This study examines Freinet Pedagogy from the perspective of French education movement. Developed based on early 20th century various education movements, Freinet Pedagogy is above all a “pedagogy” that has an organic relationship with the field o...
This study examines Freinet Pedagogy from the perspective of French education movement. Developed based on early 20th century various education movements, Freinet Pedagogy is above all a “pedagogy” that has an organic relationship with the field of practice. Later on it became an independent movement of its own educational thought and teaching methods, which played a pivotal role in contemporary French education.
Whereas Célestin Freinet established his concepts of education based on practices on-site, these practices originated from various education movements from the 1920's. These education movements have formed and evolved amid the dynamics of progressive mass movements and the demands of the era, which gave rise to other forms of movement. For instance, libertarianism, formed in the late 19th century, transformed anarchism into a progressive education movement and became the matrix of early 20th century French education movement. Paul Robin and Sébastien Faure in France and Francisco Ferrer in Spain materialized the anarchist ideal of "cultivating autonomous individuals with their own standard of value judgment" into concrete practices on-site, thereby forming a libertarian idea of education and laying the foundations to propagate it in the form of a movement. On the other hand, a syndicalist education movement was formed through the syndicate as an extension of late 19th century labor movements; the New Education movement emerged, which suggested a practical possibility for the field in the current of international educational reform. The New Education movement contributed to strengthening the theoretical base of the era's education movements as well as to the development of child psychology in the early 20th century.
The founder of Freinet Pedagogy, Célestin Freinet, is at the junction of all these movements. Freinet introduced the legacy of libertarian education movement like school printing, school newspapers, cooperative learning, and self-government to the class. Meanwhile, he assigned "the educational" to syndicalist education movement and "the people" to the New Education movement. He believed that education ideals should not become proclamatory arguments that could degenerate into another kind of dogma; rather, they should suggest efficient tools and techniques that could transform the field of education in reality, and their results should benefit not a chosen few but all children. Freinet's credo as such disseminated through the sharing of practical experience by means of his prolific writings and through a cooperative network that alternated between research and practice. This eventually formed the Freinet Education movement that advocated “a new education of the people” with the help of cooperative teacher groups.
Open to all contemporary changes, such credo of Freinet's education movement demonstrates the “modernity” it emphasized. Freinet Pedagogy rejects becoming a theoretically and methodologically complete, closed, and petrified form. It instead is open to possibilities of the potential reform and follows the organic flow of formation, evolution, and extinction. This is the ideal principle of Freinet's education movement grounded on the conception of the human. Freinet understands human nature as a dynamic movement of life based on vitalism. The endless search, trial and error, the rule and technique of life, and the reflexion upon the power and potentials intrinsic to life all start from the universal truth of "life is," while suggesting the necessity that education should be actualized with the dynamism of life in mind. Freinet's principles of learning—“experimental search (tâtonnement expérimental)” and “natural method,” techniques that stimulates and reinforces the activity of life, and “modernity” that should be intimately connected to every moment of the present—are all education principles that focus on the dynamic movements of life. Freinet Pedagogy is defined as "pedagogy" mostly because it understands education as a dynamic relationship between life-existences or, in other words, as an "action in actions" that imparts a level of unpredictability. Mobility is a salient attribute of life-existence, which is inherent to Freinet's view on human. It is also presented as a means of disseminating Freinet Pedagogy, namely, the cooperative teacher movement. Such mobility is the main theme of this research that intends to investigate the identity of Freinet Pedagogy from the perspective of the organic relations in and out of education.