Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Depaepe, Marc
• Simon, Frank
• Van Gorp, Angelo

Titel

The Canonization of Ovide Decroly as a “Saint” of the New Education

Ist Teil von

• History of education quarterly, 2003, Vol.43 (2), p.224-249

Ort / Verlag

Oxford, UK: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2003

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley Online Library Journals Frontfile Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• If any Belgian educator belongs to the canon of the New Education, it is certainly Ovide Decroly (1871–1932). Particularly in southern Europe and in many Latin American countries, the ideas and the work of this French-speaking Brussels doctor have been inspirational for a movement that projected itself worldwide—albeit in different modes—as the “child-oriented,” “progressive” alternative to the rigid, traditional school. As recent research has shown, this movement manifested itself primarily by means of the development of its own language and discourse in which the “new school” was projected into a “new” society. However, ultimately, it turned out that the “new” did not involve a radical break with the modernizing trends from which it emerged and that it wanted to combat. Without going further into the discussion of its success or failure, about continuity and discontinuity of discourse and movement, we want to show that the construction of the self-discourse of the New Education was largely determined by the extolling of its own merits. We will do this via the example of Ovide Decroly. This extolling was generally done by epigones who, from the immediate circle of often charismatic school reformers, gazed in wonder on the work of the Master (or Mistress) and ascribed to his or her “method” an authenticity that it did not actually have.