BJSW Advance Access published online on March 12, 2008
British Journal of Social Work, doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcn025
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Paradigms and Politics: Understanding Methods Paradigms in an Historical Context: The Case of Social Pedagogy
Correspondence to Professor Walter Lorenz, Fakultät für Bildungswissenschaften/Scienze della Formazione, Freie Universität Bozen/Libera Università di Bolzano, Bahnhofstr. 16, I-39042 Brixen/Bressanone, Italy. Email: Walter.Lorenz{at}unibz.it
Walter Lorenz is professor for the sociology of cultural and communicative processes and course director of a professional social work BA at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano.
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Summary
IntroductionThis paper treats the case of social pedagogy, which is an important but widely misunderstood member of the social professions, as an example of how only by exploring the historical roots and trajectories of methods paradigms can we hope to understand their contemporary, cross-national and cross-cultural relevance. It locates the rise of social pedagogy as both a method and as a set of social policy institutions in the historical context of the development of the German nation state with its particular relationship to a corporatist, conservative model of the welfare state. This illustrates not so much a singular development under particular historical circumstances, but the intricate interrelationship between social policies and social work methods which are a feature of this profession in all societies. By analysing the dynamics of this close relationship with social policy, which gave rise to the ambiguous reputation of social work as a semi-profession, the conditions of a theoretical engagement with contemporary social policy developments can be determined with much greater clarity. This is necessary, for instance, in relation of the rising importance of social care in the UK—a development which appears as yet under-theorized. Parallels and differences to the social pedagogy paradigm can only be discerned against the background of the analysis of the respective relationship to social policy. This, in turn, underlines the necessity for professional social work, under whatever title it is practised, to critically observe and contribute to the shaping of social policies in order to regain the professional initiative.
Keywords: History of social work, social care, social pedagogy, methods, welfare regimes
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Introduction |
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Social work in Europe remains a highly complex and diverse phenomenon. Neither the increase of contacts and exchanges between course providers in the wake of the ERASMUS programmes nor the efforts of the European Union to harmonize this professional group, which still causes notorious problems concerning the equivalence of qualifications, or the pressures of the Bologna Process have resulted in the standardization of titles, curricula and methods. On the contrary, new titles and branches are emerging and the boundaries to other professions become more permeable instead of being more rigidly defined (Lyons and Lawrence, 2006). All this is happening despite the notable strengthening of the academic grounding of the group of the ‘social professions’, as the field can loosely be referred to collectively in Europe. There has been a drive to consolidate its training courses and structures at university level, with opportunities being created for postgraduate studies. Ph.D. studies are now possible within the actual confines of the respective disciplines of the social professions themselves and Ph.D. candidates are under less pressure to obtain their doctorates in ‘bordering disciplines’ such as psychology or sociology. A consortium of European universities is developing the first European module for inclusion on doctoral programmes across countries (Otto and Abeling, 2007). Research projects within the social profession disciplines compete successfully with those from other disciplines for research grants from prestigious national and European funding agencies (Lyons and Lawrence, 2006). And, yet, it has to be asked whether these introspective academic developments can consolidate the identity of the social work family of professions or whether more attention has to be paid to external processes influencing identity formation—factors that lie outside the control of the traditional instruments of professional self-definition. The social professions are particularly susceptible to social policy influences, which, while not determining the shape and direction of training, create a context that is often regarded as constraining but that, in reality, represents an inalienable part of the identity-shaping and purpose-defining process of this profession.
It will be argued that historical reflections on the nature and development of this relationship are a means of regaining a sense of professional initiative and political commitment, given current social and political conditions in Europe. The necessity to do this will be illustrated through historical reflections on the relationship between the emergence of social pedagogy and key moments in the history of social politics in Germany. These historical and conceptual developments can serve not only to promote a better understanding of social pedagogy as a method which is now being taken up with greater interest in the UK, particularly in relation to residential childcare (cf. Petrie et al., 2006). They can also provide a historical paradigm for the complex relationship between methods and their socio-political context. Methods cannot be transferred simply from one context to another and newly emerging methodological paradigms, such as that of social care in the UK (which appears to have affinities to social pedagogy), need to be examined carefully as to their political significance in different historical contexts and not just their practical use. The validity of a method cannot be determined just in terms of its potential for intervention, but needs to be evaluated also in relation to the social policy messages and functions it transmits implicitly or explicitly. Teasing out the contents–context relationship of methods in specific historical contexts from a comparative perspective is an invaluable tool for the context-specific critical examination of methods in general, as this promotes more comprehensive, person-in-context-oriented forms of intervention. Historical reflection in this sense becomes an immensely practical tool for social work (Lorenz, 2007).
