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From Culture and Upbringing, Klaus Mollenhauer
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About this Website
Klaus Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing (1983), a text is internationally regarded as one of the most important German contributions to educational theory and scholarship in the 20th century. It has been translated into Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese, Spanish and Dutch, but has not yet appeared in English in full.
This Website provides sample translation and background information for Forgotten Connections from an English translation that is currently in progress. It includes a site and material for a graduate course using the translation as a textbook, texts and images in the public domain related to the translation, and an index to online material related to Mollenhauer's book on culture and upbringing.
About the Book
More about the text: From an American perspective, Forgotten Connections is in some ways reminiscent of the work of John Dewey. Like Dewey’s most famous texts, it is at once accessible and sophisticated, it effortlessly combines philosophical reflection and practical conclusions, and it draws from humanistic continental thinkers who were also important to Dewey. At the same time, Forgotten Connections speaks very much to the 21st century: it is concerned with the role of education in preparing young people for the future at a time when the future is a matter of enormous uncertainty; it deals with the challenge of communicating cultural values and understandings to future generations at a time when these values and understandings have become increasingly fraught and conflicted; and it joins contemporary educational scholarship in exploring the implications of recent philosophy and sociology (e.g. Foucault and Bourdieu) for pedagogical theory and practice.
For more about the book, see: Friesen, N. & Sævi, T. (2010).Reviving forgotten connections in North American teacher education: Klaus Mollenhauer and the pedagogical relation.Journal of Curriculum Studies, 142(1), 123-147.
Table of Contents
Linked chapters can be downloaded in DRAFT form as .pdfs. (Note: this version of the translation simplifies some aspects of Mollenhauer's original text. A revised version is currently being prepared that clearly differentiates Bildung from Upbringing, and that otherwise treats the text as a philosophical work rather than as a textbook for student readers.)
- Introduction: What do we really mean when we talk about upbringing?
- Presentation: leading our lives with children Augustine: Pointing, Ways of Life, Self / The Story of Buffalo Long Lance: Slowing Reality Down / What Images can tell us: The Origin of a Pedagogical Barrier
- Representation: Deciding what to convey Comenius and Velazquez: The Pedagogical Hall of Mirrors / Summary of Points thus far / Pestalozzi: The Construction of the Field
- Bildsamkeit: Trusting that children want to learn The Paradoxes of Upbringing / The Case of Kaspar Hauser / To render the Unsayable Doable; The Equivalency Postulate
- Self-Activity: Children’s own plans and projects Speaking / Mathematics / Drawing / Walking / The Discover of the Self / The Active Individual / The Self-Starting Individual
- Conclusion: Difficulties with Identity The Concept of Identity / Inside and Out / Reality and Possibility
Forgotten Connections Course: EDUC 5020: History and Philosophy of Education
Ideas about what education is, what purposes it should serve, and how it should be structured are closely entwined with ideas of what a society is and how it functions. This intensive, 2 week course provides an introduction to key educational philosophers, and considers their impacts on the history of education and childhood.
