Question
Education is a term that is as colourful and multifaceted as it is persistent and shapes not only specialist educational discourse, but also social and political debates with regard to shaping and securing a good future from a national and global perspective. It can be noticeable that the actors involved often have a different understanding of education, as the Austrian philosopher and publicist Konrad Paul Liessmann has pointed out: "'Education' itself has become a diffuse term in the so-called knowledge and information society, used to designate everything that somehow has to do with the supervision and schooling of children, with the training of adolescents, with career-oriented study programmes for prospective academics, with qualifications and training of all kinds, with the acquisition of basic cultural techniques or the writing of academic theses. No wonder everyone can talk about 'education' and always mean something different to the person they are talking to."
The strategic use of the concept of education in the never-ending debate about the 'right' education also shows how adaptable this word seems to be. For example, proponents of competence-orientated schools or empirical teaching research (usually conducted by psychologists) often see education as an elitist and outdated pedagogical ideal, yet they still use this term - probably in order to hold on to an established semantic framework and thus avoid losing touch with professional and social debates. There is then talk of competence-orientated education and the educational sciences - terms that met with protest from critics of the school reforms rapidly introduced in the course of the first Pisa studies at the beginning of the 2000s, insofar as they suspected a betrayal of 'real' education. This shows that education does not seem to have lost any of its appeal as a fighting concept. In addition, the pedagogical discourse knows other central terms such as learning, socialisation or upbringing, which compete with the concept of education.
However, education is not just a vague concept today. Rather, the history of the term also clearly shows how the understanding of education - and thus also that of people and the world - has changed time and again, as Michaela Vogt and Till Neuhaus have recently pointed out. Last but not least, this mutability or adaptability of the term seems to be a central reason why education - despite some setbacks - can still stubbornly assert itself as a relevant discourse term. A central transformation of the understanding of education can be seen in its change from a religious to a pedagogical term, which is also associated with the foundation of modern pedagogy since the 18th century, even though traces of a 'secularisation' of education and what it refers to can already be seen in Renaissance humanism. However, transformations are usually accompanied not only by discontinuities, but also by continuities, which is why the question of the religious heritage of pedagogy arises, not least because of the enduringly affirmative character of education.
of education.
In the following, education will first be approached from today's perspective in order to gain some understanding of the term on the basis of some basic principles of its pedagogical use. In a second step, education will be analysed historically in an exemplary manner. Starting from the meaning of education in Meister Eckhart - and thus a classical religious version of the phenomenon - epochs are considered in which changes in the understanding of education become tangible: Humanism, the Enlightenment and Neo-Humanism. Whether this change in the concept of education from a religious to a pedagogical orientation was consistent, however, will ultimately be examined in a third step.
Current approaches or what can be understood by education
For Niklas Luhmann and Eberhard Schorr, education is the 'concept of God' of pedagogy, i.e. in their view it is a conceptualisation that has exactly the right relationship between imprecision and clarity, which on the one hand makes it possible to delimit a roughly definable field of discourse, but which at the same time dissolves at its edges (Michaela Vogt/Till Neuhaus). This creates opportunities for connections from different directions, which can be seen not only in synchronous debates, but also in diachronic developments - as can be observed, for example, in the comparison of Meister Eckhart's and Wilhelm von Humboldt's understanding of education. Even though they belonged to different worlds of thought, both were concerned - as will become clear - with processes of human change through education. At the same time, other aspects of their respective views on education are quite different. Against this background, it not only makes sense but is also enlightening to analyse the transformation of education historically. It is precisely the difficulty of an exact definition of education, or even the doubt expressed by Theodor W. Adorno as to whether it exists at all or how it can be grasped as a phenomenon, that makes education the pedagogical 'concept of God' par excellence.
To the extent that attempts to clearly define education in conceptual terms repeatedly encounter difficulties, the education historian Christian Rittelmeyer has suggested that education should be described less as a term and more as a 'pattern of orientation'. He also speaks of education as a 'landscape of meaning' and describes it as a pedagogical 'centre of energy' that can drive the thoughts and actions of pedagogically responsible people. Enlightenment and humanity represent motifs that are stably linked to this field of meaning and thus give pedagogical thought and action a certain direction.
It should not be forgotten that Bildung is a specifically German-language term and therefore refers to a particular way of thinking and acting in education. At the same time, Bildung is the pedagogical term primarily used in the German-speaking world. If Bildung is translated into English as 'education', for example, a certain meaning is lost, but this does not mean that Bildung and education have nothing to do with each other at all.
