The pedagogical-didactic transformation of the national socialist ideology in primers during the time of National Socialism

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Carsten Heinze
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2013 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237526463

This project will concentrate on an examination of the instruments of indoctrination and manipulation developed and put into practice by national-socialist educators in order to educate children to subject themselves "voluntarily" to the "will of the fuehrer". The focus of the research will rest on analysing the content and methods of early reading instruction. Reconstructing the conditions governing the approach to education and teaching as well as attempts to control education policy will form an essential aspect of this research. Furthermore, different means employed to exert ideological influence in early reader and student's books will be identified. The focal point of this investigation is an analysis of primers which starts out from the hypothesis that national socialist educators took their lead from the image of childhood portrayed in progressive education, ideologically reinterpreting it with a view to achieving compliance with national socialist ideology through an aestheticisation of violence. In taking this approach, the investigation will address the problem of detecting educational mechanisms that ultimately lead to indoctrination and violent behaviour. The analysis of various school textbooks will be carried out on the basis of a qualitative content analysis aimed at locating educational processes which transform socio-cultural knowledge. In order to determine the conditions and prerequisites that fundamentally influenced the design of the primers, the project will investigate central context areas such as e.g. control over education policy, the discourse on teaching, the underlying concepts of an educational moratorium and patterns of childhood as well as national socialist ideology. The reconstruction of these context areas will follow the concept of a "grammar of schooling".

• DFG Programme: Research Grants