The religious foundations of Bildung as an epitome of German education and its fundamental anti-western recipe

Abstract

This article examines how during the Weimar Republic (1919- 1933), Lutheran thinking enabled the incorporation of education as an university discipline, intellectually organized around the notion of Bildung excluding practical aspects. In order to provide a background the article deals with the period between 1890 and 1925. First, the article examined how toward the end of the nineteenth century, Germany’s economic, territorial, and military growth, was not favoured by its intelligentsia which held a dualistic philosophy. Secondly, the paper discusses the cultural and institutional background of this philosophy in which the theory of Bildung arose and grew. Thirdly, the paper reconstructs how educational sciences, based on the ideology of Bildung became an academic discipline, during the Great War and explains how Persönlichkeit and Bildung became dominant battle cries against the West and the empirical sciences. Finally, the paper examines how advocates of Bildung tried to keep its viability.

Keywords

• bildung
• ciencias de la educación
• república de weimar
• personlichkeit.