The core of education is the self-determination and freedom of the person, which refers back to the contours of the term in the Enlightenment. In the context of this understanding, it becomes clear why educational scientist Jürgen Rekus has taken a critical stance towards the concepts of competence and educational standards, which have become established in the educational context over the last 20 years or so. According to Rekus, talking about educational standards is particularly problematic because they are externally set benchmarks that have to be met in order to be considered competent or suitable for society. In his opinion, however, education is characterised by the fact that individuals set their own standards. In contrast, educational standards and competences are externally set norms (e.g. subject curricula) whose degree of realisation is to be measured, which is why we speak of output orientation.
The understanding of education becomes clear when it is placed in relation to other central pedagogical concepts such as socialisation, learning and, in particular, upbringing. While socialisation, according to Winfried Böhm, primarily refers to the integration of children into family, social or religious contexts by living and participating in them, learning traditionally involves the storage of sensory data, whereby not only vocabulary but also behaviour can be learned. People learn "through conditioning, through imitation, through appropriation, through memory and experience (...) within institutional frameworks as well as in everyday situations". (Eva Borst) With Eva Borst, it should be noted that learning processes are linked to specific challenges and are not always fully conscious. In education, the focus is on the intentional transfer of knowledge or norms, i.e. parents, schools, parishes or other institutions consciously want to pass on content and behaviour to their recipients. Even if the motive of reproduction initially predominates here, education also aims for freedom, i.e. for people to think and act independently.
As important as these conceptual differentiations are, it is also clear that education is based on all of these pedagogical processes. Education is not possible without socialisation, learning and upbringing, which places a specific emphasis on them. This consists of enabling a specific perspective on the world: "However, education produces a different relationship to the world than education ever could, because education puts the individual in a position to reflect on what was previously taken for granted and to question it. In other words: education represents the condition for the possibility of critically analysing the social conditions still affirmed by education. Education is therefore a condition of education, but education is not determined by education." (Eva Borst)
Borst's definition is certainly based on certain assumptions, e.g. the aspects of rationality and reflexivity are strongly emphasised here. On the one hand, the Enlightenment, whose recourse to reason was central to the development of the concept of education, shines through here. On the other hand, however, this view also points to neo-humanism, whose moment of distancing people from the world was significant for Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example.
As understandable and correct as this normative view of education as a process of personal freedom is, this understanding appears to be in need of supplementation, as the linking of subject and society that takes place in the educational process ultimately leads to a set of individual skills and, at the same time, represents a socially relevant resource. This is precisely the aim of the education system since Humboldt, as Heinz-Elmar Tenorth has emphasised - perhaps surprisingly for many.
The changing concept of education - historical drillings
The historical view of education faces a problem, because although there has been a religious understanding of education since medieval German mysticism, it was not until the 18th century that the concept of education became established in pedagogical thinking (Rebekka Horlacher). If examples from the 16th and 17th centuries are presented below, in which a change from a primarily religious to a more secular pedagogy becomes initially tangible, then it would probably be correct to speak of education here - although sometimes characteristics of the later contoured concept of education may already appear. This aspect is also interesting in the context of the emergence of pedagogy as a discipline through its emancipation from theology in the course of the 18th century, in which the connection with the then current concept of education and its understanding of freedom and reason was perhaps intended to enable it to distinguish itself from the older, religiously-influenced education. If this was the case, however, it did not happen with ultimate consistency, as the concept of education remained significant - at least with regard to the broad masses of the people (Heinz-Elmar Tenorth). It seems as if this demarcation is repeated in later historical educational research, insofar as it focuses on pedagogy since modernity in order to simultaneously emphasise the emancipatory character of education. In contrast, however, it must be clearly stated that this emancipatory motif is much older and was already present, for example, in the idea of man as a sculptor of himself in humanism and the Renaissance, in which there is at least a linguistic reference to the concept of education (Andreas Dörpinghaus/Ina K. Uphoff). The following, albeit only exemplary, drillings in the history of the concept of education are intended to show its decisive changes.
Meister EckhartMeister Eckhart brings the concept of education into play in connection with the motif of the image of God. Its realisation is the goal of Christian mysticism in particular. Interesting in this context is the coining of education according to the idea of the imago dei within the framework of 'negative theology'. The author of this educational process is God, and the movement of man towards him initiated by him occurs through a detachment of man from his creaturely activity. This also applies to the human striving for God himself, insofar as the active search for God as a "creaturely statement" and "insofar as he is recognised in images and works" (Dietmar Mieth) becomes irrelevant. The image of God is realised as a process of letting go and leads to "singleness, poverty, serenity and seclusion" (Dietmar Mieth). Eckhart's clearly religiously structured understanding of education is to be understood as letting go.
