Weimar school compromise

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The constitutional offense known as the Weimar School Compromise was a result of the coalition negotiations to form the Reich government in June 1919 and is mainly anchored in Article 146, Paragraph 2 of the Weimar Constitution promulgated on August 14, 1919 . Article 146 provided the following:

  • The public school system is to be organized organically. The middle and higher education system is based on a primary school common to all. For this structure the variety of professions is decisive, for the admission of a child to a certain school his disposition and inclination, not the economic and social position or the religion of his parents are decisive.
  • Within the municipalities, however, at the request of legal guardians, elementary schools of their creed or ideology are to be set up, provided that this does not impair an orderly school operation, even within the meaning of paragraph 1. The will of the legal guardian is to be taken into account as far as possible. The state legislation determines the details according to the principles of a Reich law.
  • Public funds are to be made available by the Reich, the federal states and municipalities for the access of the less well-off to middle and higher schools, in particular education grants for the parents of children who are considered suitable for education in middle and higher schools, until the end of their education.

This seemingly democratic text in Paragraph 2 was momentous, as it provisionally stipulated the maintenance of the "orderly school operation" originating from the German Empire, such as the continued existence of denominational schools or gender segregation in the existing tripartite school system, as long as no supplementary Reich law provided other principles for the organization of the school system prescribed.

Prehistory from November 1918 to June 1919

With the November Revolution, the cultural and educational structures of the Wilhelmine Empire were also called into question. Social democratic and left-liberal forces in the local workers 'and soldiers' councils and in the newly constituting state governments urged the rapid examination and implementation of reform-pedagogical and secular education and popular education concepts, which should create equal opportunities in schools and universities and remove class barriers. The reactionary influence of the churches closely connected with the overthrown ruling houses on the education and schooling of adolescents was seen as particularly critical. Under the leadership of the SPD and the USPD , the Prussian "Ministry for Science, Art and Education" arranged, among other things, in November 1918 that the local church school supervision in Prussia was lifted with immediate effect and that the pupils should only take part in religious instruction voluntarily. The governments of the city-states of Hamburg and Bremen banned religious education from public schools by decree and planned the introduction of a single school . At the turn of the year and in January 1919 , however, attempts to reform the school system took a back seat to the power struggles and armed conflicts between the leading revolutionary parties, the SPD, USPD and KPD . The elections to the National Assembly scheduled for January 19 under the SPD leadership were partially boycotted by the USPD and completely boycotted by the KPD. The election result looked accordingly. It only allowed majority coalitions from the SPD, DDP and / or the center , which severely restricted the scope for changes in the sense of socialist programs. On February 11, Friedrich Ebert was elected President of the Reich and Philipp Scheidemann was entrusted with forming a government. The appointment of the Scheidemann government marked the end of the actual revolutionary era, with the pre-revolutionary administrative structures in the public school system being largely retained. From now on, the hopes of the school reformers concentrated on the draft constitution, in which the subject area "education and school" was dealt with in relatively extensive detail. In the constitutional deliberations, the SPD pursued the introduction of an eight-year, coeducational , secular unified school, the DDP wanted to abolish the denominational separation and declare Christian community schools or simultaneous schools to be a generally binding unified school, and the Center Party called for the influence of the churches to be preserved in the unchanged school system. The Scheidemann government, which resigned in June 1919 because the governing coalition did not have a majority in favor of the Versailles peace treaty , outlasted these different school policy views in the constitutional committee .

Coalition negotiations and school compromise in July 1919

After the DDP left the government, the representatives of the center saw the opportunity to change the school articles in the draft constitution, which were controversial for them, especially with regard to the denominational ties of the schools. A delegation from the center presented to the Reich President and indicated the willingness to enter a cabinet led by Social Democrats and to approve the Versailles Peace Treaty in the National Assembly, if the constitution stipulated that denominational schools would continue to operate as they had previously been organized. The Reich President commissioned Heinrich Schulz to conduct negotiations with representatives of the center and in the constitutional committee. In the second reading, the National Assembly approved the changes to the school articles with a narrow majority of MPs from the SPD and the Center, and in return the Center joined the Bauer cabinet . “As expected, the compromise met with strong opposition from broad sections of the public. The executive committee of the German Teachers 'Association wired to Weimar that it would result in' a disastrous surrender of state sovereignty 'and that it would be' an injustice to the youth of the people 'if the elementary school is organized according to a denomination'. "The" Association of socialist Teachers ”also protested against the abandonment of the secular school. The Prussian teachers' association threatened to reject religious instruction "if the church were to be granted any supervisory and management powers over schools in general and religious instruction in particular." The delegates at the DDP party congress, which was taking place at the same time, accepted the following proposal almost unanimously :

  • “The new school compromise means the complete abandonment of the national unified school. He is selling our youth to the political parties, poisoning the relationship between home and school and destroying any possibility of organic expansion of the school on a liberal national basis. The party congress demands that the parliamentary group, for educational and general political reasons, prevent the implementation of this agreement by all constitutionally permissible means and in the strictest form. "

The unexpectedly fierce resistance from the DDP parliamentary group and the uncertain majority in the National Assembly prompted the two compromise parties to include the DDP's requests for changes in the school articles before the third reading of the draft constitution. Even in this new round of negotiations, Heinrich Schulz did not succeed in firmly asserting social democratic positions in the constitutional text. The DDP saw in the passage of Article 146, which guaranteed the legal guardians the freedom of choice about the establishment of denominational or secular schools and in the introductory demand: "The public school system is to be organized organically", their demands fulfilled. In addition, the negotiators of the SPD and the DDP were subject to the great error that with the Reich law required in Article 146, Paragraph 2, an opening clause would work in their favor. On July 31, 1919, the constitutional text was adopted in third reading.

