General knowledge

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General education is a vague and inconsistently defined term that denotes the crucial knowledge and skills that are necessary to be able to actively and critically participate in shaping as many areas of modern society as possible. It forms the basis for the education of every person, which can essentially be understood as a measure of the conformity of the personal worldview with reality .

General education requires general knowledge. While the two terms are often equated colloquially , they are actually two different terms . Also common knowledge is conceptually fuzzy and not uniformly defined.

General knowledge means that knowledge that a person with average educational opportunities in the population can acquire. It includes both knowledge through education and training teaching are taught, as well as those who learned involuntarily be, such as in dealing with the mass media . In public communication , authors , journalists , politicians , bloggers , etc. usually assume that the addressees have this general knowledge .

The equation of general education and general knowledge , however , suppresses the abilities of the intellect which are required to relate the contents of knowledge to one another. Only then is it possible to understand the content of retrievable knowledge in context . Misunderstood, lexical key word knowledge is rather understood in the professional world as " half education ".

From the perspective of psychology , general knowledge represents an extent of knowledge about everyday facts stored in long-term memory. The structure of this general knowledge is linked to intelligence ; Some psychologists consider it an independent component of a person's intellectual equipment .

To the subject

The concept of education is based on the idea that, through reason and freedom, in contrast to mere things, humans are a bearer of meaning and thus an end in themselves . Therefore it can and must never be only a means for something else ( Immanuel Kant ). Schiller continues this idea (in the announcement of the Horen 1794) insofar as in times of political distress “a general and higher interest in that which is purely human and above all the influence of the times” is necessary, and so “for that Ideally refined humanity ”.

In the original sense of the Enlightenment era, general education therefore meant the conception and realization of what was common to people and what was possible in common in ethics and aesthetics, and was considered part of character and personality development in the broadest sense.

Today, however, this term is often used as a synonym for the educational canon . Wolfgang Klafki interpreted this development from a comprehensive understanding of education to the "educational canon" as the decline of the original humanistic educational idea.

In contrast to the humanistic concept of education, “general knowledge” - which is understood synonymously in colloquial language - denotes a basic body of knowledge that is often equated with mere information that every person should acquire: “That which one should know about the world . “This includes, as it corresponds to the modern understanding of knowledge, knowledge that can be acquired and queried, which in contrast to the humanistic understanding of education does not have to be relevant to personality.

A similar contrast can also be seen in the pair of terms training (professionally usable special knowledge and skills) and education (general education).

The concept of general education or general knowledge comes from a time when people became aware that all of human knowledge could not be summarized in a few books. In addition, there was the insight that the quantity of knowledge is relatively independent of the quality: There is a vast amount of senseless and worthless knowledge (special knowledge) for the individual, but only a limited basic stock of experiences, insights, values ​​that are important for personality development and only enable the sensible use of specialist knowledge.

A plausible redefinition of general education is also possible from here: General education is what you need to develop as a person and to acquire and use specialist knowledge in a meaningful way. General education is therefore the framework and foundation of specialist knowledge. In contrast, general knowledge can be defined as the knowledge that every person needs in order to orientate oneself in the world. Both areas overlap, but can also be sharply demarcated from one another: there is orientation knowledge (e.g. traffic rules) that has no educational value, on the other hand educational values ​​(sense of responsibility) that are not part of average orientation knowledge and cannot be acquired through knowledge processes .

history

Johannes Comenius formulated an initial approach to a comprehensive general education (in the sense of general knowledge) with the aim of teaching everything to everyone. Similarly, during the Enlightenment , the encyclopedists tried to collect all knowledge and make it available to the general public. This idea was revolutionary in that at that time education was only reserved for certain sections of the population or classes ( nobility and clergy ).

While the introduction of compulsory schooling in the 17th and 18th centuries was primarily aimed at disciplining the subjects, new humanists such as Wilhelm von Humboldt tried in the 19th century with their school reforms to enable broad classes of people to gain the general education required for emancipation in the sense of Kant - and failed. The idea of ​​equating general education with the educational canon also originated from this period, since the Humboldt epigones in particular created an exclusionary thesis that certain educational goods were impure. A concept of education developed which gave the classical contents of Latin , Greek and German an excessively high importance compared to natural sciences and action-oriented knowledge. Today's grammar school is, despite several reforms, still oriented towards this idea, which is expressed, for example, in the fact that at grammar schools less directly job-relevant knowledge is imparted than at vocational school types .

General education as a synonym for educational canon

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Adorno etc.

