Educating Citizens through Bildung. Didactics and Pedagogy in the service of Democracy

Abstract

The general challenge that I am addressing, and for which I propose a remedy, is the perceived lack of interest in citizenship education. To overcome, or at least mitigate, this challenge, I propose to invigorate democratic citizenship education by employing the fruitful German idea of Bildung. After a brief consideration of what may be the problem for citizenship education, namely alienation, I turn to Wolfgang Klafki's famous Studies in Bildung Theory and Didactics and his New Studies in the same subjects. I first sketch some of the conceptual potentials in the classical idea of Bildung, emphasizing generality, versatility, politics, and aesthetics. In continuation, I consider Bildung as a contemporary educational ideal, arguing thus with Klafki that pedagogy and didactics must endorse a renewed humanism, recognizing critically and constructively the classical educational heritage, the hermeneutics implied by this appreciation, empirical studies of education, and the ideology critique of Critical Theory. As Klafki, my overall goal is to provide a comprehensive theory of learning, teaching, and schooling, i.e., a general didactics. However, even in this general sense, the didactical ambition is still political, namely to sustain and develop a social democracy that stimulates further the continued strive for realizing a comprehensive idea of humanism.