“Education and the German Enlightenment: the case of Amalia Holst”
Dr Andrew Cooper

Andrew will be introducing delegates to an exciting and under-studied period in the history of education in which pedagogy was formalised as an academic discipline in Germany. The story concerns a fascinating confluence of philosophical ideas and concrete historical events, including the expansion of middle-class society, the development of physiology, Locke and Rousseau’s empiricist accounts of the mind, increasing opportunities for women writers, and the political questions thrown up by the French Revolution. The session will centre on Amalia Holst’s pedagogical writings, which present a daring defence of women’s education that challenged the bedrock of the modern nation state. That Holst’s arguments failed to gain any traction in Germany at the turn of the eighteenth century will raise a series of questions about the rise of modern pedagogy.

Dr Andrew Cooper is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He works on a range of issues in philosophy of science and classical German philosophy, including the early development of biology and the science of living systems. His work has recently focused on debates concerning the role of education in the German Enlightenment, with a particular focus on Amalia Holst, a school teacher from Hamburg who wrote an early defence of women’s education. His translation of Holst’s major work, On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Education (1802), was published by Oxford University Press in 2023, and his latest book, Amalia Holst, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Andrew has presented his work on Holst to a wide audience, including an article in Aeon and an episode of The Essay on BBC Radio 3.

Flyer available here.

Supported by University of Winchester Centre of Research for Educational Action and Theory Exchange (CREATE).