ABSTRACT
Almost a quarter of a century ago, Horst Rumpf argued that the contents of instruction were not being questioned in Germany. What did he mean by this? Let us break his comment down into the following simple questions: What is “content of instruction”? What opportunities for pedagogical action become accessible to teachers when they perceive “instruction content” as more than something prescribed in the Lehrplan or syllabus that is to be transferred to the heads of the students? What can a particular content signify to students who deal with it in their classes? In the years that have passed since Rumpf published his criticism, no answers to these questions have been produced beyond those that were already available in the Didaktik in the early 1970s.
