The Possibility of an Unbiased History of Steiner/Waldorf Education?

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 639-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIETER DHONDT ◽  
NELE VAN DE VIJVER ◽  
PIETER VERSTRAETE
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Education ◽  
Holistic Education ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Waldorf Education ◽  
Rudolf Steiner ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Progressive Education Movement ◽  
Central Belief

In many respects, and certainly with regard to his educational ideas, Rudolf Steiner was a child of his time. Trust in the natural goodness of the child that became more and more central, belief in an evolutionist development of both individuals and humanity as a whole, the emphasis on a holistic education realised through a community of teachers, parents and children; all of these were ideas that Steiner shared with other key figures of the progressive education movement, which began in the late nineteenth century. In line with the existing historiography on progressive education (Reformpädagogik) in general, historical research on the figure of Steiner, and particularly on the development of the schools and the educational system named after him, is characterised by paying considerable attention to the years of foundation in the interwar period on the one hand and to current practices on the other, in that way largely neglecting the developments during the second half of the twentieth century.

The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Juvenile Courts ◽  
Efficient System ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich

This book analyses the ideas and practices that underpinned the age of mass child removal. This era emerged from growing criticisms across the world of ‘dangerous’ parents and the developing belief in the nineteenth century that the state could provide superior guardianship to ‘unfit’ parents. In the late nineteenth century, the juvenile court movement led the way in forging a new and more efficient system of child removal that severely curtailed the previously highly protected sovereignty of guardians deemed dangerous. This transnational movement rapidly established courts across the world and used them to train the personnel and create the systems that frequently lay behind mass child removal. Spaniards formed a significant part of this transnational movement and the country’s juvenile courts became involved in the three main areas of removal that characterize the age: the taking of children from poor families, from families displaced by war, and from political opponents. The study of Spanish case files reveals much about how the removal process worked in practice across time and across democratic regimes and dictatorships. It also affords an insight into the rich array of child-removal practices that lay between the poles of coercion and victimhood. Accordingly, the book further offers a history of some of most marginalized parents and children and recaptures their voice, agency, and experience. It also analyses the removal of tens of thousands of children from General Franco’s political opponents, sometimes referred to as the lost children of Francoism, through the history and practice of the juvenile courts.

Jessie Fauset’s Not-So-New Negro Womanhood

2018 ◽  
pp. 222-247
Author(s):  
Meredith L. Goldsmith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Jessie Fauset ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One ◽  
Other Regarding

Chapter 8 responds to two prevailing arguments about the fiction of Jessie Fauset—the one labeling her work retrograde, the other regarding it as subtly subversive—by viewing the writer’s work as part of a history of long nineteenth-century representation. Countering the dominant perception of the Harlem Renaissance as a break from the past—a view that has shunted Fauset’s work to the sidelines—the essay argues that Fauset’s work explores the legacy of late-nineteenth-century US culture in the emergent modernity of the early twentieth century. Excavating the literary, cultural, and scientific tropes of feminine representation that burst from the pages of Fauset’s fiction, the essay identifies a recent literary past that informs Fauset’s constructions of her modern urban heroines.

The Production and Consumption of Chinese Theatre in Nineteenth-Century California

2003 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAPHNE LEI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
Chinese Theatre ◽  
Old West ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Turmoil

The history of the earliest documented Chinese opera performances in California (1852) and their successors during the following decades reveal how Chinese theatre in the diaspora was produced and consumed by Chinese immigrants, European visitors and Americans. On the one hand, a familiar repertoire eased the nostalgia and reinforced the national consciousness of Chinese immigrants, while on the other, the ethnocentric reading and writing of Chinese theatre helped establish an eternal frontier in the ‘old West’ to protect American national identity in late nineteenth-century California's periods of economic and political turmoil. Finally, the exoticism of California's Chinese theatre in America contributed to a European sense of American cultural uniqueness. Chinese opera performances played a crucial role in the invention of Californian identity.

Marriage Traps: Colonial Interactions with Indigenous Marriage Ties in East Timor

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICARDO ROQUE
Keyword(s):  
East Timor ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Marriage Contracts ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Traditional Marriage ◽  
The One

This chapter explores Portuguese colonial relations with Timorese marriage institutions during the late colonial period. By drawing on the rich colonial history of the barlake (traditional marriage contracts) in East Timor, it proposes a novel approach to the trope of intermarriage in the Portuguese-speaking world. In addressing the variety of relationships with marriage in colonial practice, the chapter conceptualises three main types of colonial interactions with indigenous marriage: predatory, parasitic and mimetic. It uses case studies to show how these distinct forms of interaction could be associated with distinct colonial agents and their particular agendas. The chapter shows how, in late nineteenth-century East Timor, colonial relationships with barlake were marked by a tense coexistence between, on the one hand, the predatory model followed by the Catholic missionaries, and, on the other hand, the parasitic exploitation of indigenous marriage ties, customarily practised by colonial officers and governors.

“To Interfere on Their Behalf”: Sovereignty, Networks, and Capital in the Dominican Republic

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Paige Glotzer
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Business Networks ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One ◽  
Incremental Construction

This article uses a lawsuit between British engineers and Dominican merchants over a sugar estate mortgage to examine how transnational capital networks functioned at the local level during a moment of transition in the late nineteenth-century global economy. When Dominican courts ruled against the engineers, the firm unsuccessfully sought diplomatic intervention, raising questions on the one hand about the incremental construction of Dominican sovereignty and on the other about the links between diplomatic and business networks on the ground. It is situated within calls for new approaches to the history of the Dominican Republic that utilize international archives and focus on corporate bodies, both in local and Pan-Caribbean contexts.

scholarly journals Educating far from Equilibrium: Chaos Philosophy and the Quest for Complexity in Education

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joakim Larsson ◽  
Bo Dahlin
Keyword(s):  
Educational Policy ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Progressive Education ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
Complexity Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Waldorf Education ◽  
Child Centered ◽  
Far From Equilibrium ◽  
The One

It would be futile, John Dewey argued in 1902, to think that we have to choose between child-centered, progressive education and traditional, subject-matter-oriented approaches. Calling for adaptivity, he stressed that we need the act of balancing the one with the other. The tendency in current educational policy to lean in favor of traditional, disciplinary modes of control appears to lose sight of this need. The aim of this paper is to reconnect to the task of maintaining a balance between educational freedom and structure, using a variety of theoretical resources such as complexity science, and the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, Schiller, and Nietzsche. Based on these resources, the authors also discuss Steiner Waldorf education as an example of how educational practice may approach, and integrate the significance of chaos in the form of a “virtual pedagogy”.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

Theodor W. Adorno

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

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