The compromise formula: Reich School Law

After the Weimar Constitution was promulgated on August 14, the country-specific, denominational tripartite school system remained in place according to the constitution. With reference to the party-political horse-trading of the SPD with the Center Party because of the Versailles peace treaty, Paul Oestreich , a founding member of the Association of Decided School Reformers , described Article 146 as an “inner Versailles” . The school reformers, who also strived for the development of a secular unified school in the sense of a life and work school, still had the hope of being able to make the school system more social and democratic by means of the Reich law required in Article 146, Paragraph 2. In the dispute between the churches and the Prussian government about the withdrawal of the school releases affecting them since November 1918, it became clear as early as September 1919 what fatal effect Article 174 of the adopted Reich constitution unfolded in the following wording:

  • "Until the enactment of the Reich law provided for in Article 146, Paragraph 2, the existing legal situation remains. The law has to give special consideration to areas of the empire in which there is a school that is not legally separate according to creeds. "

A legal opinion of the Reich government demanded by the churches declared the Prussian “Primary School Maintenance Act” of 1906 to be the “existing legal situation” and forced the Prussian government to withdraw the school edicts introduced from November 1918, which concerned religious instruction and church school supervision. Although school and university reforms were long overdue, other political events always delayed, postponed or completely suppressed them. At the Reich School Conference convened in June 1920 , two months after the Kapp Putsch and the suppression of the Ruhr uprising , the school reformers suffered another defeat. However, the results of the conference were not implemented directly, as the majority of the Weimar coalition was lost in the 1920 Reichstag election . The compromise formula "Reich School Law" was and remained an empty promise until the end of the Weimar Republic. In 1921, 1925 and 1927 more or less anti-reform bills were introduced into the Reichstag, but did not find a majority there. “The common cultural-political energy of Social Democrats, Democrats and the German Teachers' Association was already broken by 1920. What was left of that and was entwined with the cultural-political torso of the republic were, among other things, reform-pedagogical theories, whose apolitical self-image contained much of political resignation. "

Review

After the Second World War , the tripartite, denominational school system of the Weimar Republic revived in the Adenauer era . Many school and educational policy disputes in the Federal Republic of Germany can therefore be historically associated with the “Weimar School Compromise”. Proponents of the tripartite school system and the German Association of Philologists claim that the “Weimar School Compromise” was a good compromise overall. The advocates of comprehensive schools and the education and science union , like the school reformers of the 1920s, persistently work on overcoming the tripartite nature of the school system and the educational policy of "small states".

literature

  • Paul Oestreich: I don't regret it! School political struggles between revolution and Kapp Putsch . (= Decided school reform , No. 14) Verlag Ernst Oldenburg, Leipzig 1923.
  • Rainer Bölling: Elementary school teachers and politics: Der Deutsche Lehrerverein 1918-1933. Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1978, ISBN 3-525-35986-1 .
  • Peter Braune: The failed unified school. Heinrich Schulz. Party soldier between Rosa Luxemburg and Friedrich Ebert . Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-320-02056-0 .
  • Kristian Klaus Kronagel: Religious Education and Reform Education . Otto Eberhard's contribution to religious education in the Weimar Republic. Waxmann Verlag, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8309-1371-0 .
  • Hans-Georg Herlitz, Wulf Hopf, Hartmut Titze, Ernst Cloer: German school history from 1800 to the present. An introduction. Juventa Verlag, Weinheim u. Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-7799-1724-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heinrich August Winkler : Weimar 1918–1933. The history of the first German democracy. Beck, Munich 1993, p. 72
  2. ^ Hermann Giesecke : On the school policy of the Social Democrats in Prussia and in the Reich 1918/19. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , issue 2/1965, p. 172f ( PDF )
  3. ^ The New Education , Issue 15/16 Volume 1, July / August 1919, p. 521
  4. ^ Hermann Giesecke: On the school policy of the Social Democrats in Prussia and in the Reich 1918/19. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, issue 2/1965, p. 173
  5. ↑ ibid
  6. ↑ ibid
  7. ↑ ibid, p. 176
  8. ↑ Ulrich Sprenger, Arbeitskreis Schuldebatte eV: The "Weimar School Compromise" of 1920 was a good compromise (PDF; 20 kB)
  9. ↑ "Long live federalism!": Sixteen countries - sixteen ways (GEW newsletter of January 4, 2010) ( Memento of May 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive )