A new entry on Otto Neurath in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some fascinating historical material on the education reform movement in Vienna and the way this involved the philosophers and psychologists and impacted on Popper. Karl Buhler was a key person, looking after the psychological side of the teacher training. He became Popper’s most important teacher.
See also Bill Bartley’s paper on “Popper and Wittgenstein as school teachers” for some insights into the currents of thought that came through the reform movement.
The topics which I have chosen to discuss are: (1) the once famous but now virtually forgotten school reform movement which was developed in Austria by Otto Glöckel immediately following the collapse of the dual monarchy and which managed to survive until the Doilfuss dictatorship of 1934; (2) the psychological school whose ideas undergirded this school reform: namely, Bühlerian child psychology, a critical version of Gestalt psychology, difficult to classify precisely, but perhaps closer to the thought of Piaget than to that of Wertheimer, Koffka, Köhler, or Kurt Lewin; (3) the personal participation in this movement by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper; (4) the development of Wittgenstein’s thought construed as that of an amateur child psychologist turning – partly as the result of his experience in schoolteaching at this particular time – from an essentially associationist psychology to a configurationism or contextualism close to that of the Gestaltists; (5) the thought of Popper viewed as that of one chiefly a schoolteacher and neo-Kantian Gestalt psychologist, a man far removed from the essential ideas of logical positivism, who virtually stumbled into his relationship with the Vienna Circle
and the consequent development of his hobby – namely, the philosophy of science – on which his reputation came to rest but which cannot properly be understood without some knowledge of his earlier research interests and permanent anti-positivist outlook; (6) the thought of the later Wittgenstein and the early Popper viewed as far more closely linked in spirit one to the other than to that of the Viennese positivists whom they influenced.
