Close-to-Nature Pedagogy in Freinet’s the Wisdom of Matthew

Abstract

In the 1920s Freinet became involved in reformist educational efforts, attending congresses of the New Education Fellowship. It was through these forums that he was influenced by the ideas of the life reform movements, which, in many cases, reinforced his own views and experiences. A return to nature is an overarching characteristic of the modernization critique movements. Freinet, like the representatives of the movement, saw in the people a community that bore the organic unity with nature. This paper focuses on one of Freinet’s defining works, The Wisdom of Matthew, the longer and shorter essays of which were written in the early 1950s, when he had already gained much experience in rural folk schools and in his own school in Vence. By this time, he already had many fellow teachers to apply his methodological innovations – in his words, his “techniques”. In The Wisdom of Matthew, he puts his thoughts on pedagogy into the mouth of an old shepherd. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: How does Freinet interpret nature, through which elements does he depict nature? How does he interpret the ideas of nature, man, children, and society in his work? What links does he see between nature and education? The qualitative content analysis of the text reveals that the four primal elements are the main attributes of nature, as a source of vital energy. It confirms that, in Freinet’s understanding, nature and education are inseparable; he considers the collective, the folk wisdom as the guiding principle of education. An analysis of the French folk teacher’s ideas concerning work, which he considered to be the nature of man, makes it clear why work, creative work, became the central element of his pedagogy. The study also explains in detail the vision of man, children, and society that emerge from Freinet’s book.