Makarenko's Collective Education Beyond the Iron Curtain - Debates on socialist competition and their practical consequences in the GDR, Japan and the Soviet Union -

• Applicant: Dr. Ami Kobayashi
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education ; Asian Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 531866978

This project aims to investigate the transnational circulation of Soviet pedagogy based on A. S. Makarenko's concepts and its different reception across national borders, especially across the Iron Curtain. It focuses on the process of culturally specific adaptation as well as implementation of so-called collective education. In this project representative practices of collective education are examined from praxeological perspectives. This perspective enables us to take distance from political ideologies, the dichotomous ideologies of the Cold War, and focus on the examination of pedagogical practices. In this project I focus on the GDR and Japan, since German literature, especially that from the GDR, had an important function in the dissemination of socialist ideas in Japan. Left-oriented Japanese scholars saw the development of the GDR as a model of a successful transformation of a highly developed capitalist society into a socialist society. Furthermore, for some representatives of collective education in Japan, the main source of information on the subject was literature from GDR. The research interest of this project lies primarily in the field of Educational History, as there is little historical research on Makarenko from a transnational perspective. In addition to that, the project discusses the fundamental problem of education: namely, the relationship between individual freedom and living together in a collective. Makarenko's orientation towards the collective is perceived from a Western perspective as a suppression of individual freedom and has been heavily criticized, although UNESCO states that the ability to act collectively is still one of the important educational values that should be cultivated in the educational process. Research on collective education can therefore create a space for discussions on how we can cultivate individual freedom and competence in acting collectively. Moreover, the research interest of this project also lies in the field of Japanology. Soviet and East German influences on educational practices in post-war Japan have been insufficiently studied. Both Japanese scholars and Western researchers have often interpreted the so-called collective orientation of the Japanese as part of the "Japanese tradition". This project, therefore, addresses the following questions: a) How and by whom was the idea of collective education received? b) How was the idea of collective education discussed and reinterpreted in pedagogical journals and in teacher training materials? c) What kind of practices were carried out under the name of collective education and what were their consequences?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Japan, Latvia, Norway, Ukraine
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Shinichi Aizawa; Professorin Dr. Iveta Kestere; Professor Dr. Vladimir Tikhonov; Professor Dr. Andriy Tkachenko
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Angelo Van Gorp