Torsten Gass-Bolm. Das Gymnasium 1945-1980: Bildungsreform und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Westdeutschland. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005. 490 S. EUR 40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-89244-869-3.
Reviewed by Catherine Plum (Department of History, Western New England College)
Published on H-German (March, 2008)
The German Gymnasium: Identity Crisis, Reform, and Preservation
Torsten Gass-Bolm presents his readers with a well-researched, comprehensive account of the social and cultural history of the Gymnasium from the period following World War II through the 1970s. Building on the work of Margret Kraul, Hans-Werner Fuchs, and Peter Lundgreen, among others,[1] Gass-Bolm traces stagnation and reform chronologically in four areas: the Gymnasium as a place for the achievement of cultural knowledge; changing educational theories and practices; transformations in the elite status of the Gymnasium and its teachers; and gendered education. Gass-Bolm embraces the challenge of narrating social and cultural change from both a macro- and micro-historical perspective. He succeeds admirably in this respect, by simultaneously considering the works of leading theorists and pedagogical conferences and demonstrating how discourses and trends played out at the local level through close analysis of schools in Freiburg. For historians studying democratization and citizenship-building, Gass-Bolm demonstrates the dramatic changes in attitudes towards democracy from 1945 to 1980, concluding with students' journey to the exercise of democratic rights.
In the first two chapters, Gass-Bolm provides readers with a detailed background of the postwar Gymnasium via its nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. Institutions focused on the classics, Christian religion, and German language and culture served as state schools for the upper-middle classes, excluding members of the lower classes and providing a means of social advancement for some middle-class males. The Gymnasium underwent isolated reform before the turn-of-the-century and Weimar reform periods. Gass-Bolm argues convincingly that early postwar educational reform drew upon these earlier periods. Both coeducation and the first Gesamtschule were found in experimental schools of the turn-of-the-century. The Weimar period witnessed experimentation with parent representation and weak student councils. While coeducation was rare, in the 1920s most secondary schools for girls began offering the Abitur, which was increasingly a prerequisite for university study. Nevertheless, a variety of tendencies and political standpoints persisted, including reactionary policies advocated by political groups and the Deutscher Philologenverband, a conservative organization of Gymnasium teachers. Members of the Philologenverband are important actors in Gass-Bolm's account. Aside from references to nationalism in education and National Socialist attitudes to gendered education and gender roles, Gass-Bolm devotes little coverage to the 1933-45 period, which he feels has less connection to the reform practices of the 1960s and 1970s.
Gass-Bolm's third chapter highlights the tenacity of conservatism and Christian humanism in the period 1945-59, when basic assumptions about student ability and gender roles changed little. Conservative critics believed in sexual difference, supported traditional gender norms, and assumed that the students who deserved admission were being served by the Gymnasium. While all the occupiers sought significant changes in the German education system in their zones, including a horizontal, unified secondary school system, German politicians, churches, and administrators permitted very little reform. A judicial ruling of 1954 that allowed students and parents to appeal school decisions ended their status as "islands of absolutism" (pp. 117-118). This right was rarely exercised at first, but with time the concept of students' legal rights expanded dramatically. Opinion also turned against corporal punishment in schools.
The next section in this account covers a transitional era (1959-67) during which reform found greater support among theorists and pedagogues alike, including the Philologenverband. Minority opinions of the 1950s essentially became majority stances. A developing economy required expanded numbers of Abiturienten. Modern needs and interests urged a turn from classical education toward support for clearly defined goals, practice of critical thinking skills, and merging educational formation and vocational training (Bildung and Ausbildung). The Gymnasium changed from a site of elite education to a source of qualifications for further studies. Gass-Bolm provides a thoughtful analysis of the discourse on the so-called "ability reserves," or students in underrepresented gender, class, and geographical groups whose talents were not harnessed. Gass-Bolm might have used a discussion of teacher-student relationships in the early-to-mid 1960s to provide a more effective transition to the era of democratization he depicts at the end of the decade. At the Kepler-Gymnasium in Freiburg, which he investigates in depth, students began to criticize the limits of student government in the mid-1960s and took a more critical stance in their school newspaper.
The development of a strong pupil movement (Schülerbewegung) in the late 1960s symbolizes the apex of reform efforts and democratization of the Gymnasium. Nevertheless, the period 1967-73 also reveals opposing tendencies, including waning interest in reform among conservative educators by the early 1970s. Gass-Bolm provides an informative summary of the pupil movement, considering protests, influence from university groups, challenges to authoritarian structures, and demands for sexual openness. This portion of Gass-Bolm's account might have profited from a stronger analysis of generational cohorts. With respect to sexual education and freedom of speech, Gymnasium students appeared to pursue different ends than their parents, but a comprehensive account of this trend would require further investigation than the author provides. Intriguing suggestions appear here that future studies will need to work to demystify connections between school-aged '68ers and their parents and teachers including analysis of participants with respect to age, gender, and social background.
