Abstract
To what extent should the freedom and rights of private schools be guaranteed and what role should private schools take in the educational system as a whole? These are important questions, which are closely connected to the establishment of the educational system in a nation. Therefore, it is meaningful to study the private school laws in southwest Germany that combined a measure of freedom of private schools with a measure of national control of private schools. This study will help to clarify the nature of the educational system in Germany. The aim of this paper is to clarify the processes by which the private school laws in the southwest region of Germany (State South Baden and Baden-Wtirttemberg) were enacted right after the establishment of Federal Republic ofGermany, and to prove that the regal guarantee of the freedom of private schools and educational recognition, which was newly obtained through enacting the privateschool laws of the l950s, formed, at the same time, one of the bases for the democratization of German publicschools starting in the late 1960s. As regards the German private schools, we have many theses on the educational character of each private schoolor on famous founders of private schools, such as Hermann Lietz and Rudolf Steiner, among others. On the other hand, we rarely note an interest in the relationship between these noteworthy areas of education in private schools and the private school laws. We should, however, note that the regal guarantee of the freedom of private schools, under which the current number of the Steiner Schools (Freie Waldorfschule) has increased up to about 170 schools in Germany, has been acquired through conflicts between proponents of freedom in education andthe traditional system of strong state control over schools. The first legislative attempt to guarantee the freedom of private schools was the South Baden private school law of 1950. The Baden-Wurttemberg private school law of 1956 followed this law. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the theoretical readers of democratic reform of German publicschools in the late 1960s, especially Georg Picht (1913-1982) and Hellmut Becker (1913-1993), had a closeconnection with the enactment of these southwest Germanprivate school laws of the 1950s. However, in previousstudies on the history of German education thesenoteworthy facts have been ignored.This paper, based upon the above-mentioned points, attempts to analyze the following three points; what position the private schools been given in the traditional education system in Germany and in the traditionaltheories of educational law, how and in what educational context the southwest German private school laws of the 1950s were enacted, and what meaning, in the historical development of German education, the enactment of the southwest German private school laws of the l950s had.
