we look at Shatsky’s method through the lens of Foucault’s depiction of disciplinary body practices.50 Further, Shatsky’s democratic affinity lay not only with the new education rhetoric but also with the marginalised, because of the scientific atmosphere in Narkompros. Viewed from this perspective, Shatsky’s silences about the scientific culture in the post-revolutionary times became as eloquent as his statements, since the scientific method and, more specifically, the fashionable psychometrics were never mentioned in his advocacy for research-based pedagogy. Researching Children’s Lived Experience of Reading Another venture was the Institute of Children’s Reading founded by Aleksander Zelenko in 1913. The institute is a valuable case study because it is possible, through it, to consider in some detail the complexities of transnational exchange within the new education movement, not just in Russia but in other contexts too. Undoubtedly, Zelenko’s deep engagement with American innovations was extraordinary. A profound inspiration for commencing the work of the institute was story hours, popular reading activities at numerous libraries in the USA that Zelenko reinvented in Moscow. Zelenko elicited Shatsky’s group’s interest at the beginning, and the institute, which began as Griboedov Workshop, became a space for the infiltration of ideas and provided research training

49 Arhive Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, ed. hr. 203. 50 Michel Foucault, “Discipline,” in Rethinking the Subject (New York: Routledge,

2018), 60–69.

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opportunities for novice teachers.51 The researchers were predominantly teachers and trainees from Bodraya Zhisn, as well as associated lecturers at Shenyavsky University, where Zelenko read modules such as “children’s libraries” and “the spiritual development of children in relation to child reading.”52 The participants were street children as well as children enrolled at prestigious independent and state schools. The interest was perused perceptions of Western children’s literature in Russia. However, the central focus was children’s lived experiences with reading. Workshops were run by a teller and an assistant. The teller, sometimes joined by children, communicated scientific and technical information (e.g. topics relating to materials, geographic locations, or politics) that was amalgamated in the books. The teller also tried to elicit analogues with Russian cultural costumes and fiery tales. For instance, similarities were sought between the Norwegian fairy tale “The Pancake” and the Russian fairy tale “Kolobok.”53 At the same time, the assistants conducted research through observations and questionnaires. Notes from an observation undertaken with children aged five to six in Moscow in 1921 showed that the focus was also on the teller’s performance, as well as on the assistant’s own insights gained from the texts she listened to and from the children’s behaviour and comments. Children’s discussions of books were neatly recorded too. The research work was located precisely at the intersection of texts, young readers’ perceptions, and readers-tellers’ negotiations of meaning. Zelenko left the project in 1921 after being asked by Krupskaya to review museum education in the USA. Nevertheless, his legacy was strong, and the Institute of Children’s Reading, which was initially established as a set of guided reading workshops at Griboedov Library received great development before and after the Revolution, and eventually was turned into a form that distinguished itself strongly from the US-based

51 Anne Carroll Moore had introduced a story hour at the Pratt Institute Free Library as early as 1896; see Harriet G. Long, Public Library Service to Children: Foundation and Development (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1971), 176–78; and Kate McDowell, “Open Wide the Doors: The Children’s Room as Place in Public Libraries, 1876–1925,” Library Trends 62 no. 3 (2014): 519–29. 52 Among them were M. H. Svenitskaya, A. K. Pokrovskaya, U. B. Fomina, A. K. Shnejder, B. T. Kozello, A. M. Zhelohovceva, and others. 53 Arhive Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 16, op. 1, ed. hr. 19, l. 30.

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original model, because it was run more widely and targeted multiple audiences that included even preschool-aged children. After the Revolution, the institute joined Narkompros and became one of the most recognisable research centres in which major projects were run and doctoral students were trained. Remarkably, Lev Vygotsky contributed to the work of the institute through a review of the appropriateness of children’s literature.54 However, ultimately for the followers of Shatsky and Zelenko working at the institute, the approach used in selecting literature appropriate for young children might be found also in the First Station work, particularly in the investigation of children’s interests. Notably, themes such as the role psychology could play in gaining understanding about children’s interests were discussed at scholarly conferences. The transcribed discussions give us insights into the language, metaphors, and imagery of the post-revolutionary culture of research with children, and the ways in which psychological notions were elaborated. The importance of the work at the Children’s Reading Institute lies in the extraordinary influence the contributors, such as Evgenya Flyorina, Anna Pokrovskaya, and Mariya Sinitskaya, possessed in the new government and the fact that an affinity for research-informed pedagogy was at the heart of their view about the transformative power of education. Hence, among the most important themes was defining the term scientific, or nauchnost. Mihail Godar argued, “Science is the organisation of experience. Scientific is what lies at the level of contemporary knowledge … therefore, ‘scientific’ is a relative concept.”55 In science, he continued, intuition is actually more important than rationality. Nevertheless, the narrative was curiously ambivalent. A vision of negativity of the model of research practised at the institute was in sharp contrast with the celebration of the institute’s accomplishments. An illustration is a paper sent from Switzerland to the research team by Nikolai Rubakin, a writer, positivist, and respected contributor to library science. In his communication, Rubakin suggested that children’s reading constituted studies from psycho-physiological and sociological perspectives and that the book-librarian field should become a branch of the natural

54 See “Kakaya knizhka nuzhna doshkolniku” [What Books Are Good for Preschoolers ], ed. E. A. Flerinoy and E. Yu. Shabad (Moscow: Kommisiya po Doshkolnoy knige pri pedstudii Narkomprosa. 1928): 3–5. 55 Arhive Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, 1921, fond 16, op. 1, ed. hr. 31, l. 59.

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sciences.56 According to Rubakin, biblio-psychology studies of the effect of irritants (meaning words, phrases, texts, or series of books) on the subject, the reader, or the listener were the more appropriate type of study. The basic approach, he insisted, must look at the reader’s psyche and not at the dead material of letters. No irony is visible in Rubakin’s account. Further, he employed an example depicting his collaboration with the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva in 1916 and, more specifically, with the International Biblio-Psychology Project initiated by Edouard Claparède, Adolphe Ferrière, and Pièrre Bovet that became a centre of this new science.57 The model of research at the Institute of Children’s Reading, however, did not fully account for the dominant positivist agenda and contemporary preoccupation with science. Seemingly, the search for epistemological ground was the major impulse for the rejection of the scientific method, because positivism alone could not satisfy the complexities of dialectics of the transnational progressive praxis in which the research team members were enthusiastically engaged. Shatsky’s Legacy It is important to note that the Soviet progressive era had its own vitality, and its national and worldwide engagement should be appreciated. However, the atmosphere of witch hunting during the Stalinist era blackened Shatsky as utopian and Tolstoist. This vilification made him abandon the First Station and look for new prospects at the Second Moscow University in 1932, where Vygotsky and Flyorina were also teaching. Later, he became rector of the Moscow Music Academy (Conservatory), where he worked until his death in 1934. Stalin’s Cultural Revolution, especially after 1928, rapidly undervalued Shatsky’s vision of the reforms. The points scholars such as Catriona Kelly make that the work of Shatsky and his team had no impact on Soviet education treat him as an isolated figure instead of locating him in the broader context of the national and worldwide tradition of progressive education.58

56 Pismo Rubakina [Rubikin’s Letter], Arhive Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, 1921, fond 16, op. 1, ed. hr. 31, l. 123. 57 Pismo Rubakina, 124. 58 Catriona Kelly, “‘The School Waltz’: The Everyday Life of the Post-Stalinist Soviet

Classroom,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture 1 (2004): 108–58.

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Indeed, the laboratory schools were intellectual crucibles where socialist progressive education was institutionalised for a first time. Invited by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the laboratory schools were visited by Dewey Celestin Freinet, Patty Smith Hill, and many others. There were 4761 visitors to Stansky’s schools in just a nine-month period during 1925/1926. Twenty-six of them came from various countries, including China, Japan, Turkey, Germany, England, Belgium, France, Spain, Denmark, Poland, and the USA. Celestin Freinet, who visited Russia in 1925 as part of a French teachers’ union delegation, reported that he was captivated by its flexible learning environment that was dynamic and beneficial for both learners and teachers. In his 1927 essay “A Month with Russian Children,” Freinet noted that the Russians implemented widely the new education fellowship paradigm emerging in the West.59 Such pilgrimages resulted in a vast secondary literature on Shatsky’s endeavour in the West and later in the Soviet Union after the Khrushchev Thaw in the 1960s.

Transformed Consciousness in a Psychoanalytic Laboratory Kindergarten Political Status and Institutionalised Psychoanalysis Another important cluster in this brief cartography of the new transformative progressive education discourses includes the psychoanalytic tradition, which centred on the relationship between analysis and pedagogy. We highlight this relationship here. In this section, we present an example of an institutional implementation of a theory that makes clear the difficulties of considering progressive education as restricted to systematic theories or orthodox practices. In hope of pursuing the political implications of Freud’s thoughts, Shatsky, along with academics and activists of the psychoanalytic movement in Russia and supported by Commissar of War Leon Trotsky

59 Celestin Freinet, Oeuvres Pedagogiques, vol. 1 (Paris: Seui, 1994), 588. See also

Olga Gorbatkova, “Vliyanie Pedagogicheskih borozrenii S. Frene na razvitie otechestvennogo mediaobrazobaniya v 1920-e gody” [“The Influence of the Pedagogical Views of S. Frenet on the Development of Domestic Media Education in the 1920s”]. Vestnik Krasnodarskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta im V. P. Astafieva [Bulletin of the Krasnodar State Pedagogical University, V. P. Astafieva] 4 (2012): 91–97.

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(1879–1940)—a keen advocate of psychoanalysis and an energetic revolutionary—initiated a psychoanalytic kindergarten project: a boarding school called the International Solidarity Children’s Home-Laboratory in the new capital of Moscow.60 The founders, however, were not constrained to the local ambit of their work. The venture was one of the first contributions made to the development of a psychoanalytic pedagogy of early childhood; an objective was questioning how Freud’s framework could be incorporated into socialist preschools. The project was closely monitored by Sigmund Freud himself, Narkompros, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and the German mineworkers’ union. The union joined the project in 1922 to help the financially struggling laboratory during the economic despair of the post-revolutionary time. Yet, the interest in expounding the results of research on child unconsciousness was a significant historical phenomenon demonstrating that childhood was considered an important period of being. When the future is imagined through a child’s transformation, those engaged with education can turn to state intervention and government policies. Notably, the Bolshevik leaders recognised the laboratory as part of a larger social project known as psychoanalytic Marxism, which aimed to expand psychoanalysis into a revolutionary enterprise with potential to create new working-class men and women. Trotsky was openly apprehensive about the manifestation of bourgeois ideological elements in the communist mentality during the revolutionary transition. Trotsky’s version of psychoanalytic thinking derived from his encounters with Freud and Adler during an exile to Vienna in 1907. Psychoanalysis appeared to

60 See Gosudarstvenny Arhiv Rosiyskoy Federacii, fond 2307, op. 2, d. 412, ll. 1–2 ob. A useful source about the psychoanalytic kindergarten is Alexander Etkind’s Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (London: Routledge, 1997). In addition, Martin Alan Miller’s essay on psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and recent comments by Angelini and by Gianotti and Schiavulli on the Child’s Home-Laboratory seem to be most important attempts by historians of psychology to evaluate how psychoanalysis is understood in an educational project. See Martin Alan Miller, “Freudian Theory Under Bolshevik Rule: The Theoretical Controversy During the 1920s,” Slavic Review 44, no. 4 (1985): 625–46; Alberto Angelini, “History of the Unconscious in Soviet Russia: From Its Origins to the Fall of the Soviet Union,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89 no. 2 (2008): 369–88; and Merete Amann Gainotti and Paola Schiavulli, “The Pioneer Educational Work of Vera Schmidt and Sabina Spielrein in the Context of the Development of Psychoanalysis in Russia (1921–1923),” in International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences and Arts SGEM2014 Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1 (2014): 981–88.

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be a convenient framework that, Trotsky believed, would provide tools for reconstructing the intellectual manoeuvres employed by the Party’s ideologists to win working-class minds. The interest in pursuing the political implications of Freud’s thoughts, however, was not just fed by the convergence of pedagogic and political analysis, but it was also built on long-standing ties to high-flying members of the Bolshevik elite. Vera Schmidt, a Froebelian-trained educator and a Bolshevik elite wife, took a leading position in the laboratory, although formally Ivan Ermakov served as its director.61 The psychoanalytic scholarly work was accommodated by the Psycho-Neurological Institute, where a small psychoanalytic unit was established. Before the psychoanalytic project was set up, Schmidt was strongly identified as a founder of the preschool section of Narkompros. She contributed to the first handbook on preschool education for kindergarten teachers, published after the Revolution, and was an active organiser of the First All-Russian Congress on Preschool Education.62 As a deputy of the Narkompros preschool department, Schmidt worked alongside Nadezhda Krupskaya. Well spoken, fluent in several languages and current in Western social development, Schmidt read history at the Bestuzhev Courses in St. Petersburg, which were famous for their pioneering work in women’s higher education. She studied the kindergarten method at the Froebel Institute in Kiev from 1913 to 1915 and was deeply influenced by Friedrich Froebel’s philosophy. Schmidt, whose father was a founding member of the Froebel Society in Kiev, was thoroughly supported by her influential husband, Otto Schmidt (1891– 1956), a famous academic and party leader who was asked by the Central Committee to oversee the laboratory project on their behalf.63 In Vera Schmidt’s words, closeness of the founders of the kindergarten project was a feature: “In our small circle of people, who were interested in psychoanalysis, has emerged the idea of organising a children’s home that

61 Valkanova and Brehony, “Gifts and Contributions.” 62 See Dora Lasurkina, “Podgotovka nauchnoy konferencii po voprosam doshkolnogo

vospitaniya” [“Preparation of a Scientific Conference on Preschool Education”], Buletin Otdela Doshkolnogo Vospitaniya NKN 2 (1920): 1–2. 63 Otto Schmidt was a prominent mathematician who solved the theorem of isomorphism (1927), known as “the Schmidt problem.” He authored Abstract Theory of Groups (1916) and A Theory of Earth’ s Origin (1958).

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could allow us to seek a new education on the basis of psychoanalysis.”64 Thus, political and educational identities were entwined. The association of Bolshevik nomenclature with psychoanalysis, however, transcended the initial eugenic agenda—a potential was seen in the laboratory for engineering a new Soviet elite. Children from families of revolutionary heroes and officials, such as Zenya, the son of the People’s Commissar for Justice Dmitry Kursky (1874–1932), were enrolled. Some of the other Bolshevik elite children included Mikhail Frunze’s children Tanya and Tima (Timur), Vera and Otto Schmidt’s son Vladimir, referred to in Vera’s writings as Wolik, and Joseph Stalin’s natural son Vasily and adopted son Artyom Sergeev, also called Tomik.65 We might say that the busy Bolshevik parents, as Schmidt described them in her report to Freud, seemed confident in the qualities of the method. Fifteen abandoned street children known as Bezprizorni, a striking postrevolutionary phenomenon, were also enrolled. The newly established project found a home for its thirty pupils, aged from one-and-a-half to five, in the beautiful art nouveau Ryabushinsky House, a piece of vanguard architecture designed by Fyodor Schechtel and built in 1900 in Malaya Nikitskaya Street in Moscow. The exceptional significance of Ryabushinsky House for the laboratory as a distinguished point of origin of a new man and woman is remarkable.66 Its sculptured stairs, stained glass windows, and painted wall tiles represented the emergence of the unconscious soul and its spiritual evolution. Ultimately, the laboratory’s interest centred on how children’s unconscious emotionally disturbing memories or thoughts were repressed by consciousness.

64 Vera Schmidt, “Psiholoanaliticheskoe vospitanie v Sovetskoj Rosii” [Psychoanalytical

Upbringing in Soviet Russia] (Izhevsk: Ergo, 2011), 11. 65 See Vera Schmidt, Dnevnik materi: Wtoroy i tretiy goda zhizni [Mother’s Diary: Second and Third Years of Life] (Izhevsk: Ergo, 2010). 66 See Clementine Cecil, “Russian Revolutionary—With its turtle/jellyfish light, plaster snails and wavelike staircase, Moscow’s Ryabushinsky House is an Art Nouveau fantasy where Maxim Gorky once held court,” World of Interiors 29, no. 2 (2009): 102–9.

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Scientisation and Its Power in Defining Pedagogy The laboratory kindergarten team relied on systematic observations to produce psychoanalytic knowledge and to elaborate new working strategies for implementing psychoanalytic approaches in mainstream classrooms, a methodologically heretical act that later readers of Freud’s theory found unmanageable.67 In her report to Freud, written in 1923, Vera Schmidt drew on a range of observations, including lessons, parents’ visits, and bed experiences during illness, to evoke the wealth of a child’s sexual behaviour, because children were allowed to express their sexual needs freely.68 The rukovoditelnicy (preschool leaders) had to keep diaries of their observations of the children and report back at meetings of the Psychoanalytic Society. Schmidt noted that the aim was for the trainees to take a professional stance, without disgust, when observing infantile sexual behaviours. The centrality of “control of unconsciousness” demanded an interdisciplinary approach that drew from neurology and psycholinguistics. Observations had to cover a child’s character, dominant erogenous zones, analysis of the child’s play, fears, sleeping (dreams), and products of the child’s creative activities (e.g. drawings and constructions). Ermakov maintained that through children’s contacts with rukovoditelnicy and developing trust, “invisible” reactions would evolve. Through such contacts, children would be able to connect to reality and avoid fixating on physiological pleasures (e.g. oral, anal) that could delay their development and turn them into asocial individuals. Oddly, the rukovoditelnicy were prohibited from displaying affection towards the children. In an effort to cultivate the necessary professional attitude, the trainees had to go through analysis themselves. Child analysis was not a very popular practice within the psychoanalytic movement in 1921. Sigmund 67 One of the most influential philosophers in the twentieth century, Karl Popper (1902– 1994), for instance, called Freudian psychoanalytic theory “pseudoscientific.” 68 Vera Schmidt, Psychoanalytische Erziehung in Sowjetrussland: Bericht über das Kinderheim-Laboratorium in Moskau [Psychoanalytic Education in Soviet Russia: Report on the Children’s Home Laboratory in Moscow] (Verlag: Leipzig, Wien, Zürich, 1924). The book was initially produced as a report titled Report about the Work of the “Children’s Home– Laboratory” and delivered to Sigmund Freud in Vienna in October 1923. Later, it was published in German by International Psychoanalytic Publishing under the title Psychoanalytic Education in Soviet Russia. That text was deemed psychoanalytic, while another version, in Russian, was reshaped to cover issues that related to the pedagogy adopted in the laboratory.

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Freud’s work with children was rather random. Before the Moscow project took place, the only psychoanalysts who analysed children within a school environment were Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Tatyana Rosenthal. The analyst’s training was absorbed with experiencing the power of sublimation, even if the trainees had no prior analytical experience. Besides, analysis provided by non-medical practitioners was deemed inappropriate. We must note that a discussion at the 6th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association held in The Hague from 8 to 11 September 1920 examined the professional/amateur polarity and stressed the need for trained psychoanalysts, highlighting an obvious fissure between those who believed that only physicians should practise analysis and those who recognised that formal qualifications could result in a new field. Psychoanalytic thinking worked with a number of extensive concepts, such as unconsciousness, desire, otherness, and drives.69 The trainees were guided towards a cathartic transformation of their professional identity. Indeed, with the approach they had to discover the similarities of their own fears and desires to those observable in children and establish mutual identification. In addition, the observations conducted by the preschool workers (rukovoditelnicy) involved drawing pictures of children and their activities. Reflexivity was encouraged while examining children’s experiences, too. The rukovoditelnitsy used insight gained through their training and discussions with fellow trainees as well as with the members of the Institute of Psychoanalysis to interpret and uncover meanings with a goal to produce representations of children’s behaviour and development. Notably, the division of labour in the laboratory positioned women as rukovoditelnicy while men were the leaders, the brains behind the project. This positioning signals patriarchal domination, which can be seen partly as an outcome of the essentialist discourses that conceived child rearing as biologically fixed and natural, and situated women’s role in the kindergarten as mere adornment. This subtle deskilling process is observable in the reception and deployment of Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942), a famous student of Freud and Jung, demonstrating that even when women

69 Vera Schmidt, “Itogi 3-letney raboty v Detskom dome laboratorii pri Psihoanalitiocheskom institute (1924)” [“The Results of a Three-Year Study at the Children’s Laboratory, Psychoanalytic Institute (1924)”], in Psihologicheskie i pedagogicheskie trudy, t. 3 Psihoanaliticheskoe vospitanie [Psychological and Pedagogical Works, vol. 3, Psychoanalytic Education] (Izhevsk: Ergo, 2012), 199–202.

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were represented as authentic professional psychoanalysts, their contributions could be devalued and their professional skills esteemed inferior to senior roles. Just before her arrival in 1923, Spielrein worked at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. She collaborated with Jean Piaget, whom she provided with analysis, or psychanalyse didactique as Piaget himself termed the analysis.70 After her arrival, Spielrein was appointed a research fellow of the Psychoanalytic Institute to provide analyses, deliver training sessions on child psychoanalysis, give lectures on unconsciousness, and take part in the work of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society. Her devaluing sheds considerable light on the way the relationship between gender and power was made central to the conceptualisation of psychoanalytic expertise. Soon, the nature of the investigations in the kindergarten laboratory were misinterpreted by the public, too, as Vera Schmidt informed Freud in her report.71 This led to a partial withdrawal of Narkompros from the project, signalling an emerging hostility against any deviations from the “good science” that generates systematically derived evidence. In addition, while psychoanalysis nurtured interdisciplinary approaches, it did not necessarily involve imposing frameworks from other disciplines on children’s behaviour patterns. Then, the search for common epistemological ground on which to resolve differences might be futile, as Richard Rorty and Elijah Dann insisted.72 The formidable complexities of how this worked in practice is illustrated in the report written by the inspectors who conducted an institutional review of the Psychoanalytic kindergarten, commissioned by Narkompros in 1923. The inspection highlighted a lack of systematic approach. The recommendations of the review panel left the impression that the work at the laboratory had to be presented in a scientific manner, therefore having a specific form of validity. The scientific method had to take a privileged epistemological position to investigations of unconsciousness, because doing so could form a foundation for an empirically based knowledge. Rumours of purposely stimulated sexual

70 Fernando Vidal, Fernando. “Sabina Spielrein, Jean Piaget: Going their Own Ways,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 46, no. 1 (2001): 139–53. Their collaboration lasted for eight months. Spielrein analysed Jean Piaget (1896–1980) in 1921 in Geneva. 71 See Schmidt, Psychoanalytische Erziehung in Sowjetrussland. 72 Richard Rorty, An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground between Philosophy and

Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Elijah Dann wrote the conclusion.

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behaviour were circulated. Struggling to fix the meaning of science in relation to psychoanalytic-pedagogical work, the patron of the project, Leon Trotsky, looked for support from Ivan Pavlov ten days after the inspection took place. In a letter to Pavlov, Trotsky attempted to ignite his interest in psychoanalysis: I was always astonished by their [psychoanalysts’] way of associating physiological realism with fictional analysis whilst studying psychological phenomena … Respondent conditioning could not be equipped with semiscientific or semi-fictional methods which are looking at the apparent. Instead, empirically, it dives to the bottom and resurfaces.73

Pavlov kept silent. Support, however, came from Shatsky, who was quite positive about the project in his written witness statement, marking it as unique and important.74 He suggested that the kindergarten join the First Station as an opportunity to regularise the scientific feel of the work at the psychoanalytic laboratory. As questions of transformation of consciousness gained central stage, however, the laboratory’s scholarly explorations agitated controversy. Vera Schmidt’s research had to draw on a normative construct of a child, which had to be generated and clearly conveyed to politicians and teachers. Schmidt was attentive to the way in which sexual “occupations,” a term that resembled the didactic terminology of the Froebelian tradition, took place outside the established everyday behaviour of the child. The changes that occurred in early child sexual development “were normal,” she argued, but have been misinterpreted, especially by those who were not familiar with the work of the kindergarten.75 In this way, Schmidt was akin to Trotsky, who was less interested in the epistemology of the pedagogy. Instead, he stressed that the method was instrumental in revealing an individual’s unconscious processes and ability to attain control over them. Further, research publications produced by Wullf and Ermakov at 73 Leon Trotsky, letter to I. P. Pavlov, Sochineniya [Works ], vol. 3 (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927), 260, translated by the authors. 74 “Osoboe mnenie S.T. Shatskogo po povodu postanovleniya Prezidiuma nauchnoypedagogicheskoy sekcii o Detskom dome” Mezhdunarodnaya Solidarnost ” [“Opinion of S. T. Shatsky About the Decree of the Board of the Scientific Pedagogy of the Children’s Home International Solidarity”] Gosudarstvenny Arhiv Rosiyskoy Federacii, fond 298, op. 2, d. 253, l. 21. 75 Schmidt, Psychoanalytische Erziehung in Sowjetrussland.

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the time advised that the “scientific” induced a sense of a continuous dialectic between doing and conceptualising.76 Thus, it did not come as a surprise that the Children’s Home and Psychoanalytic Institute commenced to bring together a group of young supporters with an interest in pedology, engaging some of the most fascinating benefactors of the development of pedology in Russia, Lev Vygotsky, as well as Aron Zalkind (1888–1936).77 A keen psychologist and literary critic, Vygotsky was also formally a doctoral student of Alexander Luria and Aleksei Leontiev (1903–1979) at the Institute of Experimental Psychology in 1924.78 Following Luria, who was a contributor to the work of the Psychoanalytic Institute and became a scientific secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in 1922, Vygotsky joined the Psychoanalytic Institute in 1924. Starting with experimentations during his teaching in schools in Homel, here Vygotsky was working on his psychology of arts projects. Notably, the language he used to describe children’s development carried both literary and psychological meaning. His work helped him to realise that there should be no polarisation between the affective and cognitive realms, which resulted in the effort to endow the predominance of feelings in his advocacy of perezhivanie, or lived experience, as a main unit of analysis. The latter approach was further explored by Luria in his romantic science venture documented in The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory.79 Undoubtedly, the overall impression is that the members of the laboratory team wanted to emphasise the complex nature of the child’s development by integrating synthetic approaches to their research. The project of translating psychoanalysis into the realm of kindergarten practice introduced Vera Schmidt to a number of complex issues, which concerned child neurology in general, prompting her to enrol as a student 76 Moshe B. Wulff, Psihologiya detskih kaprizov [Psychology of Children’s Whims ] (Odessa: Odeskoe Otdelenie Gosudarstvennogo Izdatelstva Ukrainy, 1929). 77 Elena Minkova, “Pedology as a Complex Science Devoted to the Study of Children in Russia: The History of its Origin and Elimination,” Psychological Thought 5, no. 2 (2012): 83–98. 78 Petr Petryuk, Yuriy Ivanov, Ivan Grishay, and Olga Petryuk, “Slovo o professore L. S. Vygotskom: Vydayushtemsya otechestvennom psihologe (k 115-letiyu so dnya rovdeniya)” [“A Word About Professor L. S. Vygotsky, Outstanding Russian Psychologist (on the 115th jubilee of Vygotsky)”], Tavrichevskiy Zhurnal Psihiatrii 15, no. 2 (2011): 81–91. 79 Alexander Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory, trans. Lynn Solotaroff (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

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at the Neurological Institute. She was lucky enough to receive patronage from Sigmund Freud, with whom she kept regular correspondence, as well as with his daughter Anna Freud, and with Wilhelm Reich. Schmidt benefited from her studies and exchange with colleagues. The favourable status pedagogy enjoyed in the discourse of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) ensured her work a positive reception, which led to her election as the secretary of the Russian branch of the IPA, the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPSAO), from 1927 to 1930. The central role of scientisation of the team’s pedagogical efforts was encouraged using media such as published literature, presentations, in-house training, and meetings. According to Vera Schmidt, from the beginning of the project there was a veritable exposition of interest in the knowledge the psychoanalytic kindergarten produced. Otto Schmidt’s appointment as a chair of the State Publishing House (from 1921 to 1924) resulted in intense state-funded publication of key psychoanalytic texts in the Psychological and Psychoanalytic Library series edited by Ermakov in 1922. The series presented the work of Freud and some of his followers and included many translated key texts. The communicative space was between articulated experience and its background. Some examples of the intense publishing agenda of the psychoanalytic group are Lev Vygotsky’s 1924 essay “Iskusstvo i Psihoanaliz,”80 concerned with aesthetics and affect, delight and disgust; Alexander Luria’s 1924 work on a system of monistic psychology; Ivan Ermakov’s essay “Psychological Aspects of Children’s Experiences until Age 3 and their Representation in Drawings ”; and Sabina Spielrein’s paper “Children’s Drawings with Open and Closed Eyes.”81 All publications emerged as a result of institutionalised discussions and the research conducted in the kindergarten. Notably, the Russian Psychoanalytic Society held regular meetings on Wednesdays twice a month, following the example of the Wednesday 80 Lev Vygotsky, “Iskusstvo i Psihoanaliz” [“Art and Psychoanalysis”], in Lev Vygotsky, Psihologiya Isskustva [Psychology of Art ], 91–110 (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1986). 81 See Aleksander Luria, “Psihoanalyz kak systema monosticheskoy psihologii” [“Psychoanalysis as a System of Monostic Psychology”], in Psihologiya i Marksizm [Psychology and Marxism], ed. Georgiy Chelpanov, 47–80. Leningrad: GIZ, 1925. See also Ivan Ermakov, “Psihicheskaya aktovnost detey do trehletnego bozrasta I ee vyrazhenie v detskih risunokah” [“Psychological Aspects of Children’s Experiences Until Age 3 and Their Representation in Drawings”] (1921–1922), in I. D. Ermakov, ed. S. F. Sirotkina (Izhevsk: Ergo, 2009), 3–51 and Sabina Spielrein, “Kinderzeichnungen bei offenen und geschlossenen Augen” [“Children’s Drawings with Open and Closed Eyes”], Imago 16 (1931): 259–91.

