Teachers and Teaching

Abstract

As with most social practices, teaching is not an invention of the Age of Enlightenment but a “natural” part of any transfer of knowledge and skills and therefore an anthropological “fact.” What makes teachers and teaching a privileged subject of research in the Age of Enlightenment is a particular shift in the meaning of teaching and a modified significance of being a teacher. The two terms–teachers and teaching–underwent a shift as part of a larger movement labeled as the “educationalization of social problems”. This concept addresses the belief that social problems can or actually should be solved through education; primarily through the education of the younger generation, but also through the education of adults. All the undertaken attempts and actions corresponding to this shift counted either on the rationality of humans, concepts like common sense, perfectibility, and individual improvement, but also on the impact of aesthetics and emotion and appealed to morality. In the educationalization process, the teacher turned out to be the personification of these educational ambitions, and the pedagogical efforts to implement and guarantee these ambitions has since increased. According to these remarks, the chapter takes examples from different European regions and discusses teachers and teaching in institutional (formal) settings, e.g. in universities, academies, schools, and the like. It takes a look at teachers’ education, at their social status, at their pedagogical ideas and tools, and at the teaching materials. In this way, the history of teachers and of the practice of teaching are interwoven with an institutional history of schooling, as institutional settings do preconfigure the relevant practices at least to a certain degree. The second part deals with teachers and teaching in informal settings, with the several forms of popular enlightenment, from political pamphlets to economic treatises and moral publications, takes the related group of actors into account, and discusses the various forms of teaching in a private or vocational context, but also trough travel or through confrontation with visual arts and theatre. The chapter concludes in summarizing the two parts within a comparative perspective with regard to the different European performances of teachers and teaching.