Education and Society in Germany.
Albisetti, James C. ; Colwill, Elizabeth
Education and Society in Germany, by H. J. Hahn. New York, Berg
Publishers, 1998. xi, 196 pp. $55.00 U.S. (cloth), $15.50 U.S. (paper).
Hahn, professor of German at Oxford Brookes University in England,
offers a survey of two centuries of German educational history in under
two hundred pages. The eight chapters cover chronological periods, with
parallel chapters examining the Federal Republic and the German
Democratic Republic between 1949 and 1990. Over half of the book is
devoted to the period since 1945.
Hahn has done no original research. He presents the book as a
survey text for students in German studies, although it is not clear
what level student he has in mind. He cites German passages in the text
but also gives complete translations. Between three and seven
untranslated excerpts from contemporary texts, however, accompany each
chapter. Hahn offers commentary on these excerpts as well as lists of
vocabulary words, most of which second-year students of German should
already know.
The quality of such a synthetic survey depends a great deal on the
author's knowledge of recent scholarship on the topic. Hahn's
familiarity with research on German educational history is spotty, at
best; students using this book will not receive an adequate introduction
to the field. The bibliography includes just one of the six volumes of
the Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte; it omits entirely the
two-volume Geschichte der Madchen- und Frauenbildung edited by Elke
Kleinau and Claudia Opitz. Among the many important scholars whose works
go unmentioned are Geoffrey Giles, Ullrich Herrmann, Claudia Huerkamp,
Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Michael Kater, Derek Linton, Marjorie Lamberti,
Peter Lundgreen, Charles McClelland, Detlef Muller, Dennis Shirley,
Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, and Hartmut Titze, as well as this reviewer.
These omissions result in serious neglect of the social dimension
of education, especially for the period before 1945, where Hahn offers
largely an old-fashioned catalog of statements about education by
leading intellectuals. He uses statistical information on enrolments and
social origins of students only intermittently, so that no long-term
patterns or useful international comparisons emerge. In dealing with
recent decades, Hahn makes no mention of the problems posed for German
schools by the influx of children of foreign workers. He neglects as
well the rapid spread of secondary co-education in the 1970s and the
backlash against it in some quarters in the last decade.
The book also contains numerous mistakes, a few of which will
illustrate the carelessness involved in its preparation. The German
Confederation did not take part in the war against Denmark in 1864 (p.
26). The influential thinker of the 1890s was Julius, not Fritz,
Langbehn (p. 26). The General German Women's Association did not
hold the conference in 1872 that formulated a sexist agenda for
girls' schooling, a group of school directors and teachers did (p.
34). Women in Prussia gained access to the secondary-school diploma for
boys, or Abitur, in 1896, not 1908 (p. 35). Friedrich Nietzsche's
as yet unpublished lectures on school reform did not influence the
famous speech made by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890, and that speech
occurred in Berlin, not Kassel (pp. 35-36). The Oberrealschule did offer
the Abitur, or secondary diploma, even if its certificate did not
provide all the privileges of the classical diploma (p. 36).
In short, Berg Publishers has done a disservice to all students,
scholars, and libraries that purchased this book on the basis of its
title or cover advertisement.
James C. Albisetti
University of Kentucky
