"New education" challenged the educational orthodoxy of schooling from the 1920s. It attempted to emancipate and unfold the potential of the universal and natural child, the family and the nation, using school pedagogy. It introduced child-centered reforms into the existing state sector school in Denmark. In this article, these developments are constructed theoretically as historical processes of welfare state formation, instituting mental and social categories about the child and the social world, employing prescriptive pedagogy in an emerging field of school pedagogy. Furthermore, the network of the ‘significant school pedagogues’ that were involved in these endeavors from 1929-1960, are encircled. The characteristics of this group of school pedagogues are hybridity and plurality of disciplines and professions, i.e., teachers, psychologists, artists, philosophers etc., which is conceived of as a sign of an emerging field of school pedagogues. Finally, it is indicated which societal powers that are involved in the making and remaking of this welfare state progressivism, i.e., an upcoming bourgeois and heterogeneous culture: the main figures of the school pedagogues are originating socially from environments of teachers, farmers and small scale trade, grocers and merchants. These social groups are able to reproduce their positions relatively, conquering school pedagogy. At the same time the article describes them as conquered by the state’s universalising mechanisms and social ordering devices