Condillac's Rose - Experience as a pedagogical concept between radical sensualism and religious inwardness

In both England and France, during the late 17th and the first half of the 18th century, pedagogical concepts are renewed within the context of empirical science. In analogy to the scientific process of enlightenment, learning, education, and subjectivity are regarded as open, multiple experimental processes. Education is conceived of as a technologically determined procedure which prescribes how learning processes may and should be induced. In France, this pedagogy sharply contrasts with the theology and pedagogics of the religious movement which relies on the god-given entity of the individual. It is only during the late 18th century that a broader discussion of pedagogical empiricism is inititiated in Germany in the wake of philanthropism. There, the technological concept is adopted and redefined: subjectivity is no longer considered an open and multiple concept but, rather, a given totality, an absolute inwardness, in accordance with the Protestant tradition.