TY - JOUR

T1 - Celestin Freinet’s printing press

T2 - Lessons of a ‘bourgeois’ educator

AU - Carlin, Matthew

AU - Clendenin, Nathan

PY - 2019/5/12

Y1 - 2019/5/12

N2 - This article seeks to provide a new reading of the work of Celestin Freinet and his use of the printing press. Specifically, this article aligns Freinet’s approach to teaching and learning with a counter-reformation in pedagogical thought-an approach that places him both within and outside of the ‘progressive’ turn in education that began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Freinet’s pedagogical experiment in rural France during mid-twentieth century demonstrated the way that student freedom, uninhibited by overarching ideological pre-emption, and unbound from the progressive imperatives typical of reform education in either its Marxist or liberal variants, can be utilized as a way to inspire pedagogical techniques founded on alternative social, political, and anthropological postulates. Specifically, the authors demonstrate how Freinet’s use of the press helps us to think about the following: 1) a different relationship to technology and the role it could play in the conception of the common within the classroom; 2) the creation of an existential good as opposed to the private good discovered through the amassing of property and the advancement of the related notion of progress; 3) and a reaffirmation of the possibility of a genuine workers education.

AB - This article seeks to provide a new reading of the work of Celestin Freinet and his use of the printing press. Specifically, this article aligns Freinet’s approach to teaching and learning with a counter-reformation in pedagogical thought-an approach that places him both within and outside of the ‘progressive’ turn in education that began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Freinet’s pedagogical experiment in rural France during mid-twentieth century demonstrated the way that student freedom, uninhibited by overarching ideological pre-emption, and unbound from the progressive imperatives typical of reform education in either its Marxist or liberal variants, can be utilized as a way to inspire pedagogical techniques founded on alternative social, political, and anthropological postulates. Specifically, the authors demonstrate how Freinet’s use of the press helps us to think about the following: 1) a different relationship to technology and the role it could play in the conception of the common within the classroom; 2) the creation of an existential good as opposed to the private good discovered through the amassing of property and the advancement of the related notion of progress; 3) and a reaffirmation of the possibility of a genuine workers education.

KW - Celestin Freinet

KW - reform education

KW - technology

KW - work

KW - Educational science

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85053936416&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/00131857.2018.1498334

DO - 10.1080/00131857.2018.1498334

M3 - Journal articles

AN - SCOPUS:85053936416

VL - 51

SP - 628

EP - 639

JO - Educational Philosophy and Theory

JF - Educational Philosophy and Theory

SN - 0013-1857

IS - 6

ER -