ABSTRACT
The German concept of “Bildung” encompasses a highly complex web of meanings and usages which render it particularly untranslatable.2 Bildung denotes whatever is not covered by the other central – and themselves complex – concepts of pedagogical theory such as socialization, education, and instruction. At the same time, Bildung also aims to constitute the transcendental unity of everything those concepts seek to articulate. The term is used both as the name of the class of all the conceptual elements that make up the philosophy of education and to denote one member of that class. It is the heterogeneity of usages and the heteronomy of the various perspectives that come together in the concept which makes the discourse of Bildung so difficult (Tenorth 1997). The problem with Bildung does not have to do with its use as the conceptual underpinning of various kinds of educational research, but with the systematic and philosophical accounts of Bildung where the concept is loaded up with a tremendous critical potential and has come to stand for all the utopian and critical-emancipatory aspirations of modern pedagogical theory. It is the central critical concept of modern pedagogy, the very concept of pedagogical critique.