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Psychological Society meetings run in Freud’s home in Vienna from November 1902, and it sought in every way possible to further the scope of the themes explored.82 However, excessive preoccupation with psychoanalytic knowledge generation resulted in high turnover among the rukovoditelnicy. Institution-Child Bonding Children in the children’s home-laboratory were placed in an equivocal situation when associated with the research process: they experienced the awkwardness of growing up both as offspring and as research objects. Remarkably, a bond between child and institution developed. In 1922, in his essay on children’s caprices, Moshe Wullf highlighted the unwillingness of a child to spend time with his mother. Similarly, Vera Schmidt reported to Sigmund Freud that children were reluctant to communicate with their parents during Saturday visits, and her neat descriptions of family–child relationships clearly demonstrated the tendency outlined.83 However, isolation in the laboratory was considered a “merit” in Anna Freud’s account of the experiment. As she pointed out, the separation was necessary to eliminate the effect of parental influences on the child’s early development and allow the researchers to observe and define the pure nature of human growth.84 This suggests, as Dalibor Vesely might have put it, that the spatial setting was an important ontological structure that brought the latent world, and specifically the conditions of the laboratory project’s embodiment, to visibility.85 Boarding schools occupied a dominant place in the Narkompros laboratory schools policy because they allowed a permanent organisation of the educational 82 Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung, Wednesday Psychological Society. During the fall of 1902, they began meeting regularly at Freud’s apartment. Because the meetings took place on Wednesday nights, the group called itself the Wednesday Psychological Society (see Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, The Freud-Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, vol. 94 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994]). 83 Vera Schmidt, Psychoanalytische Erziehung in Sowjetrussland, 26. 84 Anna Freud, Detskiy Psihoanalyz Hristomatiya [Children’s Psychoanalysis Anthology],

vol. 1 (Moscow: Piter 1999). 85 Dalibor Vesely, “Modernity and the Question of Representation,” in Tracing Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, ed. Mari Hvattum and Christian Hermansen (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 81–102.

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process that permitted the everyday practice in the laboratory to incorporate knowledge generation.86 Besides, Narkompros’ drive for boarding schooling resonated with Lenin’s rhetoric of political organisation and action promising to liberate the citizens from domestic labour through public education and public canteens.87 Still, the complete isolation of the children from the outside world, conducive to centring on transformation processes, was disillusion, according to children’s accounts. For example, in his memoirs, Artyom Sergeev, Stalin’s adopted son, detailed references to sporadic visits of busy Bolshevik parents and drew on the rhetoric of the communist propaganda, reflecting on the joy of attending demonstrations and celebrations in the city.88 Therefore, the lived world of the boarding schools could be described as a totality of references, where references to the outer world were potentially present to the children even if they were not constantly visible and obvious. Exclusionary Tendencies An area of vital concern in any efforts to improve professional and intellectual commerce between the kindergarten and the scientific community and state institutions was the problem of articulation. Essentially, the entire enterprise appeared to the outside academic and practice community as a quest for the secrets of unconsciousness. The association of freely experienced sexual practices in the psychoanalytic kindergarten, for example, evoked the idea of appraising secrets of the wilderness. The sense of secrecy was fed by the involvement of the Central Committee leaders and the German trade union. Undoubtedly, the reaction of the scientific Institute of Neurology was strongly negative. Furthermore, the author of the institute’s report, Albert Pinkevich, a scholar and chair of the Expert Committee at Narkompros as well as a former lecturer at the Froebel

86 Stanislav Shatsky and Sergey Cherpanov, “Pervaya opytnaya stanciq po narodnomu obrazovaniyu pri Narkomprose RSFSR” [“The First Experimental Station for Public Education Under the People’s Commissariat of the RSFSR”], in Pedagogicheskaya Enciklopediya, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshteniya, 1930). 87 Lenin, Speech at the All-Russian Congress Education Session. 88 Artyom Sergeev and Ekaterina Glushik, Besedy o Staline [Conversations About Stalin]

(Moscow: Krimskiy Most 9D, 2011). In his memoirs, Sergeev noted that Stalin and his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, made rare visits to the children’s home-laboratory during the time both their children stayed there.

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Institute in St. Petersburg, insisted the project should be closed on the grounds that “the majority of the children practise masturbation.”89 Immediately, the commissar of health Nikolay Semashko issued a decision “for liquidation” on 14 August 1925 that ceased the existence of the Psychoanalytical Scientific Research Institute and International Solidarity Children’s Home and found the functioning of the latter unnecessary.90 The children were moved to other available institutions. In 1930, Schmidt became a research fellow at the Experimental Institute of Defectology, where she worked under the leadership of Lev Vygotsky. She was joined by rukovoditelnicy and other members of her team, including L. Kabo, D. Lugina, F. Samoylov, A. Zigel, Z. Chernyyev, Z. Grudsakya, and L. Bezimenskii. Their work covered difficult children and, more specifically, addressed the phenomenon of child psychoneurism and its effect on the child’s development as a whole. The findings of the research undertaken in the laboratory were explored further at the institute. Later they were used in Korney Chukovsky’s renowned book on child linguistics, From Two to Five.91 As a result of some fading in the interest in psychoanalysis both internationally and in Russia during Stalin’s regime, the evaluation of what kind of theories fit into the ideological role of the psychoanalytic experiment marginalised the positive recognition of the research done in the psychoanalytic kindergarten. The attacks on Freud in the late 1920s by the Soviet authorities and the academic community hinged on two main points, suggesting that his work was somehow lacking in epistemological capacity and that it supported a discourse that was problematic. Also, reactions to Vera Schmidt were profoundly affected by Trotsky’s opposition to Joseph Stalin’s policies. An example of such an account is a reference to her research with children at a conference on sexual pedagogy held in Moscow in 1930, where she was attacked most severely.92 Schmidt talked on behalf of the Psychoanalytic Society in an attempt to defeat statements 89 Gosudarstvenny Arhiv Rosiyskoy Federacii, fond 259, op. 9, d. 13, l. 5. 90 See Protokol No. 36, Meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR

from 14 August 1925 and Gosudarstvenny Arhiv Rosiyskoy Federacii, fond 2307, op. 10, d. 289, l. 58. 91 Korney Chukovsky, From Two to Five, trans. and ed. Miriam Morton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1963). 92 Aleksander Molakov, ed., “Pronblemy seksualnoy pedagogiki,” Trudy konferencii po voprosam seksualnoj pedagogiki, Moskva, 1930 [“The Problems of Sexual Pedagogy,”

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made at the conference against Freud and early sex education. Freud’s ideas could be criticised, she stated; however, they should be conveyed correctly.93 Further, sexual pedagogy should be just a component of the general pedagogy. She pointed out that, based on her own experience in a children’s institution, inappropriate organisation of a child’s living conditions elicited reactions of a sexual nature, such as sexual erection or interest in masturbation. Sublimation, she argued, was not a mechanism that could be easily switch on and switch off from outside. Schmidt insisted that sexual education should start earlier, within the family and not in school as her opponents suggested.94 Schmidt’s approach of persistently encouraging children to ask questions in relation to sexuality elicited interest after her book was published in Germany in 1924. The book became a popular and influential read and was cited by Wilhelm Reich. Moreover, since the student revolution in 1968 or thereabout, there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the kind of knowledge the Moscow laboratory project produced. Thus, Schmidt’s book found a new life in a post-1968 early childhood education and care movement in Germany.95 It was so popular that thousands of illegally printed copies were disseminated in the country.96 The movement, started by a group of parents, who viewed the psychoanalytical model of education, as depicted in Schmidt’s book, particularly consistent with their radical left philosophy. Another appealing component in the Moscow laboratory kindergarten history that attracted the activists of the kinderladen movement was Stalin’s disapproval of the project, important for their identification as an anti-Stalinist left that aimed to escape from centralised provision to “collectively transformed private life.”97

Proceedings of the Conference on Sexual Pedagogy, Moscow, 1930] (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshteniya, 1930), 38–48. 93 Molakov, “Pronblemy seksualnoy pedagogiki,” 35–37. 94 Molakov, “Pronblemy seksualnoy pedagogiki,” 37. 95 Peter L. Rudnytsky, Psychoanalytic Conversations: Interviews with Clinicians, Commen-

tators, and Critics (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2000). 96 Meike S. Baader, “Modernizing Early Childhood Education: The Role of German Women’s Movements After 1848 and 1968,” in The Development of Early Childhood Education in Europe and North America, ed. Harry Willekens, Kirsten Scheiwe, and Kristen Nawrotzki, 217–34 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 97 Ibid.

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It is therefore not possible to avoid evaluations of cultural transmission between psychoanalytic thinking and education in the West and Russia, if we wish to construct some degree of the flow of ideas in the psychoanalytic movement by means of historiography.

Implications of the Work Undertaken for Contemporary Epistemological Discussions In this chapter, we proposed to show the connection between the generation of knowledge in the laboratories and the demands for prompting modernisation processes in early childhood education. We tried to take an opposite view from the common tradition, exploring situations of research practices in two laboratory approaches derived from diverse perspectives that would enable us to display various elements, not very noticeable at first glance, that were common to both approaches but constitute paradoxical deviations from the dominant tendencies during the aftermath of the Revolution. For example, statements that the Russian Revolution marked a tectonic shift in the scope of politics and culture, prompting the psychoanalytic kindergarten and Shatsky’s station to be interpreted as a social and educational megaproject should be addressed, because the culture of the work in both cases cannot be explained satisfactorily as consequences of 1917.98 The reformist processes were grounded in the old regime. What the laboratories left behind might be called a romantic critique of the modern thinking, helping us to better understand Russian modernity as well as the Russian Revolution. Essentially, through their scientism-based tactics, the educators in the laboratory kindergartens articulated forms of confrontation with Russian modernity. The romantic dimensions of the work undertaken undoubtedly present great difficulties to historians because of the fluid nature of modernity.99 Further, the cases discussed in this chapter offer some insights into the nature of the interaction between local developments and dominant epistemologies in the transnational new education landscape. It seems we shall speak about transnational progressive epistemology in education. The common ground was manifested as a new formation, a model that did not 98 Boris Kupriyanov, “The Social Mission of Out-of-School Education in the USSR: A Historical Reconstruction of a Soviet Megaproject,” Russian Education & Society 59, no. 3–4 (2017): 195–205. 99 Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

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just copy previously or simultaneously developed models that answered the question of what the new education should be. Shatsky, Zelenko, and Schleger in the First Station, as well as the psychoanalytic project scholars, educators, and their students and collaborators, found ways to transcend their national educational beliefs in order to investigate, assess, and intrude a new, seemingly outlandish culture in the local landscape of educational ideas. As an editorial in The New Era stressed, they were wise to reckon that no method could be imported from another country.100 Indeed, the intellectual kinship between the Russian and Western new education promoters has often been mentioned. Their international visits and other forms of exchange contributed to changing the group’s professional identity, with the group not tightly territorialised. The progressive landscape of emergence and diffusion of new ideas about childhood and education appeared to affect the politics in the nations to an unprecedented degree. Cultural hydraulics offers a critical perspective to the praxes of establishing new pedagogic strategies, which are perilous for the implementation of transnational theoretical approaches and ideologies. The politicised reaction to psychoanalytic theory did much to nurture the sense that the affective realm is imperative. Psychoanalysis was inspirational because it pledged to understand sympathetically ways of existence that were extreme. By that token, it offered far more than a rational framework—it embodied relationships between known and unknown that appeared exceptionally relevant to early years educationalists. Vera Schmidt’s full biography would provide significant insights into the relationships among practice and training, leadership work, different professional groupings and political elites. If anything, however, the case of the laboratory preschools reinforces our understanding of the richness early childhood education added to the contemporary scientific culture and intellectual thought.

Bibliography Archival Sources Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk. Articles on children’s reading and children’s literature 1920–1923. Arhiv Academii Nauk, fond 16, op. 1, ed. hr. 19.

100 Beatrice Ensor, “The Outlook Tower,” The New Era 9, no. 33 (1929): 2–8.

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Gosudarstvenny Arhiv Rosiyskoy Federacii. Komisii po Doshkolnomu Obrasovaniyu [Preschool Education Commissions]. Pervy opis predpolozhennyh tezisov [The First Description of the Alleged Theses]. Arhive Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond N 1, op. 1, ed hr., 203, 2–3. Protokol No. 36, Meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR from 14 August 1925. Gosudarstvenny Arhiv Rosiyskoy Federacii, fond 259, op. 9, d. 13, 1. 4. Shatsky, Stanislav. “Pervaya opytnaya stanciya po narodnomu obrazovaniyu pri Narkomprose RSFSR.” Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, ed. hr., 203. Zapisy besed rukovoditelnicy [Leader’s Conversation Notes] 1917–1918. Arhiv Academii Pedagogicheskih Nauk, fond 1, op. 1, ed. hr. 45.

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Cecil, Clementine. “Russian Revolutionary—With Its Turtle/Jellyfish Light, Plaster Snails and Wavelike Staircase, Moscow’s Ryabushinsky House Is an Art Nouveau Fantasy Where Maxim Gorky Once Held Court.” World of Interiors 29, no. 2 (2009): 102–09. Chukovsky, Korney. From Two to Five, translated and edited by Miriam Morton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1963. David-Fox, Michael. Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Denton, David E. Existentialism and Phenomenology in Education: Collected Essays. New York: Teachers College Press, 1974. Dewey, John. Impressions of Soviet Russia, 1928. In John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 3, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 228. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Eleferenko, I. O. “Teoretoko-metodologicheskoe osmyslenie roli i kachestva uchitelya na pervyh etapah razvitiya sovetskoj shkoly” [“Theoretical and Methodological Understanding of the Role and Quality of the Teacher in the Early Stages of the Development of the Soviet School Izvestiya Uralskogo Universiteta”], Ser. 1, Problemy Obrazovanya, Nauka I Kultury [Problems of Education, Science, and Culture] 6, no. 85 (2010): 22–33. Ensor, Beatrice. “The Outlook Tower.” The New Era 9, no. 33 (1929): 2–8. Ermakov, Ivan D. Opyt organichesgogo poznaniya rebenka [The Experience of Organic Cognition of a Child]. Izhevsk: Ergo, 2009. Ermakov, Ivan D. “Psihicheskaya aktovnost detey do trehletnego bozrasta I ee vyrazhenie v detskih risunokah” [“Psychological Aspects of Children’s Experiences until Age 3 and their Representation in Drawings”] (1921–1922). In I. D. Ermakov, edited by S. F. Sirotkina, 3–51. Izhevsk: Ergo, 2009. Etkind, Alexander. Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia. London: Routledge, 1997. Flerinoy, E. A., and E. Yu. Shabad, eds. Kakaya Knizhka Nuzhna Doshkolniky [What Books are Good for Preschoolers ], ed. E. A. Flerinoy and E.Yu. Shabad (Moscow: Kommisiya po Doshkolnoy knige pri pedstudii Narkomprosa. 1928): 3–5. Foucault, Michel. Rethinking the Subject. New York: Routledge, 2018. Freinet, Celestin. Oeuvres Pedagogiques, vol 1. Paris: Seui, 1994. Freud, Anna. Detskiy Psihoanalyz Hristomatiya [Children’s Psychoanalysis Anthology], vol. 1. Moscow: Piter, 1999. Freud, Sigmund, and C. G. Jung. The Freud-Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, vol. 94. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Gainotti, Merete Amann, and Paola Schiavulli. “The Pioneer Educational Work of Vera Schmidt and Sabina Spielrein in the Context of the Development of Psychoanalysis in Russia, 1921–1923.” In International Multidisciplinary

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Scientific Conference on Social Sciences and Arts SGEM2014 Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1 (2014): 981–88. Gorbatkova, Olga. “Vliyanie Pedagogicheskih borozrenii S. Frene na razvitie otechestvennogo mediaobrazobaniya v 1920-e gody” [“The Influence of the Pedagogical Views of S. Frenet on the Development of Domestic Media Education in the 1920s”]. Vestnik Krasnodarskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta im V. P. Astafieva [Bulletin of the Krasnodar State Pedagogical University, V. P. Astafieva] 4 (2012): 91–7. Gorbunova, E. “Labour School.” Journal of Free Education and Free Labour School 11, no. 6–7 (1918): 11–23. “Instrukciya po vedeniyu detskogo sada” [“Instructions for Kindergarten”]. Obshtie principy vospitaniya detej doshkolnogo vozrasta [Guide to Managing Crèches and Kindergartens ]. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo Tipografiya 7, 1921. Instruktsiya po vedeniyu ochaga i detskogo sada [Guide to Managing Crèches and Kindergartens ] (1919), geprinted in Istoriya Sovetskoy Doshkolnoy Pedagogiki [History of Soviet Preschool Education], (1988): 54–57. Kant, Immanuel. Kant on Education [Uber Pedagogik]. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1900. Kelly, Catriona. “‘The School Waltz’: The Everyday Life of the Post-Stalinist Soviet Classroom.” Forum for Anthropology and Culture 1 (2004): 108–58. Korolev, Fyodar, Timofey Kornejchik, and Zahar Ravkin. Ocherki po istorii sovetskoy shkoly i pedagogiki 1921–1931 [Essays on the History of the Soviet School and Pedagogy 1921–1931]. Moscow: Izdatelstvo Akademii Pedagogicheskih Nauk RSFSR, 1961. Kupriyanov, Boris. “The Social Mission of Out-of-School Education in the USSR: A Historical Reconstruction of a Soviet Megaproject.” Russian Education & Society 59, no. 3–4 (2017): 195–205. Lasurkina, Dora. “Podgotovka nauchnoy konferencii po voprosam doshkolnogo vospitaniya” [“Preparation of a Scientific Conference on Preschool Education”]. Buletin Otdela Doshkolnogo Vospitaniya NKN 2 (1920): 1–2. Lenin, Vladimir. Speech at the All-Russian Education Session 28 August 1918. In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete Writings of Vladimir Lenin], 84–87. Moscow: Moskva Progress, 1965. Long, Harriet G. Public Library Service to Children: Foundation and Development. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1971. Luria, Alexander. “Psihoanalyz kak systema monosticheskoy psihologii” [“Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology”]. In Psihologiya i Marksizm [Psychology and Marxism], edited by Georgiy Chelpanov, 47–80. Leningrad: GIZ, 1925. Luria, Alexander. The Making of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

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Luria, Alexander. The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory, translated by Lynn Solotaroff. New York: Basic Books, 1968. McDowell, Kate. “Open Wide the Doors: The Children’s Room as Place in Public Libraries, 1876–1925.” Library Trends 62, no. 3 (2014): 519–29. Mchitarjan, Irina. “John Dewey and the Development of Education in Russia Before 1930: Report on a Forgotten Reception.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 19, no. 1 (2000), 109–31. Merrill, Jenny B. “How to Apply Kindergarten Principles in Rural and Village Schools.” The Kindergarten-Primary Magazine 25, no. 2 (1912): 32–36. Miller, Martin A. “Freudian Theory Under Bolshevik Rule: The Theoretical Controversy During the 1920s.” Slavic Review 44, no. 4 (1985): 625–46. Minkova, Elena. “Pedology as a Complex Science Devoted to the Study of Children in Russia: The History of Its Origin and Elimination.” Psychological Thought 5, no. 2 (2012): 83–98. Molakov, Aleksander, ed. “Pronblemy seksualnoy pedagogiki.” Trudy konferencii po voprosam seksualnoj pedagogiki, Moskva, 1930 [“The Problems of Sexual Pedagogy.” Proceedings of the Conference on Sexual Pedagogy, Moscow, 1930], 1–111. Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshteniya, 1930. Partlett, William. “Bourgeois Ideas in Communist Construction: The Development of Stanislav Shatsky’s Teacher Training Methods.” History of Education 35, no. 4–5 (2006): 453–74. Partlett, William. “Breaching Cultural Worlds with the Village School: Educational Visions, Local Initiative, and Rural Experience at S. T. Shatsky’s Kaluga School System, 1919–1932.” The Slavonic and East European Review (2004): 847–85. Pavlov, Ivan, and William Gantt. Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes: Twenty-Five Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity (Behaviour) of Animals. New York: Liverwright, 1928. Petryuk, Petr, Yuriy Ivanov, Ivan Grishay, and Olga Petryuk. “Slovo o professore L. S. Vygotskom: Vydayushtemsya otechestvennom psihologe (k 115-letiyu so dnya rovdeniya)” [“A Word About Professor L. S. Vygotsky, Outstanding Russian Psychologist (on Vygotsky’s 115th jubilee)”]. Tavrichevskiy Zhurnal Psihiatrii 15, no. 2 (2011): 81–91. Popkewitz, Thomas S., ed. Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Travelling of Pragmatism in Education—An Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. “Postydnaya stranica v istorii russkoy shkoly” [“A Shameful Page in the History of the Russian School”] [editorial]. Proceedings of the All-Russia Conference. Profesionalny Uchitelskiy Jurnal 3 (10 March 1918): 2–3. Rorty, Richard. An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

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Rudnytsky, Peter L. Psychoanalytic Conversations: Interviews with Clinicians, Commentators, and Critics. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2000. Rumyantsev, Nikolay. “Revolucionnye idealy vospitania I ‘opytnye shkoly’” [The Revolutionary Ideals of Education and ‘Laboratory Schools’”]. Izvestiya Uchitelskogo Soyuza, Profesionalny Uchitelskii Zurnal 30, no. 2 (15 February 1918): 3–5. Schmidt, Vera. Dnevnik materi: Wtoroj i tretiy goda zhizni [Mother’s Diary: Second and Third Years of Life]. Izhevsk: Ergo, 2010. Schmidt, Vera. “Itogi 3-letney rabty v Detskom dome laboratorii pri Psihoanalitiocheskom institute (1924)” [“The Results of a Three-Year Study at the Children’s Laboratory, Psychoanalytic Institute (1924)”]. In Psihologicheskie i pedagogicheskie trudy, t. 3 Psihoanaliticheskoe vospitanie [Psychological and Pedagogical Works, vol. 3, Psychoanalytic Education], 199–202. Izhevsk: Ergo, 2012. Schmidt, Vera. Psychoanalytische Erziehung in Sowjetrussland: Bericht über das Kinderheim-Laboratorium in Moskau [Psychoanalytic Education in Soviet Russia: Report on the Children’s Home Laboratory in Moscow]. Verlag: Leipzig, Wien, Zürich, 1924. Sergeev, Artyom, and Ekaterina Glushik. Besedy o Staline [Conversations About Stalin]. Moscow: Krimskiy Most 9D, 2011. Shatsky, Stanislav. Izbrannye Pedagogicheskie Sochineniya [Selected Pedagogical Works ]. Moscow: Pedagogika, 1980. Shatsky, Stanislav. “Na puti k trudovoy shkole” [“On the Pathway to Labour School”]. In Izbrannye pedagogicheskie sochineniya [Selected Pedagogical Works ], edited by Stanislav Shatsky, 7–38. Moscow: Pedagogika, 1980. Shatsky, Stanislav. “Pervaya opytnaya stanciya po narodnomu obrazovaniyu pri Narkompros RSFSR” [“The First Experimental Station for Public Education Under the People’s Commissariat of the RSFSR”]. In Izbrannye Pedagogicheskie Sochineniya [Selected Pedagogical Works ], edited by Stanislav Shatsky, 324–32. Moscow: Pedagogika, 1980. Shatsky, Stanislav, and Sergey Cherpanovym. “Pervaya opytnaya stanciy po narodnomu obrazovaniyu pri Narkomprose RSFSR” [“The First Experimental Station for Public Education under the People’s Commissariat of the RSFSR”]. In Pedagogicheskaya Enciklopediya, Vol. 2. Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshteniya, 1930. Smeyers, Paul, and Marc Depaepe, eds. Beyond Empiricism: On Criteria for Educational Research. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2003. Sochor, Zenovia. Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Spielrein, Sabina. “Kinderzeichnungen bei offenen und geschlossenen Augen” [“Children’s Drawings with Eyes Open and Closed”]. Imago 16 (1931): 259–91.

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Strong, Sydney. “Educational Need.” Russian Information and Review 2, no. 33 (1923): 527. Trotsky, Leon. Sochineniya [Works], vol. 3. Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927. Valkanova, Yordanka. “Constructions of Nature and Emerging Ideas in Children’s Education and Care: The 1600s to 1900.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophies and Theories of Early Childhood Education and Care, edited by Tricia David, Kathy Goouch, and Sacha Powell, 35–42. London: Routledge, 2015. Valkanova, Yordanka. “The Passion for Educating the ‘New Man’: Debates About Preschooling in Soviet Russia, 1917–1925.” History of Education Quarterly 49, no. 2 (2009): 211–21. Valkanova, Yordanka, and Kevin J. Brehony. “The ‘Gifts’ and ‘Contributions’: Friedrich Froebel and Russian Education from 1850 to 1920.” History of Education 35, no. 2 (2006): 189–207. Vesely, Dalibor. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Boston: The MIT Press, 2004. Vesely, Dalibor. “Modernity and the Question of Representation,” in Tracing Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, edited by Mari Hvattum and Christian Hermansen, 81–102. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Vidal, Fernando. “Sabina Spielrein, Jean Piaget: Going Their Own Ways.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 46, no. 1 (2001): 139–53. Vygotsky, Lev. “Iskusstvo i Psihoanaliz” [“Art and Psychoanalysis”], in Lev Vygotsky, Psihologiya Isskustva [Psychology of Art ], 91–110. Moscow: Isskustvo, 1986. Washburne, Carleton. “The Good and Bad in Russian Education.” The New Era 33 (1928): 8–12. Wulff, Moshe B. Psihologiya detskih kaprizov [Psychology of Children’s Whims ]. Odessa: Odeskoe Otdelenie Gosudarstvennogo Izdatelstva Ukrainy, 1929.

CHAPTER 5

The Malting House School, England

Malting House School, housed in an old brewery in the university town of Cambridge, was a brief scientific experiment shaped by the fledgling disciplines of early education, child development, and psychoanalytic pedagogy (Fig. 5.1). A new kind of teacher was imagined in an environment inspired by new understandings of children’s social, emotional, and intellectual development, as well as the possibilities of fostering scientific inquiry in young children. Malting House closed in the turmoil of the stock market crash as its entrepreneurial founder, funder, and principal, Geoffrey Pyke, faced bankruptcy. The school had limped since 1927 after Pyke’s tin and copper investments crashed; furthermore, the departure of its appointed head, Susan Isaacs, amidst a breakdown in her relationship with Pyke, effectively terminated the experiment that created the Malting House legacy. The timescale of the experiment was brief and also small in scale, with a maximum of twenty children at any time. Malting House became well known in the landscape of new education, initially through the research, writings, and teachings of Susan Isaacs in the 1930s, but also stretching beyond her death in 1948 through the endeavours of colleagues, including her husband, Nathan Isaacs. The legacy’s long reach was also transnational, spurred by Susan Isaacs’ travels to the USA and the Antipodes in 1937 and the travels and teachings of her students at the London Institute of Education.

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Fig. 5.1 Malting House, Cambridge

Three biographies of Isaacs fulsomely cover her life and work, including the Malting House story.1 Most recent is Philip Graham’s Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children (2009), which benefitted from the release of family documents and revealed the intermingling of professional and personal lives of the key players at Malting House. Most education writings about Malting House have focused on its psychoanalytic pedagogy and practices2 or Isaacs’ contributions as a woman educator,3 but there has also been analysis of the children’s engagement

1 Dorothy E. M. Gardner, Susan Isaacs: The First Biography (Methuen: London, 1969); Lydia Smith, To Help and to Understand: The Life and Work of Susan Isaacs 1885–1948 (London: Associated University Press, 1985); Philip Graham, Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children (London: Karnac, 2009). 2 Willem van der Eyken and Barry Turner, Adventures in Education (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1969). 3 Mary J. Drummond, “Susan Isaacs: Pioneering Work in Understanding Children’s Lives,” in Practical Visionaries: Women, Education, and Social Progress, ed. Pam Hirsch and Mary Hilton (London: Pearson Education, 2000), 221–34.

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with scientific ideas, a fundamental interest of both Geoffrey Pyke and Nathan Isaacs.4 This chapter reexamines the archives and writings about Malting House and its aftermath through a lens that appraises the new kind of teacher imagined in this learning environment. To reveal the long reach of the legacy across places and eras, it examines the interpersonal collaborations across sites of influence of the key Malting House players. First, there is Susan Isaacs, with her close friendship with psychoanalyst Melanie Klein that began during the Malting House years, along with Isaacs’ research and writings and her influence on teachers.5 Second, there is Nathan Isaacs, a businessman with interests in science who had a lifelong engagement with the work of Jean Piaget. Third, there is Evelyn Lawrence, whose later career as director of the English Froebel Foundation linked the experimental and mainstream new education continuum of thinking about early education and teaching. And there is Geoffrey Pyke himself, who wrote nothing about Malting House but whose connections with Cambridge University’s science academia made a unique contribution to both the programme and the people associated with the school. A more shadowy figure is Margaret Pyke, who managed the daily running of the school, often named in former students’ childhood recollections in later years as the “teacher” they remember. It was Margaret who acted as secretary for the Friday night Child Study Society held at the school, with the Lady Mayor of Cambridge as its president. There were talks from experts on new education, including Malting House staff and leading education figures, such as Professor Cyril Burt on “the young delinquent” and Professor Percy Nunn on “first things—home and school.”6

4 Jody S. Hall, “Psychology and Schooling: The Impact of Susan Isaacs and Jean Piaget on 1960s Science Education Reform,” History of Education 29, no. 2 (2000), 153–70; Laura Cameron, “Science, Nature, and Hatred: ‘Finding Out’ at the Malting House School, 1924–29,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 6 (2006): 851–72. 5 Susan Isaacs, The Nursery Years: The Mind of the Child from Birth to Six Years (London: Routledge, 1929); Intellectual Growth in Young Children (London: Routledge, 1930); The Children We Teach (London: University of London Press, 1932); Social Development in Young Children (London: Routledge, 1933). 6 John Forrester and Laura Cameron, Freud in Cambridge (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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Inside its walls, Malting House had the makings of a psychoanalytic “soap opera,” revealed by Nathan Isaacs to Margaret Pyke in a sixtyeight-page anguished letter detailing “the tangle of all our relations” with “conflicts,” “tensions,” “strain,” “breakdowns,” and “affairs” (Susan and Geoffrey, Nathan and Evelyn).7 Outside of this brewery hothouse and more broadly in the world of education, this brief intense experiment fed into the wider mix of possibilities for a reimagined teacher implementing what can be described as progressive practice in early years settings across the mid-twentieth-century years. Outside of the experiment, in the world of mainstream schooling, there were challenges, constraints, and compromises to the imagined ideal.

Disciplinary Foundations Geoffrey Pyke’s unhappy childhood and war experiences led him to seek psychoanalytic treatment. Pyke determined to create a childhood for his young son David free from the trauma he had experienced. Finding no suitable schools, he decided to establish his own, premised on emerging psychoanalytic theories. Pyke advertised in academic journals and magazines for An Educated Young Woman with honours degree—preferably first class— or the equivalent, to conduct education of a small group of children aged two and a half to seven years, as a piece OF SCIENTIFIC WORK and RESEARCH.8

Susan Isaacs applied and began a long negotiation with Pyke, sometimes including her husband, to clarify their shared education principles. The details of this story and Isaacs’ apprenticeship in education are outlined elsewhere, but in summary, her credentials were impeccable, with training as an infant and primary teacher at Manchester University, where she was introduced to the ideas of Friedrich Froebel, John Dewey, and Maria Montessori, followed by an honours degree in philosophy, further research study in psychology at Cambridge University, psychoanalysis 7 Nathan Isaacs to Margaret Pyke, October–early November 1927, 1, University of London Institute of Education Archives, NI/D/2. 8 New Statesman, 24 March 1924. The advertisement also appeared in Nature and the British Journal of Psychology.

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with Otto Rank in Vienna (Sigmund Freud himself being unavailable), membership in the burgeoning British Psycho-Analytic Society, and her fledgling psychoanalytic practice. That Pyke envisaged a new kind of teacher is hinted at in his advertisement: Previous educational experience is not considered a bar, but the advertisers hope to get in touch with a university graduate … who has previously considered herself too good for teaching and who has probably engaged in another occupation.

Practising teachers experienced in regimented large infant classroom were, in Pyke’s view, an impediment. And foremost, the school was to be conducted as a laboratory experiment with the new teacher combining the roles of researcher, pedagogue, and analyst. The latter role became important, with Isaacs writing that “there were six or seven [children] who were justly described as extremely difficult.… These parents naturally expected one to work miracles.”9 Pyke and Isaacs agreed on the principle of freedom as the basis for education, described by Isaacs as “the great experiment of our age.” The research task was to determine an appropriate pedagogy that could apply in practice with very young children, and as Isaacs wrote, “We must also observe what children do under free conditions.”10 Few photographs of Malting House have survived, but a grainy image of Isaacs epitomises the reimagined teacher as a researcher: she is writing notes as she observes four children playing outside with a dollhouse and farm animals. It was agreed that the teacher’s role was to provide a rich learning environment, always be available, interfere as little as possible, and place as few constraints as safe or possible so that children were free to explore. The free child in the new education era needed a new kind of pedagogue, likened by Pyke to a “co-investigator” who fostered children’s natural curiosity, particularly in the natural sciences, with “let’s find out” the key mantra. Geographer Laura Cameron’s study of Malting House focuses

9 Cited in Eyken and Turner, Adventures in Education, 27. 10 Susan Isaacs, unpublished paper cited in Eyken and Turner, Adventures in Education,

39.

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not so much on the “tangle of relations” but rather the “tangle of disciplinary relations,” citing “two major tributaries to the Pyke-Isaacs dream for the school: psychoanalysis and natural science.”11 Cameron writes: The [Malting House] space was understood by Pyke and Isaacs to open the child to the facts of the external world, as opposed to conventional classrooms which created barriers between children and their natural living interests, discouraging rather than encouraging children to “find out” about the world around them.12

The potent mix for this venture combined a shared belief in the possibilities of Freud’s well-adjusted child with Pyke’s scientific quest, encouraged too by Nathan Isaacs’ interests and mingled with Susan Isaacs’ understandings of Froebel’s child of nature and Dewey’s emphasis on the wider social environment.

Malting House at Work and Play The rich environment at Malting House with its extensive play equipment, much of it imported, was carefully planned. It included, for example, the first jungle gym in Britain, a seesaw designed by Pyke with hooks on its underside from which weights could be hung, a tool shed with real tools, including double-handed saws, all designed for openended educational purposes.13 There are two photographs of Isaacs with children at Malting House (see Figs. 5.2 and 5.3); one includes Evelyn Lawrence, who joined the team as a psychologist in 1926. The relaxed scenes in the garden setting suggest casual relationships among staff and children and provide evidence of the use made of the large garden. Descriptions of Malting House of the children at play, their interests, conversations, relationships, friendships, and hostilities, can be found in Isaacs’ field note excerpts reproduced in her books. In Intellectual Growth in Young Children, she details “four sample weeks” and an extensive “summary of activities.”14 Both insightful and controversial at the time

11 Cameron, “Science, Nature, and Hatred,” 854. 12 Cameron, “Science, Nature, and Hatred,” 864. 13 Smith, The Life and Work of Susan Isaacs. 14 Susan Isaacs, Intellectual Growth, 214–57.

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Fig. 5.2 Susan Isaacs and children

Fig. 5.3 Susan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence with children

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are her observations of child sexuality and records of sex talk by children at Malting House. Like the Children’s Home-Laboratory established in Moscow in 1921 by Vera Schmidt, cited in Chapter 4, the objective was to allow free expression of sexuality, testing whether Freud’s stages of sexual development were a natural progression or needed an educational influence. In both settings, such free expression was challenging for teachers and limits were imposed, possibly more so at Malting House. Cited below are two contemporary descriptions of Malting House, the second of which makes mention of child sexuality. The first was a film, sadly lost, commissioned by Pyke and shown to an invited audience of 400–500 in London in 1927. An enthusiastic reporting of the event told readers of The Spectator: I watched children … having the time of their lives, wading up to their knees trying to fill a sandpit with water, mending a tap with a spanner, oiling the works of a clock, joyously feeding a bonfire, dissecting crabs, climbing on scaffolding, weighing each other on a see-saw.… It is a system of education by discovery, aiming at the preservation of the most precious gift of discovery.… No child is ever told anything he can find out for himself.… The school is equipped with the most extensive apparatus which will stimulate the natural curiosity possessed of every child….15

The film more famously included a scene where the children dissected Isaacs’ dead cat: “They all seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely digging away at the carcass.”16 The film sparked much interest and feedback, including requests from educationalists in America wanting copies, which Pyke refused. Another reporter noted “the evident unawareness of these children—mostly between 4 and 7 years old—that they were doing anything but enjoying themselves. Yet they were learning both to know and act all the time.”17 A second contemporary view was a description of impressions by Evelyn Lawrence soon after her arrival in 1926. Lawrence was trained in new techniques of intelligence testing and interviewed all the Malting House children. After Isaacs’ death, Lawrence published her account in 15 Cited in Eyken and Turner, Adventures in Education, 56. 16 Eyken and Turner, Adventures in Education, 55. 17 “Notice of Film of the Malting House School, Cambridge,” University of London Institute of Education Archives NI/B/7 (2 of 3).

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the National Froebel Foundation Bulletin and described an arrangement of child-centred spaces including, for children who lived at the school, individual bed-sitting rooms: These rooms are charming. Each is painted in some bright colour, and each has a gas fire and a settee bed, gay curtains and cushions, and low tables and cupboards. In its own room the child is absolute master. The doors will lock from the inside, and no one is allowed to enter without knocking.18

Lawrence lists an “abundant” range of equipment, including Montessori apparatus, a gas stove where “children make their own cocoa, and occasionally cook lunch,” and a science laboratory.19 The extensive grounds included a summerhouse, individual gardens for each child, an orchard, sandpit, climbing apparatus, and rabbit hutches. Pyke had spared no expense. Commenting on the school’s purposes, Lawrence emphasised the priority needs of “a definite group of children to be educated. Something has to be done with them. They cannot be put back to sleep until educational theory has devised the perfect method of bringing up children.”20 Thus, the reason for the Malting House experiment: An indispensable preliminary improvement to educational theory was a detailed and consistent study of a group of children living under conditions of maximum freedom. The study is being made, and at the same time innovations in educational practice are being made and tried out.… The children are under trained observation.… Practically all that they do, and much of what they say, is recorded. The children are discussed individually, and the meaning of their actions, as well as how to deal with them, considered.21

Evident in Lawrence’s account is the fusing of the teacher as pedagogue and researcher but also psychoanalyst. The task for the staff was to

18 Evelyn Lawrence, “The Malting House School,” National Froebel Foundation Bulletin 56 (February 1949): 3. 19 Ibid. 20 Lawrence, “The Malting House School,” 1. 21 Ibid., 2–5.

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decide on the kind of adult they wanted to produce, and Lawrence wrote, “Our chief concern is to produce a new generation less nerve-ridden than the old. The newest psychology has taught us something about what to avoid in the way of repressions …and what sort of emotional outlets should be provided.”22 Discipline is described as “very free. There is no punishment and little admonition.”23 There were rules, such as putting playthings away and not using weapons, but the teacher was not to curb open expression of sexual interests and strong emotions such as hostility and fighting. Lawrence admitted that “this freedom entails a certain amount of unpleasantness for grown-ups.”24 Overall the Malting House teachers agreed that “the best way to prepare a person for life is to safeguard his zest for life”; to this end, observed Lawrence, “the aim for teachers is as far as possible to refrain from teaching, but to let children find out all they can for themselves.”25 Broadly, this was the experiment— to develop a pedagogy of freedom for early years education. However, as Isaacs later cautioned, Malting House was more than a laboratory experiment for testing children. It was a real-world environment for observing children’s spontaneous free play and behaviour.26 This was the novelty of Malting House in an era of burgeoning experimental work with children.

Visits by Melanie Klein and Jean Piaget In the milieu of Cambridge University, there was a crisscross of relationships across the scientific and psychoanalytic communities that hovered around Malting House. The school also attracted visitors interested in new education.27 Two are cited here. Melanie Klein visited in 1925 and Jean Piaget in 1927: both were immersed in developing new theoretical understandings of the emotional and intellectual lives of young children. Austrian born Klein, a member of the Berlin Psycho-Analytic Society, was invited to England to give lectures on her pioneering work in child analysis. As a conduit to revealing the unconscious, Klein was interpreting 22 Ibid., 2. 23 Ibid., 4. 24 Ibid., 5. 25 Ibid., 4. 26 Susan Isaacs, Social Development, 5–6. 27 Forrester and Cameron, Freud in Cambridge.

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observations of young children interacting with playthings with the same validity as the verbal free associations of adult patients. Klein’s visit to Malting House was a first meeting with Susan Isaacs and the start of a lifelong close friendship. Klein relocated to London to become a dominant figure in the British Psycho-Analytic Society. In Vienna, Anna Freud was also developing the field of child analysis partly associated with the Hietzing School case study outlined in Chapter 6, but Freud did not support Klein’s interpretations of children’s play. Over time, the approaches of Klein and Freud diverged into separate camps, made more acute after Sigmund and Anna Freud’s arrival as refugees in London in 1938. Isaacs’ approach at Malting House was in the “Klein camp” influenced initially by Klein’s 1921 paper “The Development of a Child,” which argued against the “repression of sexuality” and for the removal of “dense veils of secrecy, falsehood and danger spun by a hypocritical society.”28 Klein’s sweeping claims that “no upbringing should be without analytic help” and that there were “comparatively few” children without neurotic traits were too extreme for Isaacs, and were never supported in the Freud camp. Klein proposed a new kind of role for education: I would like to make a suggestion.… I mean the founding of kindergartens at the head of which there will be women analysts … who [have] a few nurses trained [to] recognize the suitability of analytic intervention and to carry it out forthwith.29

There are elements of this approach at Malting House, particularly with Isaacs’ background as both a teacher and an analyst. In a 1926 paper, she claimed that vague notions of freedom were not sufficient and the Malting House experiment was to “observe what children do under free conditions” in order meet their needs,30 but in a lecture to the PsychoAnalytic Society in 1927 she made clear that the children were not free to

28 Melanie Klein, “The Development of a Child,” in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1, Love Guilt, and Reparations and Other Works, 1921–1945 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 1–2. 29 Klein, “The Development of a Child,” 53. 30 Susan Isaacs, unpublished paper cited in Eyken and Turner, Adventures in Education,

39.

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do as they pleased, although to many visitors this seemed to be the case.31 On her visit to the school, Klein supported Isaacs’ concern that some aspects of freedom, in particular verbal aggression, had gone too far, and modifications in managing discipline were made.32 Lawrence also noted that views shifted over the timeframe of the school, with the conclusion that children also needed stability, order, and adult support.33 Finding this balance was part of the Malting House experiment. In her book Social Development in Young Children (1933), Isaacs used the Malting House data to illustrate what psychoanalytic pedagogy might look like and how the mix of analyst and educator might be balanced. In her response to Bertrand Russell’s review of the book, she challenged his description of the school as an “application of psycho-analytic theory of education”: It was far more truly an application to the education of very young children of the educational philosophy of John Dewey. This was my active inspiration. The only point at which psycho-analytical theory is touched in Intellectual Growth in Young Children has reference to its confirmation of the view long held by psychologists and educationalists in general, of the great educational value of play.34

In applying some of Dewey’s ideas about education, more fully outlined in Chapter 2, Isaacs intended that the school be a “point of vantage” rather than a “screen” for the outside world.35 This swaying across disciplinary lines is characteristic of the Malting House experiment. The visit of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget to Malting House in 1927 occurred after the first translations of his research into English in 1926. Piaget was developing theories on the development of children’s logical thinking and was interested in observing the way young children were reasoning in their play at Malting House. There was much mutual admiration of each other’s work, although Isaacs did not agree with

31 Susan Isaacs, “The Reaction of a Group of Children to Unusual Social Freedom,” delivered to the British Psycho-Analytical Society, 16 March 1927, cited in Cameron, “Science, Nature, and Hatred,” 859. 32 Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986). 33 Lawrence, “The Malting House School.” 34 Susan Isaacs, Social Development, 20, n1, emphasis in original. 35 Susan Isaacs, Intellectual Growth, 21.

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Piaget’s research methods or with some of his conclusions. Nevertheless, a “long conversation” began between Piaget and Isaacs that included her husband, who was also a critic and supporter of Piaget’s work.36 In later decades, both Nathan and Lawrence played a significant role in introducing Piaget’s ideas to teachers in mainstream schools. A vignette of play observed by both Susan Isaacs and Piaget during his visit was recounted by each of them in later writings. Isaacs did not accept the certainty of Piaget’s stages of development derived from test situations. Piaget had been interested in how a young child they observed (Pyke’s son David) had been able to offer a rational account of how a tricycle worked, but Isaacs described how the same child later got angry with a kettle that spat water and so spat back at the kettle! She was arguing that natural observations, rather than test conditions, revealed “more elasticity” and “more variety” in the data.37 Piaget did adapt his methods, but differences remained in their interpretation of this observation and, more broadly, in their respective understandings of the processes of a child’s intellectual development. Their “conversation” was mainly through reviews of each other’s books and rejoinders, including an interchange about Isaacs’ Intellectual Growth in Young Children and its chapter by her husband on “Children’s ‘Why’ Questions.”38 Piaget responded, admiring “Mrs. Isaacs’ fine book” as well as Mr. Isaacs’ essay of “primary importance.”39 In other reviews, Isaacs is similarly effusive about Piaget, claiming “there is probably no single contributor … whose work is of greater interest than that of Jean Piaget.”40 Lydia Smith likens the different perspectives argued throughout their conversation as an extension of the “old controversy between heredity and environment,” with Susan and Nathan Isaacs both placing more emphasis on a child’s interactions and experiences that build gradually, and not necessarily in 36 Lydia A. Smith, “Jean Piaget and Susan and Nathan Isaacs: A Long Conversation,” New Era 61, no. 4 (July/August 1980): 151–57. 37 Susan Isaacs, “Review of J. Piaget’s The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality,” Mind 40 (1931): 91. 38 Nathan Isaacs, “Children’s ‘Why’ Questions,” in Susan Isaacs, Intellectual Growth, 291–349. 39 Jean Piaget, “Intellectual Development Among Young Children: A Critical Study.” Mind 40, no. 158 (April 1931): 137–60. 40 Susan Isaacs, “Critical Review: Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conceptions of the Mind,” Mind 38 (1929): 506.

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an orderly progression, rather than a theory of stages.41 Notwithstanding such differences, the Isaacs and Piaget all saw the potential of a new kind of learning environment for young children and the coinvestigating teacher that Malting House enabled.

The Child Scientist Malting House was a scientific experiment concerning the social and intellectual aspects of pedagogy, but as well the school was an experimental environment for introducing the sciences to young children. This emphasis on science began with Pyke’s mantra of “let’s find out” by asking questions and embracing the natural curiosity of young children as a teaching tool. Among the pupils were children from Cambridge academia, including the son of mathematical physicist Ralph Fowler, grandson of the New Zealander nuclear physicist Nobel laureate Sir Ernest Rutherford. All three generations were a presence at Malting House. Nathan Isaacs formally joined the Malting House staff in 1926, enticed from his metal trading business by Pyke on a contract to write books on the theory of knowledge. While no books were produced, Isaacs used the experience to compile two papers included as appendices in his wife’s Intellectual Growth in Young Children (1930): “Education and Science,” originally published in Nature magazine42 while Isaacs was still at the school, and “Children’s ‘Why’ Questions.” In “Education and Science” Isaacs argued that “the beginnings of education have not hitherto seemed relevant to the interests of scientific men,” and he challenged the separation of the professional teaching of science as an “alternative to the humanities.”43 Isaacs claimed that the integration of the sciences in the child’s everyday world was the characteristic of Malting House that specially aims at exploring the educative use of introductory science from the outset of education. During these years, the response of children of four to seven years of age under free conditions to opportunity and

41 Smith, “Jean Piaget and Susan and Nathan Isaacs,” 155. 42 Nathan Isaacs, “Education and Science,” Nature 120, no. 3012 (23 July 1927):

105–107. 43 Nathan Isaacs, “Education and Science,” in Susan Isaacs, Intellectual Growth, 350.

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Fig. 5.4 Science laboratory

stimulus for the first direct discovery of many kinds of natural knowledge—mechanical, physical, biological—has been observed and studied … encouraging results obtained can only be suggestive.44

In “The Malting House School,” Lawrence described a carpentry workshop under development and a laboratory with tubing, flasks, tripods, and Bunsen burners used with adult supervision. Also in the laboratory were instruments for dissection and jars for specimens, as well as an outdoor menagerie of live animals and insects, an aquarium, and a wormery (Figs. 5.4 and 5.5).45 In his second, more substantive paper, Isaacs analysed the circumstances and kinds of children’s “why?” questions. He categorised the level of explanations provided by adults, arguing that the cumulative process was an essential cognitive tool for making sense of the world for the child. This was an argument too against the early specialisation of science teaching. Adults working with children had a crucial role: 44 Isaacs, “Education and Science,” 353. 45 Lawrence, “The Malting House School,” 3.

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Fig. 5.5 Drill press in the carpentry workshop

to equip and guide the natural epistemic concern of children from the start, so as to turn it to its most fruitful and valuable use.… [The child] depends for a long time upon adults for satisfaction, and they can either give every help possible to turn it into an active, enjoyed and freely advancing interest for the child, or they can rebuff, confuse, mislead and stifle it in endless ways.46

This seminal work by Isaacs formed the foundation of his quest to transform school curriculum, as well as the practice of teachers. In 1927, Pyke and Nathan Isaacs determined to extend the Malting House science experiment and placed a lengthy advertisement in newspapers and magazines for a “scientist of senior standing … to investigate and conduct the introduction of young children 4½ to 10, to science and scientific method.” The advertisement stated that Sir Ernest Rutherford had agreed to assist in the selection of the appropriate candidate for

46 Nathan Isaacs, “Children’s ‘Why’ Questions,” in Susan Isaacs, Intellectual Growth,

338.

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the appointment. Nathan circulated support for what “may easily seem an extraordinary demand [and] you might ask ‘why first-class?’ and ‘why do you want a scientist to do nurses’ or infant teachers’ work?’”47 He argued: Let us see what happens to science in early education, and for that matter to early education, if we can get a first-class scientist to apply to it methods of thorough exploration. To encourage us in trying this, let us consider how inadequate are the results of our current methods of education at their best.48

Richard Slavson, an engineer with a passion for teaching science and mathematics who had previously worked at Teachers College, Columbia University, was the successful appointee. Slavson only had a short time at the school before its financial woes began, but later wrote an article in The New Era, “Integrated Science for Young Children,” describing the “unhampered investigation of the environment with ample material and adequate adult guidance provided at the Malting House School … [that] was ‘superior’ to any he knew elsewhere.”49 In an article in The Spectator, Susan Isaacs summed up what had been learnt at the Malting House School about the “the child as a scientist” and urged adults to understand that “it is not so much information we need to give, as the comradeship of interest in the world. Our sharing of [the child’s] enjoyment of the adventure of discovering the world is what the child seeks in us.”50 Isaacs concluded her article with the rejoinder, “Let the child play and sing and dance to his hearts content. Let him make-believe and act and draw and dig.… But let us not deny him his active interest in the real world when he shows it.”51 This was the task of Malting House’s reimagined teacher.

47 Nathan Isaacs, “About Early Education,” typed letter to editor, University of London Institute of Education archives, NI/B/7 (3 of 3). 48 Ibid. 49 Richard Slavson, “Integrated Science for Young Children,” The New Era 13, no. 1 (1932): 17–21. 50 Susan Isaacs, “The Child as a Scientist,” The Spectator (1931), reprinted in Smith, The Life and Work of Susan Isaacs, 271–73. 51 Ibid., emphasis in original.

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Creating the Legacy of Malting House In the aftermath of the Isaacs’ departure from Malting House at the end of 1927, there was indeed a “tangle of relations” to deal with, including Susan and Nathan Isaacs and Lawrence, whose discreet threesome lasted their lifetime. While Nathan rejoined the world of business, Susan reestablished her work in the field of psychoanalysis and entered a long period of analysis herself. She embarked on a series of writing projects, using the data from the Malting House years. These writings, undertaken partly to generate an income, embraced a range of audiences. Susan Isaacs became a household name among parents, nursery nurses, and teachers and a recognised scholar, researcher, and teacher educator. It was the breadth of this influence that ensured the longevity of the Malting House legacy, reshaping ideas about children, child rearing, and the role of adults in the lives of children, particularly in Britain and the Antipodes. Isaacs wrote two popular books concerning the everyday life of children in the home and the classroom: The Nursery Years 52 and The Children We Teach.53 The former, with its readable overview of child development, became a standard text for student teachers; it remained in print unrevised until the 1970s. The Nursery Years combined a Freudian view of children’s development with Isaacs’ insights about her own work with children. After the Malting House experience, Isaacs was concerned that teachers and parents strive to see children as they really are rather than what adults might want them to be. She wrote, “I was not prepared to select … only such behaviour as pleased me, as fitted into the general convention as to what little children … should feel or talk [about].”54 Her chart “Some Don’ts for Parents” alongside her listed “Do’s” still resonates ninety years later.55 Between 1929 and 1936, Isaacs became “Ursula Wise,” an expert on “childhood problems” in the magazine Nursery World, writing weekly responses to letters from parents who described their everyday difficulties rearing young children. Just as interesting are the follow-up letters and comments. Still holding currency in 1948, a collection of letters and 52 Susan Isaacs, The Nursery Years: The Mind of the Child from Birth to Six Years (London: Routledge, 1929). 53 Susan Isaacs, The Children We Teach (London: University of London Press, 1932). 54 Susan Isaacs, Social Development, 19. 55 Susan Isaacs, The Nursery Years, 134.

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replies was republished just prior to Isaacs’ death.56 The topics in Nursery World were wide ranging, such as “You Must Obey!” (20 November 1929), “When Baby Says ‘I Won’t’” (27 November 1929), “Oldfashioned or Modern Methods” (15 January 1930), “Open-air Play” (5 February 1930), “Nervous Children” (12 February 1930), “Out of Mischief” (10 March 1930), “Difficulties with Two Year Olds” 30 August 1930), “Worrying over Lessons” (25 November 1931), and “Children will be Mischievous” (17 April 1932). Isaacs did not avoid addressing issues around child sexuality, particularly concerns about masturbation. Her replies were always along permissive lines, explaining the psychology and giving practical advice and sometimes citing a child she had once known—at Malting House or from her child analysis practice. In the late 1930s, Home and School magazine introduced “Readers’ Questions Answered by Dr. Susan Isaacs.” This time the questions were mainly from teachers concerned with problems they encountered in the classroom. Amidst the burgeoning awareness of new psychological insights into childhood, Isaacs became a key conduit in translating theory into practice. For this she was well placed, with the combination of her psychoanalytic training, her practical experience in an experimental setting, and her credentials as a trained teacher. In 1932, Isaacs was invited by Cyril Burt, newly appointed as head of the psychology department at University College, London, to collaborate on a memorandum for the Consultative Committee on Infant and Nursery Schools chaired by Sir William Hadow, who had previously chaired a review of primary schooling. Burt and Isaacs wrote Appendix 111, “The emotional development of children up to the age of seven plus,” the broad content of which became Chapter 3 of the final report: “The Mental Development of Children Up to the Age of Seven.”57 Recommendations from the Hadow report were slow to infiltrate policy or practice, but they were an important step towards mainstreaming selective progressive ideas, including the extension of nursery school provision. Isaacs’ booklet The Educational Value of the Nursery School (1937) cited research on the benefits of nursery schools and argued their case as a bridge between home and the wider world as a place where the child “can 56 Susan Isaacs, Children and Parents: Their Problems and Difficulties (London: Methuen, 1948). 57 Board of Education, Report of the Consultative Committee on Infant and Nursery Schools (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1933).

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make his own little friends and have his own life.”58 This was part of a wider groundswell for state-supported early childhood education imbued with the lessons learnt about young children of Malting House, if not all the freedoms. In the aftermath of the publication of Intellectual Growth in Young Children in 1930 and Social Development in Young Children in 1933, Isaacs extended her outreach into academia. In 1933, she was appointed by Percy Nunn as the head of the new department of child development at the Institute of Education, London University, a position she held until 1943. Nunn was also one of five vice-presidents of the New Education Fellowship (NEF). Isaacs’ appointment was part time, at a low salary, with few facilities, and she was never offered a promotion as her male colleagues were. Nevertheless, during these years she pioneered the teaching of child development by providing advanced-level training for teachers that fostered research, and explored the connections between new psychological knowledge and the education and development of very young children. Students came from around Britain and the world, including many who held significant positions in the education field and were potentially able to influence change. Isaacs’ teaching methods with adults were just as innovative as her work with children, encouraging discussion, seminars, and active observation and inquiry as part of the task. Surviving correspondence between Isaacs and her students reveals the close relationships she engendered.59 New Zealander Arthur Fieldhouse was taught by Isaacs when he enrolled in doctoral studies during 1935–1937. He later recalled: Susan had a wonderful analytic ability—she could analyse a situation. I remember an instance of a child whom she was studying who didn’t speak. I remember Susan’s account of how she had gone to the apartment where they lived. It was very interesting because accommodation in London was very difficult to obtain and this family had got this apartment but they weren’t supposed to have any children and so children had to make no noise! I remember how Susan teased all the little bits out, one at a time, and put them together. I’ve wondered whether that was the outcome of

58 Susan Isaacs, The Educational Value of the Nursery School (London: The Nursery School Association of Great Britain, 1937), 27. 59 Correspondence relating to students 1933–1939, SI/D/1, University of London Institute of Education Archives.

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her psychoanalytic Freudian training. I’ve often thought of her as a psychoanalyst with the most marvelous balance and ability to cope, it was so impressive. She could deal with anybody in any state. I always felt that she never felt threatened. I don’t mean that she was arrogant—not at all—but her own problems had been teased out.60

Fieldhouse returned to New Zealand and was later a professor of education at Victoria University Wellington. The reimagined teacher that Isaacs promoted and illustrated through her teaching and writings seeped into the understandings of her students and infiltrated mainstream practice, but forging real change in classrooms was slow, hampered too by war and constraints around the infrastructure of school systems, teacher education, and ultimately the conservative beliefs of many teachers. Some examples of change can be tracked. New Zealand kindergartener Elizabeth Stewart Hamilton was a student in the advanced child development course in 1937. She returned to New Zealand to teach with the Wellington Free Kindergarten Association alongside Edna Scott, who had recently returned from visits to Britain and the USA. Scott reported the changes they had undertaken: Miss Hamilton and I both feel that the majority of our kindergartens with their free and purposeful atmosphere compare very favorably with any we have seen abroad. I feel we have found the happy medium between the old type of charitable institution and the modern scientific one. I’ve noticed that the more experienced Directors have succeeded in solving the problem of freedom and discipline hand in hand with the creating of a free and natural atmosphere and building up self discipline amongst children.61

Joyce Barnes, a young teacher with the Dunedin Free Kindergarten Association in the late 1930s, recalled, “It was Stewart Hamilton who introduced us to the ideas about Susan Isaacs. She went to England and studied with Susan Isaacs.… When she came back from England, oh, she inflamed everybody and everything! Even down in Dunedin we used to hear about all these people and their lively ideas.”62 Not until 1949 did 60 Arthur Fieldhouse, interview with Helen May, 1994. 61 Edna Scott, Principal’s Report to the Wellington Free Kindergarten Association,

March 1939, MS-Group-0052, MSY-2527, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, emphasis in original. 62 Joyce Barnes, interviewed by Helen May, 1994.

