From the Past to the Future: Changing Agendas in Teacher Education between the 19th and the 21st Century

The educational turn of the late eighteenth century, nation building of the nineteenth century, and efforts to promote global unity after the two World Wars did not only have effects on educational organizations, policies, and materials, but also on the manner with which the major actors in the world of education—namely, teachers – were trained. The different ideals and agendas in teacher training reflected the major cultural concerns of each era: in the nineteenth century, this was national uniqueness and supremacy, which, in the post war period, gave way to internationalization and global standardization. These visions were associated with the emergence of particular academic subfields and heavily shaped pedagogical ideals. In the era of nation building, the history of education dominated teacher education. In the context of the Cold War teacher training was aligned with a new internationalist and scientific paradigm. The following chapter discusses these two agendas in teacher education. In the first section we will reconstruct the rise of the history of education as a major subject in nationalist and religiously inspired teacher education in Germany and France. In the second section we will show how this leitmotif in the Cold War era was supplanted by a “cognitive turn” in the training of professional educators.