Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: the natural history of a social problem
- 2 Young laborers in the population, labor force, and industrial law: structural preconditions of the youth salvation campaign
- 3 Youth savers and youth salvation: the image of young workers and institutional reform
- 4 Vocation and civics: the continuation school in practice
- 5 Beleaguered churches: Protestant and Catholic youth work
- 6 The Socialist youth movement
- 7 Youth cultivation: the centralization and militarization of youth salvation
- 8 Preparing for motherhood: the inclusion of young working women in youth cultivation
- 9 Youth cultivation and young workers in war
- Epilogue and conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Vocation and civics: the continuation school in practice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: the natural history of a social problem
- 2 Young laborers in the population, labor force, and industrial law: structural preconditions of the youth salvation campaign
- 3 Youth savers and youth salvation: the image of young workers and institutional reform
- 4 Vocation and civics: the continuation school in practice
- 5 Beleaguered churches: Protestant and Catholic youth work
- 6 The Socialist youth movement
- 7 Youth cultivation: the centralization and militarization of youth salvation
- 8 Preparing for motherhood: the inclusion of young working women in youth cultivation
- 9 Youth cultivation and young workers in war
- Epilogue and conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As Georg Kerschensteiner, Oskar Pache, and the other youth reformers had advocated after the turn of the century, mandatory industrial continuation schools became the paramount municipally sponsored socializing agencies for young urban working-class males who had completed elementary school and entered the labor force. Although playing down the controversy these schools generated in Germany, in 1907 M. E. Sadler, an English historian of education in Manchester, concisely summarized the combination of concerns about national competitiveness and moral policing, of urban anxieties and schemes for reasserting discipline that inspired the decisive transformation of these schools:
The view that technical training following upon a good general education has become indispensable to the industrial and commercial success of a nation commands the unreserved assent of the German people.… And therefore as soon as it was realized that modern conditions of industry and commerce threatened to deprive young people of the educational care that was previously provided through apprenticeship, the idea of compulsory attendance at suitable continuation schools rapidly grew in favour among the workpeople and, though more slowly, among the mass of employers also. But it was not to economic interests alone that the growth of this opinion was due. Moral considerations supported it. Fears were felt that the moral welfare of the nation would suffer if no measures were taken to counteract the deteriorating influences of town and city life during the first years of a youth's freedom from the discipline of day school life.
Although it was only around 1900 that mandatory industrial continuation schools spread throughout Germany, they had a long prehistory, and their legal foundation had been laid during the early years of the Reich.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- 'Who Has the Youth, Has the Future'The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany, pp. 73 - 97Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991