Hans Maeder

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Hans Karl Maeder (born December 29, 1909 in Hamburg , † September 8, 1988 in Manhattan ) was an American educator of German origin and founder of the reform-oriented Stockbridge School in Stockbridge , Massachusetts .

Life

Family and education

As Hans Karl Mäder , he was born in Hamburg in 1909 as the third child of a wealthy family. At the age of 18 he left his parents' house to become a teacher - contrary to his father's wishes, who wanted to see him in his footsteps as a businessman. He himself described his father as an authoritarian nationalist and anti-Semite who cheered Hitler . The break with him took place after the decision to catch up on the Abitur and to go to the Lichtwark School . The educational reform environment he found there was formative for his future life.

After graduating from high school, he began studying with Curt Bondy , Max Bondy's brother, at the Institute for Social Education at Hamburg University. In 1932 he received a grant to spend a year in Denmark, where he wanted to investigate the differences between the German and Danish welfare education.

As a refugee in Denmark, Kenya, the Philippines and Hawaii

Hans Maeder - a self- confessed socialist - was involved in anti-fascist resistance early on . When he returned to Hamburg in May 1933, he was de-registered due to this political stance. To avoid the threat of arrest, he fled to Denmark on June 6, 1933 , where he first found a job in a home for boys with behavioral disorders. He attended the teachers' college in Copenhagen and also graduated there. In parallel, he wrote for anti-fascist publications and worked on the Matteotti committee .

In 1937 he had to leave Denmark; his path led him via Switzerland, where he was not granted a right of residence, first to Kenya . On the advice of Danish acquaintances whom he had met in Geneva, he wanted to found a school for Danish children, but this failed because these children did not exist there: They were taught in Denmark. Maeder then worked in a German car workshop in Nairobi, but he soon fired him for political reasons. He received an offer from a Dane to work as an overseer in a coffee plantation. He was the only white man on this plantation, and in order to be able to communicate with his workers, he tried to learn Swahili. To this end, he developed a system that included the children of the plantation workers and gave them literacy skills. When the farm owner found out about this, Maeder resigned with immediate effect. With the money he earned, he bought a car and took tourists on safaris. But he soon intended to leave Kenya.

An immigration application to South Africa was rejected. But by coincidence - the daughter of the American consul in Nairobi was a classmate of Maeder's at Lichtwark School - he received a US visa restricted to Manila. He traveled there from Mombasa via Sumatra , Singapore and Hong Kong . He worked as a journalist in Manila, taught German to doctors at a hospital and became a representative for office machines. After the outbreak of war, however, he considered leaving the Philippines. Maeder was invited to Hawaii to teach at the university there, and with the help of American friends, he also received a visa.

Exile in the USA

In Hawaii, Maeder was surprised by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and interned on December 8, 1941 as an enemy alien because of his German citizenship. An American friend he had met in Manila and who was meanwhile working in Washington finally ensured that he was released to New York on February 19, 1943.

Maeder found his first job at the YMCA in Brooklyn, New York . In September 1944 Max Bondy gave him a job as a German teacher at the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox (Massachusetts). He then taught at the Walden School in New York, where he was also the school director in 1947/48. The Walden School was founded in 1914 by Margaret Naumburg , whose work had a major impact on American educational attitudes. The program was to promote the personal development of the students by means of the visual and performing arts. Individual contacts between students and teachers were part of the concept. Competition among each other should be avoided. In contrast to most other private schools, there were no admission tests, only interviews. The teachers were addressed by their first names; there were no grades and no formal preparation for college entrance exams. The school had to close in 1987 for financial reasons. Here he also met his future wife Ruth, the widowed mother of a schoolboy.

The Stockbridge School

Foundation and conception

1948 acquired the Maeders for 60,000 dollars a spacious estate at the foot of West Stockbridge Mountain in Massachusetts and founded her own school, the Stockbridge School - from his own experience of nationalism, racial hatred and anti-Semitism designed the Emigrant Maeder it as a reform educationally oriented boarding school without racial segregation and without religious affiliation. As a sign of the international orientation of the school, the flag of the fledgling United Nations organization waved right from the start .

On September 22, 1949, Hans Maeder started school with five teachers and 16 pupils (including a Siamese, a Colombian and the daughter of German emigrants living in Mexico). Tuition was $ 1,500 a year. In the summer of 1950, the first summer camp took place with 70 children (participation fee 350 dollars), and these summer camps developed into an important component for the financial survival of the school.

