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Scholarship on the history of West Germany's educational system has traditionally portrayed the postwar period of Allied occupation as a failure and the following decades as a time of pedagogical stagnation. Two decades after World War II, however, the Federal Republic had become a stable democracy, a member of NATO, and a close ally of the West. Had the schools really failed to contribute to this remarkable transformation of German society and political culture? This study persuasively argues that long before the protest movements of the late 1960s, the West German educational system was undergoing meaningful reform from within. Although politicians and intellectual elites paid little attention to education after 1945, administrators, teachers, and pupils initiated significant changes in schools at the local level. The work of these actors resulted in an array of democratic reforms that signaled a departure from the authoritarian and nationalistic legacies of the past. The establishment of exchange programs between the United States and West Germany, the formation of student government organizations and student newspapers, the publication of revised history and civics textbooks, the expansion of teacher training programs, and the creation of a Social Studies curriculum all contributed to the advent of a new German educational system following World War II. The subtle, incremental reforms inaugurated during the first two postwar decades prepared a new generation of young Germans for their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic state.
This book, a fascinating comparison of the educational systems of East and West Germany, demonstrates how, since 1949, education has been used to create different and competing societies: East Germany has tried to create an ideal socialist state, while West Germany has sought to be a model of Western democracy. The authors argue that the German tradition of using education to attain social and political goals continues in the two Germanys of the postwar period. The authors draw a complete portrait of the constitutional and institutional differences between the systems and of the tensions that exist between theory and practice, providing a clear understanding of the general educational problems in Western democracies and Eastern communist states.
This is a history of 1968 written from a new perspective-that of center-right student activists in West Germany. Based on oral history interviews and new archival sources, it examines the ideas, experiences, and repertoires of center-right students in this age of protest. Writing these activists back into the history of 1968 and its afterlives -including student protest, cultural revolt, internationalism, debates about left-wing violence and the terror of the Red Army Faction, the memory wars of the 1980s and beyond - reveals that this was a broader, more versatile, and, ultimately, more consequential phenomenon than the traditionally narrower focus on a left-wing minority allows. Other '68ers demonstrates that we need a more nuanced history of the 1968 generation and of generational conflict during these years. Student activists comprised individuals from across the political spectrum, who often had very different ideas about what kind of a society they envisaged and how to address the shortcomings of West German democracy. 1968 was a moment of intense political conflict, but it also played out within the student body and nurtured contrasting identities. This book shows that the center-right involvement in 1968 had real consequences. Many of the protagonists of this book would go on to pursue high-profile political careers and leave their mark on West German political culturey. Other '68ers therefore sheds fresh light on how West Germany's center-right dealt with the crisis of hegemony and political identity it experienced in the wake of 1968, how it coped with generational change, how it transformed and modernized after losing power at the national level for the first time in 1969, and how it managed to re-emerge so successfully in the 1980s.