190012 SE Development and Change of Educational Theories (2020W)

Today’s dominant ways of reasoning—at least about politics, social organization, and education—draw many of their certainties from what is labeled “the Enlightenment.” Indeed, “Enlightenment” seems to embody almost everything that modern reasoning relies upon: ideas of progress, emancipation, liberty, freedom, justice, democracy, reason, morality, tolerance, good nature, protected childhood, and—somewhat in the center of them all—education as a technology to put into practice these ideas, which were advocated as true and good human potentials.
Yet, there is no agreement on what the Enlightenment IS, and even the question of its essence may be misleading. Rather than engage in discussions on what the Enlightenment IS, this seminar focuses on educational reflections and practices in a time period labeled the "Age of Enlightenment", which covers, regarding space, the intellectual and political centers of Central and Western Europe, and regarding time, the period between the Peace of Westphalia (1648) concerning the European Continent and Scandinavia, and the beginning of the republican English Commonwealth (1649) for the British Isles, on the one hand, and the time span between the French Revolution (1789), the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (1806), and the Congress of Vienna (1814/15), on the other.
Over this period of time there was a remarkable continuing growing public interest in education, even though this interest varied across regions or political entities, and the strategies that were actually designed and sometimes implemented differed according to what may be called dominant cultural preference within the respective social orders. Protestantism and, in its wake, the Catholic Counter-Reformation played a predominant role in this emergence of a growing cultural faith in education. Notwithstanding this diversity in educational aspirations and actions, across Europe around 1800 we can identify an established “educationalized” culture in which all kinds of noneducational problems and challenges, such as crime, poverty, or corruption, were increasingly translated into educational questions in a way that education became the engine of both progress and stability, change and the taming of its feared excesses.
The seminar will alternately discuss original texts as well as new research literature with the aim of developing a differentiated picture of the age, which has been somewhat quickly dubbed the "educational century". The aim is to understand how an educated culture could emerge, which in the long 19th century made it easy for the newly emerging nation states to establish themselves on the basis of citizens educated to loyalty and identity.