Stockbridge School 1954 - part of the school complex

The school grew rapidly and the student body was very international. In general, great value was placed on intercultural education - for this purpose, a separate school in Corcelles , Switzerland, was operated for several years , where the students could complete a year abroad, and the school curriculum included the project “School on Wheels (School on Wheels) ”is of particular importance. With his help, among other things on study trips and with field studies, what was theoretically learned in school should "be checked in reality, can be experienced, the other way round, personal experiences can be classified in larger contexts". Internationality also meant school exchanges. In 1956 came the first time a hamburger students from the field of Lichtwark to the Stockbridge School , and on negotiations of Quäkerorganisation "American Friends Service Committee" was in contact with that of Max Bondy founded and since 1937 by Bernhard Knoop led Landerziehungsheim school Marienau added. From there, a total of eight students came to the Stockbridge School in the school years 1958/1959 to 1960/1961 , including the future television journalist Dirk Sager and Gunter Nabel, the author of the comprehensive study of the school.

The school in Corcelles was an important building block in the internationalization concept and was actually intended to develop from a European branch of the Stockbridge School into an independent school. Maeder had chosen Martin Wackernagel (born 1914), who had gained school experience with Kurt Hahn and Paul Geheeb and had been a visiting teacher at the Stockbridge School for a short time, as its director. In 1963 the Chateaux de Corcelles near Chavornay in the canton of Vaud was rented as a school building, a former psychiatric clinic whose facility could be used. It started with a summer camp, to which Hans Maeder traveled with students from the USA. The group was supplemented by some European children.

When the regular operation of the school under the direction of Wackernagel was supposed to start after the summer holidays, problems quickly arose: Wackernagel's ideas were based more on Kurt Hahn than on Hans Maeder, and the low number of European students enrolled was evoked from the start financial bottlenecks. The question of equal rights for girls and boys, which Wackernagel interpreted rather restrictively, was another point of conflict, which leads to Nabel's assessment: “All in all, it was an elaborate apparatus that did not breathe much of Stockbridge's spirit, but rather aroused restorative memories of the early phases of German rural education centers without even remotely exuding its vibrancy. ”The differences between those involved became so great that at Easter 1965 the students returned to Stockbridge and Corcelles was closed. What remained were debts that the Wackernagel couple had to pay off.

Although Maeder was a socialist and took a decidedly egalitarian position, a very large number of his students came from wealthy New York families, whom he won through his own recruiting office in Manhattan. The school ranged from 9th to 12th grade (high school), and of the 100 to 200 students, about a third were girls. The proportion of foreigners was around 10 percent and that of colored people around 25 percent. 20 to 25 percent of the pupils received a scholarship.

Six days a week, the students gathered after breakfast to listen to music recordings for 20 minutes. Mostly European romantic and classical music, which was selected and commented on by teachers, was played. Saturdays were usually reserved for popular music, the choice of which was left to a student.

In addition to these musical activities, the political commitment of its students has always been characteristic of the Stockbridge School . The students supported food donations against the famine in India as well as care campaigns for German children. Getting involved in the civil rights movement was as natural as participating in activities against the Vietnam War. Feidel-Mertz also points to a certain helplessness in view of the fact that black students sympathized with the Black Panther movement and consciously opposed the more universal ideas of the school. The consumption of drugs also caused insoluble problems.

In the tradition of the free school community, all important issues for the boarding school were publicly discussed and decided. Teachers and students had equal voting rights, only the director had a veto right, which, according to Feidel-Mertz, was only used very rarely. The teaching staff consisted predominantly of Americans of European origin and Europeans. The attempt to significantly increase the proportion of black teachers failed, as did the attempt to affiliate a teachers' seminar for black candidate teachers with the school.

