by Ulrich Schröder

Based on source material that has been preserved in rare completeness, the prehistory and foundation of the Cologne "auxiliary school" are described. The analysis refers in detail to the attempts to determine the student body and to socio-economic aspects such as the parents' academic appointments, residential area, etc.

Cologne Auxiliary School from 1886
"It is therefore to be welcomed with joy that a school has been established in which these poor children are treated and taught alone and with consideration for their limited talent."

Today, on 15 November 1886, the day Joh. Amos Commenius died, classes began at the school for the mentally unprogressive children of this city at Burgmauer Nro 31 in Cologne. These are children who, because they are slow to think and make judgements, slow to grasp and remember, clumsy in application and comprehension, are unable to follow the ordinary lessons of the primary schools; they are a hindrance to it; when the teacher deals with them in detail, they impair the progress of children with normal abilities and yet, when they leave school, they take nothing with them but the memory of years spent in agony and (to the great sorrow of their parents) the inability to make a useful living. It is therefore to be welcomed with joy that a school has been established in which these poor children are treated and taught alone and with consideration for their limited talents. After much preparatory work by the school inspector Dr Brandenberg, two classes were initially set up with the approval of the Royal Government; the boys' class with 28 pupils was entrusted to the teacher Michael Holl and the girls' class with 20 pupils to the teacher Anna Altengarten. These 48 children were selected from the pupils designated by the rectors of the municipal elementary schools by the school inspector Dr Brandenberg and the medical officer Dr Laudahn, director of the municipal lunatic asylum in Lindenburg, with the assistance of the two teachers in the schools concerned, examined for their mental weaknesses and physical infirmities and then designated as suitable for our institution. . ."

These lines begin the school chronicle of Cologne's first school for children who are now called "learning disabled". The first teacher endeavours to use an elevated tone in his sentences and even refers to one of the most important historical educationalists, Comenius. This is probably in keeping with his sense of self, of contributing to a good new cause.

In fact, this type of special school for children with extreme learning difficulties was still in its infancy: although its establishment was called for in a small document as early as 1864, the first actual school was not founded until 1879 in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal). Brunswick and Leipzig followed two years later. Incidentally, the first auxiliary school in Oldenburg was not founded until 1908. While the names were initially different everywhere (private school, school for the weakly abled, etc.), the name "auxiliary school" chosen in Brunswick later became generally accepted. Braunschweig and its teacher Kielhorn in particular were also the source of significant publicising and propaganda activity, which led to the founding of the "Association of Auxiliary Schools in Germany" in 1898 and the further spread of the "auxiliary school idea". Since the early 1960s, the name "(special) school for the learning disabled" has been introduced in the Federal Republic of Germany, which is currently being replaced by "special school", "school for learning assistance" or similar in various Federal States.

Cologne was therefore by no means the first school to be founded, and it was possible to build on the experience gained in the neighbouring Rhineland cities of Elberfeld and Krefeld. The people working there also had hardly any public impact. What is special about the unspectacular example of Cologne is that the sources have been preserved at all levels: both the documents of the city council and the school deputation as well as the files of the school administration, the minutes of the rectors' conferences and finally the school chronicles. They express different views of the historical events, which can be weighed up against each other.

Prehistory and foundation phase

At the end of 1881, just two years after the founding of the "school for the feeble-minded" in Elberfeld, there is the first indication of activity by the Cologne school inspector Brandenberg in the direction of such a school institution: he reports to the school deputation on his visit to the "idiot asylum" Hephata in Mönchengladbach. A year and a half later, this committee directly discusses a "school for children of unsound mind" for the first time, as well as a "school for neglected children". In 1883, the school inspector asked the head teachers to draw up an initial list of "children not normally developed", which contained 91 names, but was completely unsatisfactory because the criteria for naming them were apparently unclear. The school was not founded because no "suitable location for such a school" could be found. It is difficult to judge whether this argument is being used to conceal a lack of interest. After all, the question of space still played a certain role when the school was finally seriously considered in 1886 and realised in November. And although the building that is then made available has the desired courtyard for "gymnastic exercises", it is otherwise in a dilapidated state and must first be cleared out and repaired.

Despite the failure, Brandenberg continued to pursue his goal tirelessly, again calling for lists to be drawn up and bringing up the planned school in the school deputation. And from the beginning of 1886, the preparations enter a decisive phase: a procurement plan and budget are requested and the procurement of teaching materials is initiated. The school inspector again plans an information visit to an institution that can serve as a model; this time, however, it is no longer an institution but the school in Elberfeld, which has now been in existence for over six years. The director of the municipal mental asylum is asked for an opinion from a medical point of view. The two teachers are selected and sent to Elberfeld for observation.

