Vorschrift, Folgsamkeit und persönliche Verantwortung – Über den Wandel der (präskriptiven) pädagogischen Identität und die Bedeutung einer Anthropologie der Alterität

Precept, Obedience and Personal Responsibility – On the Transformation of (Prescriptive) Pedagogical Identity and the Meaning of an Anthropology of Alterity. Denis Vasse, Jesuit and psychoanalyst, once said: “When man identifies himself completely with the law, he degrades himself into a wolf being” (Vasse 1973, p. 148). The older generation will still know some “school wolves” from their own experience. But their strictness was by no means always the expression of sadistic lust. Rather, it corresponded to a “higher” and supreme mission for the betterment of the individual child and the human race. This attitude found its legitimation in Christian and Enlightenment contexts as well as in some (allegedly) child-oriented and still popular approaches of Reformpädagogik. However, for some time now there has been a critical counter-movement in the philosophy of education. It analyses the modern insecurity that can be understood as a consequence of the rejection of the human being as a child of God that has been emerging since the Renaissance. Furthermore, it criticises any definition of the nature of man that is presented with the claim of absolute truth.