In March 1933, Nazi storm troopers seized control of the
Odenwaldschule, a small German boarding school near Heidelberg.
Founded in 1910 by educational reformer Paul Geheeb, the
Odenwaldschule was a crown jewel of the progressive education
movement, renowned for its emancipatory pedagogical innovations and
sweeping curricular reforms. In the tumultuous year that followed
that fateful spring, Geheeb moved from an initial effort to
accommodate Nazi reforms to an active opposition to the Third
Reich's transformation of the school. Convinced at last that
humanistic education was all but impossible under the new regime,
he emigrated to Switzerland in March 1934. There he opened a new
school, the Ecole d'Humanite, which became a haven for children
escaping the horrors of World War II.
In this intimate chronicle of the collision between a
progressive educator and fascist ideology during Hitler's rise to
power, Dennis Shirley explores how Nazi school reforms catalyzed
Geheeb's alienation from the regime and galvanized his
determination to close the school and leave Germany. Drawing on a
wealth of unpublished documents, such as Geheeb's exhaustive
correspondence with government officials and transcripts of
combative faculty meetings, Shirley is able to reconstruct in
detail the entire drama as it unfolded. Others have examined the
intellectual antecedents of Nazism and the regime's success at
developing themes from popular culture for its political purposes;
Shirley goes further by analyzing the many ways in which German
educators could and did respond to Nazi reforms. In the process he
identifies the myriad forces that led individuals to accept or
resist the regime's transformation ofeducation.
"The Politics of Progressive Education" offers a richly
rewarding examination of how education in general, and progressive
education in particular, fared in the turbulent political currents
of Nazi Germany. It brings to light a remarkable story, hitherto
untold, of one individual's successful attempt to uphold humanistic
values in the darkest of circumstances.
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