Klaus Mollenhauer

Klaus Mollenhauer (born October 31, 1928 in Berlin ; † March 18, 1998 in Göttingen ) was a German educator .

He is considered one of the fundamental theorists of critical educational science and exerted a great influence on social education .

Life and academic career

Klaus Mollenhauer was born in Berlin as the son of the welfare workers Charlotte and Wilhelm Mollenhauer. After the family moved several times, he first went to school in Cottbus and then in Gollnow in Pomerania, where the family lived in nearby Naugard . His brother Peter was born in 1935. During the Second World War he became an air force helper and was taken prisoner at the end of the war . After graduating from high school in Wolfenbüttel in 1948 , Mollenhauer attended the University of Education in Göttingen and worked as a primary school teacher in Bremen from 1950 to 1952 .

From 1952 he first studied education, psychology and history in Hamburg , then education, history, psychology, literary studies and sociology in Göttingen, where Herwig Blankertz , Theodor Schulze , Wolfgang Kramp and Wolfgang Klafki were among his fellow students. During his time in Hamburg, Mollenhauer also worked as a welfare worker in the “home of the open door”. In 1958 he completed his studies in Göttingen with a doctorate as Dr. phil. and his dissertation "The origins of social education in industrial society" with Erich Less . The second speakers for the thesis were Helmuth Plessner and Walter Herrmann .

Subsequently, Klaus Mollenhauer was assistant to Erich Less and Heinrich Roth , before he joined Fritz Borinski as an academic adviser at the Free University of Berlin in 1962 and was appointed associate professor at the PH Berlin in 1965 . In 1966 he was appointed full professor of education at the University of Kiel , where Mollenhauer was director of the educational seminar. During this time he also acted as a reviewer for the German Education Council .

From 1969 to 1972 Mollenhauer was full professor for education at the University of Frankfurt am Main , from 1972 until his retirement in 1996 professor in Göttingen; Peter Alheit succeeded him in this chair . During his time in Frankfurt, Mollenhauer was a department head at the Educational Technology Center in Wiesbaden . As a member of the board of the working group called up by the state of Hesse to reform home education, he took on an important role in the Hessian home campaign , while at the same time he was involved in a children's shop in Frankfurt .

1986/87 was Mollenhauer Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin . The Free University of Berlin awarded him a Doctor honoris causa in 1993 . Klaus Mollenhauer died on March 18, 1998 in Göttingen.

Basic considerations and effect

Humanities and critical education

Klaus Mollenhauer was one of the key pedagogues of the post-war period who initiated critical educational science and achieved a paradigm shift .

Mollenhauer belonged to the war generation. Like Blankertz, he was an air force helper.

Introduction to Mollenhauer's collection of essays "Education and Emancipation": "The years after the Second World War have shown that 'humanities education' is only of limited effectiveness with regard to the clarification of those connections that make up the reality of education". How the claim to “pedagogical autonomy” is presented, which the humanities education has made, and to what extent the critical educational science is to be understood as a self-criticism of the humanities education and against the background of its own critical claims, becomes clear later in the article: “The autonomous Humanities pedagogy chose the emancipatory starting point as a motif, but drew a different consequence. It played down and depoliticized the conflict problem by constructing an educational counter-world that was directed critically against the given, but - the price of the bad utopia - could not achieve anything socially ”(ibid., P. 27).

This shows the criticism of academic students of humanities educators of their teachers that their idealistic conception of pedagogy made them blind to the political abuse under the Nazi dictatorship, although it postulates a pedagogical claim to emancipation .

Mollenhauer's criticism of humanities pedagogy, however, is developed out of its own argumentation. Autonomous, that is: freed in its effect from the church, the state , politics and ideological contexts, who want to take up education for themselves and make their interests effective through it, can only be pedagogy if it is able to reflect reflexively To behave in practice as well as the intrinsic structure of the educational thought.

Klaus Mollenhauer also saw the own demands and interests of education in key texts since the 18th century: Since Rousseau , the central task of education has been to answer the question of what should be done educationally so that society does not remain as it is is, or their future improvement is at least not made difficult by upbringing the younger generation.

Mollenhauer took over from Schleiermacher the pedagogically essential question of how the process of upbringing should be set up so that the younger generation would be able to "enter into what they find, but also to enter into the improvements that might be presented" (Schleiermacher).

