| Abstract: | The authors describe an empirical study on the curricular contents of university lectures offered to teacher students in the Federal Republic of Germany. Since students as a rule do not have to take compulsory courses it seems to be of great interest which courses are offered to them and how much these courses are related to their profession as teachers. The purpose of the study is to ascertain what knowledge and competency students intending to become secondary school teachers can acquire by attending the courses available to them. In order to fulfil this purpose a system for the classification of lectures has been developed and applied to all lectures and other university courses, from summer 1965 to summer 1972, in educational science, philosophy, psychology, political science and sociology, at the universities of Berlin (Free University and Technical University), Göttingen, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Kiel, Köln and Tübingen. This period covers a range of 15 semesters (7 1/2 years), the maximum time for a teacher student. These universities are a sample of urban and country districts, and at the same time somewhat representative for the politically different governed “Länder” of the Federal Republic of Germany. A general result of the study is that the absolute number of university lectures increased rapidly during the observed time, with the exception of philosophy. The number of lectures on educational science often doubled, in the case of Berlin and Kiel it even tripled. Another important observation shows that the categories with the most entries differed from university to university. This was especially the case in philosophy, but this phenomenon occurred also quite clearly in the field of educational science. As far as trends could be observed, a slight tendency towards the decrease of the historical components of educational science has to be reported, but this tendency is not so significant as the others. Two main conclusions among others have to be drawn from the results of the study: First, the current university education for teacher students depends mainly on local and situational factors, e.g. it is the professor's decision on which topics he wants to lecture, second, the university education for teacher students can not be regarded to be adequate to the problems they have to face after leaving university. This means that the curricular norms and values of the university education will, at least in some cases, remain unsatisfactory for these students. |
