Pedagogy between the discipline and the dispersion: a look from the history Pablo PINEA

Pedagogy between the discipline and the dispersion: a look from the history Pablo PINEA

A paradox runs the current educational writings: while the adjective "pedagogical" (pedagogical subject, pedagogical discourse, pedagogical proposal, pedagogical device, pedagogical dimension, etc.) is omnipresent, the term "pedagogy" has vanished. That old set of the knowledge seems to have broken out and disappeared, the complete works have been dispersed, the great thinkers of the field have given way to the "technical" and specialists, without to cope with the new status of the intellectual. Recent rales of old pedagogy can be found in the already ageing "Theories of education" , attempts of compendia of the issue not tested in the past twenty years.
Without a doubt, the fragmentations of knowledge, the drop in ratings, the loss of value of the legitimization "scientific" and the epistemological crisis are major causes for this phenomenon. But from these little decreeing the death of pedagogy can make for a more complete understanding of educational phenomena. We believe then valid to attempt an historical approach to the issue, not a search for back to the "lost order" , but as an attempt of compression of the becomings that gave rise to the analysis processes.
It is already a common place hold that the Modernity built a specific form of understanding education, traceable from the first approaches process of Kant to finish approach of Durkheim . Based on this, in this work, we will take a very lax and somewhat practical definition of pedagogy: "set not necessarily coherent, knowledge or closed, or complete organized disciplinary to refer to education in its modern meaning" .
The disciplinary organization - typical form of modernity — implies a certain power to know relationship, a special way of ordering the use and the economy of knowledge in order to produce useful and docile subjects. Perhaps the first definition of pedagogy, understood as we are proposing, come from Comenius : "the art of teaching everything to everyone" . While Descartes founded modern, subject Comenius It was pedagogically. This process was given jointly to the creation of the institutional space where reigned pedagogy: school. The modern company produced a double process: on the one hand he built a special way of understanding education and in turn reduced it to the school. It should be recalled that this phenomenon, identifiable globally adopted peculiarities in each case.
This process of Constitution of the pedagogies is done through specific articulations of elements purely "teaching" with the translations in this key of certain statements that various speeches made available of pedagogy through complex processes of distribution, recontextualization and evaluation (BERNSTEIN, 1994). There are various sources of which the pedagogies can take elements to articulate, and the result - the pedagogy proposed - depends on both what it has taken different forms in which have been articulated. Thus, seek to move away from positions reductionist - e. g. refer to the "positivist pedagogy"- for analysis of pedagogical translation and the various possibilities of articulation. We'll talk then of "pedagogies that took elements of positivism" , and in each case it will be necessary to analyze what it was that took and what other elements articulated it from or not from the same source.
Thus, in each historical moment, it is possible to speak of the presence of different pedagogies that are ordered collectively forming a "field" : the pedagogical field. By adopting such a configuration, different pedagogies struggle inside to dominate it, and enjoy validity and veracity. They should to may build their criteria for completeness, consistency, non-contradiction and impose them on the rest. Those proposals that achieve this objective are converted in the "hegemonic pedagogies" of each historic period, which in turn to the hegemonic pedagogical imaginary of each historical period.
As you will understand, we are proposing to rescue the social perspective for that historic conflict in the educational field. From this point of view, our questions differ from the training on two issues. On the one hand, we want know what pedagogy is the best, but understand how he managed to "convince" It was - regardless of being or not - and, on the other, we intend to analyze social joints such triumph took. Our question does not refer to the truth but verisimilitude of the proposal, and Moreover, its construction and effects.
Whatever their way of determination, across hegemonic pedagogy is a product of various negotiations between the groups involved. It is not the result of abstract, ahistóricos and objective processes, but it originates from, conflict, compromises and alliances of movements and socially identifiable groups. The pedagogical field is a space of struggle where they incorporate and intermingle contradictory trends. It is not maintained as a fact, but that takes particular social forms and incorporates certain interests that are in turn the product of continuous struggles both between groups dominated and dominant to the interior of the same.
The struggles within the educational field by the authority and recognition not due exclusively epistemological or political motivations, but a variable complementarity between the two. Their results have not only demonstrations at the level of ideas, but also in the field of institutional positions. Those who fall outside the field are also unauthorized to participate in the debates. In this way, the feud between different social concepts on education is encrypted in the discussion by the only and correct method. He is not only from academic differences, but these disputes must be located in the processes of social regulation, they must be understood as fights by the Constitution of teaching subjects and the establishment of a special relationship between society and school from complex joints that make different statements.
