Radical Schoolteachers and the Origins of the Progressive Education Movement in Germany, 1900–1914

An innovative minority of elementary schoolteachers in the big cities of Imperial Germany embraced the principles of progressive education early in the twentieth century, many years before those reforms were widely introduced in urban public schools under the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. From the 1890s on, proposals for the reform of the socially stratified educational system and the traditional pedagogy were widely discussed in the meetings and newspapers of the German Teachers’ Association. Progressive educational reform became an organized movement from 1908 on, with the founding of the League for School Reform and the creation of an office within the German Teachers’ Association for the promotion of modern pedagogy. The avant-garde of this movement—teachers in the big cities who were predominantly left-wing liberals and Protestants—were a small part of the elementary school teaching profession, but they exercised an influence in their professional society out of proportion to their numbers. In 1912, representatives at the national congress of the German Teachers’ Association adopted a resolution supporting the neue Pädagogik, as progressive education was called at that time. Why did some public elementary schoolteachers take up the political fight for democratic school reforms and become exponents of the “new pedagogy”? Where did the educational theories for the Arbeitsschule, as Germany's child-centered and active-learning school was called, come from? An investigation of these questions can deepen our knowledge of the origins of the progressive education movement in Germany and enhance our appreciation of John Dewey's contemporaries in the movement on the European continent. This research also adds a new dimension to recent historical interpretations of Imperial Germany in the years before the First World War as “a society of reform movements,” a society in which bourgeois professionals and civil servants who were politically critical of the traditional norms and institutions of the established order took the initiative to create organizations devoted to reform.