The paradigm of social care in contemporary British social work requires exactly this kind of examination. For non-UK-based observers, it poses a number of questions. Does the term refer to a field of practice which encompasses social work as its ‘professional arm’ (Higham, 2005), without implying a clear distinction in methods, or does it signal the emergence of a parallel professional field of practice characterized by its own methodology, akin to social pedagogy (Hughes, 2002) and hence possibly in competition with social work? Does the demise of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) and its replacement by General Social Care Councils across the UK signify a change at the level of methodological orientation or reflect a political down-grading of social work? A statement issued by ‘Prospects’ (the UK's official graduate careers website) states ‘You could say that social care encompasses virtually any occupation that helps people overcome obstacles in their life, with the exception of those that require a detailed understanding of the physical sciences’. It goes on to say, ‘For statistical purposes, the sector tends to be slightly more narrowly defined as social work (itself increasingly regarded as the assessment of care needs and commissioning of provision) and includes what might be regarded as personal care functions, including some educational and community-based healthcare roles’ (Prospects: www.prospects.ac.uk/cms/ShowPage/Home_page/Explore_job_sectors/Social_care/as_it_is/p!eXfeac (accessed 17 November 2007)). The relationship between social work and social care in the UK has so far been subjected to little in the way of systematic conceptual scrutiny, despite the increased use of the term ‘social care’ in conjunction with social work. Scholars tend to use it either as a collective term for the field of social services (‘social work and social care’) (e.g. Ferguson, 2003) or as a way of distinguishing social work from a health sector that progressively extends to non-medical services (‘health and social care’) (e.g. Long et al., 2006). An analysis that would clarify its relationship with social work from a theoretical perspective, in analogy to those studies which gave, for instance, community work its professional identity, is not yet discernible. The danger is that, in the absence of such theoretical reflections, social policy pressures will, de facto, determine the direction of future methodological developments and compound the reductionism implied in the above quote. The following historical reflections on the conceptual complex of social pedagogy in the German context are meant not as a comparative study as such, but as a stimulus for such an interrogation of social care.
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Development of the social professions in Europe |
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The social professions in Europe overall have their origins in the fundamental transformation processes that confronted societies with the advent of industrialization and the political revolutions that replaced feudalism with political systems based on democratic procedures. The ensuing social changes threatened to bring about a state of almost total uncertainty, best exemplified by the French Revolution of 1789, which was widely regarded as heralding the destruction not only of an old political, but also of an obsolete social order without being able to institute a legitimate new order that could command widespread consent. The ambiguity of those political events, which spelled at once freedom and emancipation as well as terror and oppression, found its equivalent in economic processes, with capitalism creating opportunities for unprecedented wealth and, at the same time, bringing abject poverty and exploitation in the course of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the changes amounted to a fundamental paradigm shift in the way integration and solidarity were understood. In this regard, Durkheim's (1984) analysis has lasting relevance when he speaks of the replacement of mechanical by organic solidarity, meaning that, in pre-modern societies, social bonds were accepted as given, whereas, in modern societies, bonds have to be created, maintained and legitimated. The state in the form of the nation state consequently assumed the role of having to organize social order rather than simply representing it, although the way in which the state should tackle this task became the subject of deep political divisions on party lines in Europe (Baldwin, 1999).
The integration of increasingly complex, capitalist, industrialized and at least rudimentarily democratic societies represented at once a political, a cultural and an intellectual-technical challenge. The frame of reference within which these efforts were organized was provided by the nascent European nation states within which distinct political, cultural and intellectual traditions began to crystallize, notwithstanding the obvious cross-national exchanges (Mommsen, 1990). The basic orientation of these political cultures, which fermented in the transition between traditional and modern societies, placed primary organization responsibility for social integration either on the individual in the liberal tradition, upholding the value of freedom, or on the state in the social democratic tradition, with an emphasis on equality and rights, or on civil society in the tradition of conservative corporatism, organized around notions of cultural identities and moral obligations. In any case, the nation state provided the organizational framework of social services and the different political ideologies impacted on the particular mode of service delivery by the modern social professions. These traditions proved remarkably durable, even under the current levelling pressures of globalization (Lorenz, 2006). From this observation cannot be inferred a direct causal connection between government politics and social work methodology, but the interplay between intellectual streams and strategic policies has been given insufficient attention in the evaluation of social work's role and professional potential. A comparative outline of some salient historical features which characterized the early developmental phase of social work as the dominant, though by no means exclusive, mode of social service delivery in the UK and of social pedagogy as an equally dominant model in the context of Germany shall therefore cast some light on those links.
