Abstract
The relative autonomy of Pädagogik (education) as an academic field has always been in jeopardy. Consequently, we take a closer look at its past, present, and future. We begin by retracing the historical development of this field of study in the German-speaking context. In the second part, we look at the current state of the discipline and spotlight current developments threatening education’s autonomy, first and foremost the steep rise and dominance of Empirische Bildungsforschung (empirical educational research). In the last part, we argue for education as an independent discipline and outline how educationalists can strengthen its autonomy and disciplinary identity.
Highlights
Thinking about educational questions has presumably always been part of human interests and goes back at least to Greek antiquity, the academic study of education was institutionalized in Germany as late as at the beginning of the 20th century (Matthes, 2021): A transatlantic perspective on theorizing education shows that the academic study of educational phenomena has developed differently within various contexts (Biesta, 2011): Especially in the Anglo-American tradition (United Kingdom and North America), education is conceived as an interdisciplinary field of study which draws its theories from contributing or fundamental disciplines such as Stefan T
Disciplines such as psychology or philosophy are conceived in this continental construction as adjacent disciplines and education as an independent discipline that have distinctive interests, questions, and genuine theories (Biesta, 2013; Siegel & Biesta, 2021; Siegel & Biesta, 2022), the relative autonomy of education has always been in jeopardy (Matthes, 2020; Saeverot, 2013)
This, complicates distinguishing distinctively educational theories from theories that are borrowed or imported from adjacent disciplines (Siegel & Daumiller, 2021). We argue that this theoretical deficit weakens the disciplinary identity of Pädagogik, threatens its relative autonomy, and further promotes the steep rise and dominance of Empirische Bildungsforschung67 in favor of psychology: Several indicators show this transformation of the field of education in the German-speaking context in recent decades (Bellmann, 2017; Schriewer, 2017): A considerable number of professorships, chairs, and study programs for general pedagogy and school pedagogy, have been renamed and replaced (Abs et al, 2020; Casale, 2021; Koller et al, 2016)
Summary
This expresses a basic scientific understanding of humanistic pedagogy (as cultural pedagogy has been called since the 1920s), to which Theodor Litt and Herman Nohl as well as his students Erich Weniger and Wilhelm Flitner felt committed Nohl and his students still focused to a particular extent on the justification of Pädagogik as an independent discipline, the basic structure of the argumentation remains the same: The cultural practice of education exists as an independent form of action with specific needs and challenges – to preserve the autonomy of this practice against the covetous and instrumentalization desires of other cultural practices (of religion, politics, economy, etc.), an independent discipline should support, strengthen, and encourage the practice, such as by helping it to develop its educational goals independently. The questions of many research and qualification projects were more sociological in nature (Matthes, 2021)
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