For example, the 19th century saw a strong debate between pedagogy as a discipline "scientific" and pedagogy "practice" and "memoirist" , that ended with the triumph of the first thanks to the contributions of positivism towards the end of the century. The appearance of specific institutions where these knowledges - as normal schools - file, the consolidation of the different "teaching methods", the annexation of the variables "professional" to the "vocational" in the definitions of teaching they engaged the Constitution of a field of production and movement of pedagogical knowledge that defined their own limits and rules of the game, and within of which faced different groups and fractions.
On the other hand, the evolution of the educational field involved two reductions. Firstly, between the 18th and 19th centuries, it fell to the school field. Secondly, in the 20th century, and especially in the second half, the school was limited to the curriculum. The logic of reducing - and subordination - ran by the string Pedagogía-escuela - curriculum. We can then consider that the imposition of the curriculum organization in the school was an important match in the educational field, and that it can be associated with the triumph of one "technical rationality" modern applied in its form more prepared to the educational problem.

The "pedagogy founding hegemonica"

Founding hegemonic pedagogy of the school systems - i.e. the pedagogical philosophy which was imposed at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th - was structured through the combination and translation of elements from three basic sources: liberalism, positivism and traditional schooll. To these sensed three strands is you were adding others, such as vigorous, welfare, pragmatism, materialism, sensualism, etc. According to the variations of space and time and that were allowing the generation of other pedagogies which contested the hegemomía of the field.
One of the constants of liberal thought is the idea of the Constitution of the free subjects through educational practice as a condition of existence of the market and of citizenship as the exercise of their rights, and a conception of dispersed power and "spread" by individuals, which they concentrated in higher structures (political parties)(, agencies, groups) that they crowd their demands and scramble to its realization. The end of liberal education is the formation of the citizen as subject bearer of rights and obligations.
Liberalism then placed education in a double set of rights and obligations. On the one hand, is an unquestionable right of individuals that society must assure, but in turn is the duty of citizens to society. Both parties (society and citizens) must require and must comply. These considerations lead to the two major contributions from liberalism to educational level: the State teaching and Compulsory school .
Law and educational obligation as indissoluble terms marked in its voltage strategies of governmentality (FOUCAULT, 1975) in game, which also lies at the base of the construction of the liberal State in both administrative and rational State. The expression "such matter is the raison d ' état" is presented as an example of such an operation. The registration of education within the framework of population education became a "problem state". This location in the arena of the State returns to education, under the Liberal influences, a phenomenon possible - and worth - be legislable. Since then, all construction with state logic - either instances below national as those superiors - considered as a priority item of their agenda the issue of regulations, laws, decrees, articles, constitutional, international agreements, covenants, campaigns, etc. relating to education.
On the other hand, liberal thought also provided an understanding of education as an "cursus honorem" allowing "Career open to the talents" (HOBSBAWN, 1984). The educational system was an invaluable way of social advancement and legitimation of inequalities, in a constant tension between equality of opportunity and the meritocracy that ordered their practices.
Finally, liberalism marked the path of construction of the Nations and the feeling of attachment to them in the 19th century. Thus nationality should order all school practices, whether French-style - where the Union was given by the signing of the Social Contract, in which the political subject "citizen" included within himself to the category of "national"- or German-style,-which sought to generate the feeling of collective affiliation through the verification of the existence of certain physical characteristicscultural and historical similar to that it gives the group a certain identity. It should be noted, finally, that the problem of nationalism took off from the liberal matrix circa 1930 and adopted new purple, making him one of the sources of the new pedagogies. We shall return to this point in the next section.
Positivism also paid to founding hegemonic pedagogy with a good number of elements. We believe that the two nodal points of the same are, first, consideration of the school as the institution "natural" dissemination of culture (single) (valid: of the European male bourgeoisie for some, for others, "scientific culture" or the "national culture" for some third parties) as instance of social regulation and, secondly, the construction of an educational method "scientist" that would allow the development and progress of mankind.
Thus established a new criterion of validation within the educational field: the paper–. For back then, all proposed educational should be considered correct, show that it was scientific. In turn, the demonstration of a proposal unscientific was reason enough to be excluded from the discussion. Because of this, for example, the consolidation of the modern pedagogical field excluded their significant elements as "practical experience", the "rote" or Method Lancasteriano .
To carry out this scientistic project conducted a series of cuts. Firstly, pedagogy was reduced to psychology and this in turn to biology, and in some cases was reduced this last to a chemical dilemma as the mielinización or the consumption of phosphorus. In this way, establishing from the beginning who triunfarían in the educational field and who had no hope. This new interpellation characterized the social subjects excluded as the product of a social disease or as expressions of from deficiencies of race, culture or society of origin. Then occurred the following movements: the individual with behavioral problems presents problems of adaptation to the environment and, as such, is a sick body and is located in one lower on the evolutionary scale degree. On the other hand, the individual adapting to the environment (school), was a senior and healthy body. (PUIGGROS, 1990, for the case of Argentina). All the medical discourse and psychometric based on social Darwinism paid these schemes. The only way to avoid the damage caused by the inevitable diseases (physical, psychological or social) was total control, classifications, the correction of the detours and other orthopedic practices.