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Development of social work in the UK and social pedagogy in Germany |
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It is widely accepted that for the later development of social work in all parts of the UK, the work of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) in England, founded in 1869, was highly influential. It set out to systematize, discipline and, to that extent, place on a rational scientific basis the actions of philanthropic charitable support to people in socially precarious situations (Payne, 2005). The significance of this departure is two-fold. First, the stimulus to the development of recognizable methods came from the practice side. Pioneers within the COS movement analysed, in the manner of deduction, existing forms of charitable giving and concluded that ‘indiscriminate almsgiving’ was only a temporary help and in the longer term the cause of ‘pauperism’ (Bosanquet, 1973). Second, these efforts to systematize charitable giving took place in the domain of civil society, and here in female circles. In parallel with this, the (male-dominated) settlement movement sought to physically bring the divergent middle and working classes closer into contact with each other. Behind these efforts clearly lay a middle-class fear of ‘the mob’—the disorganized working class caught up in industrialization and urbanization, considered a constant source of unpredictability and social unrest (Stedman-Jones, 1971). The COS approach was formally modelled on the Elberfeld System in Germany, which is held to be the first model of co-ordinated charity on the basis of explicit assessments of each client's circumstances. It was set up by the municipality of Elberfeld or Wuppertal in 1853—a newly industrialized town in the Ruhr area of Germany, which had suffered rapid social changes as a result. It meant that respectable male citizens of the town had to do rosters of duty in visiting families who were receiving charitable assistance and check whether the money given to them was used appropriately.
By contrast, the British route to systematic diagnosis and intervention remained ultimately a ‘private affair’, which notably did not involve the municipality (Lorenz, 2007). Opposition to the COS approach in the UK came from the Fabian Society, which indeed demanded public measures against poverty on the strength of various empirical poverty surveys intended to challenge and disprove the theory at the base of charitable work. In the eyes of the Fabians, the COS attributed to individuals the responsibility for their demise and hence set out to ‘educate’ them, albeit indirectly, through the exercise of moral pressure that exhorted people in need to show responsibility in resolving their problems (Jones, 2000). Fabianism, in contrast to socialism, relied on a step-by-step rather than on a revolutionary understanding of societal change, in the process of which the material divisions of society could be gradually lessened and a reasonably stable balance between rich and poor would ensue (Briggs, 1961). The pattern set by Elberfeld in Germany, however, combined individualized attention with public control, setting a paternalist conservative pattern.
Two general observations derive from these historical details; one is that, in the UK, social intervention was largely considered, at least initially, a private task, centred on individuals, their moral improvement and on rescue not only from destitution, but also from the effects of the Poor Law and the very institutions the state itself provided within this ideological framework, such as the workhouse, prison and deportation, which stood as deterrents in the background. In Germany, a similar educational task developed within a public framework, which spurred methods to transcend individualism—for better or for worse. Second, this implicit educational methodology on which these approaches converged in both countries, which aimed at changing the behaviour of the poor, represented ultimately the application of rationality. It sought to limit affective impulses, on the part of the giver as much as on that of the receiver, with reference to the rewards of ‘sensible’ behaviour. Both countries, however, came to diverge later over the ways of achieving this state of rationality, with the UK choosing, on the whole, the path of psychoanalytically inspired casework whereas, in Germany, a ‘sensible public’ had first to be educated collectively to this aim.
In the search for more effective methods of intervention, replacing the ultimately quite ineffective moral approach, the explanatory and therapeutic model of Freudian psychology pointed a way forward. It acknowledged that people often do not behave sensibly, but it held on to the guiding principle of rationality by extending its reach epistemologically and therapeutically into the realms of the unconscious. The emphasis on the universality of this rationality, based on scientific insights, was absorbed so rapidly and effectively into UK and US social work theory, because of its political neutrality. Continental European practice models tended to emphasize less the scientific and more the communicative and emancipative aspect of psychoanalysis (Lorenz, 1994).
This early paradigm of case work had always an affinity to the political ideology of liberalism which had already gained prominence in the UK in the early nineteenth century and which had favoured the development of an enterprise culture that spearheaded the capitalist exploitation of industrialization (Payne, 2005). Its success, in turn, was the product of the technological application of natural science, which had already prospered in the Britain of the Restoration and had laid the foundation for the industrial revolution. In an arrangement closely resembling the later political culture of liberalism and curiously presaging British pragmatism today in that it favours a ‘what works’ (‘evidence-based practice’) approach, Puritanism coalesced with natural science as the pursuit of progress in seventeenth-century Britain. Scientific endeavour was protected by Royal benevolence as long as it assumed total political neutrality:
In order to gain royal recognition, protection and support, and thus to become institutionalized and incorporated into Restoration society, the scientific movement had to demonstrate its conformity by renouncing all cultural, social, political and educational goals and claims that could be regarded as subversive of the new dispensation or could lead to conflict with the regime (Strydom, 2000, p. 111).
This historical detail helps to explain also why the split between the COS and the Fabians could be overcome, particularly in the training of social workers at the Fabian's bastion—the London School of Economics. The Fabian ideas of reform could be constructed as complementary to individual casework within a general framework of rational improvements of social and individual deficits that this tradition assumed take their course almost automatically once freedom of development is secured. No general, organized public education process of society was required.
