103 WCD as a (W(H)olistic Response 2 towards a more integrative and synthetic approach to the student was present. Scheuerl (1997) described the international movement of Reform pedagogy as a collective name for a series of distinct, partly competing pedagogic renewal efforts that developed in the 19th century and had its heyday following the start of the 20th century. He perceived the movement as a very broad one, reaching from the Scandinavian countries in the north to Italy in the south, and from Russia in the east to the United States in the west. However, Scheuerl (1997) placed the movement’s centre of gravity in Germany, especially the Weimar Republic, the breeding ground of Pietism and several smaller internalisation movements that, as ‘Stillen im Lande’, sought their way out of the endless dogmatic disputes of orthodoxy by concentrating on a ‘gottseliges Leben’ (p. 188). As a central feature of the Reform pedagogy, Scheuerl (1997) mentioned the longing to return to a more human-friendly approach in schools, situating the student and his or her autonomous development as the centre of attention, instead of standardised programmes that can only lead to ‘Seelenmorde’. After considering the Renaissance and Humanism, as well as ‘Reformdidaktiker’ such as Ratichius, Comenius, Rousseau and Pestalozzi, as historic precursors of Reform pedagogy, Scheuerl (1997) began with Maria Montessori (1870–1952) and her focus on freedom and the own nature of the child. From Russia, he mentioned the poet Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910); from Ukraine, Anton Semjonovic Makarenko (1888–1939). From the United States, John Dewey (1859–1952) and his pragmatism were mentioned, as were William Heard Kilpatrick (1871– 1965) and Helen Parkhurst (1887–1959)—the latter being known for the Dalton schools. From France, Adolphe Ferriѐre (1879–1960), while from Austria, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), with the latter being considered the father of the free Waldorf schools. In the heart of the Weimar Republic, Scheuerl (1997) considered the origin of Peter Petersen’s (1884–1952) Jena Plan schools to be found. The emphasis in Reform pedagogy is on the creative nature of the child, on the unity of the head, heart and hands, on freedom and on a certain wholeness connected to holism (Byram & Hu, 2013). The intention of the Reform pedagogy was to bring fundamental change to a school system highly influenced by the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, which focused on learning content and treated students like products in need of aggregated economic value. The connection between the ASCD’s (2007) whole child approach and holism in the early stages of the 21st century seems no less than logical. The matrix (Appendix 1) shows that Nel Noddings had, in 2005, already referred to it as ‘holistic treatment’. At a more fundamental level, Sam Crowell and David Reid-
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