Abstract

German educators have long been concerned with the didactics of scientific education. Shortly after the Humboldtian reforms of the early nineteenth century, university science professors realized that they had to rely on teachers in the Gymnasien for well-prepared students. By mid-century, these teachers responded with treatises on the pedagogy of scientific education, treatises whose ideas, when implemented, guaranteed scientifically literate students who would later lead Germany to her first place position in the scientific world by 1900. Now, in the twentieth century, two special conditions have changed the sense in which students could and should be scientifically literate. Logical positivism and its heirs inaugurated rigidly exact methodologies for questioning the foundation and content of science, while technological advances, specifically atomic and nuclear weaponry, raised anew the question of the role of science in modern culture, politics, and society. In recent years German citizens have had a special interest in the latter.