“Die Lernmaschinen waren ... ein Zückerchen”: das Gelfinger Schulexperiment von 1968 bis 1972

• Daniel Deplazes ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Zurich

     University of Zurich

     Zürich, Suiza

     
• Localización: Paedagogica Historica: International journal of the history of education, ISSN 0030-9230, Vol. 58, Nº. 2, 2022, págs. 290-310
• Idioma: alemán
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen
  • English

    School reformers regularly came up with ambitious promises such as increasing efficiency, individualisation, or humanisation. This is evidenced as well in the debates on the role of educational technology such as school television, language laboratories, or the so-called teaching machines in schools in the 1960s and 1970s. Additionally, the advocates of educational technology promised an increase in efficiency of teaching and sometimes even prophesied that teachers could be made redundant. This was especially the case for teaching machines that were based on cybernetics and the theory of behaviourism. Those machines made it possible to fantasise about “electronic schoolmasters”, since they promised to be able to take over the essential functions of teachers. Whilst the “digitisation” of teaching in schools has been discussed extensively recently, and there are already some historical studies on debates about technology in teaching in the twentieth century, the relevance of technologies for everyday school life has remained largely unexplored. The case study examines one of the rare school experiments with teaching machines from 1968 to 1972 in a Swiss elementary school in the canton of Lucerne. The study asks about the circumstances of the beginning, development, and outcome of the experiment as well as the importance of teaching machines in everyday school life. To this end, the (1) beginnings of the school experiment by means of planning documents from one of the former teachers is first analysed. An (2) analysis of the newspaper reports in the local press which aim to clarify how the experiment was publicly presented and how the experiment ended is then conducted. An exemplary (3) analysis of the euphoria and disillusionment of school reforms based on the publication of the initiator Lothar Kaiser supplements the case study, before finally, (4) the relevance of the teaching machines in this school experiment is evaluated. In addition to the archive documents and publications, interviews with Lothar Kaiser and Gotthard Amstutz, the two key figures who implemented the experiment, are used. In the end, this case demonstrates the extraordinary fusion of progressive education concepts and teaching technologies. Furthermore, the analysis of this experiment sheds light on how school reforms are intertwined with local political contexts and how crucial social networks are, and raises questions concerning the relevance of technology for everyday learning in school.

  • Deutsch

    Initiantinnen und Initianten von Schulreformen warteten meist mit ambitionierten Versprechen wie Effizienzsteigerung, Individualisierung oder Humanisierung auf. So auch in der Unterrichtstechnologiedebatte der 1960er und 1970er Jahre, in der die Wortführenden dank neuer Unterrichtsmedien wie Schulfernsehen, Sprachlabore oder sogenannter Lernmaschinen u.a. eine Effizienzsteigerung des Unterrichts versprachen und mitunter gar die baldige Ersetzbarkeit von Lehrkräften durch Maschinen prophezeiten. Während jüngst die “Digitalisierung” der Schulen ausgiebig diskutiert wird und bereits einige Studien zu Unterrichtstechnologien im zwanzigstes Jahrhundert vorliegen, ist die Bedeutung von Technologien für den Schulalltag bisher weitgehend unerforscht geblieben. In einer Fallstudie untersucht der Beitrag eines der seltenen Schulexperimente mit Lernmaschinen, das von 1968 bis 1972 im Schweizer Dorf Gelfingen im Kanton Luzern durchgeführt wurde. Gefragt wird nach den Umständen des Beginns, Verlaufs und Ausgangs des Experiments sowie nach der Bedeutung der Lernmaschinen im Schulalltag. Dabei geraten die Mechanismen von Schulreformen am Beispiel eines avancierten Schulexperiments ins Blickfeld der Untersuchung.