These developments in the UK contrast at several levels with those that characterize the origins of welfare and the paradigm of social pedagogy in Germany. While industrialization was much delayed in that country, by comparison to the UK, it nevertheless began to show its economic successes and also its divisive social effects mainly after the founding of the second German Empire in 1871, engineered by Bismarck as the Chancellor of Prussia. His politics orchestrated a war against France to unite the separate German small states under Prussian leadership. As a newly created nation state, Germany was confronted with two fundamental problems of integration—social integration in terms of class divisions and cultural integration because although the new state used a common language, it contained deep cultural divisions and its citizens, divided by religion and strong regional affiliations, had yet to be committed to a set of common cultural reference points. Nation building therefore took, in the typical Bismarckian conception—a dual approach of giving the state a strong practical and also a symbolic function. Creating unity had to be a collective rather than an individual affair, although the state's cultural dominance and political power had to be carefully balanced against the cultural interests of civil society and its traditional organizations, which, while being roughly as independent as in Britain, were brought into a closer allegiance to this state (Briggs, 1961).
In terms of welfare measures, this political approach resulted in the first state legislation of any country that secured social rights and guaranteed a minimal, insurance-based social protection, first in the case of industrial illness and accident and expanding gradually to illness generally, unemployment and old age. Bismarck's conservative politics generally answered the demands for social protection made by the Social Democrats, whom he had simultaneously barred from parliament. Bismarck did not devise a state insurance system but limited the role of the state to that of directing private insurance companies to perform to legally prescribed standards (Hennock, 2007). Hence, a ‘third way’ approach between, or rather in opposition to, both liberalism and socialism shaped the political culture of Germany right from the beginning. It was symbolized by the term ‘subsidiarity’ as the system of mutual obligations between ‘smaller’ and ‘larger’ units of society in exactly the manner later also favoured by the Catholic Church in the Encyclicals Rerum Novarum of 1891 and Quadragesimo Anno of 1931 (Pius XI, 1931). This move amounted to a conservative conception of the state as an organic unity within which differences were not to be eliminated, but brought to a functional synergy for an ideal ‘common good’ exemplified by the state. Given the cultural diversity of Germany, in combination with these politics, it is therefore understandable that, here, the state came to play a strong cultural and educational role expressed in emotive symbols, at times personified in references such as fatherland, Heimat or Vater Staat.
These political developments formed the subsoil for intellectual currents such as German idealism in contrast to British empiricism and pragmatism. Typical for this intellectual climate was the insistence in German universities during the latter part of the nineteenth century on the recognition of the humanities (‘Geisteswissenschaften’) as of equal rank with natural sciences and as the proper domain of disciplines like history, psychology and, later, sociology. Understanding the human world, as Schleiermacher (1768–1834) had taught and Dilthey (1833–1911) elaborated in his groundbreaking work on hermeneutics, was not a matter of scientific detachment, but of hermeneutic involvement in life and became thereby a continuous learning process (Palmer, 1969). This intellectual constellation favoured the particularly German reception of the ideals of the Enlightenment which recognized not only the emancipatory promises of modernity, but also its challenges and dangers. This tradition deals with the central question confronting all societies in the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft (Tönnies, 2002), not just from an empirical perspective or by means of appealing to a new sense of morality as Durkheim himself did. It concerns itself with the means and methods through which the integration of modern societies could be brought about. Through these reflections and in this intellectual climate, the creation of ‘the social’ becomes almost automatically a pedagogical question—a matter of instituting a pervasive education project. Modern German society after the unification of 1871 had only a chance of surviving and overcoming the threats of cultural fragmentation and social disintegration by making a collective effort to rally around a cultural project, by taking on the task of ‘forming itself’ continuously and hence making ‘formation’ (Bildung) a task in which every single member of society has not only a right, but a duty, to participate. Pedagogy becomes the concept symbolizing the cultural reproduction of society, in parallel with Bismarck's state social policies. It does this both at the collective level, in which the values, rules and laws regulating the relationship of individuals to each other have to be attended to, explained and put into practice to enable progress, and at the individual level of socialization into this lifelong process of formation, which implies emancipation and adjustment at one and the same time.
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Social pedagogy as a concept and as practice |
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The term ‘social pedagogy’ became the expression for this social mandate and the comprehensive role of education (Kronen, 1980). Only at a secondary stage, at which the practical translation of these basic concepts into concrete institutional measures is considered, does the school (in line with other educational institutions) come into view as the central carrier of this project. Pedagogy, as such, is always more than schooling, is always the totality of lifelong educational processes that take place in society, from informal learning processes through which a child acquires basic social skills of language and behaviour, habituation in family and cultural or leisure associations to formal learning in schools, apprenticeships, universities, adult education institutions and autodidactic projects. When the first Youth Welfare Act of the Weimar Republic—the seminal RJWG of 1924—opened with a section asserting every child's right to education (Erziehung), much more was meant than the guarantee of a place in a school. It asserted the right of the child to participate as a citizen in the overall processes of forming a society as a community of ‘learners’ (Rauschenbach, 1999).
