Today education is part of scientific, political and media discourses. In Germany the notion Bildung, rather than Erziehung, is almost omnipresent. It is often part of compound words, e.g. Bildungsungleichheit (inequality in education) (Ruhloff 2006). It seems to be clear and unquestionable that Bildung is something magically positive for everybody. Bildung, including formal education as well as specific ideas of the individual self-formation, is presented as a solution to basic anthropological and social tasks (Ehrenspeck 2010). For the most part, both the historical and the social contexts of discourses on Bildung are neglected. Bildung, like any form of education is linked to a specific understanding of the world. This world is mediated directly or indirectly in the formational process and it is more or less inclusive. Geographical, political and historical dimensions of the notion are left aside. The basic ideas often deprived of their original local context diffuse through time, forgetting that every educational text only answers particular questions. According to Horlacher (2011; 2016) Bildung can be regarded as the aim of a successful life. This idea of “successful life” includes cultural, religious, but also geographical assumptions. Associated with this is a singular conception of the realization of a specific form of European high culture. Bildung as a term occurred around 1800 in a specific aristocratic bourgeois Jewish Protestant context. Like any complex term it is difficult to translate (Horlacher 2014), nevertheless similar concepts of well-education can be found throughout Europe. However, neither concepts like the English liberal education or the French culture or formacion, or even the Spanish formación seem to promise so much with regard to more equality like the German notion Bildung with its roots in romanticism. Our approach is stressing the necessity to implement a more historical perspective on central terms related to classic thinkers of education, keeping in mind the problems discussed in relation to the interconnectedness of systematic and historical research in education (Depaepe 2007).
We assume that the continuation of educational thinking (Bildungsdenken) with recourse to the German-speaking Enlightenment and its relevant educational reference authors, such as Kant, Hegel and Humboldt, brings with it certain implications. Among them are problematic implications that shape the perspective on educational processes e.g. in qualitative research today. Thus racist basic assumptions of the Enlightenment are handed down under a new sign (Wischmann 2016). “Modern societies were built through a double process of subject inclusion and exclusion” (Pineau 2008, p. 744; see Hund 2006). Globally speaking they were built around a concept of Europe as a centre. One of the most pre-eminent thinker of this vision was Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel in his Philosophy of Universal History (1834) (ibid., p.744-5).
The assumptions of historical authors are adjusted, inadvertently, in reflections on the educational processes of various social actors. They are of course anchored in speaking about education and Bildung. They are therefore even accepted as a necessary and invariable part of the German-language term in its multiple uses. This paper aims to re- and deconstruct these largely implicit implications of Bildung.
The analysis will focus on the work of Hegel, because he plays an important part of the “Foundational narrative” (Koschorke 2007) of German-speaking discourses on Bildung and had significant influence on educational discourses in the “western world” and beyond. As Spivak asserted “the narrative of ‘German’ cultural self-representation, within the Western European context, is […] one of difference” (Spivak 1999, p. 7), we have to accept that the narrative of central educational terms is so as well. This narrative of cultural self-representation has shaped the approach to well-education in relation to an not educated Other (Spieker 2015).