The second cut is what TEDESCO (1972) has been called the "methodological detail", which presupposed the existence of a scientific method, and by such effective and universally applicable in any condition to achieve the expected results. Considered that the subject biologically determined to learn, exposed to the correct method, learned what was beyond its will or other types of variables.
While positivism presupposes the idea of the construction of knowledge, he felt that this process was finished. For example, William Thomson - Lord Kelvin- thought that all forces and basic elements of nature already had been already discovered, and that the only thing that remained to be done to science was to solve small details ("the sixth place of the decimals"), and in 1875, and when Max Planck began to study at the University of Munich, his professor of physicsJolly, advised not be spent to physics, because in that discipline already was not nothing to discover. (in HOBSBAWN, 1986). Well, the idea of experimentation and research propugnadas as teaching strategies became a mechanical repetition by the students of the scientific steps to reach the end default without the possibility of variation or construction of new knowledges.
Finally, the traditional classroom ordered daily practices, especially since the final and enthralling of the simultaneous gradual method or front triumph over other possibilities. The Organization of space, time and the control of the bodies followed the method of organization by the latter proposed. That organization gave a privileged place to the teacher in the educational process, so that learning (as individual process of incorporation of knowledge by subjects) is cast in education (as process of intentional distribution of knowledge). Situations in which the difference is evident are understood within the metaphor reductionist biologist, as disease of the subjects to educate. In turn, interest intellectual processes of all kinds (read, memorize, reasoning, observing, calculate) headquartered in indóciles bodies to be controlled, lattices and molded.
The laboratory School of the 19th century saw the complaint between mutual and simultaneous methods, the Constitution of the logic of system - against the conglomerates prior - order institutions, the emergence and consolidation of other elements that we have mentioned earlier - as the State teaching, the feminization of the teaching profession or academic-cultural capital, and closed with the triumph and the expansion of the school around the globe. For such, is "it beheaded" teaching traditional to change him weekends "momentous" or metaphysical comenianos, kantianos or herbartianos and placed there to liberalism, nationalism and/or scientism .
The school learning process was exclusively composed by the following triangle:- student passive and empty, reducible to the BCR, and asocial. You must control your body and form his mind. Teaching cast method, reduced to be a "teaching robot". -Finished scientific knowledge and nacionalizadores.

The problem in the interwar period

This founding hegemonic pedagogy began to be heavily eroded in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, lavish period in the emergence of new elements to be articulated by new pedagogies that fought the hegemony of the field. Within these, include spiritualism, the New school and nationalism, and in lesser measure the pragmatism, corporatism, communism, etc.
While the spiritualist positions can be traced since the 19th century - as way to escape to the border posed by scientistic positivism limited reality to the pure sensory reception of matter and considered science as the only correct way to know--in this work in particular we want to analyze what was considered that there were "more beyond of matter" and what other valid ways of knowing were presented in the first decades the 20th century and how this was prosecuted educationally. This approach brings us to rule out the term "antipositivista", because even though we consider that this current has one of its main sources in the critique of positivism,-to the point its historical origin, at least in our country-the answers presented cannot be only understood as positivist but equipped with an own specificity.
Many Argentine intellectuals of the early decades of this century began to be consumed eagerly authors such as Bergson, Ortega y Gasset, Schaller, Croce, Dilthey, and Gentile. The philosophical fields lived a resurrection of metaphysics and other problems - as the axiology - who had been banished by positivism and the return of certain classical thinkers in readings preceded by the prefix "neo": "grew", "neohegelianos", etc. All these factors led to a strong challenge to the approaches positivist, materialist and cientificistas, which were removed from the primacy in the philosophical debate. Probably the greatest influence in the educational field has prevented from Italy, with the schemes of Giovanni Gentile and Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice. In the case of the first continuator of Hegelianism, part of a concept antropólogica of man such as bearer of a spirit that seeks its moral, social and individual self-realisation. This search is for Gentile, the educational process. For that, the formation of the spirit is the ultimate aim of all educational process, is only achieved by the cultivation of the "Humanities". But for Gentile the individual can only reach self-realization through society, whose most developed form is the corporate State.