Pedagogical research on Meister Eckhart has recently drawn attention to two further important aspects. Firstly, the aspect of personal dignity, which lies in the idea of the image of God and which later became important in humanism. Secondly, the importance of Christian doctrine for the educational process has been pointed out, to which Eckhart's preaching activity refers. In other words, the theological debate also had an educational function - combined with a critical potential, as Eckhart interpreted the doctrine of faith and related it to himself or the individual, as was customary in mysticism (Michaela Vogt/Till Neuhaus). In the humanism of the Renaissance period, it was precisely these motifs strongly emphasised by Eckhart - the image of God and the dignity of man and the associated potential - that were to be reasserted. Now also with a clearer shift of activity towards man himself, who was described by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), for example, as a 'sculptor' and 'poet' of himself (Andreas Dörpinghaus/Ina Katharina Uphoff). The following section will focus on humanism, with Erasmus of Rotterdam and the College of Annecy in Savoy as examples.
Humanism IErasmus of Rotterdam: Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) was extremely productive in literature as a theologian, philosopher and theoretical pedagogue and developed a pedagogy of the subject that was not thought of in this way again until the Enlightenment. Of particular importance is the fact that the theologian Erasmus was the first to provide an anthropological foundation for the need to educate human beings. In his 1529 essay on the early spiritual formation of children, he stated: "People, believe me, are not born, they are formed." Even for Erasmus, the use of reason was a decisive goal of human education, which had to be encouraged through education. As Karl-Heinz Dammer has emphasised, he focused on three central aspects from a pedagogical perspective: Firstly, the educandus should learn to dispense with guiding principles. This is reminiscent of Kant's later definition of enlightenment: being able to use one's own intellect without the help of others. Secondly, he emphasised the importance of experience, whereby he was not referring to empiricism but to interpersonal interaction. The third guiding principle is also related to this: the importance of dialogue, i.e. the exchange of arguments and getting to know other perspectives.
In practical terms, Erasmus focussed education on five tasks. Here, too, the anthropological orientation of his pedagogy becomes clear, without abandoning the Christian faith: 1. education in Christian piety; 2. instruction in the seven liberal arts - according to Dörpinghaus, the hallmark of a so-called canonical material education up to the modern age; 3. preparation for an independent lifestyle; 4. teaching appropriate manners; 5. instruction in the realms of geography, natural history or agriculture with regard to human activity in the community (Karl-Heinz Dammer).
Humanism IIThe college of Annecy: The school of the Savoy town of Annecy was under the control of the town magistrate from the 14th century and had two branches: The elementary classes, which served the literacy and moral education of all children, and the grammar classes, which were only attended by the children of the upper classes and where Latin lessons were the main focus. As ancient literature also conveyed moral duties and virtues, language and grammar lessons also served the purpose of moral education. There was also religious education, but this was subordinate to moral education. The French educational historian Serge Tomamichel has described the school he studied as humanistic - not least because the grammar lessons used the late antique 'Donatus minor', whose sentence examples referred to pagan texts. A donation from former pupil Eustache Chapuys (1491/1492-1556), a diplomat in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, led to a reorganisation of the school. The college was now not only in a new and comfortable economic position, but also acquired an autonomous status in 1556, insofar as it was no longer managed by the magistrate but by an administrative board. This consisted of four representatives of the city and two clergymen.
As Tomamichel has emphasised, the school was humanistically and secularly oriented, which opened up a wide range of professional careers to its graduates. Nevertheless, the Christian faith continued to play an important role. However, the college primarily served the citizens of Annecy. According to Tomamichel, the secular character of the school can be clearly demonstrated by four motives: Firstly, it was run by a secular-dominated board of directors; secondly, the teaching staff consisted mainly of lay people who were married and lived outside the school complex; thirdly, the teaching was based on humanist principles; for example, texts by Cato or Cicero were read. The texts were read without religious reservations or ecclesiastical 'purification' of possibly heretical passages. Rhetoric was one of the most important subjects. The secular texts were supplemented by Christian texts, and the practice of piety was also cultivated. Of course, the Christian faith was part of school life, but it was not its ultimate purpose. Fourthly, the educational ideal was the 'uomo universale', i.e. the complete person who could actively engage in political, economic, social and religious activities.
This development and flourishing of the college as an autonomous and secular school came to an end with the confessionalisation of the school. This initially happened in the context of the 'Counter-Reformation', which gave the Catholic faith more room at the college, which was set out in new educational regulations in 1596. According to Tomamichel, Catholic piety now became the central dimension of education at the college.
