Session Information
17 SES 07, Creativity and Democracy
Paper Session
Contribution
Education in the Netherlands since the beginning of the nineteenth century has been organized along religious and ideological lines. Protestants and Roman-Catholics have had their own schools with a clear religious identity. The neutral public or state schools, however, lacked a clear identity. Humanists of the Humanistisch Verbond (Humanistic League), founded in 1946, in cooperation with other proponents of the public school, tried to free the public schools from their ‘tasteless’ neutrality in het postwar period and turn them into ‘general schools’, in which children of different social and religious backgrounds could learn to understand each other and to live together.
In addition to their endeavors to turn the public school in a general school, humanists in the 1960s tried to create legal space for non-religious children to deepen their convictions during extracurricular lessons in the public schools. A comparable type of education already existed for Christian children that went to the public schools. Humanists introduced what they called ‘Humanistic formative education’ (hfe), an innovative secular variant of religious education, which non-religious children in public schools could attend with approval of their parents.
This case of hfe is interesting because it offers insight into a form of educational innovation in a time when educational renewal was an object of national interest (e.g. the whole organization of secondary schooling was renewed in the 1960s) by a group – humanists – which were clearly present in the educational debates in the sixties and earlier, but have barely received attention by historians of education. Because the history of hfe as a form of non-religious 'existential' (humanists used the word 'spiritual') education is unclear, this paper focuses on two questions about hfe that are meant to gain a better understanding of its historical significance.
The first question deals with the context in which hfe was realized. The Netherlands, as well as other western nations, experienced an acceleration of the process of secularization in the 1960s. This, reinforced by the so-called ‘technologization of society’, made people fear a moral and spiritual ‘flattening out’. Research has been done into the effects of secularization on religious education in Christian schools, but the impact on moral and existential education in publics schools remains unclear. This paper therefore deals with the question whether and, if so, how these cultural developments influenced educational innovations of secular organizations, such as hfe.
The second questions deals with hfe itself. Was hfe indeed didactically and pedagogically innovative, and how did it fit in in the dominant phenomenological and non-normative theories of education of that time? That hfe was innovative may be suspected because some of the humanists involved with hfe, e.g. professor of education L. van Gelder (1913-1981), were leading figures in debates on educational renewal. And how unique was hfe internationally? Did there also exist non-religious variants of RE in other countries and, if so, was there a relation with hfe? Answers on these questions could lead to a better insight into the status of non-religious existential education in the 1960s.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Aloni, Nimrod, Enhancing Humanity. The Philosophical Foundations of Humanistic Education (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007). Brickman, William W., ‘The teaching of secular moral values in the twentieth century’, in: Paedagogica Historica 13;1 (1973) 5-22 Kennedy, James Carleton, Building New Babylon: cultural change in the Netherlands during the 1960s (Dissertation University of Iowa, 1995). Levering, Bas, ‘Van fenomenologie naar hermeneutiek: met een accent op de Utrechtse School’, in: Grondslagen van de wetenschappelijke pedagogiek. Modern en postmodern (Amsterdam: Boom, 2004) 73-92. Mellink, Bram, ‘Having faith: Religious optimism in Dutch parochial schools during the 1960s as a case for secularisation’, in: Paedagogica Historica 49;1 (2012) 139-148. Veugelers, Wiel, Waarden en normen in het onderwijs. Zingeving en humanisering: autonome en sociale betrokkenheid (Utrecht: University for Humanistics, 2003)
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.