ABSTRACT
Educational thought and practice on an allegedly scientific, Herbartian model did not, however, enter the twentieth century unchallenged; on the contrary, there was an equally powerful movement of dissent that had been growing throughout the nineteenth century and that became a major force in the early decades of the twentieth. It is not strictly accurate to speak of a movement in the singular except at the level of generalization, for it included many positions that were sceptical of, or even hostile to, the new ‘scientific’ pedagogy, but in general they shared a central value - namely, a belief in the need for the reconstruction of society. This concern, itself part of the Western intellectual tradition, had its immediate springs of action in nineteenth-century socialism and new perceptions of social responsibility. To many avant-garde thinkers at the turn of the century it was manifest that so-called progress had to be redirected in more beneficent ways; scientific empiricism, social Darwinism and exploitative capitalism were charged with the oppression of the mass of the people by allowing the growth of profoundly antagonistic social classes which the two-track school system served and perpetuated. The clockwork Herbartian method was no unquestioned triumph of education; it was seen by 376many as a means of maintaining the servitude of the workers, creating uniform minds to do the mechanical, interchangeable tasks developed by a ruthless industrial-commercial system. Towards the end of the nineteenth century various theories, founded upon a multitude of ideas – socialist, religious and morally scientific - gathered strength and political effectiveness as a serious opposition that called for a reconstruction of society in which a radically new theory and practice of education would be an essential element. In all of them, there was a utopian tincture.
