Beskrivelse
The interwar period from 1918 to 1939 offered an exceptional window of opportunity for the circulation of scientific and educational knowledge across borders through conferences, visits, translations, and journals. Spearheaded by the New Education Fellowship (NEF), established in 1921, European educationalists were eager to appropriate foreign ideas to improve their own educational systems.The NEF promoted democracy, cooperation, critical thinking, coeducation, and personal autonomy. The teaching of science was relevant in this context because of its secular values such as solidarity, objectivity, and laicism.
However, the progressive ideas of the New School were challenged by the emergence of fascist regimes in several European countries. These regimes did not welcome democratic values and critical, scientific thinking. As an irony of faith, the persecution of Jewish and Socialist scientists in Nazi Germany meant that progressivist international networks were established in the 1930's, when the scientists migrated to other European countries.
In this paper, we will combine the global history of progressive education and the NEF with a microhistorical approach to the circulation of scientific ideas. Thus, the paper deals with the unexpected interest of the Croatian mathematician Paul Neményi (1895-1952) in the work of the Danish pedagogue Wilhelm Rasmussen (1869-1939) which became clear in a review in the NEF journal New Era of Rasmussen's work Børnepsykologi og Pædagogik (Child Psychology) in 1939.
Neményi belonged to a group of left-wing Jewish mathematicians who, after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, took refuge in Copenhagen, where they remained until 1936. Rasmussen, in turn, was a socialist, Darwinist, and educationalist, who became reknown for his work Nature Study in School (1909), which was translated into several languages, including English in 1929 and Spanish in 1933.
The microhistories of Neményi and Rasmussen thus reveals the global character of science and education in the interwar period.
| Periode | 5 sep. 2024 |
|---|---|
| Begivenhedstitel | 11th Conference of the European Society for the History of Science: Science, Technology, Humanity, and the Earth |
| Begivenhedstype | Konference |
| Konferencenummer | 11 |
| Placering | Barcelona, SpanienVis på kort |
| Grad af anerkendelse | International |