190055 SE Development and Change of Educational Theories (2024S)

Today's dominant patterns of thought-at least as far as politics, social organization, and education are concerned-derive many of their certainties from what has been called 'the Enlightenment.' Indeed, 'the Enlightenment' seems to embody almost everything on which modern reason is based: Ideas of progress, emancipation, liberty, freedom, justice, democracy, reason, morality, tolerance, goodness, good nature, protected childhood, and, to some extent at its center, education as a technology for implementing these ideas advocated as true and good human potentials.
A closer look, however, shows that the ideas of the time about what 'the child' was and what he or she was to be as a future adult/citizen were highly differentiated: Enlightenment visions of education is thus highly diverse, especially in terms of national preferences in each case. The seminar wants to devote itself to three of these national preferences, which still dominate today. It examines three ideal types of pedagogical conceptions in the 1800s that continue to influence theory formation today: the 'virtuous citizen' in the United States, the rational citizen in France, and the 'educated man' (gebildeter Mensch) in Germany. The goal of the seminar is to use selected texts to understand how these three educationalized ideal types emerged from comprehensive political and cultural discourses, how they were 'educationalized,' and how they became the basis of the national education thought that still dominate today.