Teaching, Teacher Education, and the Humanities: Reconsidering Education as a Geisteswissenschaft

In this essay Gert Biesta asks what the humanities can contribute to the field of teacher education. In addressing this question he turns to the idea of education as a Geisteswissenschaft as it was developed in the German-speaking context in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this conception, education is configured as an interested academic discipline that engages with normative questions concerning the telos of education and does so with a focus on meaningful human action rather than human behavior. Viewing education this way highlights the role of value judgments in teaching. The values that are at stake in such judgments, Biesta argues, are not to be understood as moral values but as educational values, a view that raises some important questions about the specific nature of educational normativity. In a final step Biesta discusses how the idea of education as a Geisteswissenschaft makes a difference for the field of teacher education.