Rediscovering Education’s Relative Autonomy: Reflections on the Discipline’s Past, Present, and Future

The relative autonomy of education has always been in jeopardy. Particularly today, several developments (e.g., the rise of ‘Empirische Bildungsforschung’ (empirical educational research) seem to threaten the disciplinary “heart” of Pädagogik or at least fundamentally transform its appearance in the German-speaking context. With this in mind, we argue that it is valuable to reconsider the principle of the relative autonomy of education, which is a central topic of the paradigm Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik. Therefore, we take a closer look at Pädagogik’s/Erziehungswissenschaft’s past, present, and future. In the first part of this talk we retrace the historical development of this field of study in the German-speaking context and delineate when the idea of education as a relative autonomously discipline was introduced and what it originally means. In the second part of the talk, we analyze the current state of the discipline and spotlight developments threatening education’s autonomy. We shed light on the question of what might get lost if Pädagogik/Erziehungswissenschaft as a discipline in its own right disappeared. In the last part, we argue for education as an independent discipline that advances its own questions, interests, and perspectives and outline how educationalists can strengthen education’s autonomy and disciplinary identity.