Otto Koch (pedagogue)

Otto Koch (born May 28, 1886 in Thionville , then Diedenhofen (Lorraine), † September 19, 1972 in Meinerzhagen ) was a German reform pedagogue .

Life

Otto Koch was born in the Lorraine town of Thionville , then Diedenhofen, as the son of a lawyer in the Prussian military justice service. After attending school in Strasbourg and Karlsruhe, Koch studied English, German and theology at various universities from 1904. In 1909 he received his doctorate as Dr. phil. at the University of Greifswald . There he also completed his state examination for higher teaching post in 1911. After his legal clerkship at the Reform Realgymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, he worked at the Oberrealschule with Reformrealgymnasium in Berlin-Zehlendorf, first as an assistant teacher and then as a senior teacher . In 1918 Koch joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany and founded a young social teacher community in Berlin-Zehlendorf together with like-minded people. In 1919 he was one of the founding members of the Association of Decided School Reformers . From 1919 to 1921 he worked as a technical assistant at the provincial school college in Hanover and then for seven years as senior studies director at grammar schools in Hildesheim and Hanover. From 1928 he served as a high school councilor at the provincial school colleges in Magdeburg and Brandenburg-Berlin. In April 1933 Koch was forcibly taken off duty by the Nazis. It was not until September 1945 that he was able to resume his educational work at the Protestant home folk high school in Wislade near Lüdenscheid. After his appointment as a high school supervisor to the provincial school college in Münster, he worked from 1946, initially as deputy cultural advisor in the provincial government and until 1951 as ministerial director in the newly founded state of North Rhine-Westphalia .

Koch's reformist and school-political work as a teacher, school principal and cultural officer aimed at the democratization and humanization of German society. In terms of social reforms, his efforts served to overcome the educational misery he himself experienced in school and family. The physical punishments and psychological cruelties he suffered (lashes with a stick and other punitive measures such as dark arrest) had a lasting impact on Koch's thoughts and actions. His draft reforms, which he also represented as a member of the Schwelmer Circle initiated by Fritz Helling and Paul Oestreich , he made public through numerous articles in specialist journals. However, due to strong conservative opposing forces, the concrete implementation of these draft reforms was only successful in a few cases. The numerous negative experiences that Koch had to gain in the course of his professional activity are evidence of how difficult it was for reform pedagogues in Germany to successfully implement school reforms, both administratively and politically.

Works

• The biblical quotations in the sermons of Berthold von Regensburg . Greifswald 1909
• Nature in Experiments - Instructions for carrying out experiments for the teacher's hand . Aulis Verlag Deubner & Co., Cologne
  • Volume I: Thermal theory (1959)
  • Volume II: Electricity (1959)
  • Volume III: Optics (1961)
  • Volume IV: Mechanics (1962)

literature

• Fritz Helling, Walther Kluthe : Ways of the school reformer Otto Koch 1912-1952: Based on autobiographical records . Schule und Nation Verlags GmbH, Schwelm in Westphalia 1962
• Klaus Himmelstein (Ed.): Otto Koch - Against the German educational misery . Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-8204-0980-7