ABSTRACT
While the period between the middle of the century and the foundation of the Empire was comparatively barren as far as the theory and philosophy of education were concerned, the last three decades of the century produced a large number of works on the subject. The fact that the constitution of 1871 established universal male suffrage uniformly throughout Germany helped to make many conscious of the importance of education, especially in the case of those who were fearful of the possible consequences of an articulate proletariate. Education, they felt, could, if properly conceived, have helped to minimise the dangers which they sensed in the situation. There were also many who began to think more deeply about education because behind the economic expansion of the Empire they discerned a growing materialism. Amid the controversies regarding education from the latter part of the nineteenth century it is sometimes difficult to separate the different trends, largely because liberalism and nationalism, as we shall see, were in certain respects closely interwoven in the educational sphere. Protests, for example, against materialism and regimentation in education were not necessarily of exclusively liberal derivation and were frequently bound up with nationalist thought. They were often merely one aspect of the flight from reason, as in the minds of those whose main desire was to remove all obstacles to the evolution of German ‘Volkstum’.
