EDUCATIONAL RIVALRIES 415
critique of social constraints and power relations, with the ultimate goal
of emancipation. They also argued that this approach ignored the legit-
imacy of the constitutional institutions and the rules of the game in a
democratic state governed by the rule of law. In the face of political and
media opposition—and deterred by what had happened in Hesse—Min-
ister President Kühn asked the ministry of culture to revise the guidelines
before the coming elections and to soften the language and the political
tone of its contents.^97 Afterward, the confl ict over civic and political edu-
cation seemed to die down a bit. The “Beutelsberger Consensus,” which
was founded by civic education experts in 1976 and called for a “ban
on strong-arming” as well as paying attention to controversial positions,
seemed to indicate a pragmatic turn in civic education that would also
survive in the less turbulent 1980s.
In the GDR, one of the main goals of educational policy was to increase
the political effi cacy of schooling and education, which concretely meant
the intensifi cation of ideological indoctrination and discipline through
the FDJ (Free German Youth),^98 Communist youth groups, and the Pio-
neer organizations.^99 However, the country’s political leadership had long
since recognized that the reality of East German society no longer coin-
cided with its ideological convictions.^100 For this reason, even after the
Eighth SED Party Congress in 1971, the ideologization of the education
system was pushed forward,^101 culminating, for example, in the introduc-
tion of military instruction in the POS in 1978.^102 The SED demanded the
involvement of not only schools but also universities and colleges in its
ideological indoctrination. Its appeals to this end appeared constantly
in the statements of the Politburo of the SED, in offi cial speeches, and
in the talks delivered at pedagogical congresses. This omnipresent dis-
course, however, should not be interpreted as merely paying lip service
to doctrine, because it was a real expression of a constant paternalist
concern on the part of the SED leadership, which was not able to think
of the country’s youth as an autonomous and specifi c group.^103 The East
German youth was supposed to serve the political project of the founding
generation. On the basis of studies conducted by the Central Institute for
Research on Youth (Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung) in Leipzig and
the working materials of the APW, the Ministry of Education regularly
made note of serious and long-term defi cits in socialist ideological educa-
tion. In particular, it identifi ed a weak level of social commitment among
the youth (especially those in the workers’ milieu^104 ) in the youth orga-
nizations, which it identifi ed as a problem. The extreme politicization of
educational content and the constant expectations that the youth should
be mobilized had an opposite eff ect than what was intended. Above all,
this led to a kind of depoliticization and ideological demobilization, which