Hildegard Stratmann. Lehrer werden: Berufliche Sozialisation in der Volksschullehrer-Ausbildung in Westfalen (1870-1914). Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2006. EUR 24.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-8309-1563-8.

Reviewed by Kathy Kennedy (Department of History, Agnes Scott College)
Published on H-German (April, 2008)

Discipline and Transgression: The Socialization of Prospective Teachers in Imperial Germany

Hildegard Stratmann's book focuses on the socialization of young Germans while they prepared to become teachers in the elementary schools of the Kaiserreich. Her interest is not the formal coursework undertaken by prospective teachers, but rather their relationships with the people around them, including administrators and teachers at teacher training institutions, and their families, classmates, landlords, and other townspeople. Stratmann follows prospective teachers from their initial choice of profession, usually upon completion of the Volksschule at age fourteen, through a preparatory course that lasted three years, and three more years in a teachers' college (Lehrerseminar). The book concludes with discussion of young teachers' probationary first employment. Stratmann's greatest emphasis, however, falls on students' experiences in the teachers' college, which they typically entered at age eighteen. She limits her study to the province of Westphalia, although experiences of teachers-in-training elsewhere in Prussia were probably similar. While Stratmann attempts to incorporate material on the separate and different experiences of both genders, a lack of comparable material on prospective women teachers, and the limited network of state institutions for training women, led her to emphasize the socialization of male teachers. Her results are illuminating, but might have been developed more fully to broaden understandings of the social significance of Prussian teacher training.

Stratmann reaches below the level of policy and regulation to consider how students responded to the strict rules that governed every aspect of their lives in teachers' colleges. Memoirs serve as a valuable source of students' perspectives. By using records of disciplinary cases to study students' transgressions, Stratmann gives students voice and agency. For those students who lived in dormitories at their colleges, a detailed schedule specified the use of almost every waking hour and precise times for sleep. Students often sought to circumvent these rules, producing many infractions. Those guilty of violations, such as playing cards after lights out, skipping organ practice, or violating study hall rules, received penalties that could include lowered conduct grades, reprimands, loss of privileges, and loss of state funding. College rules either forbade or sharply curtailed students' consumption of alcohol, and cases of excessive drinking typically resulted in expulsion. Stratmann notes, however, that while "Der Besuch der Gaststätten war--von einigen Ausnahmen abgesehen--den Seminaristen zwar offiziell untersagt, sie wurden jedoch regelmässig von ihnen frequentiert" (p. 233). Also forbidden, but not entirely prevented, was virtually all contact between male students and young women; evidence of a sexual encounter generally led to dismissal. Students or their parents sometimes appealed punishments, but with only occasional success.

Stratmann presents her project as "ein Beitrag zum umfassenden Prozess der Verbürgerlichung aller Schichten, der sich im 19. Jahrhundert vollzog" (p. 305), arguing that teachers' colleges promoted the embourgeoisement of prospective teachers, preparing them to serve as "multipliers of bourgeois culture" (p. 309) in rural communities where they taught. While Stratmann shows that students often experienced some degree of embourgeoisement during their training, her research, unlike her thesis, also demonstrates the many ways that teachers' training and backgrounds limited their social and cultural penetration into the educated middle classes. A more nuanced and multifaceted thesis, one that highlighted the complicated range of interconnected identities that students adopted during their gradual professionalization, would thus have been a more accurate reflection of the rich material in Stratmann's book.

As Stratmann shows, becoming a teacher brought higher social standing and a degree of respectability to sons of rural artisans and tradesmen who tended to populate the teachers' colleges. Parents often considered the opportunity to have their sons become teachers worth the considerable financial sacrifice required during six long years of training. Moving to teachers' colleges, usually located in small to medium-sized towns, meant exposure to urban dress and manners unfamiliar in the countryside. For example, peer pressure encouraged young men to smoke pipes in imitation of bourgeois youths. Rituals and student organizations at the colleges strengthened professional identity, and once they joined the profession, teachers worked through their professional organizations to improve their status.

