Herman Nohl (full name: Herman Julius Nohl; 1879–1960) was a German philosopher and pedagogue. Informed by his time serving in WWI and witnessing the German youth movement he devoted himself to furthering the development of popular education, helping to establish a democratic folk high school in Thuringia in 1919.
Nohl subsequently became one of the best-known representatives of both reform and humanities pedagogy, working on the foundations of social pedagogy as well as on establishing pedagogy as an independent science. He was Professor of Education at the University of Göttingen, co-editor of the journal Die Erziehung, and founder and editor of the journal Die Sammlung. He wrote several works on aesthetics, educational anthropology, and pedagogy, with "Die Pädagogische Bewegung in Deutschland und ihre Theorie" being considered his main pedagogical work.
Early life
Family Nohl was born into a middle-class family on October 7, 1879 in Berlin, Germany. His father Hermann Nohl was a grammar school teacher and the young Nohl lived in an apartment on the grounds of the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster throughout his childhood and youth. His mother Gabriele Nohl (née Doepke) died in 1882 when Nohl was three years old and his father later remarried, giving Nohl a total of four siblings: JohannesSiehe dazu besonders: Peter Dudek: Ein Leben im Schatten. Johannes und Hermann Nohl – zwei deutsche Karrieren im Kontrast. and Ella from his father's first marriage, and Lotte and Hilde from his father's second marriage to Elise (née Simon).
Education Nohl studied medicine in Berlin in the summer semester of 1898 but switched to the Geisteswissenschaften in the winter semester of that year, studying history, philosophy, and German language and literature with Friedrich Paulsen, among others. Paulsen offered Nohl the opportunity to go to Davos as a teacher when his studies finished but Nohl had made contact with Wilhelm Dilthey in 1901 and had established a firm working relationship with him. In 1902 Nohl decided to write a dissertation on Socrates, and on Dilthey's and Paulsen's recommendations he was granted the Jüngken-scholarship, which made him financially independent. In August 1904 Nohl completed his dissertation entitled Socrates and Ethics (Sokrates und die Ethik), a compilation and arrangement of Hegel's Theologischen Jugendschriften nach den Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek in Berlin which was printed in 1907.
In 1905 Nohl married the pianist Bertha Oser from Vienna. Bertha was a pupil of Clara Schumann and a cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the marriage ensured Nohl's continued financial independence.
Following Dilthey recommending Nohl to Rudolf Eucken the family moved to Jena in the fall of 1907, where Nohl stayed until the beginning of World War I. He completed various academic works there, including his thesis on Die Weltanschauungen der Malerei which he finished in 1908.
German youth movement During his time in Jena Nohl came into contact with the German youth movement since some of his students were active in it. He became friends with Eugen Diederichs and acquainted with Gustav Wyneken's Landerziehungsheim in Wickersdorf, and these early experiences were important for the development of his pedagogy,Vgl. Blickenstorfer: Pädagogik in der Krise. S. 27. as he described in a chapter of his book Die pädagogische Bewegung in Deutschland und ihre Theorie, published in 1935.
Nohl saw the youth movement as changing the relationship between pedagogy and the generations, and as having an educational effect in itself. He saw it as part of a "German movement" that had lasted over 150 years including the Sturm und Drang and Romantic periods, a recurring epoch "in which the young forces of our people struggled for a new content in life".Nohl: Die pädagogische Bewegung in Deutschland und ihre Theorie. S. 12. He saw the movement as seeking, "the new unity of a higher spiritual life, which ultimately takes root in the metaphysical foundation of our existence [...] and revives the dead forms of culture and reshapes them from within". He saw parallels between the young Herder, the young Goethe, and the youth movement, such as "the feeling of the obsolescence of the previous generation, the demand for a new youth, [with] nature, art, and religion as the three liberating powers, a new humanity that cannot be separated from an original German nationality, in which at the same time the contrasts between the classes and denominations that tear Germany apart are abolished". Nohl cited "the intrinsic importance of being young [...], the focus on the present and future [...] and, most importantly, a new belief in the nature of man" as the main characteristics of the movement. He was a nature-loving person, which fitted in with the ideals of the youth movement, and his own children were active in the Wandervogel, regularly going on hiking trips.
Nohl developed his first thoughts on a specifically educational relationship as early as 1914 in the essay Das Verhältnis der Generationen in der Pädagogik ("The Relationship of Generations in Pedagogy"), which is understood as a response to the youth movement's claim that young people could organise and lead themselves.Giesecke: Die pädagogische Beziehung. Pädagogische Professionalität und die Emanzipation des Kindes. S. 220. For Nohl an educationally relevant relationship between the generations remained necessary, despite the right of the child and adolescent to their own rights. As he put it, "The actual basis of pedagogical work lies in the relationship between the two generations, because it is not what it teaches, but precisely this real relationship itself that is its deepest content and its ultimate condition".Nohl: Pädagogische Aufsätze. S. 112.