The international genealogy of such fundamental community-oriented pedagogical concepts and their exponents has frequently been traced (e.g. Lawton and Gordon, 2002). At an immediate practice-oriented level, it stretches from Rousseau and Pestalozzi to Fröbel and Montessori, to include also figures like William Morris and John Dewey—certainly a broad spectrum of European and American exponents. At the level of academic reflection, however, the coining of the term ‘social pedagogy’ was confined initially to Germany. There, the debate on the role of pedagogy in modern society went far beyond considerations of ‘pedagogical experiments’ like the Kindergarten, the children's home or the village institute. The emphasis on the ‘social’ in pedagogy opened up a perspective on the societal role of pedagogy beyond particular educational institutions and became thereby the intellectual site for the deliberation of what, in Germany since the late nineteenth century, was termed the ‘Soziale Frage’—the social question: how to collectively confront growing inequality, disintegration and disaffection in industrialized, urban and secular German society without resorting to Marxist revolution. This question was framed as concerning all sectors and classes of society, not just the paupers, and the term ‘social’ had assumed the meaning of this all-encompassing perspective and responsibility. An association of social scientists founded the ‘Verein für Sozialpolitik’ in 1873, to which later leading figures like Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber belonged. While their social analyses posed the question, social pedagogy attempted to supply the answer or at least the framework for answers. It found this in the conceptualization of the relationship between individual and society. Karl Mager (a school pedagogue) is widely credited as having first coined the term in 1844 (Hämäläinen, 1989; Kronen, 1980; Lorenz, 1994) so as to emphasize the societal aspects of educational processes which were under-conceptualized in earlier pedagogical frameworks such as those of Rousseau, Pestalozzi and the philanthropists in general. Sozialpädagogik as a new disciplinary field explored the linked tasks of preparing individuals for communal and societal life and, at the same time, bringing society as a community to orient its culture and social life towards the personal developmental and social needs of individuals. It thereby became a central reference point of pedagogical and social policy debate in the context of an incipient German welfare system. In this political environment, with its pervasive signs of crisis, it is not surprising that the fundamental ambiguity at the core of the concept gave rise to its future polarized development. A ‘left wing’ sided with the elements inherited from the Enlightenment that emphasized the right of every human being to develop his or her potential to the full, thereby stressing the duty of society to create the conditions for this to happen. A ‘right wing’ was more interested in preserving the stability of society as a whole through universal education and other efforts to provide the co-ordinated means of adjusting individuals to those universal societal goals of the collectivity. Many of the pedagogical ideas generated in this social climate left a lasting legacy in ‘radical’ educational thinking abroad that advocated lifelong (William Morris, see Anderson, 2002), community-oriented (John Dewey, 1966), self-directed (Schön, 1983) and politically ‘conscientising’ (Freire, 1995) learning approaches which retain their actuality and appeal today.
In Germany, the ultimately Hegelian thought of regarding the state as the embodiment of reason and the dialectical synthesis of conflicting positions infused most positions on social pedagogy strongly. Even where Gemeinschaft was posited as a task and a project yet to be realized rather than a given reality or an inheritance to be preserved, there was always a tendency to substitute the state for this ideal of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991). As a consequence, pedagogical projects not just of formal education, such as schools and universities, but also those of informal learning in kindergarten, youth clubs, sports and leisure associations, and, to an extent, movements of adult learning and self-improvement developed a tendency to become committed to serving the interests of the nation. Emancipation could thereby easily turn into totalitarianism. Potentially, each facet of the broad spectrum of social pedagogical initiatives which originated in the Germany of the outgoing nineteenth century, and not just schools, gradually came to be judged according to the benefits it brought, not just for the participants, but for the nation to be built—the fatherland. The strongest criticism levelled at socialism and its civil initiatives was that it produced ‘vaterlandslose Gesellen’ (fellows without ties to a fatherland) (Groh and Brandt, 1992).
