A Cultural History of Education in the Age of Enlightenment by Daniel Trhler;

Author:Daniel Trhler;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

CHAPTER SIX

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Teachers and Teaching

REBEKKA HORLACHER

As with most social practices, teaching is not an invention of the Age of Enlightenment1 but a “natural” part of any transfer of knowledge and skills and therefore an anthropological “fact.” What makes teachers and teaching a privileged subject of research in the Age of Enlightenment is a particular shift in the meaning of teaching and a modified significance of being a teacher. The two terms—teachers and teaching—underwent a shift as part of a larger movement labeled as the “educationalization of social problems.”2 This concept addresses the belief that social problems can or actually should be solved through education; primarily through the education of the younger generation but also through the education of adults. All the undertaken attempts and actions corresponding to this shift counted either on the rationality of humans, concepts such as common sense, perfectibility, and individual improvement, or on the impact of aesthetics and emotion and appealed to morality. In the educationalization process, the teacher turned out to be the personification of these educational ambitions, and the pedagogical efforts to implement and guarantee these ambitions has since increased.3

This development is, for example, mirrored by the entry Lehrer (teacher) in the most comprehensive encyclopedia of eighteenth-century Germany, Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste (Great Complete Encyclopedia of All Sciences and Arts, 68 volumes, 1732–54), where the teacher is described as “someone who informs somebody about something he did not yet know.”4 By this definition, the task of the teacher is focused on the transmission of knowledge and information, but at the same time, both the school subjects and the teachers are equally morally shaped, as they can either be good or evil. Teaching is not restricted to the mind alone but also focuses on the body and the soul, because God gave different kinds of powers to humankind to be developed through education and teaching.5 To teach or to be taught requires both “skills” and “will.” If one of these elements is missing, neither the teacher can teach nor can anyone be taught. Moreover, it must be guaranteed that the teacher teaches properly and makes the content to be taught comprehensible. This was termed Lehr-Art (style of teaching), pedagogy, or didactics.6 Teaching is therefore a demanding task, equally requiring content knowledge and didactic knowledge or pedagogy, and focuses on the “whole person,” namely at the same time on its intellectual, physical, and psychical-moral powers. Besides this, Zedler distinguished between a teacher and a scholar or a man of letters. While the latter deals predominantly with the production or distribution of knowledge, the former cares primarily for the transmission of knowledge, and while this process was associated with a pedagogical meaning, it mirrored the “educationalization”-shift of the discourse about teachers and teaching.

In Denis Diderot’s and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, 35 volumes, 1751–80), by contrast, the entries on

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