Sjaak Braster

The people, the poor, and the oppressed: the concept of popular education through time

Popular education is a concept with many meanings. At the beginning of the nineteenth century – with the rise of national systems of education – it was related to the idea ‘education for all’. In the twentieth century it became related to education for underprivileged groups like the poor, and in the course of the twentieth century popular education had to do with education of the oppressed. This introductory article focuses on these several meanings with the help of historians of education who presented their work at the 31st session of the ISCHE in Utrecht, 2009.

De positieve effecten van etnische verscheidenheid in de klas op de schoolprestaties van leerlingen in een multi-etnische metropool

Internationaal onderzoek onder vijftienjarige scholieren laat zien dat etnische ver! scheidenheid in een school een negatief effect heeft op hun onderwijsprestaties. Ook Robert Putnam poneerde de stelling dat vandaag de dag een mix van etnische groepen in steden niet per se hoeft te leiden tot positieve uitkomsten. Maar is dit ook het geval als we inzoomen op de leerlingen van scholen voor voortgezet onder! wijs in een grootstedelijke en multiculturele context? Het antwoord is ontkennend. In Rotterdamse scholen voor voortgezet onderwijs halen leerlingen van migranten hogere cijfers in etnisch heterogeen samengestelde klassen dan hun klasgenoten in etnisch homogene klassen. Daarmee lijkt de optimistische voorspelling van Robert Putnam dat op de lange termijn de toegenomen etnische verscheidenheid binnen steden uiteindelijk wel positieve effecten kan hebben op het onderling vertrouwen tussen groepen te worden bewaarheid. In zekere zin biedt de Rotterdamse jeugd daarmee een kijkje in de toekomst.

From Holland to Hamburg: The Experimental and Community Schools of Hamburg Seen through the Eyes of Dutch Observers (1919-1933).

In the period 1919–1933 the experimental and community schools in Hamburg tried to put into practice a new model of schooling without a set curriculum that was based on providing a considerable amount of freedom for pupils and teachers. These experiences were introduced in the Netherlands by way of magazines published by the New Education Fellowship (NEF) or Dutch journals edited by educationalists and university professors. The Hamburg schools were also visited by Christian Anarchist teachers who were connected with new schools in the Netherlands and who already had experimented with new ways of life in small communities. In this article we describe their experiences in Hamburg. Their observation reports would not trigger a growing interest in a social community type of schooling; in general Dutch teachers, even the socialist ones, did not change their preference for the traditional classroom system of education. More individualistic methods from Montessori and Parkhurst (Dalton Plan), supported by university professors and inspectors of education, were considered to have more potential for changing the classroom system from within.

Exploring New Ways of Studying School Memories: The Engraving as a Blind Spot of the History of Education

This article intends to track down the representation of school through the multiple versions that were derived from a single educational image. Starting with the water colour entitled “The Picture of Youth”, painted by Henry James Richter in 1809, a later portfolio of engravings done by the same author in 1822, and many other versions of this subject made by other painters and engravers, the work became a popular image for representing a school during an important part of the XIXth century. Our paper has three aims. First, we reconstruct the historical context in which the several versions of the painting and the engravings that were based on them, were made, trying to elaborate several hypothesis about the circulation of this particular image throughout Europe and United States, and the subtle modifications of its meaning that were made by rewriting the captions. Second, we analyze the four engravings published in the 1822 portfolio for exploring more in deep the main scenes and the iconographical elements of the image as a whole. Third, we give some interpretations for explaining why we have considered this particular image the iconic image of the school in the XIXth century.

Education and the children’s colonies in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939): the images of the community ideal

At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War the republican authorities started organising what came to be known as “children’s colonies”. These children’s colonies became both home and school for all the children who were evacuated from Madrid. The purpose of this article is to study in depth the transformation of many of these children’s colonies into educational communities. The teachers accompanying the children often shared the republican ideals of active citizenship and strove to make conscious citizens out of these children. The educational model chosen for achieving this aim was the community model, based on the transformation of every children’s colony into a self-sufficient community of teachers and students, along the lines of similar experiences organised by the international New Education movement in the 1920s and ’30s. The article discusses the iconic experiences of children’s colonies during the Spanish Civil War and the ways in which their different concepts of “community” were represented. By studying the photographic collection put together from different public and private archives alongside the written information preserved in unpublished diaries we are able to develop a methodological model for analysing the construction and/or destruction of the community ideal in these educational experiences.