V.J. Stolk

Physical education for citizenship or humanity? Freethinkers and natural education in the Netherlands in the mid-nineteenth century

Studies in the history of physical education show that it was often promoted for socio-political reasons: to stimulate nation-building or increase economic productivity and/or military strength. By contrast, a different kind of motivation has received little attention in historical studies: the importance of physical education for the perfection of the individual, as expressed by the German neohumanistic word ‘Bildung’. This article presents a case study in which the debate on the importance of physical education in the Netherlands in the mid-nineteenth century is examined. Ideas on the importance of Bildung in physical education especially existed within the freethinkers’ movement. With arguments derived from their naturalistic worldview, freethinkers contested educational approaches that obstructed the natural development of the child. This case study aims to contribute to a better insight into the history of physical education in the Netherlands and into the diversity of reasons for promoting physical education in the past.

The secularisation of religious education: humanism, religion and worldview education in the Netherlands in the 1960s

Abstract Secularisation is often mentioned as an explanation for changes in worldview education in modern history. Worldview education has become less preoccupied with preaching religious truths and more with developing children’s personal worldviews. However, how secularisation exactly explains these changes is not clear. To get a clearer picture, we analyse developments in the Netherlands in the 1960s and compare these with Britain. Our source material primarily consists of educational, religious and humanist journals. We connect developments in worldview education to secularisation understood in three ways: reduced church attachment, the rise of alternatives to the dominant religion, and the decrease in references to religion in public space. Our findings show that changes in theology, decline in church attendance, professionalisation of academic pedagogy, and the growing popularity of dialogical methods strongly influenced the direction of both religious and humanist forms of worldview education in a similar way.

Education as cultural mobilisation: The Great War and its effects on moral education in the Netherlands

Education during World War I has been a relatively unexplored field of research, especially in the case of countries with a neutral stance in that war. The Netherlands is one such country. This article argues that even though the Netherlands was politically neutral, it was and considered itself a part of western civilisation and shared in the experience of a cultural or existential crisis that came over Europe as a consequence of the war. This crisis also caused Dutch pedagogues to reflect on the war. Leading Dutch pedagogues wrote in their journals how education had to be changed in order to prevent a future war or to preserve moral values in their country, which was not (yet) part of the warfare. To characterise this effort, we introduce the concept of cultural mobilisation, following recent developments in the historiography of the cultural dimensions of the Great War. Based on an in-depth analysis of Dutch pedagogical journals, ranging from Protestant, Catholic and socialist to humanist and anarchistic world views, we focus on three pedagogical debates that were influenced by the Great War. The first debate focuses on peace education and shows how pedagogues rejected the war pedagogy of their German colleagues in particular and advised teachers to pass on a peace-loving message to their pupils. The second debate focuses on the reception of Montessori education and the third on Foerster’s and Kerschensteiner’s social pedagogy, both in light of the desire of pedagogues to improve moral education in the school.