Johannes Kühnel (pedagogue)

Ernst Paul Johannes Kühnel (born July 2, 1869 in Dresden ; † October 12, 1928 in Graefelfing near Munich ) was a German reform pedagogue, elementary school teacher and mathematics didactic.

Arithmetic lessons in 1st grade, source: Federal Archives

Life

As the child of a painter (craft), Johannes Kühnel only attended elementary school , but graduated after 8 years with such good grades that he (at the age of 14) was able to start training as a teacher at the teachers' seminar in Dresden and Pirna , which he did In 1889 with the school authority candidate examination (comparable to the 1st state examination) and in 1891 with the second elementary school teacher examination, which ended the electoral examination (comparable to the 2nd state examination).

Just one year after his teacher examination, he began to work alongside school lessons in teacher training: from 1892 in Borna , from 1896 in Bautzen , from 1907 until his early retirement in 1925 at the Royal Teachers' College in Leipzig. He wrote articles for the magazines "Saxon School Newspaper ", " General German Teacher Newspaper ", "Monthly Issues of the Comenius Society" and " Journal for Educational Psychology ". In 1890 he took a course in drawing at the Dresden Art College and completed it with a specialist teacher examination in drawing. In 1890/1 he was enrolled as a guest student at the Technical University of Dresden and also attended courses in art history , psychology and education . In 1893 he passed the technical teacher examination. In 1909 he passed the pedagogical examination , comparable to a qualification for a higher teaching post.

From 1907 (summer semester) to 1910/11 (winter semester) he studied at the University of Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt and his student Ernst Meumann , who was the first examiner of his dissertation ("Comenius and the Object Lessons", Kühnel 1911). In 1921 he took a six-month leave of absence to devote himself to promoting the idea of ​​working schools . He went on a lecture tour and gave 152 lectures in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He hoped in vain to be appointed head of the Pedagogical Institute at the University of Leipzig. In 1925 he retired into private life and devoted himself to writing. In 1928 he died after two strokes.

School reformer

Kühnel sharply criticized the existing school system , in particular the relentless discipline that subjects produce and the promotion of an inactive, obedient attitude that kills learning, for example by specifying the direction of thinking through closely guiding questions and then reproducing it exactly Rate given highest. Kühnel's criticism was very clear. In addition to the design of the lessons, he named three areas in which institutional conditions prevailed, which resulted in the stagnation of school development . Firstly, the real experts in education and instruction, namely parents and teachers, were excluded as responsible partners for the organization of schools and lessons. Second, the entire prevented control and paternalism by a variety of official instructions , the independent and responsible action by teachers. Thirdly, any joint further training between teachers was prevented because observations were reserved for the school inspectorate. Kühnel wanted to change these criticized points and developed perspectives that are still relevant today.

The old school	The new school
Product subject	Education goal citizen
The substance principle	The psychological principle
Passivist basic position	Basic activist position
The word school	The adventure school
Lack of science	Scientification

Comparison: Selter 1997

Kühnel wanted parents and teachers to work as partners in the school system. He strived for teachers to act independently, stress-free and autonomously in teaching and education. He wished teachers to visit each other in class in a friendly atmosphere so that they can develop further. He recommended values ​​such as friendship, autonomy for everyone and the common, positive design of the community, as well as the respect for other truths because nobody knows the truth.

Kühnel came to the teacher for the scientific orientation reform of teaching and school one. Together with others, he successfully advocated academic teacher training . Saxony set up a pedagogical institute at the University of Leipzig after the government decided in 1923 to 'academise primary school teacher training'. Kühnel hoped for the support of 'observational and experimental psychology ' for the reform and assumed that their research results would enable 'an exact analysis of educational and teaching methods'.

Kühnel referred in his writings in particular to four previous reform pedagogues Johann Amos Comenius , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi , and Friedrich Froebel . He found confirmation of his views in the work of his contemporaries Georg Kerschensteiner and Hugo Gaudig .

Education reformer

Kühnel, who regarded the study of history as a prerequisite for reform activities, described Comenius as a "theoretician of sensual perception in the classroom", as a "practitioner of vivid classroom speech" and as a "prophet of contemporary object teaching". Comenius' work is the result of his personal creativity, the systematic aspect of it is due to his time. Kühnel used the word intuition to describe all-round sensory activity .

First class arithmetic lessons

Kühnel stated that the numeracy skills of the best school leavers and adult laypeople were "pathetic". “School men” and “school authorities” tended to attribute this to the lack of diligence or attention of the students. He attributed this to a number of erroneous assumptions that were fundamental to arithmetic lessons common in his day. There was a lack of knowledge of how children develop number and order concepts; intuition is lacking in class; it is abstracted and mechanized far too early . Turn arithmetic lessons into a kind of language lesson by letting students learn numbers and operations by heart instead of guiding them through suitable tasks and problems to learn independently and thus to sustainable learning successes that they can use in everyday life. As long as the arithmetic lesson is limited to practicing arithmetic skills and solving methods, the result can only be 'sad', said Kühnel.

On the other hand, he demanded that arithmetic lessons must be combined with life and experience. Only in this way can it make a cultural contribution. He formulated the idea of 'experience-related' factual arithmetic as follows:

Our arithmetic lessons must be factual. Our teaching must be mathematical.

