Norm Friesen

A deeply insightful presentation on theory and practice in education that I just had to translate, from O.F. Bollnow:

“The discipline of teacher education has long been controversial. Some complain about its inadequate academic status and believe it urgently needs reform. Others, however, find that teacher training has already become too theoretical, alienating teachers from their practical responsibilities. This issue can only be solved by first understanding what it means to be a discipline, and by speaking of pedagogy not in terms of sociology or psychology, but as a specifically educational discipline.”  Bollnow (1989) Theory and Practice in Education

Paper introducing the “human” education of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

In a field increasingly dominated by managerial terminology and constructs of the psychological and neurological sciences, this paper presents education as an explicitly human “science”—as integral to human projects such as individual and collective self-definition as well as cultural reproduction and transformation. This paper undertakes the initial steps toward this human way of thinking about education by introducing the educational work of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher, virtually unknown in English-language educational scholarship today, can be said to have been one of the first to seek to establish education as a rigorous but consistently human way of understanding. I show how Schleiermacher worked towards this in his 70-page introduction to his recently reissued (and soon to be translated) Lectures on Education from 1826. I begin with a short biographical introduction to Schleiermacher and then focus on his treatment of three basic, closely interrelated themes—or rather, pairs of opposed elements:  1) Theory and practice; 2) teacher and student (also parent and child); and 3) education as preparation or as “life itself.”

Klaus Mollenhauer’s late philosophical text, Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing (2014) deals in a highly original and accessible way with education in its most basic human and cultural constituents. Continue reading →

Eugen Fink (1905-1975) earned his doctorate under Husserl and Heidegger and remained Husserl’s loyal assistant, even when the latter was abandoned by Heidegger and persecuted by the Nazis for being Jewish. Regardless, the influence of Heidegger is much more evident in Fink’s work in education than that of Husserl. Like both Husserl and Heidegger, Fink held a chair at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg—although Fink’s was in philosophy and education. Fink saw the two disciplines as being inextricably intertwined. After the end of metaphysics, according to one commentator, Fink saw education not simply one of many possible topics for philosophizing; instead, he saw human becoming in its imminence as the concern par excellence for both philosophy and philosophical anthropology (Graf, 2005).

Ferdinand Graf. Einführung in die Pädagogik Eugen Fink. In Anselm Böhmer (Ed. 2005) Eugen Fink: Sozialphilosophie – Anthropologie – Kosmologie – Pädagogik – Methodik. Pp. 72-84. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Eugen Fink and Education beyond the Human