What is defined as general knowledge, as a synonym for the educational canon , depends heavily on the country / culture, time, social environment or individual knowledge. In our culture, general knowledge refers to language , literature , musical talents ( music , art ), social studies , geography , history , natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) and mathematics . According to Wolfgang Klafki, general education includes not only knowledge, but also pragmatic ability to act , ethical judgment , social ability to act and aesthetic orientation.

With the development of the information society and modern information technology , general education is taking on a new role: Since information is quickly available in large quantities on the Internet, for example , it is now a matter of mastering research techniques , being able to evaluate information and establishing connections between information to be able to ( media literacy ). This corresponds in a special way to the conceptual concept developed by Wolfgang Klafki of the key problems typical of the epoch such as peace , environmental protection , democratization / human rights , one world , technological consequences . After that, general education is about understanding the central current problems of mankind and acting in a critically reflective manner.

The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) spoke of general knowledge as a “half-education” that remained abrupt and superficial. A real general education, on the other hand, must also convey critical reflection on social conditions and one's own realities of life and aim at maturity . However, this is also due to the fact that the knowledge that exists today has increased excessively and is still increasing, so that capacities must first of all be "reserved" for the knowledge required for the job.

See also

literature

Educational theory

  • Fritz Helling : New general education. Schule und Nation Verlags-GmbH, Schwelm 1963.
  • Manfred Fuhrmann : The European educational canon of the bourgeois age. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1999, ISBN 3-458-16978-4 .
  • Erich E. Geissler: General education in a free society. German educational and university publishing house, Düsseldorf 1977.
  • Wolfgang Klafki: New Studies on Educational Theory and Didactics. Beltz, Weinheim 1991, ISBN 3-407-34056-7 .
  • Martina Schmidhuber (Ed.): Forms of education. Insights and perspectives, with a contribution by Konrad Paul Liessmann . Lang Wien u. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-59333-2 . (Theory of Uneducation. The Errors of the Knowledge Society)

Lexical overview works general education

  • Tatjana Alisch, Angela Sendlinger (editor): General education - all the basic knowledge of today in question and answer. Compact, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-8174-6081-6 .
  • Eberhard Anger, Klaus Volkert (editorial management): The great book of general knowledge - an indispensable reference work for the whole family. Verlag Das Beste, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-87070-403-9 .
  • Bertelsmann Lexikon Institut: The current book of general education. Wissen Media Verlag, Gütersloh / Munich 2003, ISBN 3-89996-485-3 . (The volume includes a CD with test questions.)
  • Jonathan Byron: Jonathan Byron's Education Navigator for Messy Readers. Thiele Verlag, Munich / Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-85179-002-3 .
  • Bodo Harenberg (Hrsg.): Harenberg course book education - the first interactive lexicon. Harenberg Verlag, Dortmund 2003, ISBN 3-611-01154-1 .
  • Barbara Holle, Stephanie Köber, Stefanie Thuir (editorial director): General education - the great standard work with the knowledge of our time. Weltbild, Augsburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8289-4191-5 . (Special edition with 5000 questions & answers)
  • Meyers Lexikonredaktion (Hrsg.): Meyers Memo - The knowledge of the world according to subject areas. Meyers Lexikonverlag Mannheim / Vienna / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-411-07311-X .
  • Matthias Vogt: DuMont's handbook general education. (= Row monte ). Verlag DuMont-Monte, Cologne 2002, ISBN 3-8320-8655-2 .
  • Detlef Wienecke-Janz (editorial director): The Brockhaus Education 21 - Knowledge for the 21st century. knowledgemedia, Gütersloh 2011, ISBN 978-3-577-09056-8 .

Lexical overview works natural sciences

Humanities overview works

Web links

Wikibooks: Etiquette: Education  - Learning and teaching materials
Wiktionary: General education  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Olechowski : Conclusions for a reform of schools for fourteen to nineteen year olds under the aspect of a humane school. In: E. Persy, E. Tesar (ed.): The future of schools for fourteen to nineteen year olds. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997.
  2. ^ A b Sylwia Neidhardt-Wilberg: Female and male general knowledge? In: Susanne R. Schilling, Jorn R. Sparfeldt, Christiane Pruisken et al. (Ed.): Current aspects of educational-psychological research. Detlef H. Rost on his 60th birthday. Waxmann, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8309-1510-1 , pp. 145-146 (introduction: general knowledge).
  3. ↑ Ursula Reitemeyer: Can education be taught? (= Ethics in the classroom . Volume 5). Waxmann, Münster 2003, ISBN 3-8309-1282-X , pp. 30-31.