Abitur as an Administrative Act

The post-doctoral (habilitation) project "Abitur as an administrative act - rituals and routines of the German Abitur examination" investigates how the Abitur was organized administratively in the 20th century, what role the Abitur examination played in the German as a school subject and wether and how this changed.

Project Description

The Abitur as a "maturity examination" is linked to an administrative act which legally documents the "maturity" of the individual pupils. For this purpose, text documents about the actors (pupils, teachers and other participants) were compiled in a certain way in the Abitur examination files for each graduation class.
The 'Abiturient/-innen' (i.e. high school grauates) are to be recognized as mature with the 'Abitur', whereby 'to be mature' is defined as the result of the school education process.

How is 'maturity' documented in school records? To what extent is this administrative act routine and ritualized? And what role does the Abitur examination play in demonstrating and evaluating 'maturity'? In the habilitation project, among other things, the corpus of sources created within the framework of the project “Abitur examination practices and respective essays from 1882 to 1972“ will be evaluated in practical-historiographical perspective. Several contrasting Abitur cases from the 20th century are to be examined by the form they were put into writing and compared historically.

Funding

The habilitation project is part of the third-party funded project “Abitur examination practices and respective essays from 1882 to 1972“.

Project Management

Project Details

Project type: Qualification project
Status:
Current project
Duration:
07/2016 – 12/2023
Research field: Historical Practice of School, Instruction and Education