Around 1900 there was dissatisfaction with the old 19th century school system. It was felt that individual freedom was restricted too much and that this led to cadaver discipline. In 1921, this led to the new school movement (‘La ligue Internationale pour l’Education Nouvelle’), founded by the French pedagogue Adolphe Ferriere. This new school movement was also called reform pedagogy, because they wanted to reform the school. Adolphe Ferriere chose to use the word ‘new’ (‘nouvelle’) to indicate that he had different principles than those that were common at that time in the old school.
Assumptions
Reform pedagogy was characterized by its child-centeredness. The child had to be central to education, not the subject matter. Intellectual ability was seen as only one of the abilities of children. Much emphasis was placed on physical and artistic education. As a result, physical education and art education took on an important role in education. They also felt that there should be more confidence in the natural development of children. Children should also not be required to sit still all day, because children naturally have a need to move. This resulted in a lot of manual work (working in the garden, bookbinding, etc.). The learning material also had to match the interests of the children and there is no separation between school and society.
Five innovation schools
In 1900, a lot of new schools emerged from this reform pedagogy with their own ideas. Some of these schools are well known because their ideas still live on in some current schools. The five most important schools that still exist and arise from reform pedagogy are:
- The Freinet education (by Célestin Freinet)
- The Montessori (by Maria Montessori)
- The Dalton Education (by Helen Parkhurst)
- The Jenaplan education (by Peter Petersen)
- The Waldorf School (by Rudolf Steiner)
Reform pedagogy in the 21st century
There is a great similarity with the improvements we now want to make in our education and the principles of reform pedagogy. Some examples of this are:
- collaborative learning
- extracurricular learning
- authentic learning (the learning material has meaning for the child)
New schools are also being added all the time, which show many similarities with reform pedagogy.