The idealism which surrounded the early years of the use of the concept social pedagogy meant also that little attention was paid to the precise methods that could translate the concept into action. When it came to that task, the concept was either translated into a series of institutions, which together represented various sites on which social pedagogy took place (adult education projects, kindergarten, settlements), or as packages of measures that were directed at groups of people particularly threatened by marginalization and exclusion. For a sociologist like Ferdinand Tönnies (1989), social pedagogy represented a movement in which structural social policy measures and informal cultural, educational processes combined and interacted (Schröer, 1999). The practice area in which social pedagogy delivered the most concrete methodological innovations was work with children and, here, Fröbel's earlier pioneering work in developing the concept and practice of the kindergarten was seminal well beyond the confines of Germany. The strong influence of Pestalozzi and Fröbel, not just at an academic, but at a cultural level meant that German social pedagogy remained child (and secondarily also family) oriented. However, through the combination of its person and social policy-oriented meaning, the pedagogical approach to this day contains an impetus for practice and policy in Germany to overcome the stigmatizing split between general educational facilities for children and those designed for ‘needy’ children or children whose behaviour causes difficulties.
Social pedagogy thereby affirmed, and this is the key characteristic distinguishing it from social work, that it is not primarily ‘deficit-oriented’. It regards all children, and indeed all human beings, as, on the one hand, in need of educational guidance for the full development of their potential, more explicitly obviously in youth and in crisis situations, and, on the other hand, as capable of always developing themselves further, provided the requisite resources are available (Hamburger, 2001, 2003). Social-pedagogical approaches flourished in sectors that, in the English terminology, would be classed as care and nursing, in the sense of ‘nursery nursing’ and ‘residential care’ (Heimerziehung), leading to, at times, radical and highly political models of ‘reform pedagogy’ in residential children's institutions (Bernfeld, 1973). Particularly in Austria in the 1920s, this movement aimed at a combination of Marxist and psychoanalytic ideas that explored liberating, democratic forms of socialization within model institutions, to make them pedagogical paradigms for the transformation of social norms and practices in society as a whole.
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The further development of social pedagogy ideas |
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It took an injection of pragmatism, forged in international exchanges of practice experiences, to bring the German discourse on social pedagogy to consider and develop methods of equal standing in the non-residential field and in work with adults. This pragmatism was inspired by the bourgeois women's movement and, in Germany, found its first expression in the social work textbook Soziale Diagnose by Alice Salomon (1926)—the founder of the first German school for (female) social workers (Kuhlmann, 2001). While this was ostensibly modelled on its US counterpart—the work by Mary Richmond of the same title (Richmond, 1917)—Salomon's textbook nevertheless contained more references to community as the intellectual horizon within which social work methodology should locate itself. In contrast to the prevailing (male) notions that this community was represented by the German nation state, Salomon appealed to women as the carriers of a sense of total social responsibility that transcends national boundaries. Women as mothers have, according to Salomon, a natural ability to form inclusive social entities, which she calls ‘Volksstaat’ (people's state)—a classless society to which social work has a duty to contribute very directly (Salomon, 1919; cf. Lorenz, 2006). In this sense, Salomon represents the crossover point between the paradigms of social work and of social pedagogy, even though she herself felt more committed to the former.
Salomon developed her methodological deliberations after the end of the First World War when Germany faced its second challenge of nation building in a highly polarized political climate. The polarization affected also the use of the term ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft). The fundamental question was whether its potential for integration should remain at the level of symbolic ideals such as the cultural meanings of a folk notion of community or whether it required tangible political structures in the form of the state. Community became the central reference point for the further development of the social policy dimension of social pedagogy in the work of Hermann Nohl (Bollnow, 1980)—a philosopher in the tradition of Dilthey who was hugely influential in that after-war period in Germany. He regarded social pedagogy both as a set of social policies, such as they were defined in the social reconstruction programme of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, and as a social movement. The social policies of the Social Democratic government aimed at consolidating the corporatist, Bismarckian approach but in a less nationalist framework. They sought to improve the social insurance schemes and strengthen the rights of citizens, and particularly of children, to social solidarity and protection, even though the ensuing financial crisis of the Weimar Republic stopped the realization of those schemes in many areas (Hong, 1998), including the ‘reform pedagogy’ initiatives in residential homes for troubled children. Nohl saw in social movements a necessary pendant to the state's official policies. He considered movements such as the workers' and the women's movements, but also the youth movement, which was particularly vigorous in Germany, as spontaneous responses to the crisis of the traditional social order in industrialized societies and saw in social pedagogy a means of furthering the establishment of a new kind of community based on social obligations (Nohl, 1988).
