Paul Oestreich

Paul Hermann August Oestreich ( born March 30, 1878 in Kolberg ( Pomerania ), † February 28, 1959 in Berlin) was a German pedagogue. He was one of Germany's leading education reformers in the 1920s. From 1949 he worked in the East Berlin school administration.

Life and achievements

Oestreich was born the son of a carpenter. First he visited his hometown for four years the elementary school. With financial support from his parents, he was then able to go to a grammar school and take the Abitur. He had received the foundation for social advancement and studied from 1896 to 1900 at the Universities of Berlin and Greifswald, mathematics, physics, philosophy, pedagogy, and new languages. After graduating Oestreich received 1901 he graduated from the clerkship in Cologne and short, taught in Ilfeld and Barmen and was appointed in 1905 as a teacher at the Hohenzollern - secondary school in Berlin- Schöneberg, where he taught until the beginning of the Nazi regime.

Oestreich was involved early political: First, he joined the National Social Association of Friedrich Naumann, who went up in the Free Radical Association in 1903. As a convinced pacifist, he was a member of the Bund Neues Vaterland during the First World War. In 1918, he joined the Social Democratic Party, to which he belonged until 1931. After the revolution in November 1918 he became a deputy in the Berlin city council and staff in the reform committee of the Berlin philologist Association and of the Association of Social Democratic Teachers. 1919 was one of the founders of the Federal Oestreich Resolute school reformers ( Besch ), whose chairman and leading theoretician he remained continuously until the dissolution in 1933. Initially, this covenant was teachers of secondary schools reserved, but gradually it opened, so that from 1921 pedagogically interested laymen could join the covenant. With 5,000 members, the federal government acquired through the dissemination of humanistic ideals, who had a more conscious education of youth by society as a whole without regard to the origin of the children the goal recognition in professional circles.

In 1920, the federal government contributed significantly to the Reich School Conference on the educators themselves, were able to familiarize and discuss comprehensively about the new ideas of the representatives of different directions of reform pedagogy which had its origins in the 19th century; it always was a matter of a new school in a new society. The renovation of the school system was further discussed in the follow- on relevant meetings, organized the covenant.

Paul Oestreich put the focus of its activities to the broad dissemination of its objectives and was to publish books and a magazine and published articles in other educational publications. He thus became an active propagandist of desired new education pedagogy: to prepare children and youth for the tasks that would provide them later in life, in school.

From 1923 to 1926 Oestreich was the Board of the German Peace Society. The International Peace Congress in Berlin in 1924 came to his initiative. Connected with him was the International Congress of history lessons.

Based on the Reichstag Fire Decree, he was arrested in March 1933 for two months and dismissed from the teaching service on September 30, 1933. The management of the Federal Resolute school reformers finally ended with the forcible resolution in June 1933. During the period of National Socialism no activities of Austria detectable.

As an opponent of the Nazi regime, he was after the war on June 11, 1945 a member of the Communist Party, from 1946, the SED and was between 1945 and 1949 in Berlin- Zehlendorf and then in East Berlin in the main school office of Magistrate of Greater Berlin as head of the department working for higher education. Here he was able to bring his ideas of the renewal of the education and school system, of an education that mankind had a broader community to the goal, even though they did not achieve great response. He campaigned for the Berlin school law of 1947. In 1954 he moved to attacks by pro-Soviet because of its attitude to the East.

For his work Oestreich has won several awards in the GDR, so among other things with the Patriotic Order of Merit and Honored as a teacher of the people. 1948 awarded him an honorary doctorate University of Greifswald, 1958, the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Paul Oestreich urn was given a place in the curtain wall of the memorial of the Socialists in the Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde.

Afterlife

In the former district of Berlin- Weissensee (now belonging to Pankow ) was a street named after Paul Oestreich on 14 April 1967, the former road at secondary school. The former Upper School II Weissensee received in 1970 as EOS is also the name of that teacher and school reformer ( after 1989 in Bühring High School renamed).

Works (selection)

• The New Education, Journal of decisive school reform and liberal education policy. (Eds. from 1920 until its closure in 1933. )
• The elastic unit school: life and production school. ( = The School of Life Vol 4), Schwetschke, Berlin, 1923.
• The school of folk culture. Munich and Leipzig, 1923 ( = Educational Series, 15).
• Independent cultural policy, from the straight path of an " undisciplined ". ( Treatises on behalf of the Federal decisively school reformers ), Resolute school reform Volume 42, Ernst Oldenburg Verlag, Leipzig, 1924.
• The collapse of the technology into the pedagogy. Stuttgart 1930; again u.d.T. The technique as Lucifer of pedagogy. Rudolstadt 1947.
• From the life of a political educators. Autobiography, 1947.