Gass-Bolm effectively presents some of the outcomes of the student movement and adult support, including greater independence for student government, student representation at teachers' meetings, and school boards that included parents and teachers. Alongside substantial reform, conservative advocates successfully defended the fundamental concept of the spectrum of secondary education, despite calls for the Gesamtschule to replace both the Gymnasium and the Realschule. Nevertheless, Gass-Bolm cautions his readers, conservatives advocated stabilization, not a return to the 1950s.
At the end of his study, Gass-Bolm's attention turns to the period between 1973 and 1980. While reasons for the endpoint remain unclear, Gass-Bolm presents interesting material about student anxieties and student-teacher relationships. Having made multiple concessions, many teachers were disappointed with persistent disciplinary problems. Teacher and student stress levels became a new point of concern. Previously banned Abitur festivities returned, orchestrated by students and parents in addition to teachers. The end of Gass-Bolm's story involves not only the survival of the Gymnasium, but also the transformation of its students from objects of school and government policy to subjects in their own right.
Overall Gass-Bolm's monograph has a number of strengths. The author is clearly talented at utilizing a variety of sources to trace social and cultural change and represent interactions between students, teachers, politicians, and educational theorists. The dual macro- and micro-historical approach is methodologically innovative and masterfully executed. Sources include professional magazines, commemorative publications, Abitur speeches, and student newspapers from different West German regions and types of Gymnasien. Gass-Bolm also skillfully compares reform projects in SPD-dominated states to trends in provinces controlled by CDU/CSU governments. A CDU-dominated region, Baden-Württemberg, provides Gass-Bolm's case study. He draws on school documents from the state ministry of culture, regional records, school archives, questionnaires distributed to former students, and interviews. Theoretical concepts and transformations literally come to life through the numerous examples Gass-Bolm provides from the Kepler-Gymnasium in particular, an institution focused on the natural sciences that is depicted via student newspaper articles and minutes from teachers' meetings. The focus on Baden-Württemberg and the Kepler-Gymnasium appears logical. Baden-Württemberg was somewhere near the middle-of-the-road in terms of attitudes towards reform and reform implementation, neither as radical as Hesse, Berlin, or Hamburg nor especially hostile to change. Finally, while Gass-Bolm discusses thoughtfully the contrasts between natural, student-centered spaces oriented towards community (Gemeinschaft) and traditional styles in which the school setting symbolized the authoritarian state (Obrigkeitsstaat), emphasizing the changing architecture, layout, and furniture of schools before and after 1945.
In a project of this scope, readers may inevitably, if perhaps unfairly, wish for certain details and contextualizations that the author does not provide. I was somewhat surprised at the decision to interview former students but not teachers, who might have commented on transformations and compared generations of students. At times Gass-Bolm might have linked developments in the educational sphere with broader historical events and transformations more explicitly. Some relationships (such as the connection between the expansion of the Gymnasium population and the introduction of restrictions on student numbers in certain university subjects) are clearer than others (the effects of the 1973 oil crisis on the Gymnasium, which Gass-Bolm seems to see as self-explanatory). He also assumes that the 1960s reform movement resulted from favorable economic conditions, political stability, and relaxed international tensions. At the same time, however, he argues that Cold War competition inspired reformers in the mid-1960s to seek an expansion in the numbers of Abiturienten. Given Gass-Bolm's interest in both change and continuity, a greater attention to continuities between the National Socialist era and the immediate postwar would also appear warranted. Some of his evidence points to persisting notions of biological determinism in perceived aptitudes between male versus female students or among students from certain social backgrounds. On the other hand, reactions to the anti-intellectualism and school disruptions of the Nazi period must have inspired efforts to preserve traditional student-teacher relationships and the Gymnasium in its classical form.
Really, Gass-Bolm can only begin here to unravel the complex intersection of Cold War competition with its groups of historical actors: politicians, educational reformers, and student groups. His plausible periodization acknowledges that chronological divisions will always be imprecise in educational history. Even so, his thematic and methodological focus on educational theory and curriculum, student-teacher relationships, social mobility, and gender assumptions constitute an excellent measure of social and cultural change. Overall, scholars of social and cultural history, educational theory, youth and gender studies will surely find the final product of Gass-Bolm's extensive research to be both comprehensive and sensitive to detail.
Note
[1]. Margret Kraul, Das deutsche Gymnasium 1780-1980 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), and "Koedukation. Determinanten ihrer Geschichte," in Koedukation. Erbe und Chancen, ed. Marianne Horstkemper and Margret Kraul (Weinheim: Deutscher StudienVerlag, 1999), 20-37; Hans-Werner Fuchs, Gymnasialbildung in Widerstreit. Die Entwicklung des Gymnasiums seit 1945 und die Rolle der Kulturministerkonferenz (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004); and Peter Lundgreen, Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Schule im Überblick. Teil II: 1918-1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1981).
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Citation:
Catherine Plum. Review of Gass-Bolm, Torsten, Das Gymnasium 1945-1980: Bildungsreform und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Westdeutschland.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14341
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