December Conference 1890
The Prussian December Conference (also called the School Conference ) was a specialist pedagogical congress from December 4 to 17, 1890 in Berlin to discuss the future of the grammar school .
meaning
The highly conservative Prussian Culture Minister Gustav Konrad Heinrich von Goßler has called him against his will to the reform of the high school and baccalaureate to discuss. The driving force was the young Kaiser Wilhelm II. At the conference, the contrasts between humanistic and realistic education were vividly discussed. The conference continued with the June 1900 conference .
Shortly after Bismarck's resignation, the emperor was driven by political goals: He wanted to fight social democracy on the “main arena” in the school. One means is history lessons , in which the horrors of the French Revolution and the struggles of the Wars of Liberation are to be treated more heavily than Greco-Roman history. The old-language grammar schools, of which there are already enough, only offered an outdated offer with too much ballast; his own school days in a Kassel grammar school had shown him this. He expressed these views in the opening speech of the conference and aroused the loud protests of the humanists.
The result was a reform of the humanistic grammar school in Prussia: The number of Latin hours was reduced by 15 percent from 77 to 66 hours, and there was no longer any Latin essay to write. The German subject in particular received more lessons. The humanistic representatives got involved because the high school diploma of the humanistic grammar school was retained for the classical subjects.
According to Wilhelm II, the Realgymnasium was supposed to be abolished as a “half-measure” between classical and real education, but this did not succeed in the end; instead, the upper secondary school, without Latin, only allowed access to the technical university , but also to study mathematics and natural sciences . In 1892 the higher civil service career was opened for high school students. Under pressure from the up-and-coming bourgeoisie, the municipal authorities founded numerous secondary schools and, since 1893, also girls’s grammar schools .
With reference to the conference, reform pedagogues developed new school models: Berthold Otto designed the future school and developed a private tutor school with the help of the Prussian school administration. Hermann Lietz founded rural education homes from 1898 .
Quotes
Minister of Education von Goßler on March 6, 1889 in front of the Prussian House of Representatives :
“We must be clear about the fact that the development of our people, our educated people, is not to be promoted after purely academic education, but we must always keep ourselves present: How much does the Prussian people need for academic studies, for the filling of those? Classes that ... are counted among the so-called ruling classes? "
Kaiser Wilhelm II at the conference in 1890:
“Anyone who has been to high school and has seen behind the scenes knows where it is missing. Above all, there is a lack of a national basis. We have to take German as the basis for the grammar school; 'We should educate national young Germans and not young Greeks and Romans' ... We have to make German the basis. The German essay must be the focal point around which everything revolves ... That's why I say, get rid of the Latin essay, it bothers us, and we lose our time for German about it. "
With regard to the further course of German history, the judgment of the classical philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff on the results of the conference (1892) gives cause for concern : They meant the "abolition of Greek and the restriction of Latin to an elementary language course." People have "finally made a break with history and culture."
literature
- Manfred Fuhrmann : Latin and Europe. The history of learned teaching in Germany from Charlemagne to Wilhelm II. (The foundations of our education that have become alien) , 2nd edition. DuMont Literature and Art, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8321-7948-8 , pp. 213-217.
- Wolfgang J. Mommsen : Civil culture and artistic avant-garde. Culture and politics in the German Empire 1870 to 1918. (= Ullstein 33168 Propylaea study edition ) Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1994, ISBN 3-548-33168-8 , pp. 63–66.