His pedagogical proposal can be summed up in three points: 1) religion as basis and Coronation of elementary instruction, 2) the teaching vocation and 3) child spontaneity. Understanding of education as spiritual realization leads to Gentile to a denial of the existence of a pedagogical method. There are only, in the educational process, two basic resources: the teacher and the contents "correct", preserved in the litterae humanae. Gentile It raises as starting point of all educational process the identity between learner and educator, and the Education Act as that moment "that every good educator knows" where the spirits of the teacher and the student rise and merge, regardless of any measurement, especially methodical.
This consideration from another central feature of the educational thought of Gentile: the denial of an independent of the content "educational method" . According to this thinker, there is not a unique, abstract and general method which is worth for all disciplines and all teachers, but that method is part of the content and is, ultimately, to communicate with the spirits of the teacher and the student. The reflection of methodological, limiting the issue to a problem of interespirituales relations is thus impossible.
According to these schemes, Gentile as Minister of instruction of fascism, launched in 1923 fascistissima or Riforma Gentile Riforma, , which proposed a curriculum based on the classic knowledge, including as appropriate to achieve the "elevation of the spirits", unique and modified the teacher training Italian from a curriculum psicologista and didactista influenced positivism to a pure classical humanist curriculumthat should give teachers basic philosophical and cultural notions for his performance.
In the case of Lombardo Radice, his spiritualist imprints led to define education as the "activity that every man to conquer the truth and live according to it, and raising other men to the same truth and coherence of life". Education is for Lombardo Radice discovery and continuous creation, imbued with aesthetic and moral values that respond to children's interests. Contrary to Gentile, these schemes led him to be very interested in educational issues, which linked it to the practices of Maria Montessori and sisters Agazzi very in vogue at the time in Italy.
The spiritualist critique of reductionism scientistic reinstated a debate in the educational field: until then, thanks to the positivist imprint, pedagogical statements obtained its "validity" if they were able to demonstrate the paper– of their nominations. The fall of this criterion involved the need to establish - or at least combine it with one - another. One of the tested answers gave rise to a new reductionism, now of philosophical Court. To rescue old philosophical - as the axiology or metaphysics-dimensions, spiritualism subordinated pedagogy to them, so that responses to educational questions disposed of philosophy. For example, began to treat education in both Headquarters philosophical "problems" : the problem of the educability, the problem of values, the methodological problem, etc. Questions about the possibility of education, on the obligation of education or what values exhausted approaches to certain thinkers, and their philosophically correct answers gave validity to their pedagogical statements.
But other alternatives were also tested: for example, some proposals exceeded the reductionism philosophical to establishing the new pedagogies validity was derived from the "adequacy" that the statements were able to perform on the conceptions of childhood that had, as "respect" for their development, specificity, interests, etc. If the conception of children of pedagogical statements corresponded to an interpellation "legitimate" of children, they were considered valid. In this way, the hegemonic pedagogy strongly articulated to the espiritulismo with the New school .
Spiritualism also gave rise to the Constitution of a new pedagogical subject: the person, individual carrier of transcendental values consisting of a spirit that seeks their self-realization. The notion of transcendence -"go beyond" as educational end - in secular or religious, social or individual versions, placed in the pedagogical debate.
The breakdown of the limits imposed by positivism involved the generation of new "educational surfaces", which manifests itself in the opposition between "(integral) education and instruction". While latter had been understood as "training", "education ,intellectual, rational, mental, cerebral" , etc. the new positions sought to expand the boundaries to include new elements: formation of values, education of the body and the soul, etc. Thus, the passage of the "instruction" to "integral education" pointed to the list constituting for spiritualism to learners: body, mind and soul, which meant three targets of the pedagogical action: intellectual training - mind-, physics - the body - and - soul - moral of the students. The functions of education should pass then of the "information of the mind" - the "instruction"-integral education, whose focus was the formation of the spirit of the student. New options - which were not excluded the anti-intellectualism- were presented in this new constellation.
This new production of the student involved the generation of new educational surfaces: the soul and the body, and a new mind. But old ancient pedagogy hegemonic devices seemed not reach these new areas of impact. Thus it was necessary to resort to new strategies, line that was oriented mostly to generate joints with the so-called New school of significant growth in that time.
The movement of the New school - while it builds your genealogy including Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel or Tolstoy- has its foundational moments one hand in 1919 in the U.S. with the Constitution of the "Association of the progressive education" in 1919 and the "League International de la Nueva education" or "League of new education" in 1922 in Europe, which conducted a series of congresses during the decades of the 1920s and 1930sin particular the 1923 in Calais and in 1932 in Nice, which established a statute of thirty points to which different schools who wanted to join the League should adapt.
The first question arising thereon refers to are the limits or is meant by New school. One wonders what unites authors as diverse as Dewey, Montessori, Freinet, Kerstercheiner and Decroly, or