Abstract
"What should a child today know, be able to do, have experienced in the first seven years of life? What should it at least have come into contact with?" (Elschenbroich 2002, p. 20). With her catalogue of a so-called "world knowledge" for seven-year-olds and its rationale drawn from many different experiences, Donata Elschenbroich, a pedagogue at the German Youth Institute, has landed a bestseller that has been on the charts for almost two years like hardly any other pedagogical book and has reached an unimagined circulation. Admittedly, the central term "world knowledge" in the book remains vague - as with most uses, unless one adheres to Karl Popper's three-world theory, according to which "world knowledge" encompasses the world 3, i.e. the "objective products or ideas of the human mind (including all theories about the world and about us" [Popper 1993, p. 75]) that are externalised and documented; earlier one still had the concept of everyday knowledge as opposed to school knowledge at one's disposal; after all, D. Elschenbroich's concept and her argumentation are far more diverse and open than the title with its promise of canon for seven-year-olds suggests, for 'only' an "open educational canon" is offered, which is quite versatile and cannot be achieved only through instruction. But the public reception of the book has already - as far as can be discerned - capitulated on the fact that there is now a conclusive orientation, an exemplary "catalogue of knowledge and experience" for parents and educators to follow in their educational behaviour - however normative or rigid it turns out to be.
