Mathilde Vaerting (1884–1977) und ihr (unzeitgemäßer) Beitrag zu Pädagogik und Macht

Abstract

The article deals with the first German female educational scientist Mathilde Vaerting and her analytical contributions on topics such as sex, gender and the role of power, as well as to the question of power and violence in pedagogy, which are still relevant today. The starting point of her considerations is a comprehensive sociology of power and an intensive examination of the psychology of gender. Her engagement with corresponding pedagogical questions (e.g. co-education) is strongly influenced by the contemporary progressive education movement, in which she actively participated. Her analyses of power and domination and their role in the relationship between the gender, but also between teachers and students and in other pedagogical interaction, are in many parts inspired by her own life and career experiences as a female scholar in the period around and after the First World War. Although she was the first woman to be appointed to a professorship in educational science in Germany in 1923, her name hardly appears in the historiography of the discipline to this day. Targeted exclusionary strategies by her male colleagues, supported by a male-dominated politics and academic culture, had made her an academic outsider during her lifetime and for the time after.