Symbolic Constructions, Pedagogical Practices, and the Legitimation of All-Day Schooling from a Professional Perspective: Tendencies Towards Familialization in All-Day Schools

Abstract

With the development of a modern, universal school system in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, a modern pattern of family developed: the nuclear family that focused on personal relationships and intimacy and on emotionality within a caring child upbringing (Gestrich et al. 2003; Sieder 1987). From the very beginning, disputes on the functions of school and family accompanied this process that, as is well known, Parsons and especially Luhmann describe as the process of functional differentiation (Luhmann 2002, pp. 111–141; Parsons 1968; cf. also Tyrell 1985; Wernet 2003). Hegel (1811/1995) underlined the educational function of school as an institution of transition that imparted societal demands to children and teenagers, thereby viewing school as an “outpost” of society oriented towards subject matter and achievement that reaches right into childhood at home (Benner 1995, p. 52). Pestalozzi (1976), on the other hand, regarded the familial, emotional life of the “living room” as a model for any form of institutionalized education and thereby as the essential precondition for pedagogy.