ABSTRACT
Pedagogy is a younger discipline among the sciences. Education, in contrast, is as old as humanity. Already since antiquity, people have handed down ideas about education, critiques of bad education, ideal images of good education, educational fantasies and educational plans. A program for a science of education was only developed in the Age of Enlightenment. At that time, national governments became interested in instructing all their citizens in rational thinking, disseminating knowledge and improving morals through "general popular education". For this purpose, compulsory education was introduced, school systems were rapidly expanded, and clergy and teachers were assigned the task of educational reform. This chapter offers an example from 1912 of the linkage of teachers' class interests with illusions about progress toward the future achievement potential of "experimental pedagogy". In the social and educational fields, causal research has taught people not to overvalue the spatio-temporally closest so-called "causes" as influencing factors.
