Dr. Wernher von Braun explains the Saturn Launch System to U.S. President John F. Kennedy, November 16, 1963. Copyright: NASA, Kennedy Space Center, GRIN-Image 64P-0145.

Science and education are linked as two of the most powerful disciplining forces of modernity. For over two centuries, they have been the principal means through which the use of reason has been enhanced in all spheres of life. They undergird the entire process of rationalization, a process philosophers such as Hegel, Weber, and Habermas have viewed as intrinsic or essential to the definition of modernity. Yet modernity is not a monolithic concept; locally contingent factors modify its ideal expression as well as its material form. In examining the role of science and education in the modernization of Germany and the United States from the 1890s to the present, our essay combines an essentialist approach with a contingent one. For even as science has played a key role in the evolution of state bureaucracies, educational structures, economic change, technological developments, and even of society and the self in the process of modernization, each of these domains of life have in turn challenged and shaped science in its ideas, institutions, and social practices. The necessity of combining both approaches becomes especially evident when considering, for instance, the transition on both sides of the Atlantic from late-nineteenth century optimism concerning science, rationality, and objectivity (an optimism that often guided policy on social issues) to a skepticism concerning the extreme rationalization of life and the ethical challenges posed by technical and scientific advances in the second half of the century.

The original conception of the "Humboldtian" university in Germany, with its emphasis upon Wissenschaft, Bildung, and Lehr- and Lernfreiheit reached its limits at the end of the nineteenth century, when the status of universities was circumscribed by the growth of Technische Hochschulen. In the United States, by contrast, the transition from small sectarian colleges to research universities was just beginning, in an environment where the utility of scientific knowledge for both economic and social change was highly valued. At the same time, science began to acquire an institutional presence outside of the educational system, state bureaucracies, and traditional academies of science - in industrial laboratories, new regulatory state institutions (the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Germany and the National Bureau of Standards in the United States), and in the harbingers of "big science," such as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft.

	Professor James B. Maas lecturing to 1600 Cornell University psychology students at a concert hall, fall 2000. Photo by Kevin Rivoli. Source: Published in the New York Times, November 17, 2000, page B 1.

These structural changes produced cracks in the system. Challenges to modernity—in whatever guise it was understood—in Germany and the United States were aimed squarely at both science and education and the world they created. In Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche criticized the German emphasis on the disciplines in higher education, while Max Weber condemned the entire process of scientific rationalization as destructive of fundamental human values. Meanwhile, in America, Henry Adams and others questioned the impact of technological change on daily life, even as educators sought to emulate the German system of education with its research emphasis.

During World War I, the relationship between science, the state, the military and industry was transformed to meet wartime exigencies in both countries. The utilization of science for the war enhanced its social prestige, but also posed serious ethical challenges. In the 1920s, the contrasts between the German and American scientific communities became sharper; while German scientists were isolated after the war, American scientists continued to emancipate themselves from European role-models. German science drew upon increasingly diminished resources while large private foundations supported science in the United States. Finally, whereas in the United States scientific and rational ways of thinking were widely met with social approval during the 1920s, in Germany (despite a decade of brilliant scientific achievements) there was a reconsideration of the "rational" and, in some quarters, a pronounced turn toward the "irrational." There was a similar contrast in institutional developments. American colleges and universities began to adopt a research model, whereas in Germany the financial exigencies of the Weimar Republic barely kept higher education alive.

The paths of modernity in both nations diverged in the 1930s, and the role of science and technology in modernity was radically altered. The Third Reich marked the beginning of a massive ideological distortion of science in Germany, the forced exile of scientists, and the reciprocal transformation of the scientific communities on both sides of the Atlantic as a result of the migration of German scientists. Historians traditionally attribute the massive reorientation of American higher education in this period to the arrival of German scientists. In the United States, President Roosevelt's "brain trust" of leading social scientists symbolized the growing influence of "experts" in politics and society. State use of the social and medical sciences as a means of disciplinary control over the population can be found in both countries. The case of Nazi Germany is more complex. Is it merely the case that the Third Reich displayed the "darker" side of science in modernity, or, given the striking similarities on some issues, can we speak of parallel developments in both nations?

