Again with regard to the German term “Bildung” (embodying the ideas of education, culture and formation), IAE rejects any emphatic or naive understanding of the concept, in favour of a critical stance. The ideal of “Bildung”, both historically and in the present context, operates in the field of tension between empowerment and direction of the individual subject, negotiating this ineradicable ambivalence, as inscribed in the idea and history of humanist “Bildung”: “In Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt brought the modern idea of ‘Bildung’ – along with everything to which the modern epoch referred: the belief in reason, emancipation, progress, and autonomy – into the stable environment of state institutions (Bildungsanstalten, ‘educational institutions’). The tension between self-determination and control was integral to the humanist concept of ‘Bildung’ right from the start: contrasting with the freedom of the subject (autonomy, self-awareness), we find incorporation into or adaptation to an instruction-giving social, objectifying order. The ‘Bildung’ ideal (perfecting of the individual’s personality) developed into an instrument of power, shored up by bourgeois social and cultural predominance (that of the new ‘Bildungsbürgertum’, cultural bourgeoisie), and by didactic teaching and the unquestioned transmission of knowledge. Cultural ‘Bildung’ opened the way to upward social mobility and access to political functions, and become the central vehicle for the reproduction of class structures. Education plays a critical role in the symbolic struggle for the exclusive appropriation of legitimate cultural assets. Museums institutionalized the ideal of ‘high culture’. The rejection of school learning forms part of the habitus of a bourgeois aesthetic, which sees its own social status as natural rather than acquired (or acquirable). Pierre Bourdieu described the aesthetic sense as a sense of distinction, which demarcates itself culturally and asserts social superiority (hence anchored in a network of relationships of social structure, taste structures, the production and education system and classification practices). A transformation takes place when systems become more differentiated, socially more heterogeneous, and less hierarchical, when boundaries become less strongly marked and universal, cultural authority is decentralized, and distinction is also displayed in other cultural spheres. Calls for a ‘culture for all’ have been linked since the 1970s with educational reforms that have also led to a critical reassessment of the ‘Bildung’ policy functions of museums.” (1)
Rather than endorsing the “Bildung” ideal, IAE critically interrogates its emancipatory and disciplinary potentials.
1 Inka Gressel: «Humanistisches Bildungsideal». Glossary definition in: Kunstvermittlung. Zwischen Dienstleistung und kritischer Praxis auf der documenta 12. Berlin/Zurich 2009.
Literature
- Georg Bollenbeck: Bildung und Kultur. Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters, Frankfurt a. M. 1994.
- Pierre Bourdieu (1979): Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft, Frankfurt a. M. 1994.
- Jan Masschelein, Michael Wimmer: Alterität, Pluralität, Gerechtigkeit. Randgänge der Pädagogik. St. Augustin 1996.
- Nora Sternfeld: Das pädagogische Unverhältnis. Lehren und Lernen bei Ranciere, Gramsci und Foucault. Vienna 2008.
- Ulf Wuggenig: »Soziale Ungleichheit und legitime Kultur«, in: Sebastian Müller-Roli (Hg.): Kulturpädagogik und Kulturarbeit, Weinheim, Munich 1988, S. 33–64.