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Barnes, as head teacher at Kelsey-Yarrah kindergarten, decide to take a more radical step when it was suggested she allow the children more freedom: I talked it over with the girls I was working with and we let the children free because it was more natural. We didn’t have a timetable anymore, we just let them free, let them do what they wanted to. We let the big boys go outside. You could see them sitting on the mat bored to tears, bored, absolutely bored. They played outside, nearly all morning and the difference in them! We even let them go to the toilet when they wanted to.63

This was more than a decade after Hamilton had studied with Isaacs and over two decades since Isaacs had left Malting House. It is nevertheless revealing of the small ripples that became waves as kindergartens throughout New Zealand introduced free play programmes at the behest of the Department of Education, whose preschool officer, Moira Gallagher, visited all the kindergartens in the country. Gallagher had recently returned from visiting new education early years ventures in the UK and the USA, and with the New Zealand prime minister, Peter Fraser, attended the memorial service for Isaacs in London in 1948. Persuading teachers, and indeed parents, that a free play programme was beneficial for children was not always easy. And, like Malting House, there was much trial and error in achieving the right balance. Nor did kindergarten teachers in New Zealand ever fully emulate the programme and practices of Malting House.64

Transnational Legacy In 2004, John Godfrey titled an article in the History of Education Review journal “Perhaps the Most Important, and Certainly the Most Exciting Event in the Whole History of Education in Australia.”65 He 63 Ibid. 64 Helen May, Politics in the Playground: The World of Early Childhood in Postwar New Zealand, 3rd ed. (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2019); Helen May and Kerry Bethell, Growing a Kindergarten Movement in New Zealand (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press, 2017). 65 John Godfrey, “‘Perhaps the Most Important, and Certainly the Most Exciting Event in the Whole History of Education in Australia’: The 1937 New Education Fellowship

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was citing his opinion about the 1937 NEF conference to which Susan Isaacs travelled in a large group of speakers from Europe and the USA. It was, in fact, a gruelling six conferences held across the capitals of the states of Australia. Isaacs’ visit “down under” to Australia was captured in a headline photo in The Telegraph “making friends” with a koala bear in Brisbane.66 Before arriving in Australia, fourteen of the NEF group attended four conferences in New Zealand for which schools were closed so that around 6000 teachers could attend. The proceedings of these conferences are still key texts in education, with book titles capturing the ethos of the times: Modern Trends in Education (New Zealand)67 and Education for Complete Living: The Challenge of Today (Australia).68 Isaacs’ particular contribution at the New Zealand NEF conference is useful to revisit as evidence, not only for the distant reach of the Malting House legacy, but also the overwhelming response of attendees, politicians, and policymakers.69 A contemporary report noted, “The enthusiasm caught parents and the general public to such an extent that the largest halls were not always big enough to accommodate those who wished to attend … hundreds were turned away from halls that had seating capacity for three thousand.”70 It was Isaacs’ presence as a speaker that created the queues, and she then agreed to broadcast her talks across the nation. This report also cites evidence of Isaacs’ later influence on an emerging research community with her interpretation of observational narrative research data in ways that were meaningful for teachers.

Conference and the New South Wales Examination Reform,” History of Education Review 33, no. 2 (2004): 45–58. 66 “Making Friends,” The Telegraph, 7 August 1937. 67 A. E. Campbell, ed., Modern Trends in Education: Proceedings of the New Zealand

NEF Conference (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1938). 68 Kenneth S. Cunningham, William C. Radford, and Frank Tate, eds., Education for Complete Living: The Challenges of Today: Proceedings of the New Education Fellowship Conference held in Australia August 1 to September 20, 1937 (Melbourne, Australian Council for Educational Research, 1938). 69 Helen May, “Women and Progressive Education,” in Women and Education in Aotearoa 1920s –1950s, Vol. 2, ed. Sue Middleton and Alison Jones (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1992), 83–101; The Discovery of Early Childhood, 2nd ed. (Wellington: NZCER Press, 2013). 70 T. H. Hunter, “Introduction,” in Modern Trends in Education: Proceedings of the New Zealand NEF Conference, ed. A. E. Campbell (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1938), xiii.

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During the 1930s, Isaacs was writing for an array of magazines and journals, including the NEF’s The New Era, and was for a time chair of the English section of the NEF. New Zealand was a keen NEF member with occasional attendances by educators at international conferences. A thirty-year correspondence from NEF branches in New Zealand to the London headquarters details the relationship. A letter from Arnold Campbell, a future director of education, in 1931 records that the Christchurch branch had 83 members, was operating four study groups—infant and preschool child, social sciences, art education, and reeducation of the maladjusted—had just hosted a conference for 250 attendees, and was arranging for an international expert on the new social studies to visit New Zealand.71 This kind of activism was typical. When Isaacs was at the Institute of Education, education travellers and delegates to NEF conferences invariably met with her in London. Gwen Somerset, who played a key role in promoting a playful pedagogy and education for mothers in the post-war playcentre movement, attended the 1936 NEF conference in Cheltenham, England, and reported “spending time with Susan Isaacs.”72 On her return, summing up the “new education” Somerset wrote, “The task of the infant teacher is merely to provide experiences on which the child may build his patterns. It is but his first step in the world. It remains for a later teacher to develop these experiences.”73 The 1976 edition of Somerset’s book I Play and I Grow was still promoting Isaacs’ The Nursery Years as essential reading for all playcentre parents.74 The “down under” NEF tour was exhausting. For some speakers, including Isaacs, the tour had also entailed a series of talks in the USA. The New Zealand conference was sponsored by the first Labour government already embarked on its programme of social and economic reform. The minister of education, Peter Fraser, told the country: I hope that not only teachers, but all who have the interests of education at heart, will take advantage of this unique opportunity of making contact 71 Arnold Campbell to Miss Soper, 14 November 1931, New Zealand Correspondence, WEF/A/#/139, University of London Institute of Education Archives. 72 Geraldine McDonald, discussion with Gwen Somerset, Geraldine McDonald private papers. 73 Gwen Somerset, “The Ewe Fair,” The New Era 19, no. 6 (1938): 175. 74 Gwen Somerset, I Play and I Grow, 1972 ed. (Wellington: New Zealand Play Centre

Federation, 1949).

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with movements overseas, and preparing themselves to take an active and intelligent part in the reorganisation of education in New Zealand.75

The minister was a daily attendee at the Wellington conference and convened a meeting of conference speakers with Department of Education officials to discuss the proposed reorganisation.76 The organiser of the conference was C. E. Beeby, founding director of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, who recalled: I would see a queue all down one side of the Wellington Town Hall and half way up the other at eight in the morning to get to a lecture starting at half past nine. We believed in education in those days. We were simpletons maybe but we really believed that the world could be altered by education. There was real faith; it was not just sentimental, it was deep faith.77

The presence of Susan Isaacs was a draw card. Woman Today heralded the conference as the “highlight of the educational and cultural year [which] may well mark the beginning of a new era.”78 Isaacs did not disappoint, and as Beeby recalled, she was simple and direct. Susan Isaacs had an enormous effect here. She became so exhausted by her work I brought her home. She used to sit in that chair and lie down on that couch [in the lounge in his Wellington house where Beeby still lived in 1990] just to get away from the mob of admirers. She had big audiences. She was talking to people about what went on in the classroom and the home. What people went to hear was something to do with home and kids and classrooms. She would bring in practical cases in terms that people could understand.79

During the conference, Isaacs conducted seminars on a range of topics, including the “mental hygiene of the preschool child,” where she was reportedly “plied with questions, mainly of problems of a practical nature

75 Peter Fraser, letter of invitation to teachers, Education Gazette (1 March 1937), 29. 76 “New Education Fellowship,” News and Notes, no. 3 (October 1937),

WEF/4/vii/306 file1/2, University of London Institute of Education Archives. 77 C. E. Beeby, interviewed by Helen May, 1990. 78 “Editorial,” Woman Today 1, no. 4 (1937): 1. 79 C. E. Beeby, interviewed by Helen May, 1990.

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raised by the behaviour of small children.” The reporter noted that most of the questioners were parents.80 An adviser to infant classes, Florence Lowrie, described the impact: The visit of Susan Isaacs to New Zealand in 1937 gave a great stimulus to the recognition of growth needs of little children and made teachers aware of the necessity of relating those growth needs to education. In 1939, an infant mistress asked me for help in establishing a period of undirected play. This I did, suggesting the same types of materials as listed in The Nursery Years.81

Lowrie had recently returned from two years’ study at the Institute of Education and recalled the changing mood: No one could be unaware of the changes that were pending in those years.… All our thoughts and experiments of the last nine years had been leading up to a recognition of the rights of the individual. On my return to New Zealand I realised how unnaturally silent the infant school was, and I tried to introduce more freedom and movement into my school.82

At the conclusion of the Wellington conference, the Evening Post editorial (23 July 1937) noted the huge crowds and concluded that “much good seed had been sown … the modern school is a place where a child under guidance is allowed to develop its individuality.” Delegates were, however, cautioned by one of the visiting speakers that they “were not going to bring about any sudden change in outlook, but were simply providing the yeast which would work the educational bread.”83 In the aftermath, NEF correspondence contained regular reports from New Zealand branches about new projects, study groups, research, and seminars.84 The New Era (January 1938) devoted an issue to New Zealand education, noting that “the trend of the Conference was the 80 Evening Post, 19 July 1937. 81 Florence E. Lowrie, “Infant Schools Yesterday and Today,” Education 5, no. 1

(1956): 5–6. 82 Lowrie, “Infant Schools,” 9. 83 “Editorial Notes, The NEF Conference,” Student Teacher Association 9, no. 4

(August 1937): 1. 84 New Zealand 1938–1962, WEF/A/#138, University of London Institute of Education Archives.

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freeing of the teacher as a professional man or woman, the freeing of the child as a creative and expressive individual.”85 While the aftermath led to grass-roots activism, policy change was slower.86 In 1940, Beeby was appointed director of education. His brief was to design and manage a programme of educational restructuring. New education ideals shaped New Zealand education over the next two decades, during which Beeby was much lampooned in the media for introducing “playway” into schools.87 Playful preschool education was part of the vision. In 1944, the minister of education, H. G. R. Mason, with Beeby, convened a conference to spearhead post-war plans. Mason told the audience that the government had a “deep faith in education as the basis of national reconstruction.”88 Beeby wrote, under Mason’s name, Education Today and Tomorrow (1944), which stated amidst its photos of playful classrooms: Nothing short of a revolution has taken place in the infant room during the past twenty years. It has my full support … we must all agree that in the infant room the learning of formal intellectual skills is of secondary importance. What is of supreme importance is that the young child should be healthy and happy, that he should learn to work and play with other children, that his mind should be kept lively and eager and full of wonder, and that he should lay the basis.89

This was an overly optimistic description and does not fully tally with many former students’ child recollections of their schooling.90 Nevertheless, this stance at the highest policy level heralded shifts in the 85 E. G. Malherbe, “The NEF Conference in New Zealand,” The New Era (January 1938): 4. 86 Ian Cumming and Alan Cumming, History of State Education in New Zealand 1840– 1975 (Wellington: Pitman Pacific Book, 1978), 254. 87 Noeline Alcorn, To the Fullest Extent of His Powers: C. E. Beeby’s Life in Education (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1999); Helen May, “I Am Five and I Go to School”: Early Years Schooling in New Zealand 1900–2010 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999). 88 H. G. R. Mason, “Report of the Minister of Education,” Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives E-1 (1944), E-1. 89 H. G. R. Mason, Education Today and Tomorrow (Wellington: Department of Education, 1944), 16. 90 May, “I Am Five and I Go to School.”

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training of teachers for schools and kindergartens with much emphasis on “understanding children” and a massive programme of professional development around playful approaches to learning for younger children.91 The reimagined teacher trialled at Malting House and imagined too by other progressive educators did in time infiltrate the mainstream of teaching, although never so fully as at Malting House. Case studies also illustrate how some teachers subverted the ideal.92 There is yet another dimension to the Malting House legacy: Susan Isaacs’ observational researches influenced approaches to the study of children. Geraldine McDonald first read The Nursery Years in 1943 at Dunedin Training College. She wrote: I am not sure how I found the later books of Susan Isaacs’ work at Malting House. I remember my excitement when I read her analysis of children’s thinking in a milieu which was largely unconstrained. I was so excited that I wrote a lengthy document which became the highlight of my academic work at the college. For me the appeal was not just about the theoretical interpretation or an argument for free methods teaching. It was my introduction to the idea of research, that one could study human behaviour and analyse it—a voyage of discovery into the minds of children.93

McDonald can be credited with laying the foundations of early childhood research in New Zealand with methodological approaches, like Isaacs’ Malting House research, that were meaningful to teachers and included teachers in the task. She explained: What Susan Isaacs did for me was to inoculate me against any idea that required “hard data” and had to be analysed statistically in order to be valid.… I accepted that it is possible to do good research with careful observation and interpretation and that positivist methods do not account for the narrative experience.94

91 Sue Middleton and Helen May, Teachers Talk Teaching 1915–1995, Early Childhood, School, Teachers College (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1997). 92 Ibid. 93 Geraldine McDonald, “Unpublished Memoir of a Research Journey,” Geraldine McDonald papers, Wellington. Cited in Sue Middleton and Helen May, For Women and Children a Tribute to Geraldine McDonald (Wellington: NZCER Press, 2019) p. 22. 94 Geraldine McDonald, “Susan Sylvia and the New Zealand Council for Educational Research,” Unpublished Presentation 18 September 2003, Geraldine McDonald Papers.

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In an article celebrating the centenary of Beeby’s birth in 1902, McDonald modestly wrote, “Through several routes, including their acceptance by Beeby, [the ideas of Susan Isaacs] have influenced early childhood and primary education in New Zealand.”95

Influencing Teachers in Post-War Britain Susan Isaacs retired from the Institute of Education in 1943 and supported the appointment of her past student, Dorothy Gardner, who later wrote Susan Isaacs: The First Biography (1969). In 1949, Gardner established the Child Development Society as a continuum of work begun by Isaacs. For the next 55 years, until it finally disbanded in different times, the society was a conduit for the dissemination of current research, issues, and educational thinking about young children, including hosting the annual Susan Isaacs Lecture and celebrating the centenary of Isaacs’ birth in 1983 with a retelling of the Malting House story.96 Following Gardner as head of the Department of Child Development, leading scholars held the position, such as Jack Tizard, Audrey Curtis, and Kathy Sylva. Through their research and teaching, each in turn had a significant impact on the pedagogy and practice of teaching young children. Before her death, Susan Isaacs had a hand in blessing the marriage of Nathan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence, which took place in 1950, twentyfive years after their affair began. They became a powerhouse couple, keeping alive the Malting House legacy and influencing mainstream pedagogy in early years and primary school education. In 1943, Lawrence had been appointed director of the National Froebel Foundation and in 1955, after her retirement from the foundation, was appointed a governor at the Froebel Educational Institute, a position she held until 1972.97 In this work, she was at the heart of institutions involved in credentialing teachers across nursery and primary school settings. Both institutions promoted Froebelian principles and practices but were well attuned to 95 Geraldine McDonald, “Dr. C. E. Beeby: The Quality of Education,” NZCER Set 2

(2002): 25. 96 Child Development Society, “A Celebration of the Centenary of Susan Isaacs,” Newsletter 49 (2004): 1–10. 97 The National Froebel Foundation still exists, although its functions have changed. It is housed in the gatehouse of the old Froebel Education Institute that is now the Froebel College of Roehampton University, Richmond, London.

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the post-Froebelian new education movement. Like the London Institute of Education, the Froebel Foundation and Froebel Education Institute were central to the dissemination of new education ideas among teachers. However, like the New Zealand case study, the Malting House ideal of a reimagined teacher in Britain was selectively culled and contained so as to be acceptable in mainstream settings. The pressures of a post-war baby boom and the growth in the school population encouraged the expansion of nursery school provision but also frustrated school reform. Schools and teacher education programmes struggled to accommodate the new demands and new ideals. During her time as director, Lawrence was the editor of the National Froebel Foundation Bulletin, a conduit she and Nathan Isaacs frequently used to advance their views. Isaacs was also a governor of the Froebel Educational Institute, and in 1957 he addressed a British OMEP (Organisation Mondiale pour l’Education Préscholaire) conference on the proposed introduction of a three-year teaching qualification. His long address aptly titled “What is Required of the Nursery-Infant Teacher in This Country Today?” was published in the Bulletin (No. 109) and reprinted twice (1967, 1972). Isaacs measured the distance travelled in producing the new teacher and outlined what still needed to happen. He summed up the “common ground philosophy of progressive practice” as “freedom of belief” and the “intrinsic value of individual human beings.”98 Isaacs then asked, “What now must be our theoretical demands of the unfortunate nursery-infant teachers who are to turn this into practice?”99 He outlined the “superhuman assemblage of personal qualities” required and the need for future teachers to possess the “microcosm of human knowledge, wisdom and skill, in order to cope with … our active, eager, full-living children of three to seven years of age.”100 The teacher of young children became the most important of all teachers, opening doors for children which they might not otherwise find: For [the nursery-infant teacher] presides over the years when the first foundations for a future shareable world-view should be taking place.… But to give any real help with this the nursery-infant teacher must have her own 98 Nathan Isaacs, “What Is Required of the Nursery-Infant Teacher in this Country Today?” National Froebel Foundation Bulletin (1967 reprint): 14. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid.

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clear view of what is to be achieved and why. And for this, of course, she must have been aided to attain the right shareable world-perspective herself.101

These challenges to the field of teacher education were only partially realised and were never accepted by the higher echelons of education. Nathan Isaacs’ main contribution to postwar education was to advance the work of Piaget.102 The National Froebel Foundation published Some Aspects of Piaget’s Work (1955) containing essays by him and Lawrence. So important was Piaget’s work, he argued, “that we cannot in its light avoid thinking out our whole educational psychology and philosophy afresh.”103 Both Isaacs and Lawrence illustrated how Piaget’s work reinforced the ideals of progressive educators, outlined by Isaacs in the essay “Piaget and Progressive Education.”104 Together they produced a raft of writings explaining Piaget to the wider teaching profession. “Children’s Ideas about Number”105 by Lawrence emphasised the importance of “understanding” as opposed to rote learning. Similarly, Nathan’s essays: “New Light on Children’s Ideas about Number” and “Piaget: Some Answers to Teachers’ Questions” were written as resources for the heartland of mainstream teacher education.106 Isaacs and Lawrence had a wider agenda: the reform and rethinking of the primary school curriculum, reframing for new times Susan Isaacs’ research from the Malting House years. In Approaches to Science in Primary Schools (1960), which they edited, Isaacs wrote the chapter “What Active Enquiry Means for the Child” and he argued:

101 Ibid. 102 Hall, “Psychology and Schooling,” 153–70. 103 Nathan Isaacs, “Piaget and Progressive Education,” in Some Aspects of Piaget’s Work,

ed. Nathan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence (London: National Froebel Foundation, 1955), 32–46. 104 Ibid. 105 Evelyn Lawrence, “Children’s Ideas about Number: Summary,” in Some Aspects of Piaget’s Work, ed. Nathan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence (London: National Froebel Foundation, 1955). 106 Nathan Isaacs, Piaget: Some Answers to Teachers’ Questions (London: National Froebel Foundation 1965); New Light on Children’s Ideas of Number (London: The Educational Supply Association, Ltd., 1966).

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We must look afresh at the five year olds who enter our Primary Schools, and what these schools can do for them … think of each child as a person and aim at getting him really interested and carrying him with us, we have to give new attention to what everything we are trying to do for him means to him.107

This rethinking of teaching and learning was supported by government. For example, the Nuffield Junior Science Project (1965–1967) was underpinned by many tenets of Piagetian thought and adopted these psychological themes. In an endorsement of “active enquiry,” the front piece to the teachers’ guide for the mathematics project I Do and I Understand (1967) stated, “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”108 In 1963, the British government undertook its first review of primary education since the Hadow reports (1925–1933). The committee that produced the 1967 Plowden report fully supported progressive approaches to learning and teaching.109 Directly citing the contribution of Susan Isaacs in early decades, the committee heralded play as the conduit to learning in the early years: “We know now that play—in the sense of ‘messing about’ either with material objects or with other children, and of creating fantasies—is vital to children’s learning and therefore vital in school.”110 Lawrence and Isaacs wrote complementary submissions on behalf of the Froebel Foundation that, as Lawrence explained, “rest[ed] on the same theoretical case, namely that education must be based fundamentally on children’s own natural interests.”111 Isaacs wanted to advance his long-held view that primary education needed a rethink.112 Lawrence outlined arguments for a research department 107 Nathan Isaacs, “What Active Enquiry Means for the Child,” in Approaches to Science in Primary Schools, ed. Evelyn Lawrence and Nathan Isaacs (London: The Educational Supply Association, Ltd., 1966), reprinted in Smith, To Help and to Understand, 313. 108 Nuffield Mathematics Project, I Do and I Understand (London: Wiley, 1967), front

piece. 109 Central Advisory Council for Education, Children and Their Primary Schools (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1967). 110 Ibid., 523. 111 E. H. Lawrence, “Memorandum for the Plowden Committee,” 28 October 1964,

1, PL/10/6 1/3, University of London Institute of Education Archives. 112 Nathan Isaacs, “Memorandum to the Plowden Committee,” Froebel Journal (June 1965).

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attached to a training college, staffed with leaders in “progressive education” and advised by the heads of experimental schools, which would pilot and test the new approaches needed for teacher training in a new primary school environment.113 Not surprisingly, Lawrence proposed the Froebel Educational Institute as the “natural headquarters for such an educational testing ground”; indeed, she wrote, “The college has been advocating it for 70 years!”114 The weighty tomb of the Plowden report, read by few but cited by many, communicated the possibilities and permission for more permissive and experimental approaches to primary schooling. This was a short-lived window. By the late 1970s, political critique of so-called progressive approaches, once termed new education, led to the heavy hand of the government in schooling and teacher education, and in 1988 the Education Reform Act introduced the idea of a national curriculum for schools which, from 1996, included “Desirable Outcomes for Children’s Learning on Entering Compulsory Education.”115 Teachers were now told what to teach and how to teach, and playful learning by discovery, pioneered at Malting House and promoted by an expanding network of followers, almost disappeared from the classroom. Colleges of education, mainly merged into universities, were funded primarily to teach approved courses on curriculum rather than children development, and struggled to imbue future students with understandings of progressive practices. Nathan Isaacs died in 1966 prior to the reporting of the Plowden Committee, and Evelyn Lawrence died in 1987. Obituaries for both cited their involvement with Malting House, their relationship with Susan Isaacs, and their long years of disseminating her work. Speaking at Isaacs’ memorial, Gardner told how, after Susan’s death in 1948, Nathan, “often assisted by Evelyn Isaacs,” gave an annual lecture on the Malting House School to the students in the Department of Child Development: With Nathan and Evelyn among us this school ceased to seem almost legendary and became vividly real, and we realised why it was that so small a school for, in some ways, a rather special group of children had so 113 E. H. Lawrence, “Memorandum.” 114 Ibid. 115 Department of Education and Science, Education Reform Act (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1988). In 2008 the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework covering both preschool and the first years of schooling was introduced.

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profound an influence on English education, leading teachers in our state schools … to a deeper understanding of children and also of very significant educational principles and practices. We realised how much rigorous and critical thought had gone into the planning of this whole experiment by Susan and Nathan Isaacs and Geoffrey Pyke.116

The demise of Malting House that left Pyke “bankrupt, wifeless and reclusive” did not, in the longer term, curb his entrepreneurial ventures.117 A flow of inventions during the Second World War led to Pyke’s appointment by Louis Mountbatten as his director of programmes. Pyke was later described as “Churchill’s Iceman,” having invented “pykrete,” a compound of ice and sand with which to construct a giant aircraft carrier,118 which in the end did not eventuate. Pyke committed suicide in 1948; obituaries recalled his extraordinary life as a “fearless innovator” and an “unrecognized genius.”119 The idea and establishment of Malting House School belonged to Pyke. It was Susan Isaacs who executed the experiment and, with Nathan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence, ensured its long legacy.

Bibliography Archival Sources Geraldine McDonald Papers. Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library, Wellington, New Zealand (Cataloguing in process.). Isaacs, Nathan. “About Early Education” [typed letter to editor]. University of London Institute of Education Archives. NI/B/7. Lawrence, E. H. “Memorandum for the Plowden Committee.” 28/10/64, PL/10/6 1/3, University of London Institute of Education Archives. McDonald, Geraldine. “Susan Sylvia and the New Zealand Council for Educational Research.” Unpublished presentation 18 September 2003. Geraldine

116 Dorothy E. M. Gardner, “Memorial Meeting for Nathan Isaacs at University of London Institute of Education” (13 June 1966), n. p. 117 Lara Feigal, “Review of Churchill’s Iceman: The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke: Genius, Fugitive, Spy,” The Guardian, 29 August 2014. 118 Henry Hemming, Churchill’s Iceman: The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke: Genius, Fugitive, Spy (London: Penguin, Random House, 2014). 119 Nathan Isaacs Papers, NI B/7 University of London Institute of Education Archives.

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McDonald Papers. Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library, Wellington, New Zealand (Cataloguing in process). Nathan Isaacs Papers. NI B/7. University of London Institute of Education Archives. “New Education Fellowship.” News and Notes, no. 3 (October 1937). WEF/4/vii/306 file1/2. University of London Institute of Education Archives. New Zealand Correspondence, WEF/A/#/139, University of London Institute of Education Archives. “Notice of Film of the Malting House School, Cambridge.” University of London Institute of Education Archives NI/B/7. Scott, Edna. Principal’s Report to the Wellington Free Kindergarten Association, March 1939. MS-Group-0052, MSY-2527. Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library, Wellington, New Zealand. University of London Institute of Education Archives. NI/D/2.

Print and Electronic Sources Alcorn, Noeline. To the Fullest Extent of His Powers: C. E. Beeby’s Life in Education. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1999. Cameron, Laura. “Science, Nature, and Hatred: ‘Finding Out’ at the Malting House School, 1924–29.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 6 (2006): 851–72. Central Advisory Council for Education. Children and Their Primary Schools. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1967. Child Development Society. “A Celebration of the Centenary of Susan Isaacs.” Newsletter 49 (2004): 1–10. Cumming, Ian, and Alan Cumming. History of State Education in New Zealand 1840–1975. Wellington: Pitman Pacific Book, 1978. Cunningham, Kenneth S., William C. Radford, and Frank Tate, eds. Education for Complete Living: The Challenges of Today. Proceedings of the New Education Fellowship Conference held in Australia August 1 to September 20, 1937 . Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1938. Department of Education and Science. Education Reform Act. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1988. Drummond, Mary J. “Susan Isaacs: Pioneering Work in Understanding Children’s Lives.” In Practical Visionaries: Women, Education, and Social Progress, edited by Pam Hirsch and Mary Hilton, 221–34. London: Pearson Education, 2000. “Editorial.” Woman Today 1, no. 4 (1937): 1. “Editorial Notes, The NEF Conference.” Student Teacher Association 9, no. 4 (August 1937): 1.

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Fraser, Peter. Letter of invitation to teachers. Education Gazette (1 March 1937), 29. Feigal, Lara. “Review of Churchill’s Iceman: The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke: Genius, Fugitive, Spy.” The Guardian, 29 August 2014. Forrester, John, and Laura Cameron. Freud in Cambridge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Gardner, Dorothy E. M. “Memorial Meeting for Nathan Isaacs at University of London Institute of Education.” Froebel Journal 6 (13 June 1966): 1–4. Gardner, Dorothy E. M. Susan Isaacs: The First Biography. London: Methuen, 1969. Godfrey, John. “‘Perhaps the Most Important, and Certainly the Most Exciting Event in the Whole History of Education in Australia’: The 1937 New Education Fellowship Conference and the New South Wales Examination Reform.” History of Education Review 33, no. 2 (2004): 45–58. https://doi.org/10. 1108/08198691200400009. Graham, Philip. Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children. London: Karnac, 2009. Great Britain Board of Education. Report of the Consultative Committee on Infant and Nursery Schools. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1933. Grosskurth, Phyllis. Melanie Klein. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986. Hall, Jody S. “Psychology and Schooling: The Impact of Susan Isaacs and Jean Piaget on 1960s Science Education Reform.” History of Education 29, no. 2 (2000): 153–70. Hemming, Henry. Churchill’s Iceman: The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke: Genius, Fugitive, Spy. London: Random House, 2014. Hunter, T. H. “Introduction.” In Modern Trends in Education: Proceedings of the New Zealand NEF Conference, edited by A. E. Campbell, xi–xiv. Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1938. Isaacs, Nathan. “Children’s ‘Why’ Questions.” In Intellectual Growth in Young Children, authored by Susan Isaacs, 291–349. London: Routledge, 1930. Isaacs, Nathan. “Education and Science.” Nature 120, no. 3012 (23 July 1927): 105–107. Isaacs, Nathan. “Education and Science.” In Intellectual Growth in Young Children, authored by Susan Isaacs, 350–54. London: Routledge, 1930. Isaacs, Nathan. “Memorandum to the Plowden Committee.” Froebel Journal (June 1965): 18–33. Isaacs, Nathan. New Light on Children’s Ideas of Number. London: The Educational Supply Association, 1966. Isaacs, Nathan. “Piaget and Progressive Education.” In Some Aspects of Piaget’s Work, authored by Nathan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence, 32–46. London: National Froebel Foundation, 1955.

