Aspects of family mental health in Europe : contributors, D. Buckle ... [et al.].

Date:
1965
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Aspects of family mental health in Europe : contributors, D. Buckle ... [et al.]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SCHOOLS FOR PARENTS 105 In addition an indigenous institution, the Cultural Centre of the Province of Hainault, had formed very vigorous cultural groups throughout that Province. Several years ago this Centre decided to extend its activities to parent education work. It formed a group of lecturers and leaders and is now, in collaboration with the Paris team, organizing a proper institute for training family educators. At Brussels there is a school for parents that provides courses and arranges consultations under the auspices of the University. A few other local schools have been founded in the country. The authori¬ ties responsible for educational reform and for popular education are actively sponsoring undertakings of this kind. They are making every effort to promote the establishment of schools for parents throughout the country and to find staff for them. The latter development is still in its early stages. In Switzerland, the French-speaking cantons have for the last ten years or so been setting up schools for parents — even in the smallest localities — which arrange consultations and organize discussion groups run by a very ingenious technique involving dramatic games. These very active schools meet together annually for a kind of national congress and take part in the Sèvres Journées internationales d'Etudes. In German Switzerland too the schools for parents movement is well advanced, but on account of the language question it has closer relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. In Germany, a number of schools for mothers were set up before the Second World War in some large towns. The idea behind these schools was basically practical, not psychological. Their object was to teach mothers cliild rearing and domestic economy, also the new educational methods that had distinguished pioneers in Germany and Switzerland — Fröbel and Pestalozzi. These schools, which taught the practical management of daily life, had a fairly large attendance. After the war some of them tried to bring in fathers, and a number of schools for parents were set up in Hanover, Ulm, and Stuttgart. Mention should also be made of the very enter¬ prising step taken by the Berlin-Tempelhof youth authorities, which founded a school for parents designed chiefly to bridge the gap between the generations and to interest adults in young people with a view to checking the rise of juvenile delinquency. We should mention, in addition, the interest shown in parent education by the Faculty of Sociology of Cologne University. In 1963, for the first time, a school for parents in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Hanover School, joined the Paris Groupement international d'Etudes. In Italy, schools for parents founded since the Second World War were, in 1960, among the first to join the Groupement international