International and Interdisciplinary Research Group
THE GERMAN HALF-DAY MODEL: A EUROPEAN SONDERWEG? The ‘Time Politics’ of Public Education in Post-war Europe: An East-West Comparison
Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation

Interdisciplinary Workshop
Welfare State Regimes, Public Education and Child Care
Theoretical Concepts for a Comparison of East and West

Potsdam, March 31-April 1, 2006
Center for Research on Contemporary History, Potsdam

Program of the Workshop

Education is currently a hot topic. Business, politics and the media alike stress the significance of investing in this "capital for the future". The introduction of new information and communication technologies and the social effects of economic globalisation are increasingly making life-long learning a necessity for all members of society. At the same time, the opening of the European Union is creating a trans-national internal market that poses new challenges to its citizens' mobility and ability to integrate. The field of education considered fundamental to the development of corresponding competencies is pre-school and elementary education. For that reason, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), among other bodies, has been calling for a systematic quantitative and qualitative expansion of public educational offerings for pre- and school-age children. At the same time, the OECD regards this expansion as a key precondition for equal economic and social opportunities for women, that is, for their equal "social citizenship".
After publication of the results of the most recent studies by the Program for International Student Assessment, it became apparent once again, in the light of international comparison, how great the quantitative and qualitative shortcomings of the public educational offerings of many European countries remain. These shortcomings are considered to be an important source of the highly disparate achievements of pupils in different countries. At the same time, the quantitative and qualitative deficiencies in the primary schools, particularly the lack of facilities open to children in the afternoons, leads to serious problems in reconciling family and professional life. Given the persistence of the gender-specific division of labour, these problems affect women in particular. As a consequence, those states, such as Germany, Austria and Poland, where the half-day system continues to be dominant, not only suffer from a lower birth-rate than other comparable European countries, which have managed far better to solve the problem of combining work and family, but also from a significant waste of economic resources, since the growing potential of qualified female workers cannot be used in an effective and future-oriented manner.

Since publication of the PISA results there has been an increased emphasis on the necessity of a quantitative and qualitative expansion of public education offerings for children of pre-school and school age. Debate continues, however, about the concrete forms this necessary reform should take, as well as about its feasibility. Financial restrictions are considered the main obstacle. There is less public awareness, however, of the influence of the extremely diverse economic, political, institutional and cultural points of departure in different countries. The influence and interplay of these factors becomes visible only on the level of a European comparison. Even more than ten years after the upheavals of 1989/90, and despite increasing integration efforts in eastern and western Europe, the public education systems for children of pre-school and elementary school age still differ widely. In addition, significant variations also exist between individual countries within the eastern and western European regions. Nonetheless, we can also locate numerous similarities in the discourses and policies on public education across the old boundaries of socio-political systems. The social historical contexts and conditions of development of these differences and commonalities have received little attention from scholars up until now. The same is true of the question of whether and to what extent specific national or transnational paths of development determine the conditions for future reforms. A comparative historical analysis is essential in order to understand which specific circumstances promoted or blocked reforms in a given case, and which historically evolved institutional and cultural points of departure the efforts to expand public education in a unifying Europe can expect to face.

The international and interdisciplinary research project "THE GERMAN HALF-DAY MODEL: A EUROPEAN SONDERWEG? The ‘Time Politics’ of Public Education in Post-war Europe: An East-West Comparison", accordingly, aims to help shed light on the historical and cultural preconditions for a harmonisation of educational systems within Europe. Our research interest focuses on the question of the reasons for the extensive differences, but also the trans-national and trans-systemic commonalties in national discourses and policies regarding public education, as well as the conditions obstructive or conducive to reforms. The main focus will be the ‘time policy’ in public pre school and primary school education, i.e. the differences between half-day and all-day-school and child care systems for children under twelve. This question will be pursued in the framework of a comparison of the development in East and West Europe since the end of World War II. On the Eastern Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland and Russia will be analysed. On the Western side Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, the FRG, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland will be analysed.
The research group can draw upon a body of important preliminary theoretical and methodological work. One field of interest here is comparative research on the welfare state, which has developed various models for analysing the connections between social policy, the labour market, family forms and gender relations. Up until now, however, this research has focused primarily on the western countries, and only recently have scholars come increasingly to investigate the (post-)Socialist states as well. Discussions among historians and political scientists about the potentials and limits of historical comparisons of different social systems have also provided important inspiration and clarification. An analytically interesting concept is that of the "path dependency" of political and societal developments, which emphasises the processual nature of policies and seeks to clarify the conditions for the solidification of solutions to problems once found. It will be an urgent initial task for the research group to test the various existing theoretical models for their usefulness for an East-West comparison of educational and social systems that incorporates the gender dimension, and, where appropriate, to further elaborate them. "Gender" should be understood here as a central, relational "socio-cultural category" of analysis.
The project is conceived of as an international and interdisciplinary scholarly co-operation. The research group brings together researchers from the fields of comparative education, history, political science and sociology. Only in this way can we put the intended multi-perspectival approach of the undertaking into practice.

The project group comes together for one workshop and a symposium:

Interdisciplinary Workshop, Potsdam, March 31-April 1, 2006
Center for Research on Contemporary History, Potsdam:
“Welfare State Regimes, Public Education and Child Care – Theoretical Concepts for a Comparison of East and West”

International and Interdisciplinary Symposium, Cologne, March 1-3, 2007
University of Cologne:
”State – Children – Family: The Politics of Public Education in Europe – East-West Comparisons”

Organizers of the research project:

Prof. Dr. Karen Hagemann (project director)
Technical University of Berlin
Department of History and Art History
and
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
History Department
E-Mail: hagemann@kgw.tu-berlin.de or hagemann@unc.edu

Prof. Dr. Cristina Allemann-Ghionda (co-director)
Professor of Comparative and Intercultural Education and Director of the Department of Education
University of Cologne, Faculty of Arts
E-Mail: cristina.allemann-ghionda@uni-koeln.de

Prof. Dr. Konrad H. Jarausch
Professor of History and Director of the Center for Research on Contemporary History, Potsdam (ZZF)
E-Mail: jarausch@zzf-pdm.de