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Isaacs, Nathan. Piaget: Some Answers to Teachers’ Questions. London: National Froebel Foundation 1965. Isaacs, Nathan. “What Active Enquiry Means for the Child.” In Approaches to Science in Primary Schools, edited by Evelyn Lawrence and Nathan Isaacs. London: The Educational Supply Association, 1966, reprinted in Lydia A. Smith, To Help and to Understand: The Life and Work of Susan Isaacs 1885– 1948. London: Associated University Press, 1985, 313–21. Isaacs, Nathan. “What Is Required of the Nursery-Infant Teacher in This Country Today?” National Froebel Foundation Bulletin (1967 reprint): 2–16. Isaacs, Susan. Children and Parents: Their Problems and Difficulties. London: Methuen, 1948. Isaacs, Susan. “Critical Review: Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conceptions of the Mind.” Mind 38 (1929): 506–13. Isaacs, Susan. Intellectual Growth in Young Children. London: Routledge, 1930. Isaacs, Susan. “Review of J. Piaget’s The Child’s Conception of Causality.” Mind 40 (1931): 89–93. Isaacs, Susan. Social Development in Young Children. London: Routledge, 1933. Isaacs, Susan. “The Child as a Scientist.” The Spectator, 1931, reprinted in The Life and Work of Susan Isaacs, authored by Lydia A. Smith, 271–73. London: Associated University Press, 1985. Isaacs, Susan. The Children We Teach. London: University of London Press, 1932. Isaacs, Susan. The Educational Value of the Nursery School. London: The Nursery School Association of Great Britain, 1937. Isaacs, Susan. The Nursery Years: The Mind of the Child from Birth to Six Years. London: Routledge, 1929. Klein, Melanie. “The Development of a Child.” In The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1, Love, Guilt, and Reparations and Other Works, 1921–1945. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Lawrence, Evelyn. “Children’s Ideas about Number.” In Some Aspects of Piaget’s Work, authored by Nathan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence, 1–18. London: National Froebel Foundation, 1955. Lawrence, Evelyn. “The Malting House School.” National Froebel Foundation Bulletin 56 (February 1949): 3. Lowrie, Florence E. “Infant Schools Yesterday and Today.” Education 5, no. 1 (1956): 5–6. Malherbe, E. G. “The NEF Conference in New Zealand.” The New Era (January 1938): 3–5. Mason, H. G. R. Education Today and Tomorrow. Wellington: Department of Education, 1944. Mason, H. G. R. “Report of the Minister of Education.” Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives (1944): E-1.

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May, Helen. “I Am Five and I Go to School”: Early Years Schooling in New Zealand 1900–2010. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999. May, Helen. Politics in the Playground: The World of Early Childhood in Postwar New Zealand. 3rd ed. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2019. May, Helen. The Discovery of Early Childhood. 2nd ed. Wellington: NZCER Press, 2013. May, Helen. “Women and Progressive Education.” In Women and Education in Aotearoa 1920s–1950s, Vol. 2, edited by Sue Middleton and Alison Jones, 83–101. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1992. May, Helen, and Kerry Bethell. Growing a Kindergarten Movement in New Zealand. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press, 2017. McDonald, Geraldine. “Dr. C. E. Beeby: The Quality of Education.” NZCER Set 2 (2002): 25–27. Middleton, Sue, and Helen May. Teachers Talk Teaching 1915–1995: Early Childhood, School, Teachers College. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1997. Middleton, Sue, and Helen May. For Women and Children: A Tribute to Geraldine McDonald. Wellington: NZCER Press, 2019. Nuffield Mathematics Project. I Do and I Understand. London: Wiley, 1967. Piaget, Jean. “Intellectual Development Among Young Children: A Critical Study.” Mind 40, no. 158 (April 1931): 137–60. Slavson, Richard. “Integrated Science for Young Children.” The New Era 13, no. 1 (1932): 17–21. Smith, Lydia A. “Jean Piaget and Susan and Nathan Isaacs: A Long Conversation.” New Era 61, no. 4 (July–August 1980): 151–57. Smith, Lydia A. To Help and to Understand: The Life and Work of Susan Isaacs 1885–1948. London: Associated University Press, 1985. Somerset, Gwen. I Play and I Grow. Revised edition. Wellington: New Zealand Play Centre Federation, 1949/1972. Somerset, Gwen. “The Ewe Fair.” The New Era 19, no. 6 (1938): 174–75. van der Eyken, Willem, and Barry Turner. Adventures in Education. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1969.

CHAPTER 6

The Hietzing School, Austria

Like the Malting House School, the Hietzing School, which was started in Vienna in 1927, was small and short-lived, lasting only five years and enrolling no more than two dozen or so students at any one time. Also like Malting House, the Hietzing School was a private institution initiated and funded by a wealthy parent—in this case, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (1891–1979)—to provide her children a form of education especially suitable to their needs and development, and in contrast to that which was otherwise available. In addition, both Malting House and the Hietzing School existed at the evolving nexus of child-centred pedagogies on the one hand and the emerging field of child psychoanalysis on the other. But whereas the Malting House experiment became well known in the landscape of twentieth-century progressive education, the Hietzing School did not. Significantly, while many of those associated with the Hietzing School, including Burlingham, Anna Freud (1895–1982), Erik H. Erikson (1902–1994, then known as Erik Homburger), and Peter Blos (1904–1997), achieved international renown in their lifetimes, their fame was not achieved in connection with the Hietzing School. As a result, although the school is mentioned in numerous published biographies and memoirs of those individuals and other luminaries of

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their Vienna psychoanalytic circle,1 it has received relatively little attention in its own right. Notable exceptions to this are Rolf Göppel’s keen analysis of the school’s pedagogy, published in 1991, and a spate of more recent studies, including Florian Houssier’s examination of the school as a psychoanalytic institution and works by Nick Midgley, Elizabeth Ann Danto, and Danto with Alexandra Steiner-Strauss, who have sought to situate the school within broader psychoanalytic-pedagogical contexts and to describe the school’s unique expression of those influences.2 This chapter supplements these efforts by looking at the Hietzing School’s teachers in particular. Specifically, it discusses the ways in which the teacher’s role was reimagined and instantiated at the school: for example, as intuitive educator, as replacement parent, as fellow learner, and as nonoppressive empath. The Hietzing School is worth investigating, not only in terms of its psychoanalytic orientation (or not, as the case may be), but also precisely because—like Malting House—it had a long reach. It was very near ground zero for the development of child analysis, and it 1 Michael John Burlingham, Behind Glass: A Biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham

(New York: Other Press, 1989); Peter Conzen, Erik H. Erikson: Leben und Werk (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1996); Stephen Schlein, ed., Erik H. Erikson, A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); Sue Erikson Bloland, In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson (New York: Viking, 2005); Lawrence Jacob Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Isaac R. Galatzer-Levy and Robert M. Galatzer-Levy, “August Aichhorn: A Different Vision of Psychoanalysis, Children, and Society,” in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol. 62, ed. Robert A. King, Samuel Abrams, A. Scott Dowling, and Paul M. Brinich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 153–77; Uwe Henrik Peters, Anna Freud: A Life Dedicated to Children (New York: Schocken Books, 1985); Richard Stevens, Erik H. Erikson: Explorer of Identity and the Life Cycle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Elisabeth YoungBruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 2 Rolf Göppel, “Die Burlingham-Rosenfeld-Schule in Wien (1927–1932),” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 37, no. 3 (1991): 413–30; Nick Midgley, “The Matchbox School: Anna Freud and the Idea of a Psychoanalytically Informed Education,” Journal of Child Psychotherapy 34, no. 1 (2008): 23–42; Florian Houssier, Anna Freud et son École (Paris: Éditions CampagnePremière, 2010); Elizabeth Ann Danto and Alexandra Steiner, Freud/Tiffany and the Best Possible School: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, and the Hietzing School in 1920s Vienna [Exhibition and Catalogue] (London: Freud Museum, 2017); Elizabeth Ann Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss, eds., Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, and the “Best Possible School” (New York: Routledge, 2018).

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became an important site of experimentation (albeit nonsystematic), or what Houssier has called “an experimental laboratory for an education illuminated by psychoanalysis.”3

The School as a Joint (Ad)Venture Although some accounts suggest the Hietzing School was a psychoanalytic-pedagogical laboratory a long time in coming,4 others understand it as a phenomenon of convenience that unfolded relatively haphazardly, even coincidentally.5 Either way, it was most assuredly an “adventure,” to borrow the term used by Burlingham, the school’s founder and funder, to describe the school in hindsight.6 The school’s proximate origins lay in the 1925 arrival in Vienna of Dorothy Burlingham, an American heiress to the Tiffany jewellery fortune, with her four young children in tow. Burlingham had left her native New York after separating from her husband, surgeon Robert Burlingham, who struggled with manic depression. She came to Vienna specifically to seek help for her oldest son, ten-year-old Bob, whom she feared was also exhibiting signs of mental illness. Anna Freud, the founder of child psychoanalysis, agreed to analyse him (and his sister Mabbie) soon thereafter.7 Dorothy Burlingham herself entered psychoanalysis with Theodor Reik, a close friend of Freud’s father, Sigmund Freud, but after a short time the elder Freud replaced Reik as her analyst. Within a year, the Burlinghams had moved out of the elegantly appointed mansion they 3 Houssier, Anna Freud et son École, 97. Translated by the authors. 4 See, for example, Denia G. Barrett, “So You Want to Start a Psychoanalytic School?

Succumbing to an Almost ‘Irresistible Temptation’: An Introduction to the Section,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 71, no. 1 (January 2018): 130–36; Danto and Steiner, Freud/Tiffany; Houssier, Anna Freud et son École; Midgley, “The Matchbox School.” 5 See Peter Blos, “An Intimate History of the School in the Wattmanngasse” (unpublished, 1974), 12, Peter Blos Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Nancy Chodorow, transcript of interview of Marie Briehl, 9 February 1982, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; Erik Erikson and Joan M. Erikson, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School in Vienna (1980),” in Schlein, Erik H. Erikson, A Way of Looking at Things, 4. 6 Peter Heller, Flawed transcription of “Dorothy Burlingham in Interview,” 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3, 13 June 1975, 4. Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 7 Burlingham, Behind Glass.

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had been renting and into a far more modest flat directly upstairs from Sigmund and Anna Freud.8 The Burlinghams’ appearance in Vienna thus marked not only the beginning of therapeutic and professional relationships between the two families, but also the formation of an increasingly complex web of long-lasting personal connections among the Burlinghams, the Freuds, and others in their Viennese (and wider) psychoanalytic circle. Indeed, the Burlinghams’ arrival in Vienna was the start of a lifelong personal partnership between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, who raised the Burlingham children together from 1925 onward and lived and worked together until Burlingham’s death in 1979.9 This web of relationships, which was crucial to the development of the fields of child and youth psychoanalysis worldwide, was further strengthened through the institution of the Hietzing School. In important ways, the school arose from the confluence of immediate needs on the part of its three cofounders: Freud, Eva Rosenfeld, and Burlingham. Freud had trained and worked for a short time as a primary school teacher in the late 1910s, before extended illness with tuberculosis forced her to resign. In her convalescence, she entered analysis with her father and thereafter began her own practice psychoanalysing children. By the time of Burlingham’s arrival in Vienna in 1925, Freud was already an internationally known analyst, conference speaker, trainer, and author of works about child psychoanalysis. Freud’s own child-analysands, plus the children of her father’s visiting analysands, comprised a pool of English- and/or German-speaking children connected to the Freuds’ psychoanalytic practices who needed short- or long-term educational arrangements. The school’s second cofounder, Eva Rosenfeld (1892–1977), was a close friend of Anna Freud, a sometime analysand of Sigmund Freud, and later, an influential psychoanalyst in the circle of Anna Freud’s childpsychoanalytic arch-competitor Melanie Klein in England (see Chapter 5 on Malting House). A native of Berlin, Rosenfeld had been involved in social work projects with homeless girls there before marrying Valentin Rosenfeld, a Viennese lawyer, and moving to Vienna in 1911. After the First World War, she began using her home at Wattmanngasse 11 in Vienna’s Hietzing district to train adolescent girls in housekeeping, both as

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.

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a social-educational enterprise and as a means of improving her family’s precarious finances.10 As time went on, Rosenfeld also provided room and board to children who came to Vienna for analysis with Anna Freud, the same children who would later attend the school. At Freud’s and Burlingham’s encouraging, Rosenfeld came to see the school as an important source of emotional satisfaction in the wake of the accidental death of her adolescent daughter in 1927.11 Like Freud and Rosenfeld, Burlingham seems to have found the idea of the school compelling for practical reasons. For one thing, her children needed an education suitable to the family’s social station and circumstances. Her two oldest children, Bob and Mabbie, had most recently been taught by a private tutor from England and a governess, respectively, both of whom had come with the family to Vienna; both were let go after Anna Freud declared their presence counterproductive to the children’s analysis.12 As Burlingham recalled years later, “I just could not face the idea of the ordinary schools and how could the children be taught.”13 In Freud’s recollection, too, Burlingham’s choice of school was a question of cultural and pedagogical fit: “As Americans and—worse—as youths in analysis, her children did not fit into ordinary Viennese schools. The unpleasantness they would have encountered there would have endangered their intellectual curiosity and joy in learning. The next best solution for this problem for her was to found her own modern school.”14 That is precisely what she did, effectively financing the school for the entirety of its five-year run.15

10 Heller, “Dorothy Burlingham in Interview,” 3. 11 Anna Freud, Eva Rosenfeld, and Peter Heller, Briefe an Eva Rosenfeld (Basel: Stroem-

feld/Nexus, 1994); Eva Rosenfeld, “The School 1927–31” (n.d.), Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 12 Burlingham, Behind Glass, 164. 13 Dorothy Burlingham to Peter Heller, 9 May 1974, 2, Peter Heller Papers, Library

of Congress, Washington, DC. 14 Anna Freud, quoted in Rolf Göppel, “Die Burlingham-Rosenfeld-Schule in Wien 1927–1932,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 37, no. 3 (1991): 415, translated by the authors. Of course, given their immense wealth, the Burlingham children had had little experience of “ordinary” schools anywhere, so both Burlingham’s and Freud’s mention of them here should be taken with a grain of salt. 15 At least some children’s parents paid tuition, which Blos described as “negligible.” Blos, “An Intimate History,” 16.

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Before she decided to found the school, however, Burlingham initially avoided that “unpleasantness” by hiring a new, Anna Freud-approved German-language tutor for her children by the name of Peter Blos. A Rosenfeld family friend from Karlsruhe, Germany, Blos was a PhD candidate in the natural sciences spending a semester at the University of Vienna. The ostensibly temporary tutorship soon became a long-term engagement. Blos lived with the Burlinghams (then at a mansion in Vienna’s Hohe Warte district) and taught Bob, Mabbie, and eventually, as Blos described it, “all the Burlingham children and even … some children of American friends who were either in analysis or needed a more individualized instruction than any conventional schooling could offer.”16 Meanwhile, he, Rosenfeld, Freud, and Burlingham worked out plans for the school. When the school as such began in September 1927 it was headed by Blos, then aged 23, with the aid of a fellow German, 25-year-old Erik Homburger (Erikson). In the school’s first year of operation, it comprised twelve children in four age-grouped classes, including twelveyear-old Bob in the oldest class; Mabbie, age ten, in the second class, their eight-year-old sister, Tinky, in the third class, and finally, a class of “littles,” including the youngest Burlingham, Mikey, age six.17 The classes initially were held in the Rosenfelds’ house, but beginning in the autumn of 1928, they met in a purpose-built two-storey schoolhouse erected in the Rosenfelds’ back garden. This new building allowed the school to accommodate twice as many students as before, and additional teachers were hired to teach various subjects to the different groups. In addition to the Burlingham children, the Hietzing student body included, at various times (and among others), Anna Freud’s nephew Ernst Halberstadt (later known as Ernest Freud); Eva Rosenfeld’s son Victor (later known as Victor Ross); August Aichhorn’s son Walter; Reinhard Simmel, son of Berlin psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel; Kyra Nijinsky, daughter of famed ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky; Adelaide and Harold Sweetser, whose father, Arthur Sweetser, was an American diplomat and Burlingham confidant; and Peter Heller, son of a wealthy Berlin candy manufacturer.

16 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 9. 17 Bob Burlingham, “Our School,” in Hietzing School Pupils, Unsere Weihnachtszeitung

(1928), Peter Blos Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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The Mystique and Mythology of the Hietzing School Investigations into the Hietzing School necessarily encounter the mystique and mythology surrounding the school and the personalities involved. Part of the mystique is undoubtedly due to the school’s small size and rarefied environment. After all, both Sigmund and Anna Freud were internationally known by the mid-1920s for work that was celebrated in some quarters and met with unvarnished hostility in others. And then there was the “Burlingham wealth,” which Victor Ross felt “was a major part of the experience.”18 Thus the school’s teachers and students were not only intellectual and economic but also cultural outsiders, given that most were (secular) Jews, expatriates, or both. The school might be understood not as international but instead as extranational, for it was completely outside the Austrian education system, the students were native speakers (variously) of English, Hungarian, or German, and the lessons were taught in English and German by teachers who themselves were German, Austrian, American, and Canadian. Furthermore, the school was associated in some way or other with mental illness, as many of the students and their parents had sought treatment through psychoanalysis. There was a widespread fascination with the Freuds, their circle, and their contributions to psychoanalysis and culture at the time, and has been since. Adding to the mythology surrounding the school are the differing and sometimes vehemently conflicting historiographical and firsthand accounts of the school itself. One very simple example is the apparent lack of consensus about the school’s name among those involved. Some descriptions of the school are pragmatically straightforward: Burlingham, for example, referred to it as the Hietzing School,19 after the district of Vienna in which it was located. To some of the school’s teachers and students it was the Wattmanngasse School20 (after the property’s street address) or even the Matchbox School21 (referring to the schoolhouse’s diminutive size). Among these names were also the Burlingham 18 Victor Ross to Peter Heller, 1 November 1980, Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 19 Dorothy Burlingham to Peter Heller, 2. 20 Hietzing School Pupils, Unsere Weihnachtszeitung (1928). 21 Midgley, “The Matchbox School.”

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School,22 Dorothy Burlingham’s School,23 the Burlingham-Rosenfeld School,24 RB (for Rosenfeld-Burlingham),25 and the Freud-Burlingham School.26 Less straightforward are the ways in which some names for the school clearly credited or omitted individuals. Interestingly, some arguably suitable options—such as Anna Freud’s School27 or even the Blos or Blos-Erikson School (given the latter’s shaping of its day-to-day work)—seem not to have caught on. Some of the richest sources about the school are those amassed and interpreted by Peter Heller (1920–1998), a Hietzing School student who was later married for a time to Tinky Burlingham. Inspired by the receipt of his childhood analysis records from Anna Freud in the mid1970s, Heller decided to write a book about the school, which he saw as “this imaginative and enlightened educational experiment … ideally suited for a discussion of both pros and cons of progressive education.”28 Thus he wrote to all his surviving Hietzing classmates and teachers with a questionnaire designed to elicit information and recollections about the school. Although Heller did not ultimately write the book he had intended, he did incorporate some of the responses he received into other works he published about Anna Freud and his own experiences at the school.29 Fortunately for us, the responses to Heller’s interview requests survive, and they, along with a wide range of other published and unpublished sources, form the basis of this chapter’s analysis. In addition to adding rich details to the history of the school, the responses Heller received also add to the school’s mystique. Not only 22 Dorothy Burlingham to Peter Heller, 1. 23 Erikson and Erikson, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School.” 24 Göppel, “Die Burlingham-Rosenfeld-Schule.” 25 Victor Ross to Peter Heller, 1982, Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 26 Chodorow, interview of Marie Briehl, 25. 27 Houssier, Anna Freud et son École. 28 Peter Heller to W. Ernest Freud, 5 April 1992, Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 29 Anna Freud, Rosenfeld, and Heller, Briefe an Eva Rosenfeld; Peter Heller, Anna Freud, and Günther Bittner, Eine Kinderanalyse bei Anna Freud (1929–1932) (Würzburg: Königshausen + Neumann, 1983); Nick Midgley, “Peter Heller’s ‘A Child Analysis with Anna Freud’: The Significance of the Case for the History of Child Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 60, no. 1 (February 2012): 45–70.

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did Heller’s questionnaire elicit vastly differing and sometimes conflicting accounts about the school, it also met with resistance from some key participants. For example, on 3 April 1974, Anna Freud wrote to Heller explaining that she was the wrong person to ask about the school: “As regards … the school, this is not a matter for me to comment on, but it very much concerns Dorothy Burlingham, Erik Erikson, [and] Peter Bloss (sic).”30 Dorothy Burlingham, too, initially demurred in a May 1974 response to Heller’s queries, noting that she had destroyed all papers related to the school when she left Vienna in 1938 and that, looking back, “I find I know very little about the beginnings and what is worse is that when I talked to [Eva Rosenfeld] about this time our recollections differ.”31 Fortunately for Heller and for us, Burlingham did ultimately concede to an interview. Taking an even stronger stance, Peter Blos, the school’s director and a main teacher, rebuffed Heller’s repeated entreaties and refused to comment on the school altogether. As an intermediary explained to Heller in 1983, “Peter Blos is not willing to give any information about his experience in … relation to the Burlingham School…. He had deposited all he knew and wants to say with the Library of Congress, not to be made available to the public until the next century.”32 This was a source of great mystery and frustration, not only to Heller but also to other Hietzing alumni who supported his efforts. Blos’s once-sealed account offers what he saw as a necessary corrective to the idealised versions of the school’s history in works by or about others involved, especially Erikson, Freud, and Rosenfeld.33 After the response from Blos’s intermediary, Erikson and his wife Joan rescinded their own cooperation with Heller. They had, in any case, already published their memories of the school, at Anna Freud’s request, on the occasion of Dorothy Burlingham’s death.34 Upon hearing of this situation from Heller, Hietzing alumna Elizabeth Lewis (née Iona) wrote to Heller: “I am not surprised that Peter Blos and Erik

30 Anna Freud to Peter Heller, 3 April 1974, Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 31 Dorothy Burlingham to Peter Heller, 1. 32 Peter B. Neubauer to Peter Heller, 9 February 1983, Peter Heller Papers, Library of

Congress, Washington, DC. 33 Blos, “An Intimate History.” 34 Erikson and Erikson, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School.”

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Erikson are secretive.… It seems to me the school was a convenient help to earn their studies in Vienna.… For them it was a stepping stone to their future.”35 Added to this complex of reactions are factors such as the vagaries of long-term memory, the drama of entwined professional and personal relationships, and the professional wont of psychoanalysts and analysands to revisit and interpret their own and other people’s memories. Nevertheless, the various accounts provide colourful personal insights into the experiences recalled by individuals associated with the school—including, especially, the teachers.

Red Vienna and the Making of neue Menschen Even as the Hietzing School satisfied its founders’ proximate needs, it also appeared at the confluence of several important political, intellectual, and pedagogical streams in 1920s Vienna. One was a phenomenon known as Red Vienna, the name given to the period from 1918 to 1934 in which the capital city of the newly declared Austrian republic was thoroughly modernised by its first social democratic city council. Struggling to counteract high levels of post-war unemployment and seeking to remake the city’s working class into enlightened neue Menschen (new people), city leaders in this period instituted a coordinated cradle-to-grave system of health and social welfare, including a massive expansion of high-quality public housing, public health and dental clinics, layettes for new mothers, kindergartens, swimming pools, and after-school care.36 School reform, too, was part of the Viennese socialist agenda. Sweeping changes were initiated by former teacher Otto Glöckel, who served as the Austrian republic’s first minister of education in 1919 and 1920 and later as president of the Vienna education authority. Glöckel’s reforms sought to do away with the drill-oriented traditions of Austrian schools, introducing new curricula which took into account the characteristics of the students as children and young people and sought to equalise educational opportunity regardless of socio-economic status, to democratise schools by giving students a say in how classrooms and schools were 35 Elisabeth Iona Lewis to Peter Heller, 9 February 1983, Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 36 Judith Beniston, “Culture and Politics in Red Vienna: Introduction,” Austrian Studies 14 (2006): 1–19; Richard Calvocoressi, “Oskar Kokoschka, Red Vienna, and the Education of the Child,” Austrian Studies 14 (2006): 215–26.

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run, and to instil a feeling of community and common purpose among the citizens of the new republic. Teacher training, too, was revised to reflect the schools’ new orientation and the growing importance of psychology as a tool for understanding and educating children. Newly instituted school psychologists and social workers aimed to improve children’s lives and habits and to train parents and teachers to correct them without the use of punishments and Verbote (prohibitions). Psychoanalytic theory also played an important role in Red Vienna reforms, as pioneering analysts, including Willie Hofer, Siegfried Bernfeld, August Aichhorn, and Anna Freud herself, sought to apply it to the prevention and alleviation of social problems. Hofer, a psychoanalyst, and Bernfeld, a leader in Jewish youth and self-defence organisations and an education reformer, cofounded the Baumgarten (“Arboretum”), a residential school for Jewish war orphans, in 1919. The Baumgarten was a radical experiment in progressive child-centred care and education, designed to be unencumbered by what Bernfeld called teachers’ repressive “appetite for power, vanity, dominating, education.”37 The Baumgarten’s existence—and its chaotic collapse after six short months—served as both an inspiration for Freud’s later work and a cautionary tale about the limitations of psychoanalytic ideas as applied to educational institutions.38 Aichhorn (1878–1949), also a long-term member of the Freudian circle, was a one-time school teacher who pioneered the development of “positive” residential institutions for juvenile delinquents based on empathy and intuition instead of authoritarian discipline. His pathbreaking international bestseller Verwahrloste Jugend (Wayward Youth), which was first published in 1925 with a foreword by Sigmund Freud, was adapted from lectures Aichhorn gave to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and based on case studies from his institutions at Oberhollabrunn (1918–1920) and St. Andrä (1920–1922).39 Anna Freud, too, contributed to public social and educational reform efforts as she sought to identify ways for psychoanalysis to contribute to the field of education. She cultivated close contacts with the city’s Montessorians, served as a consultant to teachers in Viennese nursery 37 Midgley, “The Matchbox School,” 28. 38 Ibid. 39 August Aichhorn and Sigmund Freud, Verwahrloste Jugend. Die Psychoanalyse in der Fürsorgeerziehung. Zehn Vorträge zur ersten Einführung, Vol. 19, Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek (Leipzig: International Psychoanalytic University, 1925).

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schools, and was invited by city authorities to speak to groups of educators and others working with children and youth. She convened a study group—the Kinderseminar—with Hofer, Bernfeld, and Aichhorn (a group which would later include Burlingham, Blos, Erikson, and other Hietzing teachers), helped initiate the Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Pädagogik (Journal for Psychoanalytic Education), and aided Hofer in founding the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Course for Educators.40 At the same time, she was analysing children in her busy psychoanalytic practice, providing crucial support to her famous father as he battled oral cancer, helping to run the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, serving as secretary of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and publishing and lecturing widely on child psychoanalysis.41 Many of her lectures and publications were based on her analyses of children who were Hietzing School students. Thus, although the Hietzing School emerged as a solution to individual concerns and was never affiliated with the Viennese education or welfare systems, it fit well within the larger historical context of transnational intellectual, political, and pedagogical trends, the specific circumstances of Red Vienna, and the particular expertise and experiences of Anna Freud herself.

“Gifted People Rather Than Trained People” Although Burlingham paid the teachers’ salaries, it was Anna Freud who handpicked the school’s teachers, beginning with Blos and Erikson.42 One might assume Freud’s own background as an educator and psychoanalyst with close connections to Vienna’s Montessorians would lead her to hire teachers with expertise in these areas, but that was not the case. Instead, as a look at five of the school’s main teachers illustrates, Freud seemed to base her selection on some combination of propinquity and gut instinct, resulting in what Hietzing teachers Erik and Joan Erikson described as an “improvisation” of a school, an institution in which

40 Nick Midgley, Reading Anna Freud (London: Routledge, 2013). 41 Midgley, “The Matchbox School.” 42 Peter Blos, “Recollection of Anna Freud,” in Anna Freud Remembered, ed. Erikson Institute (Chicago: Erikson Institute, 1983), 14.

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empathy and amenability appear to have been as important—if not more important—than pedagogical training and teaching experience.43 As previously mentioned, Peter Blos was hired as a private tutor for the Burlingham children long before the school existed. He entered the Freud-Burlingham orbit via family connections and was invited by Anna Freud to teach Bob and Mabbie, not because he happened to have a teaching diploma, but because he seemed strong enough in character to refuse possible sexual advances from ten-year-old Bob Burlingham.44 According to Bob’s son and biographer, Michael John Burlingham, “this was the cardinal reason for [Blos’s] invitation to live with the Burlinghams.”45 Bob’s homosexual tendencies in connection with his previous tutors appear to have been the main factor behind the tutors’ dismissal and the reason why Bob did not attend boarding school. For Blos, the invitation to serve as live-in tutor was unexpected but welcome; he immediately “accepted the offer, looking forward to the diversion and the extra schillings.”46 In 1927, however, after two years of living with the Burlinghams and tutoring the children in natural sciences and German, Blos sought to leave Vienna, ostensibly to complete his doctorate elsewhere. In response, Burlingham and Freud raised the prospect of Blos starting a school for the Burlinghams and other Freud analysands, and Blos was convinced to stay. The founding of the school was relatively uncomplicated in administrative terms, as there was little regulation of private schools in Austria at the time; in addition, money was essentially no object.47 As Blos recounted in his (initially sealed) account: The problem of staff was of first importance.… I told Miss Freud that I have a friend who, I think, would be a good teacher. His qualifications, however, were rather of a negative order: he never taught children, in fact he knew nothing about children, but, I added with emphasis—he is gifted. I believe, so I said, in gifted people rather than in trained people. Miss Freud looked at me in astonishment for a while and then told me that she would like to meet this friend of mine. The friend I spoke of was 43 Erikson and Erikson, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School,” 4. 44 Burlingham, Behind Glass; Houssier, Anna Freud et son École. 45 Burlingham, Behind Glass, 173. 46 Blos, “Recollection of Anna Freud,” 13. 47 Göppel, “Die Burlingham-Rosenfeld-Schule,” 416.

