Political education in the Federal Republic of Germany

This article deals with fundamental questions of political education in the Federal Republic of Germ any. It describes the developm ent of conceptions of political education since the establishm ent of the FRG, the political orientation of guidelines for political education practices, and special attention is paid to the latest conceptions of political education based on the philosophy Frankfurt School, w here the basic elem ent is social conflict. Part Two is devoted to fundamental problem s of political education in the FRG, particularly to its relationship to concrete State and party policies, the relationship of political institutions as a subject to real political thinking, and the relationship of political instruction to education for active involvem ent in political life and for political behaviour. The author discusses here critically newly introduced term s ’’social learning“ and ’’socialization“.
The third part of the article deals with the ideological orientation of political education in the FRG at present, and comes to the conclusion that despite relative progressiveness of theoretical and didactic conceptions in the adm inistration of political education, the revenge-seeking and anti-Communist guidelines of the sixties are still in force. The article goes on to show how in political education in the FRG the relations to the neighbouring Socialist countries are pregnant with anticom m unism , and, as a result, pupils acquire m ore inform ation about these countries on the radio and television than at school. The pupils’ attitude to Nazism is not quite what it should be, either. Thus there is considerable contradiction in the political education in the FRG, and the citizens who have undergone this education will have to overcom e this contradiction later on by their own experiences of life.