And again a list is requested from the headmasters of the primary schools (district and independent schools). It again contains over 90 names, from which a boys' class and a girls' class of 25 children each are to be put together. In fact, considerably more boys than girls are accepted (28:20). But this does not lead to any further considerations - nor does the fact that the numbers of children registered by the schools already showed a ratio of around 3:2 in favour of boys. This ratio still applies today in schools for the learning disabled. Sociological approaches such as gender-specific roles and the corresponding behavioural norms are usually used to interpret the phenomenon. However, these alone cannot suffice, as no form of disability, including blindness, for example, has an even gender distribution.

In order to be able to estimate the class frequency - both the planned number of 25 children and the actual number of 28 in the boys' class - it is important to realise that primary school classes were generally more than twice as large at that time. However, in preliminary considerations, whether in Cologne, Leipzig or elsewhere, the maximum number of children was said to be 15 to 20. In correspondence with the school administration, the Cologne teacher Holl repeatedly and almost desperately called for a reduction in class sizes. In May 1887, his school already had three classes: one with 28 boys, a girls' class with 17 and a mixed class with 27 children. In a petition, he stated on the one hand that the girls' class was "completely full" and on the other hand that "with this number of pupils" "nothing can be achieved"; 15 to 20 children were "the utmost". He lost the battle. In 1893, the maximum number of 25 pupils, which had long been a waste of time anyway, was raised to 30.

	Practical lessons with vocational orientation in the new auxiliary schools: carpentry workshop, school garden, teaching kitchen

Something similar can be observed almost everywhere: Kielhorn in Brunswick speaks of 20 as the "normal number", but his first class in 1881 already had 29 children, and even he did not succeed in reducing the average number significantly in the long term. Overall, one must come to the conclusion that from the very beginning the auxiliary school was not able to work under the conditions that all educational or medical representatives and advocates declared to be indispensable - and one can add: This has remained the case to this day.

The "right" pupils

One of the main problems of the emerging special school was determining the right pupils. It was recognised that these had to be children who did not come close to academic success in general school, even though they did not primarily suffer from organic damage or were merely neglected by parents or teachers. They were supposed to be somewhere between the more or less 'normal' learners and the mentally handicapped ("nincompoops"). They were labelled as "the last in the class", the "mentally weak", "half-wits", "weakly capable", "weakly gifted" or "(educationally) feeble-minded". The terminological confusion reflects the fact that there was a complete lack of a theoretical basis. The most frequent formulation found in the sources by the Cologne teacher Holl and his school inspector also corresponds to this, namely a vague "suitable for our institution".

The Cologne preference for the expression "mentally not normally developed", which certainly goes back to the school inspector, is out of the ordinary. It has not yet been possible to establish where he got his inspiration from. There is only one parallel, which Brandenberg is unlikely to have been aware of: In Brunswick, the term "school department for mentally weak children" was once considered before the auxiliary school was founded. What both formulations have in common is that they do not express a static lack of talent, a defect, but the aspect of development. This seems downright modern and cannot simply be dismissed as a meaningless variant within the colourful spectrum of terms. Furthermore, the way in which the term is used shows that great importance was attached from the outset to labelling the student body as precisely as possible. The fact that the search for this had to remain unsuccessful due to a lack of scientific foundations should not lead us to question its seriousness.

Social aspects

The situation was similar with socio-economic aspects. It was foreseen early on that children from the poorer classes would be the majority of those attending the remedial schools. But a systematic treatment of the phenomenon failed again because theoretical approaches, in this case sociological ones, were not available, certainly also because of the political climate of the Wilhelminian era. Nevertheless, the sources contain a wealth of material providing insight into family and social circumstances. For example, in his report on the mother of a child suspected of prostitution, a police inspector openly calls for socio-political measures to alleviate the social misery of those 'lower class' families. The home visits give the teachers an insight into the reality of their children's lives, which is reflected in the sources. The same applies to the "follow-up care" of school leavers by the teachers, which makes it possible to follow individual fates in their professional and social integration over the years. There is not enough space here to go into this in detail. Instead, the analysis of the school background, the parents' occupational details and the addresses will be presented. This data provides information on both economic and socio-cultural aspects.