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Erik Homburger (later Erik H. Erikson). At the time … [his] career as an artist had come to an end … he tried in vain to pass the examination for becoming an art teacher in high school.… He lived a desolate, depressed, and hopeless existence from which I was determined to rescue him.48

Blos convinced Burlingham to commission Erikson to draw portraits of her children, which naturally required him to come to Vienna and spend many hours with the family. Blos’s machinations soon bore fruit, and he convinced Freud to interview Erikson for a teaching position in the new school. As Blos reported many years later, the interview did not go exactly as he had hoped: “She told me that she had liked my friend but questioned his fitness to be a teacher. She put it to me this way: if you will see to it that the children learn something, he can come. My answer was brief and somewhat arrogant: Just leave it to me.”49 And Freud did so, hiring Erikson on the basis of Blos’s assurances. Blos set to work, inviting Erikson to his family’s country house in Germany’s Black Forest for a month-long crash course “in teaching and subject matter” in the summer of 1927.50 Erikson himself had never really taken to formalised education, having struggled as a student and failed to earn official credentials as an art teacher.51 But what Blos proposed, drawing inspiration from John Dewey’s project method, was something altogether different, modern, and fundamentally creative. Indeed, the new role and intensive training seemed to Blos to give Erikson a new lease of life, as Blos explained: “My friend felt like released from a prison without exit and enthusiastically approached his new career. We worked all day preparing teaching material. We wrote quite a few short books on themes that were to be studied in the coming year.… Erik drew many posters for my Biology class.… By September we were ready to start.”52 For his part, Erikson was impressed by Blos’s powers of persuasion, as well as by his capacity as a teacher. Years later he remembered Blos in his Hietzing years as “a remarkably craftsmanlike young teacher with

48 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 13. 49 Ibid., 13–14. 50 Ibid. 51 Conzen, Erik H. Erikson, 16. 52 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 13–14.

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clear concepts about how children learn.”53 And whether because of the training he received from Blos or because of innate qualities he brought with him, Homburger was recalled by at least one Hietzing colleague as having been “a good teacher” himself.54 Burlingham was pleased with Freud’s hiring of the two young teachers and noted the complementary nature of their skills and personalities. As she explained, “I knew for instance that Erik would bring in … the art side.… I knew that Peter would bring in the history [and the science].… And they were as new at it … as it was for me, it was to them an adventure.”55 Students, too, noted the contrasts between the two teachers. Heller remembered Blos most vividly as a “systematic, natural scientifically minded German” and “a noticeably good-looking, very young man, for whom I had a certain respect because he was strict, precise, even pedantic, and in any case could not abide sloppiness or chatting.”56 Erikson, by contrast, who taught the younger children in general and the older children in the arts, was perceived as Blos’s “bohemian painter-friend” with a warm and charming personality; Heller described him as an “interesting, lively and fine” teacher who “motivated us to do work of our own.”57 Heller’s former classmates, too, recalled Blos’s and Erikson’s personalities and teaching in similar terms, and for the most part with similar fondness.58 Blos was in charge of daily operations, with Erikson at his side. The two consulted with Freud and Burlingham, meeting (by some accounts regularly, by other accounts, only occasionally) to discuss, in Burlingham’s words, “what was being done and what should be done—and whether it was a good thing or not—right all the way through.”59 She remembered their meetings about the school as harmonious and productive, noting: “I don’t remember anything on which we disagreed—I remember many times the enthusiasms, my thinking: I am so glad they are getting

53 Erikson and Erikson, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School,” 3. 54 Chodorow, interview of Marie Briehl, 24. 55 Heller, “Dorothy Burlingham in Interview,” 4. 56 Peter Heller, “Vorerinnerung,” in Heller, Anna Freud, and Bittner, Eine Kinder-

analyse, 14. 57 Heller, “Vorerinnerung,” 14. 58 Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 59 Heller, “Dorothy Burlingham in Interview,” 4.

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that—I mean they were inspiring people.”60 Burlingham explained her and Freud’s implicit trust of Blos in this way: “After all if you choose somebody you choose somebody because you think [he has] a quality to do something, so you give him a free hand.”61 And it was this free hand that Rosenfeld, too, recalled, noting that “the ideas and the teaching plans were entirely the product of [the] two young teachers’ creative abilities.”62 In addition to “Herr Blos” and “Herr Erik,” as the students called them, a handful of other individuals taught at the school, whether regularly or only occasionally, over several weeks or months or even years.63 Some of them came with teaching credentials and extensive experience in teaching school; others had neither. All, however, had close social or psychoanalytical connections with the Freuds, Burlinghams, or Rosenfelds. These sometime subject-specific teachers included direct family members, such as Dorothy Burlingham herself, who taught English, and Erik Erikson’s wife, Joan (née Mowat), a Canadian who had earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in the USA before coming to Vienna for a doctorate in dance. She met Erikson at a masked ball in 1928 and married him two years later. For a time, she taught dance to children at the Hietzing School and English to adults connected with the school, including her husband.64 Other Hietzing teachers came from the larger circle around Anna Freud. For example, some Hietzing students had maths lessons from Kurt Eissler, then a psychology student at the University of Vienna, Austrian protégé of Sigmund Freud and analysand of Aichhorn. Ernst Kris, the curator of Vienna’s history of art museum and antiquities advisor to Sigmund Freud (and, later, a psychoanalyst himself), led groups of children on field trips to the city’s museums. August Aichhorn had many layers of involvement in the Hietzing School, including as a parent, a teacher, and a teaching mentor. In addition to being a trained teacher

60 Ibid., 5. 61 Ibid., 4. 62 Eva Rosenfeld, “The School 1927–31” (n.d.), 43, Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 63 Hietzing School Pupils, Unsere Weihnachtszeitung. 64 Daniel Benveniste, “The Importance of Play in Adulthood: A Dialogue with Joan

Erikson,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 53, no. 1 (1998): 51–64.

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and an important Red Vienna reformer (as previously discussed), he also served as a Social Democratic city councillor. He had been a long-time member of the Freudian psychoanalytic circle and he maintained close relationships with Anna Freud, Burlingham, and Rosenfeld; indeed, it was Freud who convinced him to undertake psychoanalytic training in 1922, after his work at Oberhollabrunn and St. Andrä ended. His son Walter was in analysis with Burlingham and attended the Hietzing School, and at times he himself taught geometry there. In 1931, Aichhorn took over from Blos as the director of the school until it closed about a year later. Aichhorn’s own training and experience as a school teacher, combined with his experience as an analyst, his work with delinquent youth, and his “congenial” personality, made him an important mentor to all involved in the Hietzing School, both through the psychoanalytic-pedagogical Kinderseminar he founded with Anna Freud, Bernfeld, and Hofer and through his individual contacts with teachers at the school. Two other Hietzing teachers, Marie Briehl (1897–1993) and Esther Menaker (1907–2003), were there in connection with their training in child psychoanalysis with Anna Freud. Briehl, who was born in czarist Russia and raised in New York, came from an activist socialist family and arrived in Vienna in 1924 with her husband, Walter, and sister Rosetta Hurwitz (all seeking training in psychoanalysis), bringing with her a substantial pedigree in progressive education. Briehl had earned a teaching degree at Hunter College in New York in 1917 and worked as what she called “a model school teacher” in New York City. She explained: “This only means that I was recognized as somebody who had a particular quality, an ability to work with children, to empathize with young people.”65 She attended Columbia Teachers College as a postgraduate, studying under John Dewey, among others; eventually she moved to the New School for Social Research, which Dewey and other anti-war Columbia intellectuals cofounded in 1919.66 At Hietzing, Briehl taught English language and literature to all the children, German and English speakers alike, from 1927 to 1930. By her own account, her experience in teaching at New York City “progressive schools like Walden and others in the area, uptown, downtown and all over” was what got her the job at Hietzing, and it was also the

65 Chodorow, interview of Marie Briehl, 13. 66 Ibid., 8.

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reason she received higher pay than the (depressed) Viennese salaries paid to Blos and Erikson. In hindsight she conceded: “Now that might have been quite unfair. But I needed it, in the first place because I wouldn’t take anything else, if I had to work for a pittance I could go home to America and in one year make more [,] then … come back and stay for three.”67 For Briehl and her husband to remain in Vienna as Freud’s trainee analysts, her terms had to be met, and so they were. Although one might expect Briehl’s progressive pedigree to have influenced the school’s pedagogy and curriculum, there is no indication of it in the historical accounts—including her own.68 For all of her experience, then, she did not see it as a pedagogical laboratory but rather as a means to an end in terms of her own psychoanalytical training. As she once explained, For me [teaching at the Hietzing School] wasn’t even a daily thing, it was several times a week and so on. It was a very interesting little school, and both of those teachers who taught the main subjects were very good.… So it was just—we were interested in it as an observational developmental thing, but I think it served to help the teachers live on some of the money they were earning.69

Others seemed to make even less of her time at the school than she did. As she recalled: It happens that I … heard a public lecture by Peter Blos (many years later) in which at the large meeting he gave the story of that school … but he omitted me because he was putting his wife in as the teacher of English, and some other people who came in. And I called his attention to that. Now he evidently forgot the early beginnings … but he was a good teacher.70

Like Briehl, Esther Menaker came to Vienna with her husband so that both could train as psychoanalysts; in fact, the Menakers arrived in Vienna in 1930, the same year the Briehls returned to New York. Swiss born but 67 Ibid., 26. 68 Göppel, “Die Burlingham-Rosenfeld-Schule,” 417. 69 Chodorow, interview of Marie Briehl, 24. 70 Ibid., 25.

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raised in the USA, Menaker had completed a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s in social work at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Vienna, where she earned a PhD in 1934. She taught English literature at Hietzing “for a very short period” after Joan Erikson gave birth to her and Erik’s son Kai. At the time, Menaker saw her own work at the school “not … in terms of educational philosophy or pedagogic issues, but primarily in terms of teaching English!”—a responsibility for which she had not been trained.71 Nevertheless, she came to the post on the recommendation of Anna Freud, whose “only stipulation,” Menaker reported, was that “I communicate forthrightly in my analytic sessions any and all thoughts, feelings, and reactions I might have about people and events at the school. Since I never had a problem with forthrightness, but rather one with being diplomatic, the purposes of the analysis were well served.”72 What is preserved for posterity are not the details of Menaker’s reports to Freud but instead her overall sense of the school, which, Menaker wrote, left her feeling “impressed by the lack of an authoritarian atmosphere at the school, and by the cameraderie (sic) between teachers and students.”73 Because many of the children did not understand English very well, Menaker often had to rely on her own “faltering German” to explain what she meant. To her mind, “this put us on a more equal footing, which was good for the classroom atmosphere”74 —thus underscoring the collaborative spirit of the school.

“Our Little Intellectual and Affluent Society in the Wattmanngasse” The brief biographies of these Hietzing School teachers illustrate that they were not simply—or perhaps not at all—hired as teachers per se; rather, they were invited to teach at the school because they had been accepted as part of the larger Freudian circle, an exclusive professional, intellectual, and social community of which the Hietzing School was a part. It was not easy to gain entry into the circle, whose ultimate gatekeepers were Anna and Sigmund Freud. Many of those who entered the circle in (or 71 Menaker to Peter Heller. 72 Menaker, Misplaced Loyalties, 96. 73 Menaker to Peter Heller. 74 Menaker, Misplaced Loyalties, 93.

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via) the school remained part of it and benefitted from it greatly in career terms for the rest of their lives. This was certainly true of Blos and Erikson, both of whom entered the Freudian circle through social contacts alone. Not only had Blos got Erikson the position as Hietzing School teacher and given him a crash course in training for the job, he also got him an invitation to spend “at least part of the summer” of 1927 with the Burlinghams and Anna and Sigmund Freud at their country house at Semmering, Austria, when he himself could not go. As Blos recounted: I had other plans and therefore suggested that Erik Homburger might fill the post. Living with the Burlinghams, getting to know Anna Freud better and know her influence on Mrs. Burlingham might prove a valuable introduction for him to working within and belonging to the circle of these extraordinary personalities. Erik Homburger moved into the Burlingham summer household after we had concluded the practical preparations for his first teaching experience.75

Teaching at Hietzing was not merely a job nor even an “adventure” but was instead a matter of “belonging to the circle of … extraordinary personalities” and of observing the strict etiquette and “forbidding social formality” and hierarchy within the circle itself.76 This meant that although Blos and Erikson (and others in the circle) had contact and some interaction with Sigmund Freud, it was “impossible for a young ‘Hofmeister’ (the Austrian term for a male tutor or caretaker of boys, as Peter Blos and Erik Homburger) to approach Freud without explicit invitation or introduction.”77 Things were different within the subset of the Freudian circle around Anna Freud and the even smaller subset that comprised the teachers at the Hietzing School. There, in what Eva Rosenfeld once referred to as “our little intellectual and affluent society in the Wattmanngasse,”78 the presence of and focus on children, the homely environment provided by Rosenfeld, and the literal familial and domestic relationships among many of the participants affected the school environment and ethos as well. For 75 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 14. 76 Ibid., 15. 77 Ibid. 78 Rosenfeld, “The School,” 40.

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some Hietzing students, the lines between family relationships and school relationships—and analysis relationships—were very blurry indeed. The four Burlingham children, for example, attended the school cofounded and funded by their mother under the supervision of Anna Freud, who was simultaneously their mother’s life partner (their stepmother, effectively) and their analyst. As Sigmund Freund once described having Burlinghams living upstairs: “The Burlinghams are ideal neighbours, but in fact it’s more like a single family in two camps.”79 The Burlingham children had lost their father through separation and lived in a household that for large periods of time included one or another of their male teachers. In addition, their mother occasionally taught English lessons at the school, and the siblings themselves made up a substantial proportion of the student body. Distant cousins of theirs also attended the school for a time. What is more, not only the Burlingham children but in fact all Hietzing students referred to Dorothy Burlingham as Mother (using the English word). And then there was Eva Rosenfeld, known to Hietzing students by the affectionate nickname Muschi, who also served as a mother figure both to the Hietzing students who boarded with her and to the rest of the students. After all, in the early days of the school the classes met in her home, and even after the schoolhouse was built in her garden, all of the students came to her home for a hot midday meal. Rosenfeld’s son Victor attended the school, too, albeit for a short time. And on top of it all, the students in analysis with Burlingham or Freud, as the majority were, no doubt experienced some degree of psychological transference, projecting their feelings about their parents onto their analyst. Teachers’ and students’ memories of the school include numerous references to the benefits—and some complications—of the school as familial (or familiar) environment. For Blos and Erikson, both of whom married during their Hietzing School years, the school was a focus of their overlapping social and increasingly psychoanalytically oriented professional lives. Not only did Blos and Erikson live with the Burlingham family in Vienna and at Semmering, the two men also shared an apartment for some time. Blos described their relationship as containing “elements of ‘platonic love’” even as it fell short of the “manifest homosexuality” that

79 Sigmund Freud to his son Ernst Freud, 26 June 1929, quoted in Houssier, Anna Freud et son École, 190. Translated by the authors.

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Aichhorn had at one time suspected.80 These intense and interwoven personal and professional relationships between Blos and Erikson and Burlingham and Freud—and among all four—thus took many forms: as individuals and as fellow household members, as employer and employee, analysand and analyst, trainee analyst and supervisor, and they extended to include other members of the Viennese Freudian circle as well. They are very much reminiscent of the tangled web of personal and professional relationships described in this volume’s chapter on the psychoanalytically inflected Malting House School. In this way, both the Hietzing and Malting House case studies support Barbara Neudecker’s contention— based on an analysis of correspondence among Anna Freud, August Aichhorn, and Kurt Eissler—that “psychoanalytic pedagogy’s roots lie especially within a community of people who [were] fond of each other, almost libidinously, beyond their scientific relations”.81 Thus the affect and empathy—and the amenability to psychoanalysis, or even the need for therapeutic intervention—that drew many individuals to the Freudian circle (and, by extension, to the school) led in many cases to what Neudecker calls “inappropriate” relationships—whether those present at the time saw them as such or not. Indeed, the shadowy sides of what Göppel refers to as the “psychoanalytic clan” became apparent to many participants later on, such as to Hietzing student Peter Heller, who wrote late in his life about “growing up in the shadow of the circle of the Vienna Burlinghams and the analysts gathered around Freud” in which psychoanalysis was “a cult, a church.”82 For many of the European students, including Heller, being in the orbit of the American Burlingham children and the teachers and their families was culturally exciting, emotionally meaningful, and altogether educational. As Ernest Freud reminisced about the Hietzing School decades later:

80 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 16. 81 Barbara Neudecker, “Persönliche Bermerkungen zu August Aichhorns Briefwechsel

mit Anna Freud und Kurt Robert Eissler,” in Psychoanalytische Pädagogik: Selbstverständnis und Geschichte, ed. Maria Fürstaller, Wilfried Datler, and Michael Wininger, Schriftenreihe der DGfE-Kommission Psychoanalytische Pädagogik 5 (Opladen: Budrich, 2015), 95–96. Translated by the authors. 82 Göppel, “Die Burlingham-Rosenfeld-Schule,” 413; Heller, “Vorerinnerung,” 11; both quotes translated by the authors.

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I was very happy there, and I think it changed my life. That had also to do with the Burlingham children.… They came from a broader environment and did so many things I would not have dreamt of in my own home. They were very interesting and interested children and we had a wonderful time together. They accepted me as belonging to their family.83

This feeling of acceptance as a quasi-sibling was important to Ernest Freud and other Hietzing students; interestingly, as many as half of the children at the school at any one time were either only-children or lived as such (having had siblings who died).84 In addition, the majority of the children at the school were affected by familial or individual trauma or psychological dysfunction (which is how they approached Anna Freud or Sigmund Freud and their circle in the first place). Thus, the school’s family-like environment could provide what Ernest Freud called a remedial way of teaching, making up for what some of these children might have missed out on earlier on. Their task of making learning palatable and enjoyable, paralleling the same task with regard to early feeding, encompassed various levels in various sectors such as the social relation, the peer relationships, the relationship between teacher and pupil, the relationship with one’s own family, and the relationship with one’s own internal environment.85

In this vein, the Eriksons’ son Kai, born in 1931, was welcomed as a baby brother to the Hietzing students. As the couple recalled, “We daily carried him between us in a laundry basket to the tiny schoolyard or the Rosenfelds’ back porch. It became routine that the children would tell us during class when he was crying (‘Kai weint’), and in the intermission some watched him being nursed.”86 This mixing of family intimacy and school life accords with Erik Erikson’s understanding of the ideal relationship between teacher and student

83 W. Ernest Freud and Jay Martin, “A Conversation” (Los Angeles, 23 July 1985), Psychoanalytic Education 4 (1985): 37. 84 W. Ernest Freud, typescript of “Psychoanalytic Pedagogy, Reminiscences of the Rosenfeld-Burlingham School,” Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 85 Ibid. 86 Erikson and Erikson, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School,” 5.

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in general, as expressed in a paper he read before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in April 1930. In it, he asserted that whereas “the clinical analyst maintains an attitude of impartiality throughout,” when it comes to the teacher and student “the relations are much more flexible.”87 To be fair, even at the Hietzing School, teacher-student relations were not without their limits: Erikson is said to have once faced a gentle reprimand from Eva Rosenfeld for having Mabbie Burlingham, age ten, sit on his lap during an arithmetic lesson.88 Ultimately, the blurring of the roles of parent and teacher, classmate and sibling was present throughout the school’s existence and was proposed as a means of liberating the marginalised or hurt child from forms of parental or institutional oppression or whatever else might have caused their neuroses. But it was also complicated, given that so many of those involved in the school came to it via psychoanalysis, which itself was ridden with blurred professional and personal boundaries and practices which, from a century’s distance, seem extremely unethical. These boundaries were further compromised by some Hietzing teachers’ (eventual) roles as trainee and/or supervising analysts. This included Briehl and Menaker, who came to the school in 1927 and 1930, respectively, as trainee analysts, and it also included Aichhorn, whose psychoanalytic orientation was central to his long-standing relationship with Anna Freud. Neither Blos nor Erikson had any knowledge or experience of psychoanalysis when they were hired to found the school. Although there was no requirement for the teachers to become analysts—or even to be analysed—clearly it was something Freud desired and continued to recommend, especially to Blos. Decades later, he remembered his resistance to analysis during the Hietzing years: “Miss Freud had kept me within her psychoanalytic circle for years in spite of my disinterest in analysis and my many attempts to break away.”89 Freud persisted nevertheless, and when she offered him “a ‘Pädagogen’ analysis … practically a ‘gratis analysis’ for a teacher” (most likely in 1929), and although it was intended as an offer he could not refuse, he managed to put Erikson forward in

87 Erik H. Erikson, “Psychoanalysis and the Future of Education (1930),” in Schlein, Erik H. Erikson, A Way of Looking at Things, 14. 88 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 16. 89 Ibid., 19.

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his stead.90 Although Blos did eventually undergo analysis—and undertake training as an analyst—it occurred long after the school had been established and, by his own reckoning, could not possibly have influenced his decisions when it came to the school’s pedagogy and curriculum or even much of his work as a teacher there. This situation was different for Erikson, who not only underwent analysis but pursued training as an analyst, drawing upon observations of children at the Hietzing School in his earliest psychoanalytic publications (which appeared in the Psychoanalytische Pädagogische Zeitschrift begun by Freud, Aichhorn, Bernfeld, and Hofer). While teaching at Hietzing, Erikson worked towards a diploma from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute (completed after the school had closed) and also earned a certificate in Montessori education from the Vienna Montessori Association, an organisation with which Anna Freud was closely connected. Unlike the highly educated Blos, who earned his PhD in biology in 1934, Erikson never completed a university degree.

“A Veritable Beehive”: Teaching and Learning at the Hietzing School A great deal of information about daily life at the Hietzing School can be gleaned from the students’ own school work and from students’ and teachers’ reminiscences. In 1928 and 1929, for example, the older students produced a newspaper called Unsere Weihnachtszeitung (Our Christmas Newspaper), a typescript record of various students’ work, including their fictional and nonfiction writing, woodcut prints, and hand-drawn maps and diagrams. The 1928 issue, whose cover featured a woodcut (Erikson’s speciality) of the Madonna and Child, included contributions on a wide range of topics, including an article in German about rice farming in China (illustrated with woodcuts), a poem in English about the four seasons (as woodcut print), an essay in Latin about the Roman legionary fortress at Carnuntum in Lower Austria, and a woodcut of the sheet music for a Schubert quartette.91 It also included an essay by Bob Burlingham entitled “Our School,” in which he described the new schoolhouse’s “comfortable pleasant rooms” as “very light and airy” and gave a sketch of what happened in them: 90 Ibid. 91 Hietzing School Pupils, Unsere Weihnachtszeitung (1928).

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When we enter the house, we find on our left the “Garderobe” and the “Bureau,” on our right the “Workshop” with large tables and two workbenches. When we go up the small green staircase we have on our left the “Gymnasium” (class for older students) and on our right the classroom for the little ones. In the “Gymnasium” we have a little library. Posters about geography and grammer (sic) are tacked on the wall. The little ones have their lessons all together and their teacher Herr Erik plays the piano sometimes, while they are quietly working. Our class is quite different. We have a teacher for each subject: Mother and Mrs. Briehl for English, Herr Blos for Nature Study and Geography, Herr Erik for German, History and Drawing, Herr Goldscheider for Latin, Arithmetic and Geometry, Frl. Traute for Sports. Sometimes Herr Aichhorn pays us a visit to talk with us about many interesting things. Every Wednesday afternoon all the children gather at school for a pleasant social time of singing, playing and discussing our school affairs and problems.92

Other details emerge from students’ and teachers’ later reminiscences, such as the fact that not all school days were spent in the classroom. The students often went on outings into the countryside, to the cinema, to museums, and elsewhere, driven by chauffeurs or by Mother (Burlingham) herself. In addition, some of the children had private tutorials during school hours, as Bob did with Esther Menaker, in English.93 And then there was the fact that many of the children left the schoolhouse during the day for psychoanalysis. Some students were in analysis with Anna Freud daily, with appointments during school hours. After a midday meal served in the Rosenfelds’ house, the school day ended in mid-afternoon. Thereafter, some students went back to their family homes and others (such as Rosenfeld’s boarders) either spent time by themselves or went “to town, to their various analysts,” as Rosenfeld recalled.94 Although Bob Burlingham’s description of the older children’s lessons is divided up into traditional-sounding school subjects, Blos claimed to have founded the school with something else in mind: namely, the

92 Bob Burlingham, “Our School,” in Hietzing School Pupils, Unsere Weihnachtszeitung (1928). 93 Menaker to Peter Heller. 94 Rosenfeld, “The School,” 40.

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Deweyan project method, which was then an iconic form of American progressive education.95 As Blos explained: The school I set out to shape was modeled on the image of the then still young and vigorous movement of progressive education.… John Dewey’s philosophy, translated into practice in experimental schools all over the world, formed the conceptual background to my educational endeavor. The daily work of teachers and students was done with élan and an enduring spirit of excitement and discovery.96

It is not entirely clear where Blos first learned of Dewey’s project method, but it is likely that he, like many others in Europe, read about it in a 1926 article by Beatrice Ensor published in The New Era, a journal of the “vast, rich, transnational network of the New Education Fellowship.”97 Blos then taught Erikson about the project method, and the two embraced it as a form of benign pedagogy that Freud, Burlingham, and Rosenfeld, whom Blos referred to as “the three Parcae”,98 would approve.99 Erik and Joan Erikson described the Hietzing School’s execution of the project method in exhilarated tones, noting: “The whole school would for a time become, for example, the world of the Eskimos. All subjects were then related to Eskimo life—geography, history, science, math, and, of course, reading and writing. This called for an ingenious combination of playful new experience, careful experiment, and free discussion.”100 They also recalled it as having had clear benefits for students and teachers alike: Since “doing,” itself, is a vital component of the Project Method and the skills of the different aged children had to be carefully brought into play, the little school was a veritable beehive. The children loved it, and they 95 Maria del Mar del Pozo Andres, “The Transnational and National Dimensions of

Pedagogical Ideas: The Case of the Project Method, 1918–1939,” Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 4–5 (2009): 561–84. 96 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 15. 97 Beatrice Ensor, “The Outlook Tower,” The New Era 7, no. 27 (1926): 91–93;

see also Göppel, “Die Burlingham-Rosenfeld-Schule”; Pozo Andres, “Transnational and National Dimensions,” 563. 98 In Roman mythology, the three Parcae (the Fates) were female personifications of destiny who ran the lives of humans and gods. 99 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 12. 100 Erikson and Erikson, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School,” 4.

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and the teachers learned a good deal.… In our memory, we experienced that rare joy which is evoked where a setting permits us to respond to the growth potentials of young people as they reveal and develop our own potentials.101

As Rolf Göppel has noted, however, the Hietzing version of the project method differed in important ways from the prescriptions of Dewey and of his fellow American educationalist William Heard Kilpatrick, whose iteration of the project method was based on Dewey’s.102 For one thing, Dewey felt it essential that the project topics were realistic and drawn directly from students’ lived experiences; by facing and overcoming real problems arising in the course of the project, students would develop problem-solving strategies that were directly applicable to their everyday lives. And for another, both Dewey and Kilpatrick emphasised that students should work independently of teachers in self-determined learning groups to plan, execute, and reflect on the projects. In fact, neither of these were the case at the Hietzing School. The Eskimo projects described by the Eriksons, fondly recalled by many students and thoroughly documented in the school’s 1929 Weihnachtszeitung, were far from the lived experience of any of the students. Moreover, the general project theme and many individual essay topics were selected by teachers, and students often worked alone rather than in collaboration. These differences, which jibe with critiques of the practical implementation of student agency in the project method more generally,103 underscore the fact that the school’s main aim was not to innovate and experiment with Deweyan or other pedagogies per se, but rather to protect a particular population of psychologically damaged children from further trauma of the kind they believed was perpetrated by traditional schools and even their Red Viennese counterparts. Seen in this light, the departure from American models of the project method was not only desirable but also necessary. As Hietzing alumnus Ernest Freud explained, Blos and Erikson needed to choose Eskimos because “the topic was relatively uncontaminated. We had nothing to do with Eskimos. There was the likelihood of there having been no previous experience which would 101 Ibid., 5. 102 Göppel, “Die Burlingham-Rosenfeld-Schule,” 421. 103 Michael Knoll, “Faking a Dissertation: Ellsworth Collings, William Kilpatrick, and

the ‘Project Curriculum’” Journal of Curriculum Studies 28, no. 2 (1996): 193–222.

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spoil our enjoyment of it.”104 Thus Blos’s choice of the project method and his revision of it place the school at what Nick Midgley has called the “common ground between psychoanalysis and progressive education,” both of which sought to provide educational environments that freed children from coercion and let the adults be guided by the children themselves. Where psychoanalysts such as Freud, Burlingham, and Rosenfeld saw “a way of avoiding unnecessary repressions,” progressive educationalists like Blos saw “a means of fostering the child’s own innate wish to learn.”105

The Good Teacher as Intuitive Empath By Hietzing School standards—which, as it happens, were Anna Freud’s standards—a good teacher was not necessarily one trained in pedagogy or an expert in subject matter (although some at Hietzing were). Whatever a suitable individual did not already know could be learned in a crash course, or alongside the students as they undertook their projects. A good teacher did not necessarily hold students to high standards of academic rigour, either, as evidenced by the additional personal tutoring some students received in addition to regular lessons while at the Hietzing School and by the struggles many Hietzing alumni faced in catching up academically with their age-mates in other schools later on. Nor was the good teacher necessarily an analyst or even psychoanalytically minded, although there was some sense that analysis might help. Instead, what appears to have been the main ingredient and definition of successful teaching at the Hietzing School was empathy, something missing from traditional schools. Although the Hietzing School was not intended to be a model for education reform, its existence and form derived from implicit critique of traditional schools and teachers. Burlingham, in recalling why she founded the school, explained that as a child in school she was once “put in a corner with a dunce cap on and told how stupid I was”; she saw the Hietzing School as an opportunity to spare her own children such trauma and humiliation.106 Erikson, too, was said to have had a lifelong

104 W. Ernest Freud, typescript of “Psychoanalytic Pedagogy.” 105 Midgley, Reading Anna Freud, 43. 106 Dorothy Burlingham to Peter Heller.

