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III. Conformity and Rebellion: Contrasting Styles of English and German Youth, 1900–33

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

John R. Gillis
John R. Gillis*
Affiliation:
History Department of Livingston College, Rutgers University
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Extract

When Ellen Key proclaimed this the Century of the Child sixty years ago, she might better have called it the Century of Adolescence. The modern dimensions of childhood had been developing steadily during the course of the nineteenth century. Adolescence, on the other hand, previously characteristic only of those privileged youngsters who were exempt from early entry into the job market, was beginning in 1900 to involve a much larger part of the population. Laws were excluding the teen aged from the job market and simultaneously cloistering them in the expanding sector of secondary education. Coincidentally, a whole set of extracurricular organizations, including sports clubs, youth hostels, and other age-graded activities, came into existence. Two of these, the German Wandervogel and the English Boy Scouts, the former founded in 1901 and the latter seven years later, were to become symbols of the era of adolescence in European history, a period whose distinctive social, political and psychological dimensions are the subject here.

Type
New Perspectives on German Education
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , Fall 1973 , pp. 249 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © 1973 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. No effort has been made here or in subsequent notes to present voluminous documentation. The best English language treatment of the Wandervogel is Walter Z. Laqueur's Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement, New York, 1962. For the most up-to-date and sophisticated discussion of the Scouts, see Springhall, J. O., “The Boy Scouts, Class and Militarism in Relation to British Youth Movements, 1908–1930,” International Review of Social History, 17, (1972): 125–58. My own work is based on research in England and Germany, concentrating on the social history of youth in Oxford and Göttingen.Google Scholar

2. Kitchen, Martin, The German Officer Corps, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 1968), pp. 135–142.Google Scholar

3. Wilkinson, Paul, “English Youth Movements, 1908–1930,” Journal of Contemporary History, 4, No. 2 (1969): 3–23; Finlay, J. L., “John Hargrave, the Green Shirts, and Social Credit,” Journal of Contemporary History, 5, No. 1 (1970): 52–71; Morris, Brian, “Ernest Thompson Seton and the origins of the Woodcraft movement,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, No. 2 (1970): 183–194.Google Scholar

4. Gardiner, Rolf, “German Youth Movements,” Youth: An Expression of Progressive University Thought, No. 8 (March, 1923), p. 203.Google Scholar

5. Quoted in Laqueur, , Young Germany, p. 242.Google Scholar

6. Speech by Dickson, A. G. to the Oxford University Boy Scout Club, May 1939, Minutes of the Oxford University Boy Scout Club, Bodleian Library Collections, Mss Top Oxon d 238/2.Google Scholar

7. The best treatment of this change is Newsome, David, Godliness and Good Learning (London, 1961). Also of interest are Wilkinson, Rupert, The Prefects: British Leadership and the Public School Tradition, (Oxford, 1964); and Weinberg, Ian, The English Public Schools: The Sociology of Elite Education, (New York, 1967). Google Scholar

8. Goffman, Erving, Asylums, (Garden City, New York, 1961), p. xiii.Google Scholar

9. Spender, Stephen, “The English Adolescent,” Harvard Educational Review, 18 (1948): 235; Also Weinberg, , English Public Schools Chapter II. Google Scholar

10. Wilkinson, , The Prefects, Part II.Google Scholar

11. Musgrove, F., Youth and the Social Order, (London, 1964), Chapter III.Google Scholar

12. Political backgrounds of this change are treated by Semmell, Bernard, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social Imperial Thought, 1895–1914, (Garden City, New York, 1968); and Hynes, Samuel The Edwardian Turn of Mind, (Princeton, 1968), pp. 26–9.Google Scholar

13. A Mass Observation survey taken in 1966 and involving 2000 adults showed 44 percent of middle class males had been Scouts; only 25 percent of the working class respondents indicated similar membership. Springhall, , “The Boy Scouts:” 138–9.Google Scholar

14. For the demography and economy of the English family in the nineteenth century, see Anderson, Michael, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire, (Cambridge, England, 1971), Chapters IV, V. The broader outlines of the argument presented here are discussed by Tilly, Charles, “Population and Pedagogy in France,” History of Education Quarterly, 13 (Summer 1973).Google Scholar

15. On the changing middle class pattern, see Banks, J. A., Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning among the Victorian Middle Classes, (London, 1969), Chapters X-XII.Google Scholar

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19. Quoted in Simon, Brian, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920, (London, 1965), p. 65.Google Scholar

20. Meachem, Standish, “The Sense of an Impending Clash: English Working Class Unrest before the First World War,” American Historical Review vol. 77, No. 5 (December 1972): 1343–1364.Google Scholar

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24. Fishman, Sterling, “Suicide, Sex, and the Discovery of the German Adolescent,” History of Education Quarterly, 10, No. 2 (1970): 170–188.Google Scholar

25. On leadership, see Jantzen, Walter, “Die soziologische Herkunft der Führungsschichte der deutschen Jugendbewegung, 1900–33,” Führungsschichte und Eliteproblem, (Frankfurt A.M., 1957). Also Freudenthal, Herbert, Vereine in Hamburg, (Hamburg, 1968), pp. 297–305: and Rabe, Hanns-Gerd, “Der Wandervogel in Osnabrück. Bild einer Jugend von 1907 bis 1920,” Osnabrücker Mitteilungen, 70 (1961).Google Scholar

26. On the ambivalence of German middle class, see Dahrendorf, Ralf, Society and Democracy in Germany, (Garden City, New York, 1967), Chapter III.Google Scholar

27. Laqueur, , Young Germany, Part III. For full treatment of the problem see Gillis, J. R., Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Grouping, 1770–1970, forthcoming.Google Scholar