Bildung: History

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Bildung History Currency

• Norm Friesen
• July 24, 2009
• nfriesen_at_tru.ca

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Overview

• What is Bildung?
• What is its history?
• The destruction and re-birth of Bildung in the
  20th Century
• Exercise Think of something/someone that changed
  you, and is responsible for who you are today.
• Bildung now Structural (Klafki) or
  Existential (Mollenhauer)
• Bildung versus the facilitation of learning

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Bildung

• A German word translated as
• Formation
• Growth
• Edification
• Not the same as
• Education
• Development
• Upbringing

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Recent Definition (Biesta, 2002)

• Bildung stands for an educational ideal that
  emerged in Greek society and that, through its
  adoption in Roman culture, humanism, neo-humanism
  and the Enlightenment, became one of the central
  notions of the modern Western educational
  tradition. Central in this tradition is the
  question of what constitutes an educated or
  cultivated human being. The answer to this
  question is not given in terms of discipline,
  socialisation or moral training, that is, as an
  adaptation to an existing external order. Bildung
  refers, rather, to the cultivation of the inner
  life, that is, of the human soul, the human mind.

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Emphasis on self-other

• The developmental opening up of a physical and
  mental reality for a person that is the
  objective or material aspect of Bildung
• But at the same time, it also means the
  developmental opening up of this person for this,
  her reality and this is the subjective and
  formal aspect...
• reciprocal interrelationship of world and
  individual (Klafki, 1997)
• Bildung as an intergenerational social and
  political process (Klafki)

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A Basic Definition

• Understand Bildung in terms of a kind of
  fiction, story.
• Bildungsroman The term Bildungsroman denotes
  a novel of all-around self-development
• Huck Finn escapes from his aunt,and goes down
  the Mississippi with Jim, a black slave
• This type of novel is at its roots a quest story,
  as both "an apprenticeship to life" and a "search
  for meaningful existence within society."

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Inclusive Term

• Interconnected developments in education, growth,
  socialization, self-understanding, changes around
  one
• Occurs through interaction with society, a given
  social order
• End result is an autonomous individual, capable
  of meaningful self-determination in relationship
  to the world around him.

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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Lived during the enlightenment the
  pedagogical century (Gudjons)
• Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation into
  the limitations and structure of reason itself
  (1781)
• Kant's "Copernican revolution places the human
  subject or knower at the center of inquiry into
  our knowledge, such that it is impossible to
  philosophize about things as they are
  independently of us
• his invention of critical philosophy, that is of
  the notion of being able to discover and
  systematically explore possible inherent limits
  to our ability to know through philosophical
  reasoning

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• Answer to the Question What is Enlightenment?
• Reply to the question posed an official in the
  Prussian government (1784)
• Ending of church and state paternalism
• People be given the freedom to use their own
  intellect.
• Kant praised Frederick II of Prussia for creating
  these preconditions

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Kant What is Enlightenment?

• Task of Education as self-determination through
  the exercise of reason
• Enlightenment is mans emergence from his
  self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the
  inability to use ones understanding without
  guidance from another. (An Answer to the
  Question What is Enlightenment? 1784)
• Unmündigkeit Mündig able to speak for
  onesself.
• Four questions from Critique of Pure Reason
• The whole interest of reason, speculative as
  well as practical, is centered in the three
  following questions
• What can I know? What should I do? What may I
  hope (for)?

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Early 1800s in Germany
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Neo-Humanism

• Research into ancient Greek culture idealization
  of it
• Emphasis on a general idea of Humanity as a
  paradigm, to be attained through Greek language
  and culture

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W. von Humboldt (1767-1835)

• Minister of Education in Prussian State
• Responsible for aspects of university that are
  still important today (e.g. Academic
  freedom/independence from the state the idea of
  the unity of research and teaching)
• Defined citizen of the world (Weltbürgertum)
  are those who, as autonomous individuals, are
  bound together in scholarly pursuit (not
  economic, professional).
• Bound together in dealing with the largest
  questions of humanity Freedom, justice,
  exchange of cultures, relationship to nature.
• transforming as much world as possible into
  the actual person that is life in the highest
  sense of the term.

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Theory of Bildung

• It is the ultimate task of our existence to
  achieve as much substance as possible for the
  concept of humanity in our person, both during
  the span of our life and beyond it, through the
  traces we leave by means of our vital activity.
  This can be fulfilled only by the linking of the
  self to the world to achieve the most general,
  most animated, and most unrestrained interplay
  freiesten Wechelswirkung (von Humboldt, 2000,
  p. 58)
• The self contains the embryo of universal
  humanity, and its realization is the inner
  destiny of the individual.

