EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP

The author looks at education debates on the enrollment increases in secondary education in Germany and France around 1900. In Germany, the theory of ‘Bildung’ was deployed against the threat of meritocratic reform, while in France educationists pleaded for a reform in the ‘spirit of the Revolution’. So the idea of modern democratic citizenship was much more explicitly a concept of French than of German reformers. The latter pleaded for ‘natural processes of social selection’ and stood against educational reform. They avoided the overtly political formulations of liberal conflict, which, in contrast, were almost habitual among French reformists.