If the Kurrent penmanship intimates the personalized gesture within an abstracted system of writing and thinking, it also indicates the larger educational structures that attempted to produce similar (even uniform) individuals beholden to certain moral codes and models of development. In the film, Haneke examines educational institutions and methods of child-rearing belonging to a long Western tradition that was thoroughly criticized in post-1968 Germany. In doing so, he makes direct use of the aforementioned work of the critic Katharina Rutschky (1941–2010). In 1977 Rutschky, part of the generation invested in unmasking authoritarian practices in everyday life, published her book Schwarze Pädagogik: Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung (Black Pedagogy: Sources for the Natural History of Bourgeois Education), a compendium of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century texts on “Erziehung,” the difficult-to-translate noun meaning schooling, child-rearing, upbringing, disciplining, formation. Employing the caustic designation “black pedagogy” in her title, Rutschky reveals the pernicious side of Enlightenment pedagogy with her polemically chosen excerpts from various treatises espousing reform. These include works by famed pedagogues Campe, Basedow, and Pestalozzi, psychological studies, serial novels, handbooks, and manuals. Taking her cue from Norbert Elias's magisterial On the Process of Civilization (1939, republished 1969) and Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1960), Rutschky demonstrates how emotional and ideological continuities in Erziehung continue well beyond the “pedagogical century,” the name given the eighteenth century with its Rousseauian inclinations and efforts to make pedagogy a public rather than a private matter. Historical drawings in her six-hundred-page compendium show strange devices to improve posture, architecture for teacher-centered instruction (Frontalunterricht), and climbing equipment to strengthen and discipline young bodies. In Rutschky's view, the discovery of the child within the family unit goes hand in hand with efforts to internalize authority and subjugate children under duplicitous pretenses. She impugns viewing childhood as an incubation period, for it facilitates the concept that teachers need “total access” (Zugriff) to the child. The youngster becomes a “blank space, a tabula rasa, which every pedagogue desires in order to more easily inscribe himself on it.” Such a system propagates itself, churning out more pedagogues who reproduce the institutions that have created them. Child-rearing and disciplining practices (Erziehung) first supplement and then displace education (Bildung), which is interested more in the transmission of knowledge and the full unfolding of an individual's capacities.