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62 Praktiske Grunde 1-2 / 2010
Courses of events up to and after the Emdrup plan for schooling of 1945
As a point of departure, the circle here is defined as the group of people that comes
forward, involving themselves in a variety of endeavours, striving to make their mark
and form the future school pedagogy of the period.
These endeavours are detected in courses of events, e.g., the establishment of
associations, clubs, societies and experimental institutions which have an explicit
purpose regarding the building up and forming of the population through school pe-
dagogy and child psychology in a time of anticipated crises. A network of people
surfaced in these events; unifying spirits and identity formation emerged around these
different projects, associations and institutions. In these courses of events, the hete-
rogeneous network of people made statements that others in the field necessarily had
to relate to. This made them ‘significant school pedagogues’, i.e., significant accor-
ding to the logic of the field.
A school pedagogue is not necessarily a teacher. The term refers to a broader
spectrum of professionals engaged in schooling and civilising the population via
school pedagogy. Thus, a ‘significant school pedagogue’ is a person who employs
specific categories, assumptions, practices, methods, scientific arguments etc., having
specific personal and social relations and involving him/herself in specific
associations or journals, joining the battle on what good and better school pedagogy
consists of. A ‘significant school pedagogue’ is part of a social field that structurally
has the power to reproduce, produce and define distinctive categories that impinge
on activities in school via legitimate categories, reproducing social order and
relations.
School pedagogues are related to the state twofold: elements of their school peda-
gogy are gradually recognised and approved of officially, and the activities, state-
ments and assumptions are made useful and applied as welfare state ordering devi-
ces. They conquer the school pedagogy and at the same time they generate and re-
new the state, conquered by the state. Following this, the scientific construction of
the courses of the events focuses on the emergence of a modernised and scientifi-
cally-based school pedagogy for democracy and welfare.
The Emdrup plan for schooling of 1945
Until the end of World War II, a German school was located in the building
where the Danish School of Education resides today in a northwestern part of
Copenhagen called Emdrup. During World War II, Nazi Germany constructed a
monumental building on the site, in order to form the Danish Youth. 2 At the end of
the war, the educationalists in Copenhagen discussed how to make use of this huge
building. Although the aesthetics of the building were not appealing, the
educationalists were inspired by the fact that the building was there (Christensen
2 Document dated January 24, 1942, the archive of Emdrupborg teacher-training college (Arkivet for
Emdrupborg Statsseminarium), Provincial Archives of Zealand (Landsarkivet for Sjælland m.v.).