Between professional autonomy and state utilisation: A genealogy of the relationship between democracy, governing and political education in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany

• Applicants: Privatdozent Dr. Marlon Barbehön; Professor Dr. Alexander Wohnig
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education ; Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism ; Political Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524961080

The proposed project intends to analyse the ways how the state utilises political education for the purpose of realising political goals, and how the field of political education responds to these attempts, as an ongoing conflict about democracy. The project starts from the assumption that “the state” and “political education” (umbrella terms that will be analytically differentiated in the project) are in a conflictual relationship of mutual dependence: on the one hand, they need each other, and on the other hand, they develop and cultivate different understandings of what “political education in and for democracy” means. The project is guided by the thesis that this fundamental tension materialises and is negotiated in different socio-historical constellations in specific ways. In order to be able to reconstruct these dynamics and diachronic developments, the project follows a genealogical perspective with which manifest controversies between the state and political education can be analysed as an expression of a subliminal and ongoing conflict, namely over the meaning of both “democracy” and “political education”. Empirically, exemplary conflicts from three phases of post-war Germany – the first two post-war decades, the phase during the social-liberal coalition and the period since reunification – will be analysed on the basis of a reconstructive-interpretative methodology in order to abstract different variants of conflict constellations and (temporary) resolutions. As regards the empirical sources, for the political strategies of the state (at the federal level and for selected federal states) decrees from the ministries of education and the interior, school curricula, state-approved textbooks for civic education and materials from the “Landeszentralen für politische Bildung“ will be analysed. For the responses of the field of civic education (both within and beyond school education), textbooks for teacher training and school practice, programmes and course protocols of educational facilities, announcements of teachers’ associations, project applications and statements of the educational institutions are included. On the basis of the historical-empirical analyses, the project will both develop a (Foucauldian) conception of governing with education and reflect on the autonomy of political education, thus making original contributions to the two disciplines represented by the applicants – political science and didactics of political education.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants