Alfons Simon

Alfons Simon (born April 3, 1897 in Munich , † June 23, 1975 in Munich) was a German educator and representative of individual psychology . He is considered one of the most famous school reformers in Bavaria .

Alfons Simon

Life

Alfons Simon always wanted to be a teacher. After the First World War he found a detour to become an educator. He worked at various Bavarian elementary schools. As a part-time job, he was active in the Individual Psychological Association in Munich around Leonhard Seif . Following the example of the Viennese school reform , the first individual psychological educational counseling centers were founded there in October 1922. The city school council made rooms available for this purpose at three Munich schools. From these educational advice centers a working group for education developed in May 1923 , in which a large, growing circle of teachers and educators continued their education. Alfons Simon worked at this institution until World War II. National socialism and war destroyed the years of reconstruction work. Simon retired to the country during the war.

In 1945 he became mayor of Breitbrunn am Ammersee , a teacher in Munich and finally a lecturer at the Institute for Teacher Education in Munich- Pasing . Simon was a founding member and first president of the German Society for Education in Munich, Lotzbeckstrasse 2.

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Alfons Simon has written numerous books on school practice and gave lectures on the subject of schools. In view of the widespread educational needs, he devoted himself to researching new methods to overcome them.

• 1925 School Child Psychology (together with Kurt Seelmann) in: International Journal for Individual Psychology III. Born June 1925 No. 4
• 1950 Understanding and helping
• 1952 Maxi, our negro boy
• 1955 We hear the school radio. Experiences from school for school (ed.)
• 1958 Helga
• 1958 What do we do with the irascible? In: Kinderöte. Third episode
• 1962 A very different parents' evening (together with Josef Scherl)
• 1965 Partnership in class

As an author, lecturer and president of the German Society for Education, all his efforts were aimed at understanding and helping young people. After the horrors of the Second World War, it was important to him to convey his social significance to the teacher again and that the school is actually a reflection of life: " Live in it, like outside in great life, peaceful and unruly, simple and difficult minds, easily accessible and closed souls; With the difference that the teacher, like no one else and nowhere, has the opportunity to let all children experience and practice every day how to deal with a reluctant person, a shy person, a big spokesman, someone in need and how daily and sometimes every hour A balance can be found when equal desires oppose each other. ” (Alfons Simon in: Maxi, our Negerbub, p. 32)

With Simon, the unity of material and educational efforts demanded by Alfred Adler is intertwined, especially in practice, in a way that is reminiscent of an artistic composition. With him, the lessons never seem to take place without upbringing and this never seems to be in connection with the lessons.

Lessons: Strengthen self-esteem

According to Simon, the teacher has three tasks in the classroom: First, he has to recognize the children who have been misled in their self-assessment. Secondly, he has to let all children experience work successes and their beneficial effects again. Thirdly, he must teach the children to correctly assess these work successes and to correctly relate them to themselves, their own development and their future:

“Thorough psychological experience has led to the certainty that what has been taken over quickly enters consciousness, but also quickly disappears from it again. Only that which has been acquired through work, error, failed attempts, through “mistakes” is liable; for it only became really personal property through personal effort. Only overcoming initial difficulties will bring the feelings of success that are indispensable for building healthy self-confidence; because courage is the memory of past achievements. " (Alfons Simon)

“There is hardly a more pure joy than the one that comes after a job well done. You feel elevated in your whole being. We have overcome an obstacle and have made some progress with it. We experience our own growth and that radiates forces that fill the whole person. It is this growth experience that captures children in their deepest layers: in their self-esteem, their self-esteem, in their self-confidence. Our most important educational task is to let our students experience this double, intertwined joy in work and growth, to help every single child to feel their growth and in this way to discover their own worth. " (Alfons Simon, Understanding and Helping - die School tasks , 1950).

Education: understanding and helping

For Simon, as an individual psychological educator, the focus was on assessing the student's personality and recognizing and correcting poor posture. Instead of prohibition and punishment, which he found annoying, he promoted understanding for the poor attitudes of the students and the guidelines for life hidden behind them :

"The teacher does not see the child's wrongdoing or wrong posture as the outflow of his" bad or culpably weak will "- he recognizes the earliest and deepest cause of the educational difficulty in a disruption of the child's natural development. The innate forces of every healthy child, which urge them to adapt to the existing circumstances and to classify them, have been steered, disturbed, and suppressed in the wrong direction; - He regards it as his educational task to give the child the opportunity to catch up on the development he has missed; - He knows that this cannot be done with words, not even with external means, that there is only one way to do it: to let the child have different experiences. The child initially fends off; it has also lost its trust in this respect; - it then tries timidly; - it experiences small successes and the joys of success associated with them; - it discovers powers and abilities within itself, it discovers itself and its value. The teacher's word accompanies this self-discovery; it arranges where the child is not yet able to find its way around; he confirms, supports and reinforces where the child still doubts. This process of regaining self-confidence requires careful, cautious, restrained guidance. The teacher must know that he is dealing with what is most vulnerable in people, his sense of self. " (Alfons Simon, Understanding and Helping , 1950)

literature

• Literature by and about Alfons Simon in the catalog of the German National Library