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But by the early 20th Century

• He who has un
• dergone Bildung is someone who does not work with
  his hands, who knows how to dress and behave
  properly, and who is conversant with what is
  being discussed in society. A further sign of
  Bildung is the correct use of foreign words
  whoever errs in meaning or pronounciation in this
  regard will cause his (level of) Bildung to be
  judged unfavourably. On the other hand, his
  Bildung will be as good as proven if he is able
  to speak a foreign language (Friedrich Paulsen
  1903)

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Bildung a Cathedral lying in Ruins

• The unholy marriage of property and Bildung was
  secured, and Bildung was plutocratically misused,
  valued only for individual gain, and finally
  reduced to a number of cannonical highschool
  subjects. (Gudjons, 2003)
• In the 1960s Bildung was exchanged for
  psychological and sociological notions like
  qualification, socialization, integration
  learning. (Biesta, 2002)

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Re-birth of Bildung in the 1980s

• Klafki (1927 - ) the task of Bildung cannot be
  abrogatedit is required bythe way that
  democratic societies are constituted
  (inalienability of the concept)
• Re-read theories of Bildung in terms of the
  abdication of the metaphysical absolute.
• Mollenhauer (1928-1989) We are called to
  Bildung by the need to passon to children that
  which is good in our lives

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Klafki Key problems typical for our age

• Question of peace problem of self-destruction
• Question of the environment controlling
  technology
• Social inequality as it is produced by society
• Dangers and possibilities of control, information
  and communications media and technologies
• The subjectivity of the individual or self, and
  his/her relation to the other.

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• Capacity for self-determination encompasses
  ones own, personal life relationships and their
  value/meaning in interpersonal, professional and
  religious spheres.
• Capacity for collective self-determination
  (Mitbestimmungsfähigkeit) each individual should
  have the capacity to participate in
  socio-political relationships, and to engage with
  them responsibly.
• Capacity for Solidarity the claim to individual
  and self-determination can only be justified if
  one attempts to work to give the same rights to
  others who are not yet in possession of them.

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Klaus Mollenhauer

• Attempted to remember the old questions, to
  find out if there is something like the basic
  constituents of enlightenment pedagogy, a
  minimal cannon of questions, that no one today
  could ignore, if they want to be educators
• What about your own significant experiences?

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5 Questions Keywords

• Why do we want to have children? (Bildung and
  Erziehung)
• What way of life do I present to children by
  living with them? (Presentation)
• What way of life ought to be systematically
  represented to children? (Representation)
• How can I help children to become self-starters
  and support their growth? (Developmental
  Preparedness Self-starting)
• Who am I? Who do I want to be, and how do I help
  others with their identity problems? (Identity)

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Films (fiction and theory text also used)

• Why do we want to have children? (Bildung and
  Erziehung) My Life as a Dog
• What way of life do I present to children by
  living with them? (Presentation) Kolya
• What way of life ought to be represented to
  children? (Representation) To Be and to Have
• How can I help children to become self-starters
  and support their growth? (Developmental
  Preparedness Self-starting) Good Will Hunting
  The Wild Child
• Who am I? Who do I want to be, and how do I help
  others with their identity problems? (Identity)
  Wit

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Bildung vs Learning

• Process that is biological, developmental
• Occurs naturally, and formally in school leads
  to pressure to de-structure school
• Sees the education of man as a derivative form
  of education of nature and things

• Process that is social cultural
• Does not occur through nature
• Is structured socially, and school emerges from
  this
• Is a process of Überlieferung
• Includes education of things and men
• Ed. of nature seen insufficient

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Nature of Pedagogy

• Pedagogy is aporetic or paradoxical for
  Mollenhauer in that it tries to describe and
  strengthen that part of the child which is most
  fundamentally open and indefinite and about which
  nothing final or definitive can be said.

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Pedagogy as Aporetical

• The child would essentially remain something more
  than that which is immediately accessible to us
  through understanding and explanation. Whoever
  would want to be an educator, especially in view
  of a future that cannot be reliably reckoned,
  must attempt to enter into a relationship with
  this part of children's lives which can only be
  intimated. (p. 89)

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Conclusion

• It pedagogy is not a subject for scholarly
  specialization. Specialized or scientific
  scholarship can easily describe triumphs of human
  development but it can only gesture towards its
  aporetic character.... And the more finely the
  net of pedagogical strategies and institutions is
  woven, the greater a contribution that is
  expected from pedagogy towards social progress,
  the more difficult it becomes to express this
  aporetic character. (Mollenhauer, 1983, p.
  88)1

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Conclusion

• In this context, pedagogy is not a question of
  solving practical problems and optimizing
  learning processes, it is part of the ongoing
  mystery and frailty of human existence.
• Upbringing and pedagogy are not a collection of
  means or a set of techniques that can be reduced
  to processes of optimization and standardization.
  It remains a profoundly personal relation, with
  the intention of contributing to the childs
  life, experience, and supporting the child's
  growth in the direction of humanity and selfhood.

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Bibliography

• Foreignness and Otherness in Pedagogical Contexts
  http//www.phandpr.org/index.php/pandp/article/vie
  w/4/49
• Friesen, N. Sævi, T. (in press). Reviving
  Forgotten Connections Klaus Mollenhauer and
  Human Science Pedagogy in Canadian Teacher
  Education. Journal of Curriculum Studies.
  http//learningspaces.org/n/papers/Reviving_Forgot
  ten_Connections.pdf
• Biesta, G. (2002). How General Can Bildung Be?
  Reflections on the Future of a Modern Educational
  Ideal. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36, 3.