The focus of the research and teaching activities of the professorship is the history of education and historical educational science. This deals with the historical development of the relationship between person and society in its mediation through educational and socialization processes in historical change.
The Research of historical educational science is not limited to the educational field in a narrow sense (educational system, educational and welfare institutions). It focuses on historical relations of education and society in its entirety as well as on processes of collective and individual personality development in their institutional and non-institutional contexts.
The research field is therefore composed of numerous aspects: the historical socialization research as well as the educational-historical institutional research (from family to school and university to peer groups), the professional research on pedagogical activity (fields) and the investigation of life phases (childhood, adolescence and adulthood) in historical change as well as historical pedagogical debates, programmatics, and forms of thinking
Our teaching is devoted to the analysis of the development of education and socialization in the context of state and social conditions (politics, law, economy, social structure, culture). We place a special emphasis on the developments since the 18th century, i.e. the epoch of the European Enlightenment and the reorganization of Europe in the wake of the French Revolution as a significant epochal threshold within the emergence of the modern socialization order.
In addition, there is the educational-historical analysis of the modernization processes from the late 19th century to the Weimar Republic and the educational history of the Nazi period. We are also interested in developments since 1945, the discourses of educational theory in the early post-war period in their social context, and the history of the student movement “1968”.