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disdain for all types of formal education, perhaps derived from the years he spent with Blos at a centuries-old Gymnasium (secondary school) in their hometown of Karlsruhe, Germany. That school was characterised by what one biographer called “the virtues of the Wilhelmine age: discipline and a military-style culture, cramming and memorization, an atmosphere that Erikson never could abide.”107 And then of course there is the psychoanalytic-therapeutic perspective on the good teacher, articulated by Freud, Aichhorn, and others in their Kinderseminar, which identified teachers’ (and parents’) misuse of their emotional power over children as the cause of great individual and societal harm. In their institutional reform efforts, writings, and speeches they had long advocated for empathy-infused leadership at institutions for child welfare and education.108 Although Freud was associated with Vienna Montessorians, neither she nor the others in the Kinderseminar were dogmatic about pedagogy, the project method or otherwise; they were far more interested in the personality and role of the teacher in potentially fraught teacher-student relationships as a means of protecting (rather than educating) students instead. Thus, the intuitively empathic teacher as facilitator of a warm and congenial social and emotional environment was essential to the Hietzing School’s very purpose and the mark of its success. To Blos it was an “an inventive, experimental, educational process, guided by inspired, intelligent and creative teachers who learn much of what they teach for the first time themselves, offer[ing] children a cognitive and emotional experience that ‘is good for them.’”109 And although Blos had earned a teaching qualification in Heidelberg, his real training in empathic education came from his mentor: Aichhorn. Although Aichhorn, too, was a trained school teacher, he was a good teacher despite that training and not because of it. As Anna Freud explained, Some people are “natural” teachers, and Aichhorn was an especially natural one.… So often teachers are in a hurry to get their students to know something, to have the right answers: a possession. Aichhorn knew how to 107 Conzen, Erik H. Erikson, 16. 108 Aichhorn and Freud, Verwahrloste Jugend; Anna Freud, Einführung in die Psycho-

analyse für Pädagogen. Vier Vorträge (Stuttgart: Hippokrates-Verlag, 1930). 109

Blos, “An Intimate History,” 12, emphasis added.

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scratch his head and say: Well, we can look at this boy in this way, but we can also look at him in this way, and there may be other ways, too. He was challenging us: can you do the same—focus and refocus, shift your angle of vision, adjust your point of view?110

It was Aichhorn whom Blos remembered as his mentor (and indeed Aichhorn’s work with adolescents inspired Blos’s career in the field of adolescence later on). Blos recalled, “I hardly ever turned to [Anna Freud] for advice, even though she was always most responsive and made herself easily available. Yet, I rather consulted with Aichhorn about school problems or personal matters.”111 Blos described his relationship with Aichhorn as not stiffly professional but “natural and congenial”; of Aichhorn, he wrote: “He had always time for me, most often at odd hours. He either invited me to accompany him on a long trolly-car ride or he might suggest that I come to his apartment at 12 o’clock at night for a beer or drop in at 6 o’clock in the morning.”112 Echoing Freud’s comments about Aichhorn, Briehl—perhaps the school’s most highly trained and experienced teacher—explained her move from education to psychoanalysis (and her move to Vienna, and to Hietzing) as based on the realisation that good teachers were not experts but instead had “that something” that made them “intuitive and empathic” and able to “approach and communicate with children … at their level.”113 Pedagogical training brought one only so far, and not far enough, in her experience: Something happened between (teacher and pupil) as human beings that was a good thing, that made the education possible. But what it was I didn’t know, and Dewey didn’t explain it, and none of our other pedagogues from way back, even if you went back to Pestalozzi and Cominius (sic) and all the others, they didn’t tell us how it happened that we were good teachers or that we were not good teachers. Or that children learned, or that they did not learn.114

110 Anna Freud, quoted in Robert Coles, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis, Radcliffe Biography Series (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992), 46. 111 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 19. 112 Ibid. 113 Chodorow, interview of Marie Briehl, 13–14. 114 Ibid.

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In the recollection of most Hietzing students and teachers, the Hietzing School was indeed an atmosphere infused with empathy, an “essential spirit of Menschlichkeit,” of humaneness.115 And yet, as the monikers Herr Erik and Herr Blos suggest, most students reported having had a warmer relationship with the artistic, jolly Erikson than with Blos, the stern scientist. The Eriksons recalled with relish the warmth and closeness of student-teacher relationships at the school, relating an incident in which a Hietzing student “made a strange confession,” namely: “In the other schools it was fun to pin a paper on the teacher’s coat. Here there’s no fun in it anymore.”116 From this, the Eriksons concluded, “We were too nice!”117 Blos, by contrast, was recalled by Ernest Freud as “too severe,” although Freud conceded in the same breath that “that too might have had a positive side to it, in that it served the purpose of limitsetting,” thus hinting at something of a good cop/bad cop situation.118 This balance between freedom and limit setting was a focus of Freud’s interest in education in general and something she debated in correspondence with Aichhorn and with Rosenfeld. In a March 1929 letter to the latter, who was then in Berlin, Freud expressed her concerns about Blos and Erikson in particular: We don’t disagree. I, too, think that school requires coercion. The disagreement lies in a single point: I think one should coerce the children to want to do what they should do, and you want them to be coerced to do the things that they don’t want to do. But the teachers don’t understand any of this. All they know is compulsion or liberation from compulsion—and the latter results in chaos.119

And indeed, it is a sense, if not of an entirely chaotic school, then of an enigmatic and problematic one that remained with many Hietzing alumni late in their lives. Tellingly, the students who were not in analysis seemed to have appreciated the school least. Among the most disappointed in 115 Peter Heller to Erik Erikson, “Sent 1980,” n.d., 1, Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 116 Erikson and Erikson, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School,” 13. 117 Ibid. 118 Ernest Freud, typescript of “Psychoanalytic Pedagogy.” 119 Anna Freud, Rosenfeld, and Heller, Briefe an Eva Rosenfeld, 123, translated by the

authors, emphasis added.

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their Hietzing experience were Elisabeth Lewis (née Iona) and her twin brother Mario Iona, who attended Hietzing from 1928 to 1932. Among the few children with no contact with psychoanalysis, their family had a long history of orientation towards progressive education. In retrospect, Elisabeth noted that “at the time I was a dreamy happy go lucky child happy not to be pushed. I only realized much later that I have missed out on much, simple knowledge which is easily learned at an early age.”120 In her view, the Hietzing School curriculum had been riddled with “gaps”; despite the project method’s supposed child centredness, the curriculum “just went as far as the knowledge and interests of our teachers,” and that was simply not enough.121 Similarly, her brother Mario remembered being “unhappy with the lack of discipline and organization” at the school and having had a “negative perception” of Blos’s and Erikson’s “competency” compared to teachers in the other schools, both traditional and progressive, that he had attended in Germany and Austria.122 Like Elisabeth Iona, Victor Rosenfeld was “happy not to be pushed” during the year he spent at the school. He recalled Erikson as a “vain but ineffective” teacher and the school as “a cushy number compared with the real world” and even “a kind of prolonged holiday.”123 Rosenfeld’s assessment of the school was crushing from a Deweyan perspective: “I don’t think I learnt anything useful while I was a pupil there.”124 Despite the fact that the school had been founded by Victor’s mother and was literally in his back garden, Rosenfeld’s father, “who was not one to put his foot down, said ‘Nope—that is not an education for my son.’”125 At his father’s insistence, Victor was then moved to a classical Gymnasium in Vienna (from which he was expelled) and then on to another in Berlin. The question of academic achievement, of preparation for later studies and careers, had not been a priority of the Hietzing School during its brief 120 Elisabeth Lewis, “Retrospect of the Burlingham-Rosenfeld School” (1982), 1–2, Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 121 Ibid. 122 Mario Iona to Peter Heller, 1 January 1983, Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 123 Victor Ross to Peter Heller, November 1982. 124 Ibid. 125 Inge Scholz-Strasser, Victor Ross: Zeitzeugengespräch 4 [Video-recorded interview] (Vienna: Sigmund Freud Museum, 2011), 14:00–14:30. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GwhKa_YQEmU&list=PLCE2BB57631653219&index=2.

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lifespan, but it did come back to haunt students and parents, including Dorothy Burlingham. She described her lingering concern about this in a 1974 letter to Heller, writing: “I have often wondered whether this school venture was a good idea or whether Anna Freud was right and it would have been better for all your futures if you had gone to the ordinary schools.”126 Like many Hietzing alumni, Peter Heller regretted that “there was little systematic learning, and students were used to either not meeting the state educational standards or meeting them only barely (which made it a struggle to prepare for public school admission examinations later on).”127 Hietzing alumni not only lacked the content knowledge, they also lacked the self-discipline required to succeed in the academic environments they found themselves in next.

The End of the School, and Its Aftermath Much like its opening, the school’s closure appears to have been caused by a confluence of factors rather than a single one. The school had operated under the radar of the educational authorities its entire existence. According to Blos, bribes initially paid by Burlingham to encourage local school authorities to look the other way became “too risky” in the changing political climate as Red Vienna faced a backlash of rising Austrofascist influences. Austria in general became increasingly inhospitable to Jews, who made up most of the Freuds’ circle. At the same time, the Americans who “had lived for years in Vienna, so well on so little,” as Blos noted, found their lives there unsustainable in the wake of losses in the 1929 stock market crash and the Depression crises that followed.128 In addition, it was necessary for the older Hietzing students to move on to other institutions in order to attain formal school-leaving certificates and prepare for university admission. Aichhorn had taken over the directorship of the school in 1931, as both Blos and Erikson were increasingly occupied elsewhere. As Burlingham put it, “they also had to go on with their training … [as] analysts … —this [school] couldn’t go on

126 Dorothy Burlingham to Peter Heller. 127 Heller, “Vorerinnerung,” in Heller, A. Freud, and Bittner, Eine Kinderanalyse, 15ff.

Translated by the authors. 128 Blos, “An Intimate History,” 20.

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forever—because this was an interim for them, surely.”129 Meanwhile, Anna Freud’s analyses of some of the children (or their parents’ analyses with Sigmund Freud or others in Vienna) had come to an end, and so they left the city. And finally, after Eva Rosenfeld and her husband divorced in 1931, she moved to Berlin to work at a psychoanalytic sanatorium there, and it would be only a matter of time before the house in the Wattmanngasse with the schoolhouse in its garden was sold.130 After the school closed in 1932 (or 1933—there are conflicting reports, again adding to the school’s mystique), its students, founders, and teachers scattered, most seeking asylum in the face of Austrofascist anti-Semitism. Eva Rosenfeld moved to the UK in 1936 and worked as a psychotherapist there, allying herself with Melanie Klein (thus injuring her relationships with Freud and Burlingham). Burlingham and Freud stayed on in Vienna for several years, founding the Jackson Nursery and pioneering work in observing young children in that city before fleeing to London with Sigmund Freud in 1938. Joan and Erik Homburger left Vienna in 1933 and ended up in the USA, where they renamed themselves Erikson. Erik’s newly completed psychoanalytic training and membership in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society garnered him a position first at Harvard Medical School and later at Yale and Berkeley—despite the fact that he did not hold a doctorate. Peter Blos completed his biology PhD at the University of Vienna in 1934 and he too ended up, with his wife and children, in the USA, first in New Orleans, where he worked at a private school, and then in New York, where he completed his analytic training and worked for many years in private psychoanalytic practice and as a trainer of psychoanalysts. Esther Menaker and her husband William returned to New York in 1934, where she became a central figure in psychoanalysis and one of the city’s first psychoanalysts of children (as well as one of America’s first female Freudians). Marie Briehl, who had returned to the USA well before the Hietzing School closed, was celebrated as a pioneer of child psychoanalysis in California, where she established training programmes for child analysis and worked as a training and supervising analyst for almost fifty years. In 1949,

129 Heller, “Dorothy Burlingham in Interview,” 6. 130 Scholz-Strasser, Victor Ross.

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Briehl cofounded the Westland School in Los Angeles, described as a “progressive school with a psychoanalytical orientation.”131 As these brief resumes indicate, the school’s key actors (Freud, Burlingham, Erikson, Blos, Rosenfeld, Briehl, and Menaker) went on to careers of success and influence based on their work as psychoanalysts, and much of their work was applicable to education, even if not specific to it. Perhaps the best example is Erikson, whose stages of development shaped the field of education for generations. In addition, Peter Blos’s pathbreaking book On Adolescence (1962) established him as the founder of modern adolescent psychology. Only Briehl went on to help start a school, but she was not involved in its day-to-day administration or teaching. The fact that none of the school’s founders or teachers continued (or reinvigorated) the pedagogical project of the Hietzing School as educators elsewhere underscores the idea of the school as a means to other ends. Some of the school’s students also went on to career success in academia and other fields, whether because of or despite their Hietzing experience. Several Hietzing students—including Mabbie and Bob Burlingham—led lives cut short by mental illness. All appeared to have left Austria, and several later changed their names as the Homburgers had (Victor Rosenfeld becoming Victor Ross, Ernst Halberstadt becoming W. Ernest Freud, Reinhard Simmel becoming Michael Hunter). Most kept in touch with at least some of their classmates— some in close friendships or romantic relationships—and many of them continued to have connections with psychoanalysis in one way or another. In 1972, there was a reunion of Hietzing students in London, where Freud and Burlingham were still living and working together in the house they had moved to with Sigmund Freud after leaving Vienna. Eva Rosenfeld, then working as a psychoanalyst in London herself, hired a calligrapher to create an honorary scroll for the occasion, some four decades after the school had closed.132 Upon close inspection, the scroll and its contents can be seen as emblematic of much about the Hietzing School, its history, and its enduring mystique. For one thing, the scroll was designed for and presented to (only) Burlingham, whose children 131 Myrna Oliver, “Marie Briehl: Pioneer in Child Psychoanalysis,” Los Angeles Times, 22 December 1993, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-12-22-mn-4366-story. html. 132 Honorary scroll presented to Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, 1972. Peter Blos Papers, Library of Congress.

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had provided an impetus for the school and whose money had made the school possible. Rosenfeld requested signatures from all living alumni, but she only received twelve, seven of which were from blood relatives of the school’s cofounders (Burlingham, Rosenfeld, and Freud). Interestingly, the other five included the signatures of the Iona twins, who had expressed great dissatisfaction with their time at the school (as had Rosenfeld’s son Victor). There were two other categories of signatures listed separately on the certificate: “Creative Teachers” (where four people signed, using their first names: Peter, Erik, Joan, and Marie B.) and “House-Mother and Staff” (a category also comprising four first-name-only signatures, including Eva). These informal signatures underscore the school’s existence as an intimate group within small, overlapping social and professional circles. It was funded by a woman whom all the students called “Mother,” and they were fed (and some of them housed) by another mother figure within the group. Many of the school’s students lived with the effects of psychological trauma or mental illness. Their classes were led, not by regular teachers, but by “creative teachers,” with and without qualifications, expertise, and experience. Anna Freud’s name is notably missing from the scroll, yet she was physically present at the reunion, evocative of the way she had been invisible yet omnipresent in the school. The scroll itself was not immune to criticisms of inaccuracy and embellishment; the copy (or perhaps original) of the scroll held at the Library of Congress includes a handwritten note by Peter Blos asserting that Rosenfeld had falsely credited the design of the school seal to Bob Burlingham when in fact it predated the school. Finally, what is perhaps most striking about the scroll is its description of the outcome of the Hietzing School, not in terms of its students’ educational achievement and not in terms of the development or propagation of a specific pedagogy, but in terms of a far more nebulous “outlook and attitude towards Learning and Life.” And it was this empathic, psychoanalytically inflected outlook that shaped the teachers’ lives and careers and, by extension, the fields of child and adolescent development and psychoanalysis, for decades to come. Recent commemorations and examinations of the Hietzing School, namely Danto’s excellent Freud Museum London exhibit in 2017 and its companion catalogue, symposium, and book, have quoted Erik and Joan Erikson as referring to the Hietzing School as an attempt to create “the

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best possible school.”133 However, as this examination of the teachers and teaching at the school has shown, there is more to the story. As it turns out, there is more to the quotation, too. According to the Eriksons, “Dorothy was implementing the best possible school situation which could be devised so it would be congenial to the special needs of English-speaking children living in Vienna and yet also conducive to an atmosphere hospitable to a psychoanalytic orientation.”134 In other words, this was not to be “the best possible school” by any objective measure, but rather the best possible fit—culturally, linguistically, scientifically, socially, and personally—for the children, parents, teachers, and others within and close to the Freudian psychoanalytic circle.

Bibliography Archival Sources Blos, Peter. “An Intimate History of the School in the Wattmanngasse” (unpublished, 1974). Peter Blos Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Burlingham, Bob. “Our School.” In Unsere Weihnachtszeitung, authored by Hietzing School Pupils (1928). Peter Blos Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Chodorow, Nancy. Transcript of interview of Marie Briehl, 9 February 1982. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Freud, W. Ernest. Typescript of “Psychoanalytic Pedagogy, Reminiscences of the Rosenfeld-Burlingham School.” Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Hietzing School Pupils. Unsere Weihnachtszeitung (1928, 1929). Peter Blos Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Peter Blos Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Peter Heller Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Print and Electronic Sources Aichhorn, August, and Sigmund Freud. Verwahrloste Jugend. Die Psychoanalyse in der Fürsorgeerziehung. Zehn Vorträge zur ersten Einführung. Internationale

133 Danto and Steiner, “Freud/Tiffany and the Best Possible School”; Danto and Steiner-Strauss, Freud/Tiffany. 134 Erikson and Erikson, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School,” 4.

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Psychoanalytische Bibliothek, Vol. 19. Leipzig: International Psychoanalytic University, 1925. Barrett, Denia G. “So You Want to Start a Psychoanalytic School? Succumbing to an Almost ‘Irresistible Temptation’: An Introduction to the Section.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 71, no. 1 (January 2018): 130–36. Beniston, Judith. “Culture and Politics in Red Vienna: Introduction.” Austrian Studies 14 (2006): 1–19. Benveniste, Daniel. “The Importance of Play in Adulthood: A Dialogue with Joan Erikson.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 53, no. 1 (1998): 51–64. Bloland, Sue Erikson. In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Viking, 2005. Blos, Peter. “Recollection of Anna Freud.” In Anna Freud Remembered, edited by Maria Piers, 13–14. Chicago: Erikson Institute, 1983. Burlingham, Michael John. Behind Glass: A Biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham. New York: Other Press, 1989. Calvocoressi, Richard. “Oskar Kokoschka, Red Vienna, and the Education of the Child.” Austrian Studies 14 (2006): 215–26. Coles, Robert. Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis. Radcliffe Biography Series. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992. Conzen, Peter. Erik H. Erikson: Leben und Werk. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1996. Danto, Elizabeth Ann, and Alexandra Steiner. Freud/Tiffany and the Best Possible School: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, and the Hietzing School in 1920s Vienna [Exhibition and Catalogue]. London: Freud Museum, 2017. Danto, Elizabeth Ann, and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss, eds. Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, and the “Best Possible School.” New York: Routledge, 2018. Ensor, Beatrice. “The Outlook Tower,” The New Era 7, no. 27 (1926): 91–93. Erikson, Erik H. “Psychoanalysis and the Future of Education (1930).” In Erik H. Erickson, A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980, edited by Stephen Schlein, 14–30. New York: Norton, 1995. Erikson, Erik, and Joan M. Erikson. “Dorothy Burlingham’s School in Vienna (1980).” In A Way of Looking at Things, edited by Stephen Schlein, 3–13. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. Freud, Anna. Einführung in die Psychoanalyse für Pädagogen. Vier Vorträge. Stuttgart: Hippokrates-Verlag, 1930. Freud, Anna, Eva Rosenfeld, and Peter Heller. Briefe an Eva Rosenfeld. Basel: Stroemfeld/Nexus, 1994. Freud, W. Ernest, and Jay Martin. “A Conversation” (Los Angeles, 23 July 1985). Psychoanalytic Education 4 (1985): 29–56. Friedman, Lawrence Jacob. Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

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Galatzer-Levy, Isaac R., and Robert M. Galatzer-Levy. “August Aichhorn: A Different Vision of Psychoanalysis, Children, and Society.” In The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol. 62, edited by Robert A. King, Samuel Abrams, A. Scott Dowling, and Paul M. Brinich, 153–79. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Göppel, Rolf. “Die Burlingham-Rosenfeld-Schule in Wien (1927–1932).” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 37, no. 3 (1991): 413–30. Heller, Peter. “Vorerinnerung.” In Eine Kinderanalyse Bei Anna Freud 1929– 1932, authored by Peter Heller, Anna Freud, and Günther Bittner, 7–29. Würzburg: Königshausen + Neumann, 1983. Heller, Peter, Anna Freud, and Günther Bittner. Eine Kinderanalyse bei Anna Freud (1929–1932). Würzburg: Königshausen + Neumann, 1983. Houssier, Florian. Anna Freud et son École. Paris: Éditions CampagnePremière, 2010. Knoll, Michael. “Faking a Dissertation: Ellsworth Collings, William Kilpatrick, and the ‘Project Curriculum.’” Journal of Curriculum Studies 28, no. 2 (1996): 193–222. Menaker, Esther. Misplaced Loyalties. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1995. Midgley, Nick. “Peter Heller’s ‘A Child Analysis with Anna Freud’: The Significance of the Case for the History of Child Psychoanalysis.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 60, no. 1 (February 2012): 45–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003065112436718. Midgley, Nick. Reading Anna Freud. London: Routledge, 2013. Midgley, Nick. “The Matchbox School: Anna Freud and the Idea of a Psychoanalytically Informed Education.” Journal of Child Psychotherapy 34, no. 1 (2008): 23–42. Neudecker, Barbara. “Persönliche Bermerkungen zu August Aichhorns Briefwechsel mit Anna Freud und Kurt Robert Eissler.” In Psychoanalytische Pädagogik: Selbstverständnis und Geschichte, edited by Maria Fürstaller, Wilfried Datler, and Michael Wininger, 95–108. Schriftenreihe der DGfEKommission Psychoanalytische Pädagogik 5. Opladen: Budrich, 2015. Oliver, Myrna. “Marie Briehl: Pioneer in Child Psychoanalysis.” Los Angeles Times, 22 December 1993. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm1993-12-22-mn-4366-story.html. Peters, Uwe Henrik. Anna Freud: A Life Dedicated to Children. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. Pozo Andres, Maria del Mar del. “The Transnational and National Dimensions of Pedagogical Ideas: The Case of the Project Method, 1918–1939.” Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 4–5 (August 2009): 561–84. Schlein, Stephen, ed. Erik H. Erickson, A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.

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Scholz-Strasser, Inge. Victor Ross: Zeitzeugengespräch 4 [Video-recorded interview]. Vienna: Sigmund Freud Museum, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GwhKa_YQEmU&list=PLCE2BB57631653219&index=2. Stevens, Richard. Erik H. Erikson: Explorer of Identity and the Life Cycle. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Anna Freud: A Biography. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

CHAPTER 7

Transcontinental Reflections

This final chapter revisits the central concepts that framed our research and presents reflections emerging from the case studies. It brings together key phenomena cutting across the five schools; it is not intended to reiterate conclusions detailed in individual chapters. The chapters revealed the different ways in which knowledge travelled and pedagogical practices were appropriated. The adaptation of new ideas of teaching and childhood coexisted and tangled with preexisting images of teaching and learning. Insofar as teachers internalised new discourses alongside existing expectations and assumptions about schooling, hybrid practices resulted that reflected discourses in between the new and those which were in use at the time. We are left to ask how innovative the education at these schools was. Are the teaching and learning experiences at these sites best understood as part of a continuum of the resignification of existing ideas and practices in changing contexts? While the schools’ approaches to teaching and learning were created with visions of the future in mind, they were intrinsically connected to concepts of their time. The transnational approach applied in this study helps us understand how, in these particular cases, the movements of adaptation, recontextualisation, and accommodation happened across networks and influences.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. A. Hai et al., Reimagining Teaching in Early 20th Century Experimental Schools, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50964-4_7

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Preconditions Central to all of our case study schools were transcontinental interpersonal relationships, which brought together strands of thought from different societies undergoing transformation and melded them to form new visions of the school, the teacher, and the child and/or learner. Other elements were also important to the emergence of these schools and to the desire in these very different places to implement new visions of school, teacher, and child. All of the schools were developed alongside contexts of mass compulsory education, political transformation, and an increasing confidence that branches of science (e.g., child study, psychoanalysis, psychology, social sciences) held answers for how to reshape nations and their citizens and improve the lives of individuals. These influences are exemplified in our case studies by the archetype of the new Soviet man, by Dewey’s writings about school and society and the workings of his laboratory school, by visions of repression-free schools, as at Hietzing and Malting House, and by the development of kindergarten pedagogies intended to develop strong citizens in the young Brazilian republic. Another important precondition to the emergence of these schools was the availability of funding and the commitment of considerable financial resources—whether of individuals or of the state—to realise these new educational visions. The schools were either state-financed or supported by a combination of funding sources, for example, from wealthy benefactors, tuition, or institutional grants. Such contextual arrangements influenced the focus of each school differently. While pedagogical freedom was important to the foundation and practice of each of the schools, the sources of the schools’ funding strongly influenced many aspects of their operation. These ranged from decisions about school location and who would attend, to the hiring of staff, the selection of materials and the languages to be spoken. Collectively, the case studies are exemplars of the mix of funding arrangements and rationales; from entrepreneurial investment to family needs, to state and/or institutional experiments. A central element, however, is individual agency: there is someone with a vision to see new education approaches as a conduit to a well adjusted and better society or, indeed, a new society. A notable difference across the cases is the scope of the experiment, ranging from the small-scale schools at Malting House and Hietzing, to the institution-supported laboratory school at the University of

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Chicago and government-supported Caetano de Campos Kindergarten. The Bolshevik-supported laboratory kindergartens established amidst the formation of the Soviet Union after the 1917 Revolution were by contrast more complex, wide ranging in focus and grand in scale: one hundred and fifty-eight were established between 1919 and 1921 under the umbrella of the Narkompros laboratory schools department. Three settings in this mix are elaborated for our chapter, one of which, the First Laboratory Station, became a wide-ranging combination of schools and institutes. Across this diversity in the scope of the experimental schools in our book, the Soviet experiment again stands out, emerging amidst the backdrop of turmoil, social and civic dysfunction, famine and civil war. The re-imagining of the teacher and the child was fuelled by the pressing and acute need to articulate and realise new institutions in a re-imagined society. While the social and political settings of the other case studies were complex and at times troubled, they did not suffer the same urgency, nor the crosscurrents of political opinion.

Networks Networks arose, in part, out of earlier and ongoing movements for Froebelian education, but also in conjunction with emerging transnational entities, such as the New Education Fellowship and the International Psychoanalytic Association in particular. In all of our case study schools, the key actors were outsiders in important ways. This point has been made about other networks of educational innovation, for example, by Kevin Brehony about the UK Froebel movement.1 The schools’ founders and leaders held power in one or another regard, but they were also outside of traditional or local hegemony in their respective contexts due to their social class, gender, sexuality, religion, or lack of pedagogical pedigree. They saw themselves or each other as being “apart,” which in turn appeared to have fed their views on their schools and themselves as teachers within them as different. Here we return to the concept of “transnational educational spaces” (as described by Vera and

1 Kevin J. Brehony, “The Froebel Movement in England 1850–1911: Texts, Readings and Readers,” in Perspektiven der Fröbelforschung, ed. Helmut Heiland, Michael Gebel, and Karl Neumann, 49–64 (Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006).

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Fuchs2 ) in depicting our case studies as occupying multilingual, multicultural, intellectual, pedagogical, and emotional spaces at the “crossroads of international trends and local concerns.”3 In this way, the schools represent “realms of the reimaginary” which collectively included purposeful, systematic experimentation as well as more free-form exploration of pedagogical approaches and concepts. Malting House School brought together an unlikely group of individuals as an endeavour to create a new pedagogical environment for young children. In one sense, the players were all outsiders from the mainstream education systems, although Susan Isaacs had had the benefit of a progressive intellectual milieu of university teacher training. But Geoffrey Pyke, Nathan Isaacs, and Evelyn Lawrence worked outside of these streams and were more closely aligned with the worlds of business, economics, and science. Each of them had faced personal crises that caused psychological damage; each had undergone psychoanalysis and continued to do so after the closure of the school. It could be argued they were collectively, in the aftermath of the First World War, searching for new solutions, not only for their personal problems but for societal ills. For them, Malting House was an opportune conduit to a better personal, social, and economic world, whereby understanding the world of children would create better-adjusted adults. The Malting House case study is sited within a nexus of institutional and interpersonal relationships that were not necessarily neatly aligned but reflect the dynamic mix of influences shaping new education. Susan Isaacs herself had a Froebelian background through her teacher training experience, but she had also been introduced to Dewey who, she claimed, influenced Malting House pedagogy more than the psychoanalytic interests of its members. In fact, Malting House traversed both worlds of education and psychoanalysis, represented by international visitors such as Jean Piaget and Melanie Klein, as well as a who’s who of British progressive educators. Malting House staff were actively involved with the British Psychoanalytic Society from earlier times, and in the years beyond Malting

2 Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs, “Introduction,” in The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (Global Histories of Education series), ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia R. Vera (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 18. 3 Vera and Fuchs, “Introduction,” 16.

