The German Schools of Decorative Arts: Vocational Training Institutions for Arts and Crafts in the Long 19th Century

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Joachim Scholz
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558214259

The planned scientific network “The German schools of decorative arts: vocational training institutions for arts and crafts in the long 19th century” deals with the conditions, developments, and implications as well as socio-cultural and political interdependencies of the school type of “school of decorative arts”. It emerged in the middle of the 19th century and has long been a research desideratum. The research subject are about 40 German schools of decorative arts and their different founding impulses, profiles, and relevance. In order to make reliable basic statements on central questions of the history of those schools – such as curricula, gender equality and state-public influence – international expertise from educational and art history, economics and social sciences, consumer, gender and local research, material culture, and digital humanities will be bundled in a multidisciplinary way. A particular concern of the planned network is to define, differentiate and contextualize the type "school of decorative arts" within the educational landscape of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to the thematically focused academic discourse, working meetings will be located at former locations of schools of decorative arts. This offers the opportunity to include the schools’ respective buildings, artifacts and archives in the research process. The aim of the academic network is to secure the results of fundamental findings on the history of schools of decorative arts through publications, and at the same time to prepare a more extensive project proposal, which should enable a longer-term and more detailed examination of the research subject.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Anna-Sophie Laug