Some Remarks on the Theory of Political Education. German Studies Notes.

This theoretical discussion explores pedagogical assumptions of political education in West Germany. Three major methodological orientations are discussed: the normative-ontological, empirical-analytical, and dialectical-historical. The author recounts the aims, methods, and basic presuppositions of each of these approaches. Topics discussed include what is and what is not learned in schools, how teachers might talk about political education, how to formulate political and educational ideas theoretically and how to conceptualize them, to what degree theoretical positions can be called political, how theories are discussed in political didactics, and literature on the discussion of political didactics within West Germany. Views of socialist Herbert Marcuse and liberal Karl Popper are compared in an attempt to show politics as the concrete expression of theories extracted from the humanities and the sciences. Remarks on the paper by Cleo Cherryholmes at Michigan State University and Klaus Hornung at Padagogische Hochschule, Reutlingen, West Germany, are included. German bibliographic sources are cited in the document. (Author/DB)