In the first place of his new building for arithmetic lessons , he set the task of developing the child's strength, which is essential for dealing mathematically with reality in everyday life. This requires visualization in class. I.e. Numbers and operations must be learned through connection with concrete things and situations. This is the only way to develop ideas that enable students to transfer what they have learned in school to new situations in life. This is the cultural contribution of each individual. The vivid learning has to be "repeated" very often "all-round", ie with all the senses, whereby the sense of touch has priority, and on the most varied of things, until numerical notions and operations become familiar. For this purpose, the students need the “scheduled” instructions from the teacher, which should enable them to experience the appropriate things.

Kühnel wrote in 1916 that his demands did not demand a revolution, but only a changed inner attitude . He wanted to stimulate the matter and ask his “colleagues” from all types of schools to “try out his proposals in practice”.

Topicality

Since the 102nd congress in Mainz in 2011, the MNU ( German Association for the Promotion of Mathematical and Scientific Teaching ) has been awarding the Johannes Kühnel Prize for the promotion of early mathematics lessons. The Johannes Kühnel Prize is donated by Ernst Klett Verlag .

His publications had already been received with approval as early as 1916. After the Second World War, Kühnel's new building for arithmetic classes became the standard work for teacher training and in German schools. Calculation methodology and curricula were shaped by Kühnel's ideas.

Only through saturation of perception does the child mature into abstraction. or perception is half the teacher's life.

were phrases often used among teachers. With the changes in the school curricula in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century and due to the mathematization in elementary school didactics, new standards became effective and Kühnel was forgotten.

Works

• Teaching samples from object lessons with methodological justification. Klinkhardt, Leipzig 1899, reissued in 1923 under the title Modern Object Lessons.
• The home in the change of the year. Meinhold, Dresden 1903.
• Modern object lesson. Klinkhardt, Leipzig 1907 a. 1910.
• New edition of Comenius' Orbus pictus. Klinkhardt, Leipzig 1910.
• Comenius and Object Lessons. Dissertation. Klinkhardt, Leipzig 1911.
• Technical preliminary course. Leipzig 1912.
• Handicraft lessons from the point of view of educators. Leipzig 1915.
• Thoughts on teacher education. A reply. Leipzig 1920.
• Teacher training at the university. Dresden 1923.
• The old school. A book about the German essence and about peace in the world. Leipzig 1924.
• Technical education. Leipzig 1927.
• Four lectures on modern arithmetic instruction. Klinkhardt, Leipzig 1922. (Eugen Koller (Hrsg.): Lively arithmetic instruction. 6th edition. Ehrenwirth, Munich 1949)
• New building of the arithmetic lesson. A handbook of pedagogy for a special field. Klinkhardt, Leipzig 1916. (Eugen Koller (Ed.): 10th edition. Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn / Upper Bavaria 1959)

literature

• Bertold Eckstein: With 10 fingers to understand numbers: Optimal support for 4- to 8-year-olds. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, p. 27f.
• Günter Graumann: Mathematics lessons in elementary school. Julius Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2002, pp. 20-22.
• Gilbert Greefrath, Friedhelm Padberg: Didactics of factual arithmetic in the secondary level. Springer, Wiesbaden 2010, p. 28f.
• Christoph Selter: School pedagogy and subject didactics: On the topicality of the work of Johannes Kühnel (1869–1928) . (= Dortmund contributions to pedagogy. Volume 21). University Press Dr. N. Brockmeyer, Bochum 1997.
• Uwe Sandfuchs: Johannes Kühnel (1869–1928). A seminar and reform pedagogue as a Klinkhardt author. In: Uwe Sandfuchs, Uwe, Jörg-W. Link, Andreas Klinkhardt (Ed.): Verlag Julius Klinkhardt 1834–2009. Publishing activity between education, politics and economics. Bad Heilbrunn 2009, pp. 57–80. (Digital publication, accessed September 2014)
• Siegbert Schmidt: The didactics of arithmetic by Johannes Kühnel (1869–1928): Understanding of science, descriptive and normative foundations as well as their meaning for the proposals for the design of elementary arithmetic lessons . Dissertation . Cologne 1978. (summary)
• Martin Schneeberger: Understanding and solving mathematical word problems in dialogue. Waxmann Verlag, Münster 2009, p. 51.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the old school. Pp. 15-31.
2. ↑ See the old school. Pp. 145-150.
3. ↑ Cf. Carsten Heinze : The pedagogy at the University of Leipzig in the time of National Socialism. Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2001, p. 18.
4. ↑ Cf. Comenius and Object Lessons. Dissertation . Klinkhardt, Leipzig 1911, foreword and pages 8, 59.
5. ↑ 'z. For example, seasoned foremen do not know that mixed fractions can be added up and teachers assume that girls are stupid because they cannot do the math. ' See lively arithmetic lessons. P. 5.
6. ↑ New building of arithmetic lessons. P. 13f and 66-69.
7. ↑ Lively arithmetic lessons. P. 7.
8. ↑ Lively arithmetic lessons. Pp. 15-17.
9. ↑ See new building for arithmetic lessons. Pp. 8-10.
10. ↑ Eugen Koller in his foreword to Kühnel's new building for arithmetic lessons. Pp. 5-7.
11. ↑ Martin Schneeberger: Understanding and solving mathematical word problems in dialogue. Waxmann Verlag, Münster 2009, p. 51.

Web links

• mnu.de
• wilfriedmetze.de