The pedagogical revolution: Karl Philipp Moritz, 'Philanthropismus' and the politics of educational reform, 1776--1789

My dissertation examines the pre-Italian writings of Karl Philipp Moritz in light of initiatives to reform education under "enlightened Absolutism." Although the scholarship has tended to undervalue Moritz's close affiliation with the proponents of Philanthropismus, by reassessing Moritz's writings of the mid 1780s as direct contributions to Philanthropist discussions of education this study presents Moritz as a unique voice in the late-Enlightenment pedagogical project. Through an analysis of the institutional discourse published at Basedow's experimental teaching institute in Dessau, my first chapter examines methods introduced by the Philanthropists to shape their pupils into independent, rational, and moral subjects. The chapter emphasizes the strategies adopted by early Philanthropist reformers as they navigate their intermediary position between the egalitarian principles driving Enlightenment social reforms and the exigencies of the absolutist state. In my second chapter, I consider how the pedagogical goals outlined at Dessau generate a pastoral model of education in which the educator assumes the function of empirical observer and moral guide. The chapter explores how Moritz's project for an empirical psychology advances a more comprehensive psychological approach to pedagogical praxis and further elaborates the pastoral model of education introduced at Dessau. My third chapter considers a shift in late-Philanthropist pedagogy away from this pastoral model to the controversial program of standesgemasse Erziehung, a political compromise designed to improve the education of the working poor while carefully preserving traditional divisions of estate. Against the backdrop of debates over Volksaufklarung, I consider how late-Philanthropist approaches to popular education determine how much to promote knowledge in the laboring estates and how much to preserve ignorance and prejudice. My fourth chapter presents Moritz's popular journalism of the 1780s as an informed, critical alternative to "estate-appropriate education." In his programmatic "Ideal einer vollkommenen Zeitung" and in his Denkwurdigkeiten, Moritz turns the periodical into a medium for exposing the limitations of Philanthropist pedagogy and for advocating a more radical program of Volksaufklarung, one that would "abolish" the traditional divisions between the estates through a systematic redistribution of intellectual culture. Turning to the last literary work Moritz publishes on the eve of his departure for Italy, Fragmente aus dem Tagebuche eines Geistersehers, the second half of the chapter examines how Moritz uses fiction as an alternative genre for exploring key pedagogical problems raised by his Philanthropist contemporaries. While the administrative, institutional and theoretical writing that characterizes Philanthropist discourse is shaped by political pressures and the demand for feasible social policy, with the Geisterseher Moritz uses fiction as a controlled environment where he is free to explore the radical social implications of "natural education." Moritz constructs the Geisterseher narrative, I argue, not only as an elaborate pedagogical experiment, but as a direct response to Villaume's arguments promoting standesgemasse Erziehung in Campe's Allgemeine Revision. At the same time, the chapter underscores the importance of generic innovation in Moritz's responses to the initiatives of his Philanthropist interlocutors. In the case of his journalism, I emphasize how Moritz transforms the bourgeois periodical into a popular medium for the distribution of knowledge and culture to the lower estates, and how he uses the fable and irony to signal an important shift in his thinking about education. With respect to his use of fiction to extend the debate over popular education into the realm of literature, I emphasize the importance of the fragment as a form particularly suited to the themes Moritz explores throughout the Geisterseher.