Friedrich Copei

Friedrich Copei (born September 29, 1902 in Lage (Lippe) ; † 1945 , probably in or near Crossen an der Oder ) was a German educator .

life and work

Copei, whose father died early, attended elementary school in Lage and switched to the preparatory facility in Dortmund in 1917 . He completed another three-year course at the teachers' seminar in Detmold, where he completed the first section of his training as a primary school teacher in 1923 . First, he took on a teaching position in Bösingfeld near Lemgo. There Copei made contacts with the circle around Erik Nölting , which developed interests in the youth movement and innovative tendencies in sociology. Copei joined the SPD without assuming any internal party function. In the meantime he started studying in Münster and Berlin. To provide financial support, he kept interrupting it by returning to school until he took the second teacher examination. Only then did he continue his studies uninterruptedly up to his doctorate.

Copei is known to this day for his book The Fertile Moment in the Educational Process, which was first published in 1930 and which he wrote as a 28-year-old doctoral student with Eduard Spranger in Berlin. He also studied with the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer . In the foreword he expressly thanks for lengthy conversations with Eberhard Grisebach , Romano Guardini and Hendrik Josephus Pos . Copei not only analyzes “those peculiar moments in which a new knowledge awakens in us in a flash, a spiritual content grabs us” (Copei, 1960, p. 17), but also the possibility of creating favorable educational framework conditions for their emergence. Copei first describes, with reference to Edmund Husserl's theory of intentionality, how in intellectual, aesthetic, ethical and religious “experience” a “transforming effect” (ibid. P. 100) can take place in relation to oneself and the world. With impressive examples from teaching practice, Copei describes how these educational processes or effects can be vividly staged in an educational way through Socratic questions or maeutics (ibid., Pp. 19-27. 128f.).

Copei was appointed lecturer at the Pedagogical Academy in Dortmund in 1931 , but had to move to the Pedagogical Academy in Kiel in 1933 . There he was dismissed in 1934 as a religious socialist and because of his membership in the SPD. Copei himself worked as a primary school teacher in Haustenbeck from 1934 to 1939 . In 1953 he was posthumously awarded the title of professor.

His example of the milk can, taken from elementary school lessons, is particularly well-known (Copei, 1960, pp. 103-105): On a hike to school, the children puzzle out why no milk flows out of a can if you only drill a single hole in it. A second hole lets the milk flow - but only as long as you hold the can at an angle. How come With discreet, but targeted interventions by the teacher, the actually coincidentally resulting fertile moment in the educational process is used. The children are "reduced no effort, but also no tension and joy" (Copei, 1960, p. 105); in the end they themselves find the answer to their questions driven by the matter. The modern theory of discovery learning picks up on this.

Copei first became an army psychologist in 1939 , and from 1943 he was a film advisor at the Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild . At the end of January 1945, at the age of 42, he was called up for military service. In the foreword to the second edition of "The Fertile Moment in the Educational Process", published posthumously in 1949, Copei's companion Hans Sprenger reports: “There is one last piece of news from his hand from Crossen on the Oder from these days. Then soon death will have accepted him. "

A secondary school in Schlangen ( North Rhine-Westphalia ) was named Friedrich Copeis until it was closed in 2018.

Quote

“Where the self-evident are shaken under an impact and break, the tense question arises. This presses towards the solution in a methodical way, paving a way through the conditions, analyzing, organizing and combining. The solution, however, often only appears in the 'fertile moment', especially in the case of new intellectual achievements, often separated from it by a period of time, and in any case depends on factors other than intention and effort. The completion of the intellectual achievement lies only in the embedding of what is grasped in the 'fertile moment', in the integration into the general mental inventory. ”(Copei, Der Fruchtbare Moment im Bildungsprozess , 1930, p. 60)

Fonts

The fruitful moment in the educational process . (Diss. Phil. Berlin) Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1930 (VII, 134 p., With fig.); 5th, unchanged edition, inserted. and ed. by Hans Sprenger, Quelle & Meyer, Heidelberg 1960 (135 pages) [semi-critical].

Forms of education in elementary school. From the estate, ed. by Hans Sprenger. In: Westermanns Pedagogical Contributions 1 (1949), Issue 1, pp. 1-6.

literature

Martin Schwab : Friedrich Copei. In: Karl Knoop / Martin Schwab: Introduction to the history of pedagogy. Pedagogue portraits from four centuries (UTB 1100). Quelle & Meyer, Heidelberg 1981, pp. 257-275; important are the detailed explanations of Copei's biography (pp. 259–263), which take into account his estate and conversations with companions, especially Hans Sprenger.
Käte Meyer-Drawe : The fruitful moment in the educational process. On Copei's phenomenological approach to pedagogical theory building. In: Danner, H./Lippitz W. (Ed.): Describing - Understanding - Acting. Phenomenological Research in Education. Munich 1984. pp. 91-151.
Alexander Hesse: The professors and lecturers of the Prussian educational academies (1926-1933) and colleges for teacher training (1933-1941) . Deutscher Studien-Verlag, Weinheim 1995, ISBN 3-89271-588-2 , p. 222–224 ( limited preview in Google Book search).

Web links

Literature by and about Friedrich Copei in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

↑ Nekrolog: http://www.dwc.knaw.nl/DL/levensberichten/PE00002391.pdf
↑ Klaus Karenfeld: Blackboard should remind of reform pedagogues. Retrieved August 11, 2020 .
↑ This edition is semi-critical and represents a treatment by Sprenger in which the place and scope of the revision and incorporation of estate material are not marked in the text; see. Sprenger's foreword to the 2nd edition 1949 [p. 6–15], ibid. P. 15: "He [F. Copei] himself had the idea of reworking the book and having it reprinted in due course. We found some notes in his estate. From this I have included some unchanged parts of the material in the text of the first edition, as far as the intentions of the author were clearly recognizable.I only made a small expansion in the chapter on "Pedagogical Conclusions" [pp. 129-131], also revised the short subsection 'On Religious Education' [pp. 126-128] at the end of the book.This part does not belong to the core of the investigation, and over the period of two such eventful decades the change in attitudes could not be overlooked completed at this time on questions of religious instruction. Apart from this minor revision, the text of the book has remained unchanged. "

personal data
SURNAME	Copei, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German educator
DATE OF BIRTH	September 29, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH	Location (lip)
DATE OF DEATH	1945
Place of death	Crossing the Oder

[1] Nekrolog: http://www.dwc.knaw.nl/DL/levensberichten/PE00002391.pdf

[2] Klaus Karenfeld: Blackboard should remind of reform pedagogues. Retrieved August 11, 2020 .

[3] This edition is semi-critical and represents a treatment by Sprenger in which the place and scope of the revision and incorporation of estate material are not marked in the text; see. Sprenger's foreword to the 2nd edition 1949 [p. 6–15], ibid. P. 15: "He [F. Copei] himself had the idea of reworking the book and having it reprinted in due course. We found some notes in his estate. From this I have included some unchanged parts of the material in the text of the first edition, as far as the intentions of the author were clearly recognizable.I only made a small expansion in the chapter on "Pedagogical Conclusions" [pp. 129-131], also revised the short subsection 'On Religious Education' [pp. 126-128] at the end of the book.This part does not belong to the core of the investigation, and over the period of two such eventful decades the change in attitudes could not be overlooked completed at this time on questions of religious instruction. Apart from this minor revision, the text of the book has remained unchanged. "