Abstract

What today is manifestly a crisis in culture (Bildung) is not exclusively the subject matter of any particular discipline nor even of a sociology of culture. The symptoms of the decline of culture, which are recognizable everywhere, even among the highly educated, cannot be explained entirely by the inadequacies of educational systems and teaching methods which have been blamed for generations. However necessary they may be, pedagogical reforms alone are not sufficient. At times they may even intensify the crisis by lowering the intellectual demands made on those who are to be educated and by naively underestimating the impact of extra-pedagogical reality on these people.