Human Science Pedagogy, Pedagogical Anthropology in School and Didactics Content : A Vision of Education: Grasping Continental European Impulses

• Underpinning all education is an implicit image or ideal of what it is to be human. With its emphasis on “college and career readiness” and on employment in high-demand science, technology, and engineering fields, the language of today’s education appears driven primarily by the ideal of the human as a competitive economic creature (homo economicus). Other important visions of the human would include homo rationalis—the human as a rational being—or homo biologicus—one understood in terms of its neurology and its biological and behavioral evolution. Regardless of their importance, such images of the human are only suggested implicitly in education and in society more broadly. In this presentation, we address this by examining such images explicitly from the perspective of theoretical anthropology—understood as the study (-pology) of the human (anthro-). We begin this paper, however, by outlining the history of this anthropology and by examining how it has been made relevant to education and the study of pedagogy. For example, when seen from this perspective, education itself unavoidably appears as a process of humanization, a way of helping those involved in it to realize their humanity—however it may be defined. In this light, the human can also be seen as a creature above all in need of education. “Man,” as Kant wrote, “is the only creature that must be educated,” but this is only one way of viewing our nature in its relation to education. We argue that these and other visions of what the human is and should be need not only to be made explicit but need to be made a matter of awareness and open deliberation. For ultimately, anthropology shows that we humans are not any one thing; we are able to realize our human potential in the widest variety of ways. In the face of this, the task of education then becomes one of helping the young explore and decide for themselves about who and what they are as humans.Human Science Pedagogy refers to the dominant scholarly approach to education in Germany in the 20th century. It begins with the question, as Friedrich Schleiermacher put it, of what the “older generation actually wants with the younger.” From this, it derives its disciplinary grounding: “the study of pedagogy,” as Wilhelm Dilthey wrote late in the 19th century, “…begin[s] with the description of the educator in his relationship to the student or child”—in other words, of the relationship of representatives of Schleiermacher’s two generations. This relationship, with its focus on the biography and subjectivity of the child, of the student or young person, forms the basis for many of the themes and concerns developed later in Human Science Pedagogy. These range from the notion of educational reality—the place(s) and situations of this relation—to those of pedagogical tact as well as of “personal crises” that inevitably arise in education.Regardless, in the 21st century, Human Science Pedagogy remains ‘a strange case,’ as Jürgen Oelkers has noted: In the Anglophone world, where Gert Biesta has compellingly encouraged scholars to ‘reconsider education as a Geisteswissenschaft’ (a human science), its main themes and the contributions of its central figures remain unknown. For Germans, particularly in more ‘general’ or philosophical areas of educational scholarship (i.e. Allgemeine Pädagogik), this same pedagogy is recognized only insofar as it is critiqued and rejected. Taking this strange situation as its frame, this paper introduces Human Science Pedagogy and its central themes to English-language readers, providing a cursory overview of its history and principal contributors. At the same time, it suggests the contemporary relevance of its themes and questions to both English- and German-language scholarship. This paper concludes with an appeal to both sides of the Atlantic to new or renewed consideration of this pedagogy as a significant and influential source for educational thinking deserving further scholarly attention.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Didaktik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Didactics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Pedagogical Anthropology

Continental tradition of Educational Sciences

pedagogik med inriktning mot utbildningsvetenskap

Educational Science

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

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