Program and Abstracts
Birgit Althans
The forgotten tradition of caring/maintenance of offspring (Wartung)
in pedagogy
If we look on current practices of handling the newborn infants we see them fixed in the hands of doctors, nurses and mid-wifes. All of them act not only as experts with medical professional training but as educators as well - they give advice to the mother about the right way to handle her baby, they show her how to hold, (breast-)feed, wash it and they correct way to change his nappies. And later on, during the prescribed checkups in the consulting rooms of the pediactricians the impartial spectator can watch the pedagogical performance of doctoral consultants. In fact it is the discourse of medicine now who controls, instructs and judges the the interaction between mother, father and child.
From the perspective of historical and pedagogical anthropology this looks like a very new phenomena. If we look into the pedagogical classics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kant and Hegel we always find a chapter on caring, nursing and its pedagogical meaning.
My lecture tries to reconstruct this forgotten tradition from the pedagogical authors of European Enlightment in Eighteenth Century and the influence of Froebel and Womens Lib-Movement in Nineteenth Century trying to find reasons for that loss.
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