Psychologie und Schule (English: Psychology and school) is a German book published in 1920 by the German author Otto Lipmann. It was published by the Julius Beltz publishing company and is book 47 of the series Aktuelle Fragen aus der Pädagogik der Gegenwart (English: Current questions in the present pedagogy), issued by Max Reiniger. The book discusses the field of use of psychology in the school environment. By writing it Lipmann wanted to teach the readers about the development of modern psychology in 1920 and its relation to pedagogy. It incorporates topics with regard to education that are also dealt with in the 21st century and gives insights into the progress made in the 20th century.
Context After finishing his banking apprenticeship, Otto Lipmann studied philosophy and psychology from 1899 to 1904 in Munich, Berlin, and Wroclaw. In 1906, he founded the Institute for Applied Psychology and collective psychological research in Berlin together with William Stern and took over the sole management in 1916. Together with Stern, he founded the Zeitschrift für Angewandte Psychologie (English: Journal of Applied Psychology) from 1906 to 1933, in which he published articles about applied psychology and educational psychology. Lipmann's focus on work and educational psychology was also present in multiple books he published before 1920, the publication year of Psychologie und Schule. Examples of those are Grundriss der Psychologie für Pädagogen (English: Outline of Psychology for Educators) in 1909, Forschung und Unterricht in der Jugendkunde (English: Research and teaching in youth studies) that he wrote together with William Stern in 1912, as well as Schriften zur Psychologie der Berufseignung und des Wirtschaftslebens (English: Writings on the psychology of professional aptitude and economic life), a journal he wrote together with Stern from 1918 until 1933. With those publications, Lipmann contributed to advances in the field of applied psychology. His book Psychologie für Lehrer (English: Psychology for teachers) which he published in the same year as Psychologie und Schule deals with the outcomes of psychology that are relevant for teachers in the economical system. Lipmann declares those two books as supplementing each other by expanding the reader's knowledge. With Psychologie und Schule (English: Psychology and school), Lipmann reacted to the outcomes of the Reich School Conference in Berlin, in 1920. The conference was convened by the Reich Ministry of the Interior under Erich Koch-Weser, and systematically reorganized the German school system in the Weimar Republic. He argued that those outcomes were not representative of the up-to-date state of modern psychology during that time period. The Reich School Conference differed from all other school conferences that took part in the Empire and before in one important respect: for the first time, it was an event organized by the Reich and not by the individual states. It also did not consider separately lower and higher schools for boys and girls but pursued the idea of a comprehensive school system. The Reich School Conference took place with reference to the Imperial Constitution of August 11, 1919, in which a uniform program for the entire public school system was laid down. This program established principles of compulsory education and included all public schools, from the beginning of compulsory education to leaving school and entering employment or college. These principles were decided on because until then it was up to the individual German federal states to take care of cultural tasks, whereby they did not have to take each other's decisions into account. The different cultural and historical development of the individual countries meant that the school system also differed greatly from one another. This lack of uniformity was particularly noticeable in the internal and external organization of school life. Lipmann was concerned with counteracting the prevailing work organization of the time, Taylorism. His goal was to replace it with a psychologically sound form of work design. He tried to make the relationship between work psychology and social interests explicit by asking in whose interest work psychology should be practiced, by whom, and under what conditions.
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