Fritz Haber and Albert Einstein at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für physikalische Chemie und Elektochemie, Berlin-Dahlem, July 1, 1914. Copyright: Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem (Haber, Bild-Nr. 1/VI).

In World War II, science became an instrument of wartime policies in both nations. The militarization of science and technology marked the advent of a new era of "big science," symbolized by rocket research in Germany at Peenemünde, or the Manhattan project to develop an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, Hanover, and Oak Ridge. The nature of scientific and technological research changed on both sides of the Atlantic, and not only in its military applications. Eugenics, for instance, could be found throughout most of the West, resulting in practices that in Germany have been called a "science without moral boundaries." The American dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki also raised ethical questions about the role of science in the modern world. Whereas in an earlier era the rationality associated with scientific knowledge was believed to lead to a moral good - progress, emancipation, and enlightenment - now science and technology seemed to diminish considerably not only the quick association of "progress" with scientific discovery, but also the Enlightenment promise of emancipation through reason. A cornerstone of the definition of modernity was thus crushed.

In the era of the Cold War (1945-89), science and education functioned very differently in the American democracy, the West German social welfare state, and the communist East German regime. In structural terms, the remnants of wartime operations in the United States combined with the Cold War conflict became the foundation of a massive restructuring of education and science during the 1950s and 1960s, which in turn eventually became a model for West German reconstruction in both realms. In terms of education, both countries witnessed the advent of the "mass university," which opened up higher education to new social (and in the case of the United States, also racial) groups but posed serious challenges to the traditional curriculum and teaching methods. Since the 1950s, the educational debate in Germany and America has revolved around the question of the best way to adapt to constantly accelerating social, economic, and political change. One example is the post-Sputnik transformation of science education in the United States and the concomitant development of the space program, especially under President John F. Kennedy. In terms of research, the Cold War fostered research in America for national defense, broadly defined. To that end, science and education became integrated as never before through the National Defense Acts, the National Science Foundation, and other federal structures. In the GDR, the scientific community and the educational system were tied to communist social and economic goals. West German reconstruction took place more slowly than in the America, but did so under what was perhaps greater consideration of the moral dimensions of science and technology as they affected state and society. Examples of this include a constitutional ban on certain types of human research, the decision to confine the nuclear program to peacetime uses, and the public critique of post-war forms of rationality (especially by thinkers of the Frankfurt School). With a range of scientific breakthroughs in biotechnology and medicine in the late 1980s and 1990s, ethical conflicts have become even more pressing in both countries and are the subject of intense public discussion.

The period after 1945 marks the onset of a "postmodern" or "postindustrial" society. The Third Reich and World War II were decisive challenges to the narrative of science, rationality, technology, and progress that had been built up since the Enlightenment. That narrative disappears in different ways on both sides of the Atlantic. In Germany, one finds reflection on the role of science in modernity, indeed on the entire concept of modernity, for example in the anti-nuclear movement or in Habermas's philosophical reflections. In the United States, by contrast, one observes a strong, positive valuation of modernity, and especially the role of science and education. One might consider this embrace of modernity almost too self-assured, for instance in the role of the social sciences in defense initiatives, in modernization theory, and in the use of science and technology to "dominate" the world through development projects.

The response to the legacy of the Third Reich in Germany, on the other hand, led to alternative ways of dealing with science and technology as a part of national identity and national policy (Werner Heisenberg vs. Vannevar Bush). On both sides of the Atlantic there are divergences in how the social sciences are used to define the modern self and modern society, especially through the disciplining process of education. Initially, in West Germany the social sciences took a more conservative turn, while in America the social sciences turned toward the liberal project of understanding the individual's role within society. Yet despite these differences, on both sides of the Atlantic there is agreement that the disciplining forces of both science and education have created templates for the individual which challenge the more traditional notion of the modern self as a critical and independent thinker who exercises reason in the public sphere. In place of the critical and independent individual, science and education raised the specter of social conformity in a world dominated by technological systems.