The humanities pedagogy formed a circular theory of practice, which - in the "pedagogical reference" - was confirmed again and again as a state of pre-stabilized harmony, where the objective conflicts that permeate pedagogy also defined the intergenerational relationship. So Mollenhauer finally asserts critically: "The development of a context of educational sentences is at the same time the development of an image of society" (ibid., P. 25). In this respect, education, whether it wants it or not, is always integrated into an at least political aspect of the “educational reality” (cf. Mollenhauer 1968): through education and upbringing, a model of society is anticipated, the existence and validity of which is only then demonstrated when the younger generation has grown up. Nonetheless, education and upbringing are largely conveyed through preparation for a future society and from a given society against which it must be turned critically.

Education, according to Mollenhauer, is therefore necessarily political. The only question is how it can turn out emancipatory at the same time with a view to a freer and more democratic society.

Mollenhauer argued decidedly against the background of a reality scientific theory understanding, as it has indeed claimed the liberal arts education. However, according to Mollenhauer's criticism, due to its hermeneutical understanding of the humanities, it did not really refer to what it named as the starting point for its theory formation: the educational reality in its objective fullness. This impulse was picked up over the 1970s, so that the establishment of the objective-hermeneutic procedure, for example, can also be traced back to Mollenhauer's criticism of humanities education.

effect

Mollenhauer contributed to the establishment of a critical-emancipatory, political professional conception in social education by leading the theory of social education away from its intellectual-historical foundations and towards a socio-historical, sociologically informed interpretation.

His dissertation already dealt with the history of social pedagogy and discussed the concept of " neglect " to what extent this should be seen as a separate educational problem. His impact as a theoretician of social education was strengthened by numerous publications in the specialist youth welfare bodies from the mid-1960s, his importance in the home campaign and through his involvement in youth welfare reforms.

Michael Winkler emphasized Mollenhauer's effect as a major influence on the “appearance and self-image of social education in the second half of the 20th century” and attributes it to this: “He leads social education out of its conceptual and conceptual agony after World War II and towards a modern scientific discipline ” .

In the further course of his scientific work, Mollenhauer turned to questions of general education . It was in this context that his book Forgotten Connections was created . Mollenhauer's turn to aesthetic education influenced and expanded educational research to include image hermeneutic methods.

A joint project of the Universities of Göttingen, Lüneburg and Osnabrück has been working on an online portal for Mollenhauer's entire work since 2018.

Fonts (selection)

• The origins of social education in industrial society. An investigation into the structure of pedagogical thought and action. Weinheim, Berlin 1959.
• Introduction to social pedagogy - problems and terms of youth welfare. Weinheim 1964.
• Educational reality. In: Ilse Dahmer, Wolfgang Klafki (Hrsg.): Humanities education at the end of their epoch - Erich Less. Weinheim 1968, pp. 223-230.
• Education and Emancipation. Polemical sketches. 4th edition. Munich 1970.
• Theories on the educational process: An introduction to educational science issues , 1972.
• Forgotten connections. About culture and education. Munich 1983.

literature

• Alex Aßmann: Klaus Mollenhauer. Pioneer of the 1968 - founder of emancipatory education. A biography. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2015, ISBN 978-3-506-78105-5 .
• Alex Aßmann: Klaus Mollenhauer (1928–1998): Critical-emancipatory education, student movement and German post-war educational science. In: Karsten Kenklies (ed.): Person and pedagogy. Systematic and historical approaches to a problem area. Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2013, pp. 133–181. ISBN 978-3-7815-1954-1 .
• Wolfgang C. Müller: Epilogue to a historical document. In: Klaus Mollenhauer: Introduction to social pedagogy. Problems and terms of youth welfare. 10th edition. Beltz, Weinheim 2001, p. 179 ff.
• Christian Niemeyer: Classics of social education. Introduction to the theoretical history of a science. 2nd Edition. Juventa, Weinheim, Munich 2005.
• Michael Winkler: Klaus Mollenhauer. An educational portrait. Beltz, Weinheim, Basel 2002, ISBN 3-407-25265-X .
• Klepacki, Leopold: Klaus Mollenhauer: Difficulties with identity. About pedagogy as dealing with the possible. In: Jörissen, Benjamin / Zirfas, Jörg (Hrsg.): Schlüsselwerke der Identitätsforschung, 2010, pp. 259–274. [1]

Web links

• Literature by and about Klaus Mollenhauer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Brief biography and a brief outline of his theoretical development (PDF; 150 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ For the first time the complete works of the educational scientist Klaus Mollenhauer appears. Retrieved May 3, 2018 .