Bildung as deontic scorekeeping? Toward a Social-Pragmatist Approach in Educational Theory

The term Bildung enjoys a “renaissance ” in the last decade – and this not only in German-written texts.1 Precisely speaking, a modifying re-invention of that term is currently taking place. In the course of this re-invention (and re-interpretation) of Bildung its “elitist ” heritage has been to a significant extent cleared out from its semantic core: While the “classic ” concept of Bildung emphasizes an initiation of the individual in a canon of higher culture, which claims a “timeless ” and meta-social validity, the current discursive usages of Bildung display it rather as a designation of a particular and profoundly social, everyday life practice. This is the practice of the simultaneous formation and development of a self on the one hand, and of opening and widening of a realm of worldly meanings for the same self on the other. To un-derstand this simultaneous process as a social one means to address the question, how both self-development and world-disclosing (as well as their interdependence) are situated in the social interactions of the subject. In this paper I will try to find out a possible answer of that question on the ground of the very elaborated and powerful theory of reasoning as a subjectivity-building and world-disclosing social practice, developed by Robert Brandom. In a first step of this attempt I am going t