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

the school last summer, my training as a teacher prompted me to make a set of apparatus
to simplify the teaching of Mathematics. The only use the children have had for it has been
as a medium for playing football. I have learned that children when absolutely free have
no use for apparatus.
Last summer when we entered our school we found an upper room more like a barn than
a schoolroom. Everyone began to paint the walls and windows and doors. Each child selected
a table and a corner of the room, and for three month the school was a collection of
egoists, each decorating his or her own table, chair, and wall. Today only two newcomers
have tables and corners, the others work everywhere.
When the decorating fever had worked itself off, there came a time of weariness. The
children had come from schools in which they had always been led. They were not ready
for freedom. Betty from England did almost nothing for six months; she became absolutely
wearied and bored, and she came to me and complained about the school. Why didn't I
teach her subjects? In short she required six month to recover from her ‚education‘. At
last life became so dull for her that she began to work for herself, and today she studies
hard with a view to passing the London Matriculation Exam. I find that every child over
ten requires a long rest, a recovery I call it, before he discovers that education comes from
the self not from the teacher. Naturally we provide material for the children. Artificial
apparatus of the Montessori manner is pedagogical and therefore forbidden, but a school
must provide paper, paints, wood, tools, linoleum for cuts, books of all description. It is
in the book matter that we find the greatest difficulty. We have three Jugo-Slavs, for example.
It is impossible to provide a library for Jugo-Slavs, English, Norwegians, Russians
etc. All children learn German and English, but that is not satisfactory in a creative
school. A child can write poems and novels and plays, but no man can be at his creative
best in a foreign language. The language difficulty alone would force our school to be a
handwork school, even if the psychological necessity of the child did not direct his interest
to handwork.
What a child knows is of little importance; the one thing that matters is what a child is.
And it is here that we differ from most experimental schools. Nearly every school attempts
in some way to mould character. The old schools moulded character by fear, the
new ones try to mould it by reading Shakespeare or Goethe. They set up a standard of
values; they say in effect that Goethe is better than a cabaret. We set out with the frank
confession that no man has the right to give another a standard of values. Life holds
Goethe and Wagner and Charlie Chaplin and cabarets, and the child must be left free to
form his own standard. We are individualists, that is we treat each child as an individual.
We know his psychological history, his strength and his weakness. But we have continually
to fight the propensity to see a school as a great machine running like a clock. And
every school that is not free must be a clock. The child must learn Mathematics from ten
o'clock till eleven, wether he has interest in Mathematics or not. And as interest is the
concentration of the conscious and unconscious working together, every system that does
not follow the interest of the individual child is wrong. An army is an excellent machine,
but no man would today call an army an educational establishment.
One day an English lady said to me: ‚What in a word is your school?‘ I replied without
thinking: ‚A school that doesn't believe in original sin.‘ Our system might be called the
No-Conscience school. When a parent or teacher says to a child: ‚You must behave so‘,
he gives the child a conscience. All neurosis and all crime is the result of a conflict between
the instinct (the voice of God) and the conscience (the voice of parents, teachers,
preachers). That this conflict is unconscious only makes the tragedy greater, for it is the
buried conflicts that make man miserable and inefficient.
In spite of the enormous progress of psychology in the last twenty years, no man knows
enough about the child to say: Thus must you live. Education can only be a watching the
child to see what he wants to do. Every day we see the results of the character-moulders'
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