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House, Isaacs became particularly active in the New Education Fellowship and indeed became an international traveller under its auspices. A distinctive contribution to the Malting House experiment came from Pyke’s scientific world in Cambridge and beyond and the quest to create a pedagogy for young children that might foster scientific inquiry as a societal good. This legacy was long lasting: while delayed for decades, it did influence school policy. Networks at the Dewey School included progressive women who worked outside of mainstream philosophical and educational circles, such as Jane Addams, who helped shape Dewey’s ideas about democracy, citizenship, and curriculum, and the female heads of kindergarten training schools in Chicago, who arranged the school’s programme for the youngest children and supplied it with teachers. The Dewey School’s research aimed at determining the means to promote democracy through education, something Dewey did not consider possible using traditional approaches. The school was thus necessarily situated outside mainstream schooling. Its outsider status was reinforced by its employment of an influential cadre of untrained teachers, mainly subject specialists with degrees in history or science or some other discipline. However, “outsider” held a double meaning4 at the school. From the Dewey School point of view, it also pertained to those who lacked an understanding of or agreement with the school’s project, a group that included, at times, University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper, school visitors, and a subset of the school’s own teachers. The school’s intimate and casual environment, combined with some staff’s preexisting personal relationships with John and Alice Dewey and their social networks, contributed to the development of an in-group at the school, which in-group teacher Katherine Camp called the “Camp-Dewey-Mead crowd.”5 The out-crowd were mainly teachers who had been associated with Francis Wayland Parker. In the end, Dewey’s project came undone when power shifted from the ingroup to the out-crowd, triggering Dewey’s departure to Columbia and a return to institutional forms of schooling at the University of Chicago laboratory schools. 4 For a sociological explanation of the double meaning of outsider, see Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 1–2. 5 Anne Durst, Women Educators in the Progressive Era: The Women Behind Dewey’s Laboratory School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 41.

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Networks across the Soviet case study experiments are insightful of the extent and nature of the personal political links at the highest level of the Soviet systems. This undoubtedly provided a degree of protection enabling the “political courage” to meet the new “political demands,” but survival was at times fragile amidst the opinions and the power of the new orthodoxies of Soviet society. And as Stalinism took hold the experiments were shut down, faded, or transformed into the new education orthodoxy. These were dangerous times for proclaiming new ideas. Nevertheless, in common across the case studies the people involved were transnational in their education travels, associations, and contributions to discourses on new education, including welcoming visitors, such as Dewey, keen to view the Soviet Union’s education experiment. We see in this case study how the progressive ideas of new education were accommodated and transformed within the Marxist labour school philosophy. The laboratory schools were about defining, institutionalising, and realising a socialist version of new education. That the Bolsheviks were intent on social engineering with a keen interest in Eugenics, all added into the mix of educating the new Soviet child who would in time exemplify the new Soviet society. Money was both a precondition for the schools and played a role in determining networks, enabling, for example, the exchange of individuals, the procurement of texts and materials, the hiring of particular types of teachers, and the recruitment and admission of certain types of students. Differences in funding sources and regulation affected the schools’ approach to decision making (more or less agile) and reporting (what and to whom) and their commitment to any particular ideology or aim. Whether schools were funded privately or by the state, whoever controlled the finances had the power to control key aspects of the schools. Similarly, the schools’ fates were closely tied to those of their funders, financially and otherwise. During this era, private schools were constricted by very limited state regulation or else operated under the radar of the state. There were few or no requirements, for example, in our case study schools in the private sector—Malting House and Hietzing—to employ trained teachers or use “official” curricula or materials, which were key aspects of the experiments. These conditions were mostly true for the Dewey School, too, though it operated within the University of Chicago’s institutional governance. And, while the university benefited from Rockefeller money, the Dewey School’s operating grant was small and it otherwise relied on

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parent fees, making it subject to influence from wealthy parents and benefactors. The Malting House School was only made possible by Pyke’s successful financial speculation. Evidence of his wealth can be seen in the calibre and numbers of staff and the rich learning environment Malting House provided. Descriptions of Malting House as comfortable and well equipped with the latest (often imported) equipment and playthings mirror those of the Hietzing School, funded by Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham’s immense wealth. Both schools’ closures were connected in some way to the 1929 stock market crash, which bankrupted Malting House’s entrepreneurial founder and funder and drastically curtailed international expatriates’ ability to fund extended stays in Vienna for psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic training, or both. The situation was different at the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten, a government-funded school established to develop and modernise São Paulo State. Although the school’s materials, furniture, toys, and books were purchased from abroad, the kindergarten operated within Brazilian pedagogical circles and was strongly connected to São Paulo’s Liberal Party. Unlike the private case study schools, Caetano de Campos was the fruitful product of a very strict model of teacher training in which innovation was achieved via an institution very rare in Brazil: the Normal School. Political and intellectual networks inside the country defined the kindergarten aim, which was inspired by transcontinental travelling ideas.

Culture of Teaching In considering the culture of teaching in each school—that is, means of assessment, conceptions of the learner and teacher, the social and material learning/teaching environment and pedagogies—our focus has been on the reimagined teacher and child in particular and how they were reflected in the learning environments and pedagogies. The importance of empathy emerges as a central theme in new visions of teachers in our schools. In some cases, such as in the Soviet Russian laboratory kindergartens and at the Hietzing School, this was part and parcel of the evolving ideological bundle that was psychoanalytical pedagogy at that time. In all cases, to some extent, it was connected to ideas about freedom and child centredness that have been (mis)understood to be Deweyan, or Froebelian, or Montessorian, or associated with still other (indigenous or transplanted) pedagogies.

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There was a strong sense in the case study schools of a contrast between “other” schools and “ours” (i.e. the schools of the reformers we are studying) and between critiques of existing forms of education and solutions—or at least approaches towards solutions—for the problems identified within those existing forms. Some of the differentiation between “our school” and others was achieved through a discursive framing of the other schools in temporal terms as being of the past and associated with societies, both literal and figurative, that had been rendered obsolete by social and political change. Traditional forms of education that perpetuated the vast political and economic inequalities of czarist Russia and imperial Brazil were deemed not only antiquated but antithetical to the new Soviet and republican Brazilian visions, respectively. Not only were new nations arising but new understandings were required: of education, of the transnational (as in Soviet Russia and Brazil), or of an improved and more fulfilled citizen in a maturing democracy, as at Dewey’s school. The traditional stood in contrast to the “modern” and therefore liberating—both individually and in terms of national consciousness. In some cases, such as at Malting House and the Hietzing School, the contrast was less about old and new and more about school culture: relationships between teachers and pupils, individuals and the curriculum, or even the student and his/her/their own self, conscious or subconscious. In some of our case study schools, such as in the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten and the Soviet laboratory kindergartens, new education was seen as a crucial (if utopian) means of forming citizens of a new nation, with a new national consciousness. Caetano de Campos Kindergarten expressed this movement in a defence of the use of Froebelian methodology which was allied with the discussion centred in science, positivism, and recapitulation theory present in teacher education inside the São Paulo Normal School—that is, the new—in opposition to teaching centred in the “old” remains of pedagogical practices based on memorisation and repetition, bringing a religious view of the world and the child. The Soviet experiments, nevertheless, when first announced in 1918 caused disquiet among many teachers even of a liberal persuasion. The notion of creating a “new human species” was deemed too radical amidst the larger task facing educationalists of creating the new unified school system and the dire situation of many children in the postrevolution years. No doubt competition for funds and resources in such difficult times and the privileged connections of the laboratory school networks caused a divide.

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Teachers The reimagined teacher at our experimental case study schools was selected by those schools for criteria entirely different from those expected of teachers in previous times or in mainstream school settings, including (especially) empathy and amenability, and also their ability to act as researchers, innovators, social workers, and analysts. This reimagining of the teacher (as entity, as role, as individual) was ongoing in the schools in question and was hashed out and adapted over time. For example, at Malting House it was soon realised that being too free was harmful for some children and too difficult for teachers to manage, and so better guidance was given. We have discussed this reimagining under the rubric of “the teaching self” and tied it back to the ways in which these reimagined teachers became, if not ideals to be translated into every local school, then at least “symbols of the possible,”6 to return to Balz once more (see Chapter 1). While Dewey was clear that he wanted his teachers to be researchers, he wrote comparatively little about the processes of research-based teaching. And little attention was paid to systematically orienting the fifty-plus teachers the school employed over the years to what it meant to teach in a new way. Instead, their induction occurred through informal mentoring by colleagues or through coursework with Dewey or other professors. Some teachers also sought out their own professional learning opportunities through summer courses, as Anne Durst noted.7 Few of the teachers had normal-school training; graduate student assistants were pedagogy or psychology students. This contrasted with subprimary (kindergarten) teachers, who were graduates of kindergarten training schools.8 The matter of traditionally trained teachers and their engagement with new education practices received less of our attention than we expected, since the teachers at our case study schools were largely selected for their amenability to new approaches and to working in environments different to those which formed the local standard at the time. Many of them were not traditionally trained at all or had stood out during their training as 6 Albert G. A. Balz, “A Letter to Mr. Dewey Concerning John Dewey’s Doctrine of Possibility,” The Journal of Philosophy 46, no. 11 (1949): 328. 7 Anne Durst, Women Educators. 8 The exception was the school’s first subprimary (kindergarten) teacher, Florence La

Victoire.

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different in some way. This difference was apparent, too, in the aforementioned contrast between “other” schools and “ours” and in the very sense of a “we” of the school community of educators and leaders (or benefactors) who collectively determined the school’s direction based on observations, experiences, and experiments rather than on any wholesale subscription to one or another programmatic pedagogy. Reimagining the role of teachers was accompanied by (and/or driven by) a reimagining of the role of adults in relation to children, childhood, and education in general—including a reconceptualising of the role of parents in childrearing and in selecting, providing, or advocating for “appropriate” modes of education for their children. There were, of course, differences between the role of parents vis-à-vis the institutions in the individual case study schools, and both social class and the nation as agent and construct played different parts in various schools. Most formally trained teachers at the Dewey School were graduates from kindergarten training schools and taught in the subprimary class. Teaching practices in the subprimary class were distinct among the school’s groups. Students remained with their teacher for the day instead of rotating to work with other specialist teachers, as was the case for other groups. The teachers were kindergarten specialists and drew upon their training at Chicago training schools, which advocated for freer play with the Froebelian gifts. Yet, their training no doubt influenced their work in ways that sometimes differed from Dewey’s ideas. Kindergartener Grace Fulmer, a former head of the primary division, wrote to Katherine Camp Mayhew in 1930 to contribute her recollections of the Dewey School for Camp Mayhew’s history.9 Fulmer noted that “cooking was tried” but the teachers gave it up, finding they needed to give too much attention to keep children from turning on and off the gas. In the archival copy of the letter, Fulmer’s observations were marked “omit” and crossed out, and didn’t make it into the final publication. The Malting House experiment exemplifies the ambivalence of new education in relation to the role of teachers. Pyke’s original advertisement for “an educated young woman” who might consider herself “too good for teaching” was decidedly discouraging of any well-qualified or experienced teacher. Such applicants were, as noted in Chapter 5, an 9 Grace Fulmer to Katherine Camp Mayhew, 11 October 1930, Edwards Family Papers (1484), Box 44, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

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impediment to Pyke’s vision of a new kind of teacher combining the roles of researcher, analyst, and pedagogue. While Isaacs was qualified, she was not experienced in classroom teaching and the other cohort of adults at Malting House were not teachers. However, it was in the domain of mainstream teaching and teacher education that the Malting House experiment became famous. Isaacs’ writings and research were disseminated mainly through these networks, and indeed Isaacs herself was a conduit for these networks through her employment as a teacher educator. Her teachings and writings were influential in shifting many aspects of mainstream practice in early education, particularly around ideas of free play and a more empathetic understanding of children’s feelings, behaviour, and development. The Malting House experiment, while not replicated, did indeed generate change in practice if not a revolution in the hegemony of education. Fifty years later Isaacs’ texts based on the school experiment were standard texts for teacher training across several British Commonwealth countries that were endeavouring to implement school-wide reforms framed around “understanding children.” The reimagined teacher at the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten had a classic normal school preparation that centred learning from models. By seeing the art of teaching in practice, student teachers would then reproduce, adapt, and transform the model, as necessary, in everyday classroom routines. Teachers at the Normal School did not take coursework in kindergarten methods and theory, they only had contact with kindergarten practice through the kindergarten, so, those tools, combined with models or script lessons brought by transcontinental travel, were believed to be sufficient to scaffold their pedagogical practice. Possibly, the reimagined teacher within the various Soviet laboratory schools presents the most radical and diverse vision. In line with other case-studies in the book, the Soviet experiments imagined a broader role for teachers, such as Shatsky’s view that teachers needed the qualities of social workers if they were to regard children as social beings. They were also be a friend to children. For Vera Schmidt, the intention to explore the role of psychoanalysis as a conduit for engineering the new elite citizen entwining both education and political agendas, the new teacher had to also undergo analysis herself to step into the fledgling arena of child analysis. A view held in part too at the Malting House and Hietzing schools, but without the political intentions. While the Dewey laboratory school was established in association with the training of teachers at the University of Chicago, Shatsky’s First

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Laboratory Station set up programmes for training teachers at the First Station Technikum. This was also developed in an experimental mode actively exploring the links between theory and practice, lived experience and knowledge. The environment was one of dialogue and engagement between students and lecturers that stemmed from the lived realities of classrooms as experienced by children, teachers, and students. This was a dynamic model in terms of impact spurred by the urgency of the times in contrast, for example, with the much delayed impact of the Malting House model.

Whither the Experiments? In this final section, we reflect on the impact the five schools had on teaching following the period reviewed in our study, which, for all of the schools but Caetano de Campos Kindergarten, coincided with their closure. To start, the case of Malting House illustrates the value of such experiments in effecting change in classroom settings. While the experiment was brief in terms of the school’s operational years, through the writings and work endeavours of key members Susan and Nathan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence, its impact reached far across time and place. The case study documents, albeit in brief, key signposts of the school’s influence on policy, pedagogy, and practice in the UK and the Antipodes stretching over decades. Evident is the power of the pen and the publications—and personality—of Susan Isaacs herself, both at an individual level with her many students and in the higher echelons of policy. Malting House became an exemplar of observational research in real rather than laboratory sites, although it could be argued that Malting House was in fact a laboratory. But Isaacs’ research was characterised by its taking place in an environment of everyday school life that was inclusive of the breadth of a child’s experience and interests rather than being an artificially created test environment focusing on the researcher’s interests and excluding the broader context. This influence is still evident in ethnographic research practices of current times.10 The Dewey School’s influence is glimpsed in the other schools described in this volume. However, determining the particulars of its impact is difficult, filtered as it is through publications about the school, 10 Sue Middleton and Helen May, eds., For Women and Children: A Tribute to Geraldine McDonald (Wellington: NZCER Press, 2019).

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reports by visitors, travels by teachers, Dewey’s later writings, and the writings of interpreters, adapters, or translators. In a general sense, the school shows the potential for experimentation in which teachers are regarded as intellectuals and researchers and their practice is grounded in inquiry-based learning. Dewey described schools based on these ideas in Schools of Tomorrow, written with his daughter Evelyn Dewey, who had been a student at the laboratory school, and published a decade after he left Chicago. As at the laboratory school, the schools showcased in Schools of Tomorrow used theory-based principles of new education and recognised “the role education must play in a democracy.”11 At the time that Schools of Tomorrow was published, Dewey and other progressives were optimistic about the potential for schools to contribute to democratic citizenship. In the mid-1930s, amid the rise of fascist approaches to indoctrination in schools, Dewey broke with progressives to conclude that it was “unrealistic” for schools to be a “main agency” for transformative social change.12 Nevertheless, his loss of faith did not impact the Dewey legacy and that of his laboratory school, at least in academic circles and particularly in schools of education. Twenty-firstcentury views on Dewey’s legacy are mixed, however. Aaron Schutz writes that Dewey’s model of democratic schooling “ultimately reflects the ways of being of particular classes and cultures of his time” and that “we must move fundamentally beyond the vision he developed in his lifetime if we are to be true to the spirit of his pragmatic project.”13 David Waddington identifies Dewey’s commitments to modernist thinking—that is, to “normal science” and a belief in the “domination of nature,” “to progress, technology, colonialism, and control”—as a “serious problem.”14 The specific problem, in Waddington’s view, is modernist thinking’s “incompatibility with critical social-justice-oriented 11 John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915),

iii. 12 John Dewey, “Education and Social Change.” The Social Frontier 3, no. 26 (1937), 414, emphasis in original. 13 Aaron Schutz, “John Dewey’s Conundrum: Can Democratic Schools Empower?” Teachers College Record 103, no. 2 (2001): 268. 14 David I. Waddington, “Schools of Education and John Dewey: The End of a Romance?” In The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education: Mapping the Decline and Its Consequences, ed. Andrew Colgan and Bruce Maxwell (New York: Routledge, 2020): “normal science,” 29; “domination of nature,” 37; “to progress … ,” 31; “serious problem,” 41.

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scholarship in education,”15 which he believes makes Dewey irrelevant for schools of education today. Others maintain that the Dewey School is an example of transformative teaching with continued relevance. Anne Durst, for example, writes that the laboratory school suggests “a different way forward”16 from the testing movement driving twenty-first-century schooling in much of the world. The scope of the Soviet laboratory schools, the number of people involved and their influential networks across a broad range of political, social, and cultural domains would imply a long reaching impact and legacy. The flourishing of education ideas and permissive experimentation allowed during the 1920s had immediate impact amidst the broader Soviet revolution, although the laboratory school projects sat alongside the much larger more challenging and urgent reform of education system. This too was an experiment, but one bound by more pragmatic needs and more direct political interest. However, as Stalin sought to impose ideological control and spur further reorganisation of the education system many people involved in the laboratory school movement, and who had gained positions of power across the spectrum of education institutions were, after 1928, gradually removed. For example, Shatsky’s First Experimental Station was closed down in 1932. Nevertheless, despite the Stalinist suppression of Shatsky’s work and of many others, some of his ideas, if not the intuitions, did infiltrate pedagogical practices, albeit within the Stalinist Soviet ideological orthodoxy. More broadly, while this experimental decade had its roots in earlier education reform initiatives and transnational collaborations around new education, it also demonstrated that the new Soviet society could develop its own solutions to the unique political and social contexts of the time. Determining the Caetano de Campos Kindergarten’s influence is difficult. As Brazil’s first public kindergarten, it introduced models and ways of teaching and concepts of early childhood education and teacher preparation. As a showpiece of educational policy in Brazil, it was highly visible and its practices were adopted and adapted. Its political background

15 Waddington, “Schools of Education and John Dewey,” 40. 16 Anne Durst, “‘On a Piece of Research Together’: Teaching at John Dewey’s Labo-

ratory School, with Implications for Teacher Education Today,” in Dewey in Our Time: Learning from John Dewey for Transcultural Practice, ed. Peter Cunningham and Ruth Heilbronn (London: UCL Institute of Education Press, 2016), 11.

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served to draw attention to this kindergarten as a symbolised call for innovation for several decades, in various nuanced forms. However, the more important legacy, in terms of understanding how institutional early childhood education came into being in Brazil, may be its place as a centre of innovation in which teachers were expected to be creative and able to appropriate, adapt, and transform transnational education practices, thereby working in between the new and the old.

Current Times A century later it is useful to comment on the relevance of these casestudies for current times of powerful state hegemonies where the state, in particular via its economic arms and agencies, has become more proactive in imagining and regulating the role and function of teachers and the content and direction of pedagogical innovation. Beyond the transnational and transcontinental sites and networks that form the exemplars in this book, current economic hegemonies are global and their reach into education practice explicit. Institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are not only engaged in comparative country assessments and rankings of school children but have more recently been proactive in shaping the curriculum and assessment in early years education. This has not been without resistance.17 While there is a degree of experiment encouraged within some education systems, the perceived risk of experiment outside of the control of state hegemony is now curtailed and monitored in more ways than in the times of our exemplar experiments. Nevertheless, the legacy of the experiments cited in this book is that while they were “apart” from mainstream schooling at the time, in different ways across the transcontinental sites they were a precursor of educational change and reform, usually in part and often delayed in time but providing powerful models of an ideal nevertheless. A key question for current times is the extent to which comparable kinds of experiments can seed and flourish “apart” from the state and global hegemony. Can the inspired individuals who seed such

17 Peter Moss, Gunilla Dahlberg, Susan Grieshaber, Helen May, S. Mantovani, Alan Pence, Sylvie Rayna, Beth Blue Swadener, Michael Vandenbroek, “The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s International Early Learning Study: Opening for Debate and Contestation.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 17, no. 3 (2016), 343–51.

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experiments find a pathway and space to reimagine the teacher, the child, the family, and society? And are the teachers in mainstream institutions given the freedom to listen, investigate, imagine, adopt, and adapt from such outer sites of innovation if they exist? History’s lesson is that the dynamic interchange of ideas is the crucible and catalyst for shifting older paradigms and practices.

Bibliography Archival Source Edwards Family Collection. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

Print and Electronic Sources Balz, Albert G. A. “A Letter to Mr. Dewey Concerning John Dewey’s Doctrine of Possibility.” The Journal of Philosophy 46, no. 11 (1949): 313–42. Becker, Howard. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. Brehony, Kevin J. “The Froebel Movement in England 1850–1911: Texts, Readings, and Readers.” In Perspektiven der Fröbelforschung, edited by Helmut Heiland, Michael Gebel, and Karl Neumann, 49–64. Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. Dewey, John, and Evelyn Dewey. Schools of Tomorrow. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915. Dewey, John. “Education and Social Change.” The Social Frontier 3, no. 26 (1937): 235–38. Durst, Anne. “‘On a Piece of Research Together’: Teaching at John Dewey’s Laboratory School, with Implications for Teacher Education Today.” In Dewey in Our Time: Learning from John Dewey for Transcultural Practice, edited by Peter Cunningham and Ruth Heilbronn, 10–23. London: UCL Institute of Education Press, 2016. Durst, Anne. Women Educators in the Progressive Era: The Women behind Dewey’s Laboratory School. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Middleton, Sue, and Helen May, eds. For Women and Children: A Tribute to Geraldine McDonald. Wellington: NZCER Press, 2019. Moss, Peter, Gunilla Dahlberg, Susan Grieshaber, Helen May, S. Mantovani, Alan Pence, Sylvie Rayna, Beth Blue Swadener, and Michael Vandenbroek. “The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s International

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Early Learning Study: Opening for debate and contestation.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 17, no. 3 (2016): 343–51. Schutz, Aaron. “John Dewey’s Conundrum: Can Democratic Schools Empower? Teachers College Record 103, no. 2 (2001): 267–302. Vera, Eugenia Roldán, and Eckhardt Fuchs. “Introduction.” In The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (Global Histories of Education Series), edited by Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera, 1–47. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Waddington, David I. “Schools of Education and John Dewey: The End of a Romance?” In The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education: Mapping the Decline and Its Consequences, edited by Andrew Colgan and Bruce Maxwell, 25–44. New York: Routledge, 2020.

Index

A active enquiry, 186 active learning, 3, 96 adaptation, 7, 8, 92, 94, 95, 104, 235 aesthetic experience, 115 appropriation, 7, 82, 93, 108 art of teaching, 48, 86–88, 92, 245 Austrofascist, 226, 227 autodidactic approach, 127 B biogenetic approach, 40, 57 Bolsheviks, 115, 119, 120, 240 C century of the child, 2 child analysis, 12, 16, 137, 164, 165, 173, 194, 227, 245 child development, 19, 40, 58–60, 115, 118, 129, 155, 172, 174, 175 child linguistics, 145

child of democracy, 5 child of nature, 160 child psychoneurism, 145 children’s nature, 87 children’s project work, 68 children’s self-consciousness, 58 child sexuality, 162, 173 communist morality, 115 concentration theory, 47 correlations studies, 45, 47, 48 creation, 7, 80, 90, 93 crossover, 11 cultural hydraulics, 120, 148 culture-epoch theory, 57, 59, 67 culture of teaching, 20, 241

D determinism, 107–109 disciplinary body practices, 129

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. A. Hai et al., Reimagining Teaching in Early 20th Century Experimental Schools, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50964-4

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INDEX

E early education, 10, 11, 19, 99, 155, 157, 171, 245 education reform, international movement for, 3 education research, 17, 36, 37 empathy, 32, 203, 205, 214, 221, 222, 224, 241, 243 eugenics, 115, 118, 136, 240 excursions/field trips/outings, 44, 54, 208, 218 experimental, 2, 8, 9, 12, 16, 17, 19, 27, 30, 35–38, 41, 44, 62, 64, 116, 118, 124, 157, 164, 168, 173, 187, 222, 243, 246, 248 experimental learning environment, 20, 39 experimental school, 2, 7, 13, 14, 17, 18, 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36, 39, 42–45, 47, 48, 57, 67, 116, 121, 124, 187, 219, 237 expert knowledge, 129

F freedom, 9, 69, 97, 159, 163–166, 174, 176, 180, 224, 236, 241, 250 free expression, 66, 162 Froebelian gifts, 95, 96, 98, 99, 244 Froebelian materials, 92, 95, 96 Froebelian principles, 34, 89, 95, 107, 183 funding, 31, 40, 236, 240

G gender, 104, 139, 237 gifts, 10, 11, 31, 92, 95, 102, 103, 106, 123, 162 grammar of schooling, 6, 63, 78, 79, 84, 94, 99, 107–109

H homogenisation, 8, 84 hybrid practices, 235

I in between/in-between space, 6 innovation, 7, 10, 14, 19, 77–79, 87, 107, 129, 163, 237, 241, 249, 250 inquiry learning, 54, 57, 58 interdisciplinary approaches, 139 interpersonal collaborations, 157 interpersonal relationships, 17, 65, 236, 238 intuitive method, 81, 88, 93, 107

K kindergarteners, 10 knowledge transfer, 2

L labour-focused education, 115 liberalism, 82

M Marxist labour school philosophy, 19, 115, 240 material practices, 6, 7, 78, 79 model lessons/scripts, 96, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108 modernity, 83, 118, 119, 147 moral and ethical precepts, 104 mothering guidance of the teacher, 99

N naturalistic methods, 36 neue Menschen (new people), 202 neuroscience, 117

INDEX

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O objective observation, 38 object lessons, 9, 10, 41, 81, 88, 93, 96, 102, 103, 107 observation, 10, 17, 35, 37, 40, 87–89, 93, 96, 99, 102, 118, 119, 125, 127, 130, 137, 138, 162, 163, 165, 167, 174, 182, 217, 244 occupations, 10, 11, 39, 56, 57, 67, 68, 99, 108, 123, 140, 143, 159

power, 14, 69, 77, 86, 115, 121, 131, 138, 139, 203, 206, 222, 237, 240, 246, 248 practical discourses, 6, 7, 78, 94, 96, 99, 107 pragmatism in education, 3, 78, 119 progress, 46, 51, 54, 83, 85, 86, 247 progressive education, 3, 14, 64, 65, 69, 132, 133, 187, 193, 200, 209, 219, 221, 225 progressive era, 8, 17, 132 psychoanalysis, 3, 16, 120, 121, 134–136, 138–141, 145, 148, 158, 160, 172, 193, 195, 196, 199, 203, 204, 209, 214, 216, 218, 221, 223, 225, 227–229, 236, 238, 241, 245 psychoanalytic kindergarten project, 19, 134 psychoanalytic pedagogy, 19, 20, 134, 155, 156, 166, 214, 215, 221, 224 psychometrics, 129 public education, 15, 80, 124, 144 public kindergartens, 19, 83, 84, 248 public school(ing), 4, 8, 10, 11, 14, 63, 64, 91, 226

P pan-Americanism, 83 parents, 8, 9, 18, 20, 36, 37, 49, 52, 61, 65, 66, 68, 136, 137, 143, 144, 146, 159, 172, 176–178, 180, 193, 194, 197, 199, 203, 208, 213, 216, 226, 227, 230, 241, 244 pedagogical library, 27 pedology, 118, 141 post-revolutionary discourses, 118, 136 poststructural spatial theory, 6, 78

R recapitulation theory, 40, 57, 88, 242 Red Vienna, 202–204, 209, 226 reflexology, 117, 118 reform, 5, 11, 14, 19, 80, 88, 109, 116, 117, 119, 120, 132, 178, 184, 185, 202, 203, 221, 222, 245, 248, 249 regimentation, 10, 103 reproduction, 7 republican citizens, 84 republican ideals, 77, 78, 84 resignification, 93, 235 romantic science, 118, 141

new Brazilian citizen, 18, 84 new child, 2 new education, 1–5, 8–19, 21, 55, 56, 65, 93, 98, 99, 120, 121, 129, 133, 136, 147, 148, 155, 157, 159, 164, 176, 178, 181, 184, 187, 236, 238, 240, 242–244, 247, 248 new era, 2, 10, 18, 54, 86, 121, 179 new Soviet citizen, 5 new teacher, 2, 117, 159, 184, 245 new (wo)man, 115, 118, 136 normative construct of a child, 140

256

INDEX

S school space, 8 scientific inquiry, 20, 155, 239 scientisation, 118, 119, 121, 142 self-expression, 65, 69 social change, 1, 84, 247 social class, 66, 78, 237, 244 social engineering, 115, 240 socialist, 4, 124, 133, 134, 202, 209, 240 stages of infant play, 57 stages of inquiry learning, 57 story hours, 129, 130 subject specialists, 48, 239 T theory of higher nervous activity, 117 transformation, 7, 12, 77, 134, 138, 140, 144, 236

transnational, 2, 4, 5, 8, 19–21, 78, 84, 107, 129, 132, 147, 148, 155, 204, 219, 235, 237, 240, 242, 248, 249 transnational perspective, 79 travelling ideas, 6, 8, 78, 241 travelling library, 5, 65

U unconsciousness, 134, 137–139, 144 unfoldment theory, 40, 66 unified schools, 116, 242

W women, 14, 42, 108, 109, 134, 135, 138, 165, 239