Teachers

For the first 15 years of the school's history, Feidel-Mertz refers to Hans Maeder in particular to three teachers who have shaped the school:

  • Bertha Rantz , 1893–1994, daughter of Russian emigrants, grew up in Philadelphia, but lived for a few years in the Soviet Union and traveled in Europe in the 1920s. She began teaching in a one-class rural school in the forests of Puget Sound near Seattle . After a short time she moved to a public school in San Francisco before she went to the Walden School in New Yorker. Berta Rantz stayed at this school, a pioneer of the experimental and creative educational movement in the USA, for the next 26 years, initially as a teacher and later as the director of the high school. In the fall of 1951, at the age of 58, Rantz left the Walden School and transferred to the Stockbridge School . Here she was assistant director, teacher and finally educational advisor until her retirement at the age of 82. She had a very close relationship with her students, who kept in touch with her even after they left school and visited her on her 100th birthday. At this celebration Berta Rantz declared: “I have had a very rich and productive life. How? Because I am surrounded by people who want to create. ... You gave to me and I gave to you, so it's been a good exchange and a good life. How about that? "
  • Alexander Perkins was the conceptual thinker of the school with the "integrated curriculum" developed by him, the cognitive learning systematically with the social learning association. A key point of this curriculum was the study trip program "School on Wheels", through which the pupils learned to explore foreign countries. He was from England and had studied in Italy and France. Since he also spoke the German language, he was an officer in the British secret service during World War II. At the Stockbridge School he worked from 1950 to 1964, he left for family reasons.
  • Karen Jakobsen was at Stockbridge School from 1954 to 1972 . She came from Copenhagen and, as a child, was strongly influenced by the resistance against the German occupation. According to Feidel-Mertz, she was the one “who put Hans Maeder's ideas into tangible practice with organizational talent and empathy”.

In the early years, all teachers received a standard salary of $ 2,000 a year and could live and eat in the school for free. But in 1954 a conflict arose because individual teachers wanted to enforce higher pay and also founded a union for this purpose. The leader of this revolt, which was directed against the socialist Maeder as the private owner of the school, was a German émigré, a communist. Maeder had to give in, which was at the expense of the reserves intended for scholarships.

Another conflict with some teachers developed from Maeder's decision in 1953 to accept four Arab students from Yemen. Although this did not lead to any conflicts with the American students of the Jewish faith, some of whom shared the rooms with their Arab comrades, this step was incomprehensible for some Jewish teachers. This question led to internal disputes, a split in the teaching staff and, finally, in 1955, five teachers left the founding days of the school.

The Stockbridge School was then even more tailored to the person Hans Maeder, and it seemed to many observers that he was the school alone. According to Nabel, this dominance and self-expression did not distinguish Maeder “from the founders of well-known schools such as Lietz, Hahn, Geheeb, Neill, to name but a few, whose names are synonymous with the schools they have shaped”, and he points to this the assessment of John Tishman, who stated that Maeder “had more difficulties with colleagues than with students. He expects from others what he asks of himself. His work ethic was always present from morning to night, and he expected the same from others. I [Tishman] think the teachers often thought he was dictatorial. "

The end of the Stockbridge School

In the spring of 1971, Hans Maeder retired from running the school. According to Feidel-Mertz, with this step he wanted to prove that the idea of ​​the school was independent of himself. In view of the fact that the school only existed for five years after that, she is skeptical whether this was a sensible step, because "the school he created was his life" and with his departure is the driving force behind it No school. Maeder's immediate successor as headmaster was Thomas Newman. He was followed in 1973 by Richard Nurse. A former student of the Stockbridge School, he was the first black man appointed to direct a private multiracial boarding school in the United States.

Hans Maeder moved to New York and was considered an expert on educational issues until his death in 1988.

The Stockbridge School closed in 1976, largely due to difficult demographic and economic developments in the 1970s. Declining student numbers threatened many boarding schools in the New England states, their often elitist reputation no longer worked, the costs they had to raise seemed too high, and there were no donations for scholarship funds. James Cass, citing Benjamin Barber, addresses the fact that beyond these demographic and economic reasons there could have been deeper social causes that brought about the end of the Stockbridge School :

“Benajamin Barber a 1956 graduate who, after college and graduate school, remained close to Hans and the school and served for many years as vice chairman of the Board of Trustees until the school closed, does not grieve for the passing of Stockbridge. 'As a political scientist looking at institutional history,' he says today, 'I believe that special mission institutions, which is what Stockbridge was, have a natural life cycle. I don't believe they can, by definition, be made permanent, be institutionalized. If the ideas on which they are based are of a critical nature, if they challenge society, as Stockbridge did, then they have a natural life span. If a special mission institution attempts to prolong its life cycle, it loses its vitality, its creativity , its sense of purpose. Stockbridge challenged American education successfully for 20 years, until the rest of society caught up with it. It had an influence in secondary school circles out of all proportion to its size. Then its mission was over. That ultimately is the story of Stockbridge. During those years it mattered. The challenge it presented to American education was terribly important. By the 1970's it was no longer needed. Society had caught up with it. Hans had been proven right, his vision had been vindicated. '”

