Summary Basic education, general education and subject-focused lessons This contribution focuses on the not unproblematic tensions between basic education, general education and subject-focused lessons. Demanding subject matter, which offers more than those basic competencies studied in the international PISA study, cannot be justified for all learners with a normative reference to the attainment of general competencies (i.e. learning, social and problem-solving skills). Generality is indeed to be found in the contingency and difference of subject matter. Bildung is defined as the ability to deal with uncertainty. On the basis of a case study of a teacher from Hamburg, it will be demonstrated that this concept can — in pragmatic terms — simply mean the realization of „good“ subject-focused teaching. According to the theory of Bildung, it can be shown that the teache’s work is implicitly based on a didactic with as-if-character, which will be further generalized in this paper. An appropriate framework for such concepts is offered by the Bildungsgangdidaktik, which places the realized learning and educational processes at the center of its theory.