Daniel Tröhler

The discourse of German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik – A contextual reconstruction

The framework of German educational discourse of the twentieth century is so‐called geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, or education as one of the humanities or arts rather than as a science. It triumphed around 1925 in the second half of the Weimar Republic. This article outlines in three steps the core elements of this educational discourse. First, it shows that the mode of thinking of the exponents of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik was dualistic in a traditional Protestant manner. They juxtaposed empiry and Geist, plurality and unity, and outward and inward, and they favoured the inward unity and coherency of Geist. The contextual analysis shows, however, that the dualistic thought schema was virulent not only among German educationalists and philosophers, but also found strong expression in novelists and essayists like Thomas Mann, or the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rudolf Eucken. Mainstream thinkers criticised the plural systems of Western democracy and capitalism – first and foremost, however, American democracy and capitalism – which were seen to epitomise both of these “un‐German” movements. The true German nature was thought to be an inner spiritual life, which was originally religious and through the course of history came to characterise the whole of German life and thought. It was believed that this spiritual inner life was revealed best by German art, particularly German music. This resistance to empiricism led, and this is the second step, to two analogous notions of the totality or wholeness of the individual and the nation. Man is not understood to be merely an individual, but more importantly a “personhood” (Persönlichkeit), which was described as an inward spiritual life that arose through effort and self‐cultivation, or Bildung. In addition to this inward personhood, however, the conception of “nationhood,” a national spiritual life as Volksstaat, or the ethnocultural nation as detached and distinguished from the political sphere, is seen as important. The individual person can perfect himself only in the framework of the typical characteristics of his Volk – the German Volk. Western democracy and plurality are seen as an atomistic “aggregate of individuals” and juxtaposed against the German concept of the ethnocultural Nation, the Volk community composing an organic unity that transcends the individual. Bildung is the spiritual formation of integrated, cultivated personalities who would orient themselves to the Volk community. In the curriculum of true education, along with the German language the study of Heimat becomes the fundamental element. In contrast to specialised subjects, the contents of Heimat would reflect the organic in the world, the totality of life: in the Volk and in the spiritual‐mental unity within the Persönlichkeit. The two constructions – deepest roots in the tradition of the Volk on one side, and highest inner spirituality in the personality on the other – resulted in education that had to oscillate between lowest and highest and, through this, had to lose sight of empirical, that is, social and political, dimensions. This is the third step that the present article wants to address. The true understanding of education, according to the exponents of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, puts social and political issues in their only proper place: inside the inner 760 Daniel Tröhler personality. Politicisation of the German person had to take place in the context of Volksstaat, not in democracy. To be free meant the embedding of the individual into the harmonious beauty of the whole. This notion created a social and political vacuum between the lowest denominator or totality of the Germanic people and the highest whole or totality of the Germanic personality, so that education had to be given the attribution – one that continues to be variously described and affirmed in education research in the German‐language realm up to the present day – that education is autonomous, independent of social or political context. This was based on the term Bildung – the inner ideology set against a pluralistic world. Autonomy means insisting on the inner freedom of man, on his inner coherency, and his will. In the midst of the confusing simultaneous demands of society on youth, educational autonomy is believed to be a means of assuring human unity and wholeness; it serves a protective dam to contain the danger of persons being ripped apart or pulled hither and yon. With its goal of awakening a unified spiritual life against the modern plural democratic world, the true educational community becomes crucial.

The medicalization of current educational research and its effects on education policy and school reforms

This paper starts from the assumption of the emergence of an educationalized culture over the last 200 years according to which perceived social problems are translated into educational challenges. As a result, both educational institutions and educational research grew, and educational policy resulted from negotiations between professionals, researchers, and policy makers. The paper argues that specific experiences in the Second World War triggered a fundamental shift in the social and cultural role of academia, leading up to a technocratic culture characterized by confidence in experts rather than in practicing professionals (i.e., teachers and administrators). In this technocratic shift, first a technological system of reasoning emerged, and it was then replaced by a medical “paradigm.” The new paradigm led to a medicalization of social research, in which a particular organistic understanding of the social reality is taken for granted and research is conducted under the mostly undiscussed premises of this particular understanding. The result is that despite the increased importance of research in general, this expertocratic and medical shift of social research led to a massive reduction in reform opportunities by depriving the reform stakeholders of a broad range of education research, professional experience, common sense, and political deliberation.

Curriculum history or the educational construction of Europe in the long nineteenth century

Although it is generally acknowledged that the building of mass schooling systems must be considered in close relation to the emerging nation-states of the long 19th century, few published studies discuss the interrelation between the actual foundation of the (nation-) states and the introduction of the modern school. This article examines the role that constitutions play in the construction of national citizens as an expression of a particular cultural understanding of a political entity, and then discusses European examples, indicating how the particular constitutional construction of the citizens of European countries almost immediately triggered the need to create new school laws designed to organize the actual implementation of the constitutionally created citizens. The focus is on the specific need to ‘make’ loyal citizens by creating the symbiosis between the nation and the constitutional state and by emphasizing the cultural differences between the individual nation-states and their overall curricula. The article concludes with a formulation of research desiderata which envision a transnational curriculum history that is emancipated from both national and global research agendas, enabling a European education history that respects cultural distinctions rather than levelling them into one grand narrative.

The Global Language on Education Policy and Prospects of Education Research

In an interview with the New York Times on March 9, 2008, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, Joel Klein, formulated the objective of his school reform programme: “What you need to create,” Klein told the journalist, “is a school district that people from other cities can come to and say: ‘This works. All we’ve got to do is replicate this’” (“How Many Billionaires,” 2008).

Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationalization of the Modern World

Introduction The catchword “educationalization,” which enjoyed some popularity around 1920, has been used increasingly since the 1980s, first in the German and then in the Belgian and English discussions. Although the uses of and intentions behind the term are far from identical, they all express a perceived intersection between distinct social practices, one of which is education. As a rule, this intersection is interpreted as assigning education the task of coping with perceived social problems. Accordingly, the most popular expression of this mode of thought has been labeled, in an abstracting way, the educationalization of social problems. This entry builds on that but suggests a more comprehensive view, less reactive in character by claiming that since the eighteenth century the construction of modernity, progress, and open future depends on an idea of education that promises to be the engine of modernity by means of (new) and broadly disseminated knowledge and technologies and, at the same time, an instance of moral reassurance empowering the individual exposed to these modern conditions and their moral hazards to act morally or virtuously. Educationalization of the modern world, in this more comprehensive way, is a key concept for understanding and deciphering the grand narratives of modernity and the modern self. Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationaliza... file:///Users/daniel.troehler/Downloads/manuscript.html

The Educationalization of the ModernWorld: Progress, Passion, and the Protestant Promise of Education

In the foreword to his very last World Development Report by the World Bank Group in 2007, World Bank Group President Paul Wolfowitz (2006) reminds readers that the Bank’s overarching mission is to fight poverty throughout the world. A core task in this fight is to invest in young people, more precisely in their education. Never before, Wolfowitz asserts, has the time been better to invest in young people, because never before in history has the number of people worldwide aged 12–24 years been larger, and never before have young people been as healthy and well educated as today. Because of falling fertility, the need for this investment has become even more urgent, since the aging of societies will cause tremendous social, economic, and political challenges in the near future. In order to avoid the fundamental problems of aging societies, it is necessary to raise the share of the population that is working and to boost household savings. After all, Wolfowitz reminds the readers, the young people of today are “tomorrow’s workers, entrepreneurs, parents, active citizens, and, indeed, leaders” (Wolfowitz, 2006, p. xi). At least two discursive patterns in this Foreword by Wolfowitz might catch our attention. First, we might note the rhetorical trick that reformers always use by urging that ‘never before’ has such and such been the case and that it is most important ‘especially today’ to think or act in this or another way. The seriousness or even tragedy of the present is presented as an indisputable fact. However, despite the fact that the alleged appraisal of the present can only be read as historical argument, it is not based on any historical investigation at all but instead appeals to general sentiments that people have had forever as they deal with everyday life and strive for certainty. According to John Dewey’s (1929) Gifford Lectures, The Quest for Certainty, this striving is the fundament on which people construct dualistic worldviews, praising religiously the intelligible eternal world and being sceptical toward the contingent empirical world.

Concepts, Cultures and Comparisons

In the October/November issue of 2002 the University of Heidelberg newsletter Unispiegel announced a series of public lectures dedicated to the question: “Are we still a people of poets and thinkers?”, with the subtitle providing the information that the university’s Studium Generale lecture series in winter semester 2002/2003 would focus on educational questions (Bildungsfragen) (Unispiegel, 2002). Ten different scholars were invited, including even one scholar from abroad, as the announcement proudly emphasized.

Langue as Homeland: The Genevan Reception of Pragmatism

Hardly in any other European country than in Switzerland can we demonstrate evidence of an early and long-lasting interest in pragmatism.1 To be accurate, the Swiss reception had three centers, one of them a kind of “headquarters”: Neuchâtel, Lausanne, and above all Geneva—in other words, in the three Protestant capitals of cantons in the French part of Switzerland. In order to explain this phenomenon, I first reconstruct the early contacts between Geneva and the United States; these show a familiarity going beyond personal sympathy. Next, I focus on the transcontinental exchange after 1905, which became more and more educational, in connection with progressive education; this points out the core element of the Genevans’ specific interest in Deweyan education: activity. Then I try to show that this core element was part of the liberal reformist langue, showing that langues are homelands without political borders, although they do not rule out local readings and accentuations. Finally, I show that the activity of reception was not limited to the Genevans, and that they, in turn, experienced an active reception abroad, showing that libraries do not travel without specific preconditions in the destinations.

Beyond Arguments and Ideas: Languages of Education

Whether or not education counts as an academic discipline is being disputed. This uncertainty is connected with both the object of educational research – the educational field with its public discourses, organizations, and personae – and the mode of research and academic discussion. These two elements, the field and research in the field, are closely connected, because the research questions regulate (to a large extent) what constitutes the field. The dominant modes of research define the way in which the educational field is perceived. For instance, today’s globally dominant large-scale assessment research mainly defines the educational field in terms of core skills or school disciplines that are to be learnt.

Between Ideology and Institution: The Curriculum of Upper-Secondary Education.

This study examines apparently similar historical phenomena in 19th‐century Prussia and Switzerland: the establishment of modern foreign languages in the curriculum of upper‐secondary education. Through the course of the 19th century, there appear to have been great transnational European affinities with regard to both the differentiation of the upper‐secondary education into types and the development of the curriculum. However, the contextualization of the curriculum within the overall organization of the school system raises doubts as to whether the similarity is more than only quantitative. A second contextualization of the overall organization of education within cultural convictions also reveals fundamental differences rooted in different political convictions, such as monarchism and republicanism. As a result, despite the formal similarities, the establishment of the foreign language education in Switzerland and Prussia could not have been more different.