The most pervasive aspect of future teachers' socialization was the relentless emphasis on "duty, obedience, discipline and order" (p. 312), qualities Stratmann associates with a bourgeois lifestyle. While bourgeois culture valued orderliness, the barrack-like lifestyle in teachers' colleges hardly modeled the lifestyle of the male bourgeoisie. Stratmann also provides little evidence that the stated or actual goal of college discipline was to instill bourgeois values. While students in the upper grades of the teachers' colleges awoke at 5 a.m., shared a washroom, ate meals in fifteen minutes, and marched silently to church in double file, their contemporaries from the Bildungsbürgertum enjoyed the freedoms of university life. The sharp contrast between the infantilization of prospective Volksschullehrer and the autonomy granted university students underscores differences between the socialization of upper-middle-class and lower-middle-class males as well as the limits of Verbürgerlichung in teachers' colleges. On this point, Stratmann could have strengthened her argument by elaborating on the complexities and contradictions inherent in the concept of Verbürgerlichung.

Intertwined with the growing, if partial, identification of young teachers with the educated bourgeoisie was the simultaneous development of gender, national, and especially, religious identities. Analysis of these intersections might also have yielded a more powerful thesis for this book. Even as schooling played a role in the dissemination of bourgeois values and customs, key players in training and supervising teachers continued to be members of the clergy. Teachers' colleges, like the elementary schools that employed their graduates, were organized by confession, and religious instruction remained an important part of the curriculum, both for prospective teachers and their later pupils. Because a majority of the directors of Prussian and Westphalian teachers' colleges, as well as many of the senior teachers, were clergymen, rules governing all aspects of students' lives fell within churchmen's purview. As Stratmann points out, "Der Erziehungsanspruch der geistlichen Direktoren musste es daher sein, einen bei den Zöglingen tendenziell bereits angelegten konfessionell geprägten Gesamtlebensstil zu erhalten, durchzuformen und zu verstärken" (p. 112). In most respects, a teachers' college, with its required daily attendance at religious services, bore greater resemblance to a monastery than to a bourgeois home. Teachers who completed their training and embarked on careers generally found themselves subject once more to a clergyman's supervision and standards, because clergy served as local school inspectors. Although the state held ultimate authority over teachers' colleges and elementary schools, clergymen occupied many positions of direct authority over young and prospective teachers. The importance of clergy in shaping the professional socialization of young teachers is unmistakable in Stratmann's account, but she ignores the religious aspect of socialization in her introduction and her conclusion. By centering her argument on embourgeoisement, she largely misses the opportunity to explore areas of overlap and tension between Christian/ecclesiastical and bourgeois norms and values.

The second part of Stratmann's thesis, her argument that training prepared teachers to be "multipliers of bourgeois culture," also invites further discussion. A major goal of the Volksschule in imperial Germany was to provide "religiös-sittliche Erziehung." It is less clear how this moral education, offered under ecclesiastical supervision, related to what Stratmann calls an "Ausstrahlung der städtisch-bürgerlichen Kultur auf das Umland" (p. 20). Stories in the reading books used in the Volksschule encouraged diligence and responsibility, but also tended to celebrate characters satisfied with their modest station in life. Most of the stories had rural settings and few reflected an urban, bourgeois milieu. While teachers presumably did contribute to the spread of bourgeois customs and attitudes, Stratmann might have focused more on the limits on embourgeoisement in rural schools.

Stratmann's book contributes to ongoing scholarly discussion of the relative modernity and backwardness of education in imperial Germany. Her detailed examination of the long, challenging path required to become a teacher underscores the highly structured, selective quality of the process. Young men who successfully completed this training had generally proven themselves capable, diligent, and highly motivated. They had also coped with the all-encompassing rules of the teachers' colleges by a combination of obeying, pushing back, adapting, and cooperating with their classmates. For their efforts, they achieved enhanced social status. Greater explicit incorporation into Stratmann's analytical framework of the more traditional aspects of the young teacher's career path, especially the dominant role of the clergy and the profoundly class-based nature of the entire educational system, would have strengthened her argument.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.

Citation: Kathy Kennedy. Review of Stratmann, Hildegard, Lehrer werden: Berufliche Sozialisation in der Volksschullehrer-Ausbildung in Westfalen (1870-1914). H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14435

Copyright © 2008 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.