Curriculum for Disobedience: Raising Children to Transform Adults

Abstract

The Kinderladen movement in 1970s West Germany, a critical forerunner of present-day alternative and free schools in Germany, began as an effort to raise children to be disobedient in all senses. Members of cooperative “pedagogy groups” hoped to make social change by changing themselves as parents and educators.  This photo essay challenges received histories of early childhood education and the origins of many practices later justified in cognitive psychological and developmental terms, reclaiming the political and psychoanalytic sources of such practices; it also critiques the activists’ conception of authority and disobedience. We question curriculum histories that offer linear narratives leading up to the present, attempting rather to think about the variety of alternative futures these experiments offered, raising for renewed consideration current, radical initiatives that are often either dismissed or subsumed under versions of “reformed” education.