Finally, Bishop Francis de Sales (1567-1622) of Geneva, who resided in Annecy, also exerted a strong influence on the school. Its main purpose was to recruit new priests. He therefore ensured that school life was consistently structured along religious lines. Due to financial difficulties, the school was handed over to the Barnabite Order in 1614, which meant that the school finally lost its secular, autonomous character. The development outlined here is an example of the confessionalisation of secondary schools, which can be observed for both Protestantism and Catholicism from the later 16th century onwards, whereas prior to this, secondary schools in both Protestant and Catholic areas were oriented towards humanism and the 'devotia moderna' and thus, as Rudolf W. Keck sums up, would have referred to the same concepts. The focus of teaching and education thus shifted with the confessionalisation of secondary schools: "Whereas humanism and its after-effects in the 16th century were concerned with the scientific nature and contextual accuracy of the interpretation of beliefs, attention was now focused on the reliability of beliefs that could be established and produced through control." (Rudolf W. Keck) This broke off a potential development of an early, more anthropologically orientated pedagogy, which would not pick up speed again until the Enlightenment and which was closely linked to the concepts of education and education.
As Dietrich Benner has noted, since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Bildsamkeit" has referred to the idea that although people are born without specific talents, they are also capable of making something of themselves. They just need to be encouraged to do so. While Rousseau referred to this phenomenon as perfectibilité, Johann Blumenbach and Gottfried Herder, for example, spoke in more natural philosophical terms of the educational instinct, whose centre for Herder was the soul. Against this background, education is constituted as material-formal teaching, in which the educational instinct, i.e. the child's naturally inherent powers, must be awakened through content. Similar to humanism, an attempt was thus made to explain man from within himself, namely to understand him "as a being that undergoes an inner, individual development process". It can be stated: "(...) in this respect, people were also capable of a self-knowledge that allowed them to represent themselves as intelligent subjects with their own rights, independently of God's grace. (...) Education no longer meant the imagination of God in the soul, but rather the moulding of the individual's inherent powers with the aim of perfecting them in this world, which necessarily also included the perfection of the entire species." (Eva Borst) Superficially, this secularises the concept of education. However, the following historical explorations of the Enlightenment and Neo-Humanism seek to call this into question.
ClarificationJean-Jaques Rousseau: At first glance, Rousseau's famous educational philosophy text 'Émile', published in 1762, which was also influential in the German-speaking educational discourse, reveals something of an 'anthropological turn' in education, in that the human being - freed from original sin - is understood to be at the centre. This already becomes clear in the first sentence of 'Èmile': "Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates under the hands of men." And shortly afterwards he continues: "The natural man rests in himself. He is a unity and a whole; he relates only to himself or his equals." (Jean-Jaques Rousseau) Rousseau thus opened up a decisive, pedagogically relevant dichotomy: There is the morally good nature and there is the so-called state of society, which is characterised by depravity. By assigning the child to nature, Rousseau, as Fritz Osterwalder has shown, also places it in its good moral order and makes the child an expression of this good nature.
Education is understood here as the preservation of the wholeness and moral quality of the child and the natural development of its strengths. From a pedagogical point of view, two prerequisites are necessary for this: Firstly, the educator and secondly, the environment. The demands on the educator are high in that he himself must be a person who has been brought up in the absolutely good natural order and has remained in it. In other words, he himself represents the moral goodness of nature in the educational process and helps to ensure that "the eternal law of goodness is purely realised in the educated child" (Fritz Osterwalder).
In the face of a morally corrupt society, a weak child who is dependent on other people must be brought up far away from their influence, i.e. in rural seclusion. The only person of reference is the educator - but even this person takes a back seat to an environment arranged by him. The child is therefore left to its own devices and thus to the good order of nature. Good self-love is at work in the child, which develops in part because it does not recognise comparison with others - after all, for Rousseau, comparing oneself with others is the origin of evil.
This pedagogical setting leads to a great deal of power for the educator as well as a high level of responsibility, because: What God's grace was responsible for in Christian education, the human educator must now take responsibility for: "Absolute goodness is now at the direct disposal of education, or rather of the educator; the goodness of the pupil is a direct pedagogical responsibility in radical contrast to any social practice." (Fritz Osterwalder) Even if Rousseau initially 'secularises' education by rejecting original sin, he nevertheless establishes a new form of pedagogical 'sacrality' with the divine principle in nature, which appears very concretely in the child.
