Bourgeois societies, as a creation of modernity (Koselleck 1959), face an open future with many ill-defined problems, like health, security, and education (Hopmann 2008). As an attempt to mitigate the impossibility of solving these problems, institutions with professionalized actors were formed. The Western model of institutionalizing education by implementing public schooling and professionalizing teacher training soon spread globally (Ramirez/Boli 1987). German-speaking countries and the current USA have been exchanging these and other pedagogical ideas and concepts for at least some two hundred years (Overhoff/Overbeck 2017) and still share the hope of self-stabilizing societies through education and the pursuit of optimism (March 1975). Narratives of hope, covering the wish for a better future for upcoming generations (Boser et al. 2018) and of optimism, that schools let us have it both ways, securing status and enabling advantage (Labaree 2010) as well as solving our social problems (Smeyers/Depaepe 2008) can be found in public discourse, media and politics. Constitutional mindsets (Hopmann 2008) or systems of reasoning (Popkewitz 2012) lose their role of explaining how to see and interpret our surroundings in times of crisis. Wars, financial collapses or humanitarian and natural catastrophes may delegate the task of easing the situation to schools. However, schools are not able to do what they are asked. Consequently, disappointment spreads. Interestingly it is a circular process (Tyack/Cuban 1995) of times of crisis, school reform and new crisis. Focusing on periods during the 19th Century, I will show similar processes for German-speaking countries and the US. Johann Gottlieb Fichte´s Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807/07) [Adresses to the German Nation] and Horace Mann´s Annual Reports to the Massachusetts Board of Education (1837-1848) are analyzed besides Friedrich Nietzsche´s speeches Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten (1871f) [Thoughts on the Future of our Educational Institutions] and Josiah Strong´s Our Country: its possible future and its present crisis (1885). Using these selected sources, the role of narratives of school crises in Germany and the US are highlighted. They show, that the triad of hope, optimism and disappointment is recurrent in crisis narratives (Fairclough et al. 2007) and still unbroken today (Hemetsberger 2018).

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