Populismus und Bildung

Right-wing populism has strongly polarizing effects in politics, education and science—a problem which this article aims to adress. Instead of claiming a demarcation between science and education on the one hand and right-wing populist ideology on the other, we initially focus on continuities. At the same time, we are concerned with finding a critical distance towards right-wing populism. Using the theoretical framework of boundary-work we therefore analyse a case of right-wing populist educational and scientific efforts. Boundary-work can occur in an institutional, content-related and epistemic dimension. While we identify strong continuities in the institutional and content-related dimensions, we see the main difference in the epistemic dimension. In conclusion, we use the results of our analysis to develop a critical position as scientists and educationists towards right-wing populism, drawing consequences for the epistemic, content-related and institutional dimensions.

Organizations function as the central generators of complexity in modern society by regulating and constantly increasing the opportunities for simultaneous action. The paper conceives populism as a socially widespread form of criticism of this organized complexity and systematically differentiates it from fundamentalisms and conspiracy theories as important complexity reducing interpretations of modernity. The structural logic of organizations and their role in society is analyzed in relation to society’s demands for individual participation. The educational potentials of participatory organizational structures are discussed in view of the fact that this mode of systematically generated complexity exposes itself to populist criticism.

Basic civic education is discussed as a substantial pillar in the discussion on basic education, although little is known about the basic civic skills of adults with low literacy skills. In this article based on the results of LEO 2018 and with logistic regression models, the thesis is examined that low-literate adults assess their own civic skills as rather low and thus exclude themselves from the political field. It is shown that even when controlling for various socio-economic factors, low-literate adults are more likely to assess their own competences as rather low.

The contribution aims at outlining a proposition as to how institutions of further education may be typed and systematically increasingly differentiated within the framework of developments on the landscape of further education. In addition to explaining how this differentiation could be achieved, the article also offers a broadening of the current perspective of typologies of institutions by including adjunctive education as a category of typification. The approach is thus anchored at the interface between program research and organizational research.

Due to the ongoing process of globalization, the need for trainings for intercultural competences increases. The study aims to measure the meaningfulness of intercultural training without additional coaching. Therefore, it assessed the level of intercultural competence of participants with and without an intercultural training in a cross-sectional study design. The results show that trainings actually have a positive effect on intercultural competence. Thereby, younger participants profit more from trainings. However, results reveal that trainings are not the appropriate tool to increase actual intercultural competence, but serve as preparation measures.

This article regards the publication of a text-foto-volume on the 100-year-history of the German Volkshochschule as an impulse for a possible innovation of writing history of adult education. First, the methodological principles of a both empirical and narrative historiography and its terminology will be described. Departing from a pragmatic moral intention of the book to present an affirmative history of the Volkshochschule, the article suggests a historical-normative historiography. Thereafter, the political consolidation of adult education in the Weimar constitution is related to the history of the revolution of 1918/19. This allows to reconstruct the normative status of the (partial) revolution of the educational system of the German Reich.