“Die dorfeigene Schule” [“the village’s own school”] was a key concept in the German and Austrian debate on rural school reform around the middle of the 20th Century. In essence, the idea was that the appropriate school for rural areas had to be a school that was closely linked to the social life of the village with a didactical approach that took the children’s experiences of rural everyday life as a starting point. In my talk I want to suggest that the concept was an attempt to constitute a transitory space in the sense that the “dorfeigene Schule” was intended to reconcile two diverse and often conflicting spaces: school and the rural world surrounding it. Conflicts were situated at two levels. From the child’s point of view the conflict was between the informal learning space of the rural world with its everyday experiences and the formal learning space of school with its curriculum. From the adult villager’s point of view the conflict was between the organic culture of the local community and the bureaucratic and knowledge-orientated culture for which school stood. The “dorfeigene Schule” was to facilitate transitions on both levels and in both directions. Rural life-world was to be brought into the classroom, and the classroom was to be brought into the surrounding rural space, e.g. through outdoors lessons. Villagers were to be involved in school life and school was to become involved in the village’s social life. Based on teachers’ literature from the late 1920s to the 1960s, I want to examine the concept of “dorfeigene Schule”. Thereby I will show that, over time and under diverse political regimes, there were significant variations on how the role of such a school and the relationship of the diverse spaces it sought to reconcile were constructed. Finally, I want to turn to the question of why the concept no longer appeared in debates after around 1960. One could argue that as an effect of modernization at that time the underlying conflict between the diverse spaces of school and the rural life-world vanished. But one could also argue that the concept was an attempt to tackle the problem of the relationship between schools and the local communities. Since this problem did not disappear along with the traditional rural life-world, how was it approached instead?

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