Our presentation is part of an international project on ‘Forward to (Common) Roots – Pedagogical Terminology in Different Languages,’ on which we worked in several workshops and common papers. This project is theoretical and builds on efforts by intergenerational scholars from North America, Sweden, and Germany working collaboratively to reconnect and renew their understandings of education and pedagogy.

In this international project, a transcultural perspective on education will be provided by working on the terminologies of Bildung, learning, curriculum, didactic, education and upbringing, educational practice, and methodology. Specifically, this paper focuses on social and cultural diversity in relation to education and pedagogy.

In many nation-states, various forms of social and cultural diversity have been increasingly recognized and included in the core of educational values, practices, curricula, and research. However, because diversity is being defined almost exclusively as a difference in race, gender, and identity, how diversity is discussed, imagined, and implemented in pedagogical practice increasingly appears the same. What is missing is a notion of diversity as difference in the educational experience. In the United States, for example, diversity seems to be a standard or standard of uniformity, not multiplicity, and paradoxically is reduced to a rubric or checklist (defined by others, not in education) to demonstrate the meeting of pre-determined ends rather than a collective inquiry toward un-determined and what could otherwise turn out to be new opportunities for different ways of perceiving one and the same thing and to act upon that, or what we would argue to create the conditions for true diversity in teaching and learning.

For this ECER conference paper, we focus on and discuss the relationship between educational philosophy and policy regarding such diversity as acting upon people’s differences (s). Here we draw on Wilhelm von Humboldt (1854) and John Stuart Mill (1859) to consider questions of education and educational approach concerning tensions between the universal and the particular and, in contemporary times, between freedom and security. Highlighted will be philosophical connections to problems with current initiatives, including DEI or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” 

We ask how to address such questions of diversity, representation, and recognition in education and pedagogy. Following Humboldt and Mill, we would suggest that we should answer these questions not concerning special interests or “transient desires” but concerning what Humboldt called “ewig- unveränderliche Vernunft” (“eternal and immutable dictates of reason”).

Indeed, Humboldt and Mill together indicate a universalizing aspect concerning education and a full appreciation and aspiration for developing the powers of the individual by exposure to different learning experiences. That was a key and crucial insight on their part: a genuinely educational education, with authentic diversity, stems not from where one was born or to whom, nor to what conditions or demographics a student hails from. Instead, students are cut from the same cloth; humanity. We all should be equally afforded the dignity of access and opportunity. A universal education with particular diversifying experiences provides the means for cultivating the individual powers of each respective individual.

It is also worth inquiring about what exhortations from Humboldt, Mill, and others in the Continental Philosophy tradition translate to later work of influential pedagogues such as John Dewey. We seek in this paper to provide some of the tacit dimensions (Kraus et al., 2021) and revisit that lost translation to reimagine diversity in the present and future as more than a rubric or identity, as a different difference, a possibility for an experience that is different, and educational.

This project is theoretical and builds on efforts by intergenerational (senior and emerging) scholars from North America, Sweden, and Germany who have worked collaboratively to reconnect and renew their understandings of education and pedagogy. The project method has taken the form of comparative, hermeneutic reading and re-reading texts and translations, looking deeply into the meaning of key vocabulary, such as Growth and Bildung. Hermeneutics is “a return to the essential generativity of human life, a sense of life in which there is always something left to say, with all the difficulty, risk, and ambiguity that such generativity entails” (Jardine, 1992, p. 120). As a research approach, hermeneutics offers possibilities of renewal and a generative approach to educational study and practice responsive to the multi-faceted crises contextualizing contemporary education. Likewise, it is open to the voices of other strands of thought, cultures, and ways of viewing the world and seeks to do them justice in understanding and practice. In keeping with Gadamer (1990), we draw on hermeneutics in our knowledge of something written, not as a repetition of something past but as the sharing of present meaning. Our task has thus been and remains one of close reading, comparison, and actualization, of realizing the contemporaneity with the presentation of works that might be remote in time or place (pp. 393, 394; translated by the authors).

We acknowledge contemporary challenges and return to education as a discipline and philosophy as the theory of education with a language of education and pedagogy, one that is deliberative and explicitly aims to further the democratic prospect. The importance of our study is that by engaging Humboldt’s and Mill’s work in this hermeneutical manner, we open a different conversation concerning education, neither overtly instrumental nor unduly critical. We find that the continental roots of Humboldt’s philosophy have been obscured but are renewed when we return to John Stuart Mill. Furthermore, by returning to the “Hegelian deposit” (Good, 2006) and the Herbartian idea of “pedagogical tact” (Herbart, 1964)—inspiration for John Dewey’s early philosophy of education—a language of education that is also educational might be realized. In conclusion, we hope our “educational theorizing project,” which started with shared readings and complicated conversations, is succeeding and is stimulating educational theorizing, supporting a reconsideration of Mill’s work and continental philosophy for understanding the contemporary period. With this presentation, we seek to build upon our previous studies, workshops, and conferences, inviting other scholars cross-generationally and internationally to construct scholarly networks. The aim is to sustain these relationships and this hermeneutical type of scholarship, develop curriculum, and share course content material, resources, and activities.

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