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Usurping the socio-pedagogical legacy? |
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Was the Nazi state the ultimate realization of this socio-pedagogical project? Nohl's ideas had at times a bewildering affinity with the Fascist project of combining state and (folk) community. While his own relationship with the Nazi state remained ambiguous, that regime then imposed its very distinct nationalist and racist version of community on Germany, thereby ending the intellectual openness around the term of community which had characterized the Weimar years and usurping the pedagogical legacy. The Nazis gave youth work great official importance, celebrated solidarity among workers, upheld motherhood and selflessness as paradigms of good social behaviour and gave order to unite, to ‘line up’ (‘gleichschalten’) civil society initiatives under a common goal—the consolidation of Germany as a racially defined folk community. On this basis, the German delegation to the Third International Conference on Social Work, held in London in 1936 (Conference Report, 1938), could, for instance, arrogantly claim that many of the pedagogical, community-building plans which were still under discussion in other countries concerning the mobilization of civil society, the creation of a stronger community spirit and the fostering of self-help initiatives were already a reality in Hitler Germany, at least for the racially privileged ‘deserving’ (Althaus, 1936). Despite this very obvious exploitation of social pedagogy for political ends, most social professionals who had not lost their positions on racial or political grounds either failed to reflect on the political implications of their work of social pedagogy or enthusiastically subscribed to its ideological programme. This widespread blindness towards the political context and the ensuing separation between social pedagogy as a set of methods and as a social policy framework contributed, in retrospect, to it becoming discredited. The humanist tradition of social pedagogy was effectively abandoned and social services became embroiled in selection processes for the most inhumane purposes on account of the presumed value neutrality of pedagogical practice (Lorenz, 1994; Schnurr, 1997; Sünker and Otto, 1997).
In view of these experiences, it was understandable that the programme of social reconstruction in post-Fascist Germany, as in the rest of war-devastated continental Europe, symbolized a new methodological beginning. British and US-led social reconstruction programmes under the aegis of the UN chose to achieve this through instituting a positivistic, politically neutral conceptual framework of social work. The methods trio of casework, group work and community work shared the aim of rendering clients self-sufficient and socializing them in democratic competences of participation and self-determination. The social pedagogy movement, academically depleted in Germany by the Nazi persecution of its critical members (Wieler and Zeller, 1995), remained in abeyance even though, among US social work educators operating in post-war Germany, there were refugees from Fascism like Gisela Konopka, who, in exile in the USA, had contributed their social pedagogy knowledge to the development of social and group work approaches.
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Social pedagogy reborn |
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The renaissance of the social pedagogy model in Germany happened in the wake of the events of 1968. These brought about, among many other issues, a fundamental questioning of the Fordist approach to welfare of the immediate post-war period, with its functional, rational and ultimately paternalist flavour into which the ‘imported’ social work model had fitted. New social and political movements demanded immediate participation by citizens in processes of social transformation, placed questions of personal and collective identity at the centre and, above all, raised historical questions concerning the responsibility for the systematic oppression of women and minority groups and for the holocaust. In this intellectual climate, the academic discipline of pedagogy became a rallying point at German universities for the critical reflection on the relationship between individuals and society. In relation to pedagogy in schools as well as in social services, university degree courses were implemented designed to overcome the image of a ‘service’ function delivering personnel to norms set by the agencies. With the introduction of the first degree courses in social pedagogy in 1970, student numbers exploded (Rauschenbach, 1999). The confrontation with the social work paradigm, on which most social work educators had been trained, frequently through studies in the USA, became not just a methodological dispute, but a comprehensive socio-political programme.
A central figure in this transformation process was Mollenhauer—a primary school teacher who eventually became professor for General Pedagogy and Social Pedagogy at the university of Göttingen and who, in his work, elaborated on the humanist tradition of pedagogy (Niemeyer, 1998). He had to steer a difficult course between the universal claims of pedagogy to represent the totality of processes of social integration that had proved their totalitarian leanings and the institutional, pragmatic reduction of social pedagogy to ‘everything that is education but not school or family’ (Bäumer, 1929, p. 3). He wanted to de-institutionalize pedagogical thinking whilst keeping it committed to immediate practical tasks arising from people's attempts to cope with difficult life situations. This brought him to use the term ‘Lebenswelt’ (lifeworld) in the tradition of phenomenological sociology (Mollenhauer, 1972) as a reference to the coping abilities clients have available to varying degrees in contexts markedly different from the world which professionals occupy and whose values they often seek to impose.
This idea of a ‘bottom-up’ approach became the focus of the most comprehensive and distinct formulation of the modern social pedagogy project through Thiersch. His key publication, Lebensweltorientierte Soziale Arbeit (Thiersch, 1992) (in which the term Soziale Arbeit serves as the umbrella term for both social work (Sozialarbeit) and social pedagogy), aims at rebuilding academic confidence in this discipline by focusing on its distinct methodology, namely the ability to professionally immerse itself in the complex hermeneutic processes which characterize the everyday life (‘Alltag’) of people who are struggling to cope with and make sense of poverty, conflicts and injustice. Pedagogy-inspired intervention must not take its bearings from institutional objectives, but network with and build upon the countless moments of ‘expertise’ with which people demonstrate their coping abilities in everyday informal and non-formal learning processes. Such interventions are not a flight from political action, but, on the contrary, identify political processes, issues of justice and equality, in life-world contexts in which they build social policy ‘from the bottom up’. Social work could and should engage constructively with social policies on a broad front. Furthermore, these conceptual changes levelled the differences between social work and social pedagogy by committing both to a double task while remaining within their respective traditions. Many academic institutions in Germany could therefore now give joint awards bearing both titles.
However, the consolidation of practice that this conceptual and methodological development set in motion—the combination of personalized assistance with constructive-critical participation in the shaping of structural welfare issues—was once more challenged by social policy developments. Germany, despite its corporatist social policy tradition and the privileged autonomy the big non-governmental welfare institutions had enjoyed under the formula of subsidiarity, began to feel the ill winds of Neoliberalism in the 1990s. This led to the first attempts at restructuring social services according to criteria of efficiency and a sudden fascination with social management as a concept that by-passed the dual tradition. The paradigm of human resource management—the diametrical opposite to humanist pedagogy—took over key concepts that had originated in both pedagogical and social work thinking, such as self-help, civil society initiative and empowerment (Lorenz, 2001, 2005), and subverted them to its political ends. It seems that the optimism with which Thiersch had declared the previous century as the ‘century of social pedagogy’ (Rauschenbach, 1999), on account of the profession's success in establishing itself solidly in all parts of society, had come to an abrupt end.
The fundamental question facing the social professions all over Europe now is not whether they can maintain their hard-won occupational boundaries, not only between themselves, but vis-à-vis the plethora of counselling, caring, coaching and managing activities that claim their stake on an increasingly liberalized welfare market—this battle has probably already been lost, despite the protestations of professional associations. The socially relevant concern turns rather to the question whether the notions of ‘the social’ itself, for which the social professions have traditionally stood, can still have a place in the political agenda of re-ordering social relations according to capitalist principles of individualism and personal enterprise, and whether the social professions collectively promote ‘the social’ (Seibel et al., 2007).
These threats, by signalling a new crisis in social solidarity, in many ways bring European societies back to the early days of industrialization when new collective, scientifically grounded ways of tackling disintegration had to be found. In this situation, social work's and social pedagogy's stock of historical knowledge and experience is a valuable asset to be tapped. These disciplines can demonstrate their critical, reflexive potential transversally in relation to the different methodological discourses that already exist in Europe and that are newly emerging. This is not a matter of nostalgically warding off all new methods and professional formations. At stake is the intellectual ability of all the social disciplines, regardless of their titles, to relate theories of psychological coping in socially difficult situations as a continuous, lifelong learning process to the analysis of structural preconditions for such self-realization. On this criterion, interventions with both individuals and groups, in residential and in community settings, have to prove themselves and show that they can reconstitute users of services, young and old, as active citizens with rights and a stake in society as a whole (Böhnisch et al., 2005). The advance of pragmatic, theoretically not yet sufficiently grounded notions of social care in the UK carries the danger of reducing complex learning and coping processes to sets of interpersonal skills without reference back to the wider political issues in which they are embedded. An attempt in that direction with the introduction by CCETSW of the Certificate of Social Service (CSS) in 1974 had once triggered a storm of critique on the part of the social work discipline (Smith, 2003). Compared to that, responses to the moving together of social work and social care have been less pronounced. The history of social pedagogy in Germany demonstrates that, without a thorough, systematic theoretical reflection on the relationship between interpersonal processes and social policy structures, this sector will not only fail to formally professionalize, but fail to deliver an accountable public service that renders people not only more autonomous, but also secures their social and citizenship rights. The social professions are mandated in a very particular way to relate life world processes to conditions at the level of the system, but they can only meet this challenge by thorough and critical analytical work that integrates psychological, social, anthropological, political and indeed historical insights in order to avoid the pitfalls of reductionism and instrumentalization, which the history of the social professions, including social pedagogy, so frequently reveals.
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Conclusion |
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In such engagement lies, dialectically, the chance of gaining independence, initiative and recognition for the profession. Cross-national and inter-disciplinary reflections help to sharpen the awareness of the historical contingency and cultural specificity of theories and particularly the inherent tendency of the social work paradigm to disengage from political processes on account of its fascination with value-neutral scientific paradigms, as in the British tradition mentioned above. Social pedagogy in this regard is one largely untapped resource for the English-speaking world and can serve not as a new ‘import’ in the plethora of methods contesting or replacing social work, but as a mirror in which the social work tradition can become aware of its own rich but also contested diversity that already contains many of the same elements as the social pedagogy tradition. But, as the references to the historical development of that paradigm in the German context have shown, very different connotations can attach to methodological concepts, depending on the political context to which they relate, actively or passively. Whether the universal term of ‘care’ can indeed provide a valid conceptual umbrella for the social professions in the UK can only be decided by a critical analysis of the tensions and indeed contradictions contained in this title, which, for historically minded social workers, represent familiar territory, but territory worth exploring.
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