At the time of the first two surviving registration lists in 1883 and 1886, there was still a distinction in Cologne between "district schools" and so-called "free schools for the poor". The latter suffered from generally catastrophic conditions. It is hardly surprising that of the 91 children registered in the 1883 list, 67 were in free schools and only 24 in district schools. In 1886 the ratio was less distorted at 58:34, but it should be noted that in the meantime children from overcrowded free school classes had been transferred to district schools on several occasions.

The lists also requested information on the "status of the parents". Day labourers" predominated, i.e. working people who were in a very insecure position without a long-term contractual commitment but who did not always have to be unskilled workers. There is evidence of multiple changes between skilled trade employment and day labour - in both directions. These day labourers, who must in any case be counted among the poor or at least among those constantly threatened by poverty, make up 46% of the occupations listed in the 1883 registration list (and with the exception of 3 cases, these are exclusively parents of children from free schools), 40% in 1886 and around 40% in the registrations of the following years. This proportion is extremely high, far exceeding the data that has been handed down from Aachen (20%) and Düsseldorf (26%). This reflects the social and economic structure of Cologne's population, which has long been - and still is - problematic.

If you plot the homes of all the children listed in the 1886 registration lists on a city map, you will see a strong concentration in one part of the southern part of the historic city centre. This includes several streets that had been known for centuries as poor people's neighbourhoods. There does indeed seem to be a very long-lasting socio-economic topography in large historic cities. So while the classes of "mentally abnormal children" are recruited from very specific, circumscribable neighbourhoods in Cologne's old town, the school building, whose location is explicitly approved of, is located almost at the other end of the city. This proves once again how 'blind' the decision-makers were to the unequal distribution of social classes, despite their intimate knowledge of the city.

However, it would be wrong to assume that ignoring the socio-economic aspects was total. But it did take a few years before a second auxiliary school was founded in the southern part of the old town, which soon outnumbered the first. The main reaction of the school inspector, the teachers and private, mostly church-orientated associations to the social problems consisted of intensive efforts to integrate the children into the labour market, which led to the years of aftercare mentioned above. It was in this area that early remedial education achieved its highest-ranking pedagogical achievements (even if these were all too often unsuccessful in the long term).

Preliminary conclusion

In some respects, the historical beginnings of the school for the learning disabled lay the foundation for its problematic situation today: the relationship with the general school was ambivalent. On the one hand, the special school advertised itself with the dubious argument of relieving the burden, on the other hand, there seemed to be no particular enthusiasm for it in the general school. Apart from the fact that special education may seem like an unspoken reproach to 'normal' education, other means had long been used to relieve the 'burden': Children were left to sit on the back benches, or they were dismissed from school as 'unfit for education'.

On the one hand, the municipal authorities welcomed the new school, but on the other hand, the required class sizes, which were tiny by the standards of the time, seemed too expensive. Thus, although high expectations were built up - also by the representatives of the idea of an auxiliary school - the conditions for realising them were denied to the auxiliary school from the outset. At best, it was able to shine in the area of vocational preparation and aftercare.

The definition of the student body is also characterised by several 'on the one hand and on the other': While the children were understood as not normally developed and weakly capable, in any case incapable of benefiting from elementary school education, they were not supposed to be on the level of 'imbeciles' who were no longer capable of schooling at all. Weakly developed mental (today we would call it intellectual) abilities were recognised a priori as the decisive factor in children's school problems, and much evidence was found to support this; on the other hand, in the course of day-to-day educational work, experiences were repeatedly made that should have called this theoretical assumption into question. In particular, teachers were confronted almost daily with the poverty and marginalised social position of the children and their families.

All of these contradictions and ambiguities were carried along by the remedial school for decades, carried over into the phase of the school for the learning disabled and have basically not been able to be resolved to this day. The fact that a confusion of terms has recently set in again with the coexistence of "school for the learning disabled", "special school" and "school for learning assistance" is just one indication of this. However, today I often cannot even recognise any serious efforts to bring about clarification, as was the case at the end of the 19th century. And whether the abolition of this problematic form of special school was a solution is still an open question ....

The author

Prof Dr Ulrich Schröder, special education teacher at the Institute of Educational Sciences 2 in Department 1 Education, was appointed to Oldenburg in 1978. After working as a teacher for several years, he studied psychology, education and art history in Cologne. After completing his doctorate, he worked as an academic councillor in Cologne. His research focus is on the history of education for the learning disabled, metacognition and comparative special needs education.