Neo-humanismWilhelm von Humboldt: In the modern German-speaking pedagogical debate, Humboldt's understanding of education is regarded as normative, whereby, according to Tenorth, it should not be forgotten that he understood education to be "esoteric and philosophical" on the one hand, but also very practical on the other. The founding of Berlin University, which was intended to provide both a general education for people and an academic education for future state and church servants, comes to mind here. The focus here is on the philosophical side, in which it becomes clear how Humboldt's turn towards man and the world is understood in sacred terms. It is above all the aspects of 'mediation', 'unity', 'soul' and 'freedom from the world' that make this new religious version of education clear - not least in comparison with Meister Eckhart's explicitly religious understanding. While Eckhart was concerned with the 'mediation' between the human and the divine, Humboldt's education meant the connection between the self and the world. The idea of 'unity' also runs through both concepts - but for Humboldt it is not the unity of God and man. For him, the unity of education is characterised by science integrating the individual disciplines and by true humanity as the goal of education. The purposeless reconnection (religio) of man to the world ultimately strengthens and nourishes the 'soul', just as worship is free of purpose and is intended to edify the soul. Humboldt writes about the general education of man: "Every occupation is capable of ennobling man (...). It is only the way in which it is pursued that matters; and here it can be assumed as a general rule that it has a beneficial effect as long as it itself, and the energy expended on it, primarily fills the soul" (Wilhelm von Humboldt).
Eckhart's divine revelation is replaced by Humboldt's spirit, which is supposed to enable objectivity and unity of education in the face of human diversity, but also the right values and feelings. Its seat is within the human being - the actual place of the educational process, as Humboldt emphasises (Wilfried Sühl-Strohmenger). After all, for Humboldt, education is the mode through which man is able to overcome his finiteness, in which one could see an analogy to Eckhart's divinisation of man. Humboldt states in his work on language: "Since this finiteness cannot be cancelled in fact, it must be cancelled in idea; since it cannot be done in a divine way, it must be done in a human way. But man's nature is to recognise himself in another; from this arises his need and his love. (...) But to arrive at this, language is the only (...) human (...) means".
Summary: The enduring religious structure of the pedagogical field
The exemplary drillings into the historical massif of the concept of education have shown that its processes of change have been characterised by both discontinuities and continuities. Humanism breaks up an educational process that was conceived entirely in terms of God in favour of individual human activity and human freedom, without abandoning the Christian faith, so that, with Stephanie Hellekamps, one can speak of traces of a secularisation of pedagogy before the Enlightenment era. In the Enlightenment and Neo-Humanism - apparently interrupted by the confessional age - these rationalising endeavours continued in the pedagogical field on the one hand, but on the other hand, education apparently invoked a surplus of possibilities that could not be communicated in any other way than in sacred language - be it with Rousseau as morally good nature and perfectibility or with Humboldt as the highest form of humanity. Both authors thus point beyond anthropologically given boundaries or at least clearly extend them. Education thus shows itself to be a real concept of God - not only because of its open-endedness of meaning, but above all because of the perspectives of hope and fulfilment associated with it. The secularisation of the concept of education since the Enlightenment thus goes hand in hand with new sacred patterns - possibly far more strongly than in humanism, inasmuch as human and divine scope for action could perhaps be thought of as separate but mutually complementary areas, whereas education now appears as a secular-sacred amalgam. However, the fact that education and pedagogy had a lasting theological subtext after the Enlightenment is not really surprising when you consider, on the one hand, how long the education system was the responsibility of the church and, on the other, that Christian faith and theology were "powerful generators of pedagogy" (Lothar Kuld), insofar as they influenced and inspired pedagogical actors.
While Rousseau's educator continues to have an impact on the pedagogical debate - namely in the ideal of the teacher as the authority responsible for the optimal development of pupils' good potential - the concept of education associated with Humboldt has come under fire since Pisa in the 2000s. The criticism was that it was too ineffective, too elitist and too cumbersome for a constantly changing and heterogeneous society. However, the 'God term' of education continues to function due to its unstable and sacred structure: as a point of reference for competence orientation, as a semantic motif of hope and struggle affirmatively anchored in society with regard to the ideal school and enabling a good future for all. In the face of global and multiple perceptions of crisis, these expectations are increasing and education is mutating into an eschatological buzzword, with which schools are assigned nothing less than the task of saving the world (e.g. 'sustainable education'). The openness of education in terms of content and the dependence of educational discourse on a semantics that can be utilised by as many actors as possible will probably ensure the lasting attractiveness of this term in the future. Just like the sacred charge of this pedagogical 'God term', which seems to promise the preservation and development of the natural goodness of the individual as well as the (moral) betterment of people and the world.