World War I and after Nohl was conscripted into the army in the summer of 1915 as a Landsturm and stationed in a barracks in Weimar. He spent the war as part of the occupying army in Ghent, where he was mainly assigned administrative tasks due to a knee injury and his short-sightedness. His conviction of the war's legitimacy and his initial enthusiasm for it changed over the course of the war and after the death of several friends. He realised how senseless and contradictory the war was when he met up with Belgian friends at the same time as soldiers from Germany and Belgium were killing each other on the Western Front.
Nohl returned to Jena in November 1918, devoting himself to popular education and becoming a founding member of the democratic folk high school in Thuringia in 1919. At the instigation of his friend Georg Misch, Nohl succeeded him in the summer of 1919 in an extraordinary chair for practical philosophy with a special focus on education at the University of Göttingen, and on May 8, 1922 he became a full professor of education. He would remain in Göttingen, developing his theories of pedagogy, until his forced dismissal from the civil service in 1937.
Nohl joined the Social Work Guild founded by his student Curt Bondy in 1925 and together with Aloys Fischer, Wilhelm Flitner, Theodor Litt, and Eduard Spranger (whom he had met at boarding school) they founded the journal Die Erziehung: Monatsschrift für den Zusammenhang von Kultur und Erziehung in Wissenschaft und Leben, which championed a humanities-oriented pedagogy. Nohl was involved in the reform of the pedagogical academies in Prussia in 1926, and starting in 1928 he and Ludwig Pallat published the five-volume Handbuch der Pädagogik. In 1929 Nohl sought a connection to actual educational practice by founding a home in Lippoldsberg affiliated to the pedagogical seminar in Göttingen, where he held didactic courses for teachers in pedagogical seminars and combined theoretical knowledge with pedagogical practice.
In 1931 Nohl presented a plan for a "national educational organisation within the framework of aid to the East". Further lectures from 1931 and 1932 emphasised the national aspect of education and were published in 1933 as Landbewegung, Osthilfe und die Aufgabe der Pädagogik. Aspects of his pedagogy
"Educational reality" Nohl's pedagogy was oriented towards the totality of pedagogical phenomena, and based on the concepts of the customer ("Kunde") and pre-scientific knowledge ("vorwissenschaftlichen Wissens"). Accordingly, education represents a reality of life that has always existed and the practice of education is therefore older than scientific reflection on it and thus has its own value. The experience of education ("Erziehungserfahrung") is the result of a possibly unconscious, but in each case very specific question.
As a result of his intervention in the discussions surrounding the school reform of 1927, Nohl formulated the postulate of the "relative autonomy" of education as a demarcation from political claims to power. Accordingly, education is primarily derived from the reality of education, which served Nohl as the starting point for a universally valid theory of education.Karl-Christoph Lingelbach: Erziehung und Erziehungstheorien im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main 1987, S. 34 f. He argued that Dilthey's concept of education as a "planned activity through which adults seek to educate the souls of adolescents"Zit. nach Uhle: Wilhelm Dithey. S. 69. should be understood, for according to Nohl, the reason for the autonomy of pedagogy lay in the "fact of educational reality as a meaningful whole". The pedagogical idea determines the meaning of that reality, and this also determines the independence of education and its boundary to other areas of society.Nohl: Die pädagogische Bewegung in Deutschland und ihre Theorie. S. 119. Pedagogy should therefore assess economic, religious, or political interests from its own point of view, rejecting them if necessary rather than subordinating itself to these interests.
"Pedagogical reference" Nohl first used the term "pedagogical reference" in his Sozialpädagogischen Vorträgen lectures on social pedagogy in 1924 and 1925. In his 1924 lecture Die Pädagogik der Verwahrlosten ("The Pedagogy of the Neglected") he named pedagogical reference as a possible cause of neglect, alongside disposition and milieu.Vgl. Nohl: Jugendwohlfahrt. Sozialpädagogische Vorträge. S. 102. In 1925, he called for an unconditional soul connection with the young person in the period of maturity:He saw the acquisition of a pedagogical reference as the prerequisite for a pedagogical relationship in general.Vgl. Colla et al.: Handbuch Heimerziehung und Pflegekinderwesen in Europa. S. 347f. According to Nohl, the relationship between pupil and educator was a community in which both were dependent on each other:As with Dilthey, for Nohl the relationship between an adult and a younger person formed the basis for educational action. In this way, education is no longer conceived only in asymmetrical relationships but also as a personal choice based on sympathy. According to Nohl, the starting point of education was not the demands of society but the sensitivities and learning needs of the adolescent himself. The starting point should be the difficulties that the child has and not those that the child makes for the educator or the parents.Vgl. Colla et al.: Handbuch Heimerziehung und Pflegekinderwesen in Europa. S. 348. The educator should step out of his role as a purely professional interested party and fill his task with passion (Leidenschaft):From this Nohl derived the following points which he considered decisive for the pedagogical reference:
The relationship has an emotional component (passion); The pedagogical reference is fundamentally based on different levels of development, which requires maturity from the educator (relationship of a mature person to a developing person); and Educational action is not derived from external goals and purposes but is primarily oriented towards the pupil (for his or her own sake).