Session Information
Session 2B, Post-Modern Conceptions of Education
Papers
Time:
2005-09-07
17:00-18:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Elaine Ricard-Fersing
Contribution
The classical concept of Bildung has more or less vanished from the scene of schooling and higher education, at least in Sweden. No doubt, the term (in Swedish bildning) appears now and then, and actually more frequently during the last decade or so, but then typically with very vague denotations. (I will disregard here the international difficulties in terminology and use the German term Bildung throughout.) It seems that in present-day parlance in general, Bildung means little more than a concern with meaningfulness and a broad-minded outlook on life, preferably coupled with a dissatisfaction with modern efficiency and rationalistic forms of educational planning. Within the discipline of education itself topics of Bildung have been played down during the last decades to a remarkable degree. However, there is presently an emerging meeting between German Didaktik and anglo-american curriculum research in which the concept of Bildung reappears in new and interesting ways.In a study including conversations with university professors from different disciplines and fields of research on the topic of Bildung, a wide range of meanings and implications could be established (Fritzell, 2004). A common denominator was to be found in considerations to the effect that education at all levels has succumbed to fragmentisation and brutish effectiveness formula within very narrow fields of study. From a normative point of view, a general standpoint was taken in that a search for Bildung will have to involve a focus on complex relationships and wholeness, either by deeper involvement in specific disciplines or fields of study, or by broadening the scoop of reflection by connecting to adjacent fields. However, my collegue professors in the study had very little to say about classical notions of Bildung and they seemed rather unfamiliar with later, although sparse, philosophy and debate on the issue (e. g. writers like Rorty or Nussbaum). In an overall sense, many educationalists in Sweden seem to hold the view that Bildung mainly involves the widening of perspectives by way of literature and the fine arts. This may take place by means of student assignments like reading Strindberg in law school or having a free choice of learning opportunities about musical genres in teacher education. In such contexts, Bildung in conspicuous ways turns out as something altogether extra-curricular or as a parallel ambition to standard subject matter teaching. The impression is that Bildung and curricular subject matter are two fields of study that have to be kept apart.In this paper I would like to present, from a social philosophical point of departure, another view on the concept of Bildung in education. Building in particular on Jurgen Habermas´s theories of late modernity, communicative action and deliberative discourse I will suggest a perspective on Bildung in which classical views are both maintained and transgressed. Education for Bildung in late-modern society, with its pluralist under-pinnings in all kinds of ways, is seen as a free and open-ended process of communication in which whatever subject matter and cultural issues are argued over in critical deliberation. Bildung as an educational process is considered an interactive activity of qualified discourse, and as a human capacity Bildung then refers to capacities to take active part in such activities.
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