Recalling reactions to the Enlightenment in the German-speaking world, schooling was made compulsory. Soon after the institutionalization of compulsory public schooling (Ramirez/Boli 1987) and the pursuit of optimism in education (March 1975), there was a regrettable crisis in schooling. Historical circumstances – wars, changes in climate, and economic problems – challenged the idea of a stable society and the preparation for an open future via schooling. Napoleon´s victories in nearly all Central European countries led Johann Gottlieb Fichte´s Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807/08) [Adresses to the German Nation, Trans. 1922] to become a prominent example for stating that schools were not doing what they were asked to do: reforming society for the better. A similar shift can be observed in North America after the second War of Independence (1812-1815).  Ralph W. Emerson´s American Scholar (1837) or Horace Mann´s Annual Reports (1837ff) try to clarify expectations and deficiencies of American schools. All respective sources were widely known and discussed in Germany and America. They reflect the societal experiences of a closer past as well as the hopes, wishes, fears and expectations for the future via schooling. These creations of a possible future are multiple but open an analytical perspective on the past (Koselleck 1985/2004). Regardless of whether or not they were realized, these imaginations refer to constitutional mindsets important for dealing with societal risk perceptions (Hopmann 2008).

My methodology follows the work of Reinhart Koselleck (1985/2004) by adapting the interpretive frame of futures past. The creation of future imaginings through historical semantics based on widespread works and hotly debated topics – schooling and education – expands existing historical works on schooling (like v. Friedeburg 1989; Butts/Cremin 1952; Brubacher 1947). Their narratives (White 1986, 1994a, b) can be analyzed and are embedded in a long history of reforms in educative systems (Elmore/McLaughlin 1988; Tyack/Cuban 1995). In a comparative perspective (Tenorth 2009), references to other systems (“externalization” Schriewer 2003), “favoured or denied” (Waldow 2016), open an interpretation as to why foreign systems of schooling were used.

My presentation shows how schooling, using selected sources, was criticized at the beginning of the 19th Century for not doing what it had been asked to do. German and US-American societies used school critique to deal with their own particular problems and were especially thrilled as a shared belief in schooling as risk prevention for future generations and for themselves had been uncertain. In these narratives whole societies are opposed with decline or collapse, and even catastrophic situations are portrayed. Fichte calls for national schooling to prevent the “German”, Mann uses his reports on Massachusetts´ schools to develop the idea of public schooling. Earlier, Emerson states that “our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.” The connecting link of the sources and their futures past can be found in war times, reflections on schooling, school critique, visions of a better future through new school models mainly grounded in their own national(istic) ideas in contrast to foreign manifestations.

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