Johannes-Martin Kamp Kinderrepubliken - Wer nichts aus der ...

ches Genie für undurchführbar 130 halten. Auch die Arbeit Neills in Summerhill
wurde vielfach als Folge seiner unnachahmlichen Persönlichkeit und
nicht seiner Methoden beschrieben 131 .
except a lunatic, who is already demoralized,‘ I said dogmatically. ‚The delinquent boy is
not a demoralized boy, nor is he any child who is sane enough to attend a school. Their
behaviour may be bad, but that is a sign that someone has been using ‚personality‘ on
them - trying, that is, to subject their will to an authority outside their own minds.‘“
(Lane 1969: 173)
„I have been accused by my friends of ‚genius‘ for dealing with children. It may now be
seen, in the light of the psychological principles I have so imperfectly explained to you,
that my relationship with my charges is logical, reasonable and scientific.“ (Lane 1964:
266 f.)
Little Commonwealth... „It failed only in establishing the general applicability of the
principles on which it was conducted. It was, throughout its existence, and it still remains
in the minds of many who knew of it, a freak institution associated with the influence of
a unique personality. If one were to ask any of the children who passed through the Little
Commonwealth and who are to-day upright and law-abiding citizens to what they attribute
the change in their attitude towards society, I believe that most of them would reply: ‚It
was Daddy that made me see things differently.‘ If one had asked the teachers or reformatory
superintendents who visited the Little Commonwealth whether they left it with a
certainty that their own methods were wrong and that those of the Little Commonwealth
were right, wether, in fact, their first act on returning to their own institutions had been to
substitute the Commonwealth methods for their own, they would have replied, perhaps a
little sadly: ‚No, we have seen a most wonderful and inspiring place, we are filled with
admiration for the work of a most wonderful man, but we could not ourself do what he is
doing.‘ Even Miss Bazeley, a member of the staff and a resident citizen of the Commonwealth,
has given as the reason why visitors left with dancing hearts that they had discovered
‚a man‘ - more inspired and more sincere than any other man they had ever known.
Here is the explanation of the failure. If the known success of the Little Commonwealth
was due, as so many believed, to the personality of Homer Lane, then obviously it could
not serve as a model reformatory, it was not worth keeping alive. If anything could make
Mr. Lane angry, it was the assertion that he was ‚a wonderful man,‘ or that the success of
the Little Commonwealth was due to his personality. He felt such a statement to be the
condemnation of the principles in which he believed, the stamp of failure on the work of
his life, and it was his hard fate to hear such condemnation almost daily upon the lips of
those who were his greatest admirers and the most enthusiastic upholders of his principles.
It was because the members of the Managing Committee could not think of carrying
on the Commonwealth without him“ ... (Lytton, Vorwort zu Bazeley 1948: 10 f.)
Auch Burn (1956: 58) betont ausdrücklich, daß es sich bei Lywards Arbeit in Finchden
Manor um lernbare Methode und keineswegs um irgendeine besondere Begabung Lywards
handelt.
130 Dahinter steht vermutlich mehr als Ideologie oder Unfug. Es ist in der Geschichte der
Pädagogik eine durchaus häufige Erfahrung, daß Nachfolger weniger pädagogisch befähigt
waren als die Begründer eines pädagogischen Systems. Solche Nachfolgeprobleme
gab es z. B. bei Trotzendorf, Planta und Arnold (vgl. Kapitel 9).
Ich könnte mir vorstellen, daß dies an einer (mangels pädagogischer / psychologischer
Theoriebildung) unzureichenden theoretischen und methodischen Beschreibung und Begründung
des jeweiligen Systems gelegen haben könnte. Daran, daß das System der Persönlichkeit
seines Gründers so sehr auf den Leib zugeschnitten war, daß er die Funktionsweise
des Systems nicht hinreichend klärte und die Handhabung deshalb nur schwer
lehr- und lernbar war.
170