According to this assessment, the school had achieved the goals it had sponsored when it was founded; it had become mainstream and was therefore no longer needed. Nonetheless, it can also be remembered as “a further development of the free school community under American conditions. American founder optimism mobilized a pioneering spirit and a thirst for adventure to change social conditions. They consciously wanted to offer alternatives, a new human being. "

Well-known graduates

Arlo Guthrie: Photograph by John Kloepper, Guthrie Family Tour, Socorro NM, 2MAY07

The best-known Stockbridge graduate is Arlo Guthrie , whose arrest for a bagatelle in 1965 inspired the song Alice's Restaurant Massacree . Alice Brock, the title-giving restaurant owner for the song and the film Alice's Restaurant based on it , had previously been the Stockbridge School's school librarian . Other well-known Stockbridge alumni include Chevy Chase and Benjamin Barber , as well as Gunter Nabel, who studied his former school in depth.

literature

  • Gunter Nabel: Realization of human rights - educational goal and way of life: Hans Maeder and the Stockbridge School. Frankfurt / Main: dipa 1985, ISBN 3-7638-0507-9 .
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Education in exile after 1933. Education for survival. Pictures of an exhibition. dipa publishing house, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, ISBN 3-7638-0520-6 .
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Hrsg.): Schools in exile. The repressed pedagogy after 1933. rororo, Reinbek, 1983, ISBN 3-499-17789-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Global Thinker Benjamin Barber's Ideas on Capitalism and Conflict No Longer Seem So Academic. ( Memento of the original from July 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Washington Post, November 6, 2001.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.benjaminbarber.com
  2. ^ Berta Rantz: Her life and legacy. In: Teacher Education Quarterly, 2001.
  3. Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Ed.): Schools in Exile. P. 202
  4. a b c Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Ed.): Schools in Exile. P. 204.
  5. ^ Children Are The Same Everywhere. ( Memento of the original from July 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / stockbridgeschool.org
  6. ^ The bankruptcy of the Walden School in 1987
  7. Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pedagogy in Exile after 1933. p. 171, the school was “the first racially fully integrated boarding school in the USA”.
  8. Gunter Nabel: Realization of Human Rights. P. 72
  9. Gunter Nabel: Realization of Human Rights. P. 92
  10. Gunter Nabel: Realization of Human Rights. P. 100. After his exchange year, Nabel was also traveling as a travel companion for the “School on Wheels” in Europe and Puerto Rico and in 1964 worked as Hans Maeder's assistant at the Corcelles summer school.
  11. Gunter Nabel: Realization of Human Rights. Pp. 118-123
  12. a b Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pedagogy in Exile after 1933. P. 171.
  13. Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Ed.): Schools in Exile. P. 200.
  14. a b c Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Ed.): Schools in Exile. P. 221.
  15. Quoted from Rasjidah Franklin: Berta Rantz: Her Life and Legacy. Teacher Education Quarterly, Summer 2001 Rasjidah Franklin: Berta Rantz (PDF) No less interesting is the story of her sister Mary Schwab, with whom she gave an interview for the book by Paul Avrich: Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. Princeton University Press, New York, 1995, ISBN 0-691-03412-5 . Mary Schwab was the daughter-in-law of Michael Schwab, one of the defendants in the Haymarket trial .
  16. Gunter Nabel: Realization of Human Rights. Pp. 74-75
  17. Gunter Nabel: Realization of Human Rights. P. 75
  18. Gunter Nabel: Realization of Human Rights. P. 75. John Tishman, quoted by Nabel, was a member of the school's board of trustees throughout its existence.
  19. Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Ed.): Schools in Exile. P. 201. That very private reasons also played a role in this step is made clear by James Cass in his introduction to Gunter Nabel's book: "Hans retired in the spring of 1971 to care for his seriously ill wife." But also he states: "The driving force behind the school was gone." Quoted from: The Stockbridge School Web ( Memento of the original from July 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / stockbridgeschool.org
  20. Maeder, Hans Karl - In: Biographical dictionary of modern American educators. Pages 212-213.
  21. a b Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Ed.): Schools in Exile. P. 201.
  22. The Stockbridge School Web ( Memento of the original from July 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / stockbridgeschool.org
  23. Full text: Alice's Restaurant Massacree