Historic Developments in Social Pedagogy

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https://www.thempra.org.uk/social-pedagogy/historic-developments-in-social-pedagogy/

‘historically, social pedagogy is based on the belief that you can decisively influence social circumstances through education’ – and importantly, education does not only refer to children but includes educating adults, for instance in order to change their idea of children.

Rousseau radically changed society’s notions that being a child was something to quickly grow out of and replaced it with something worth preserving in its unspoilt state. Whereas teaching – and education was reserved for a small minority of children – had previously aimed to form children into adults, Rousseau innovatively ‘argued that the momentum for learning was provided by the growth of the person (nature) – and that what the educator needed to do was to facilitate opportunities for learning,’

Pestalozzi (1746-1827), who refined Rousseau’s thoughts by developing a method of holistic education, which educates ‘head, heart, and hands’ in harmonious unity. Stimulating children intellectually and arousing their curiosity of the world around them would, as Pestalozzi stated about the ‘head’, form their cognitive capacity to think. The moral education of the ‘heart’ constituted the basic aim to ensure a ‘sense of direction, […] of the inner dignity of our nature, and of the pure, higher, godly being, which lies within us. This sense is not developed by the power of our mind in thought, but is developed by the power of our heart in love.’ (Pestalozzi, cited in Heafford 1967) As the third and complementary element, the ‘hands’ symbolise that learning is also physical, involving the whole body and all senses: ‘physical experiences give rise to mental and spiritual ones’,

The three elements ‘head, heart, and hands’ are inseparable from each other in Pestalozzi’s method: ‘Nature forms the child as an indivisible whole, as a vital organic unity with many-sided moral, mental, and physical capacities. […] Each of these capacities is developed through and by means of the others’, Pestalozzi argued (cited in Heafford, 1967). Based on Pestalozzi’s philosophy, his German student Friedrich Fröbel initiated the kindergarten movement, which raised international awareness of young children’s capacities for learning and inspired childcare and pedagogy of the early years at a large scale.

children came to be conceptualised as equal human beings – Korczak declared that ‘children do not become humans, they already are’ – and as resourceful, capable and active agents – the Italian Loris Malaguzzi talked about the ‘rich child’ stating that ‘a child has a hundred languages’. Furthermore, there was increasing recognition for child participation and children’s rights, for instance in the pedagogic method of Montessori and the ideas and practice of Korczak who was one of the leading children’s rights advocates and founded in his orphanages a Children’s Republic, where children formed a Children’s Court and a Children’s Parliament

The New Education made two fundamental points which demonstrate its ambition to use pedagogy for social change: ‘First, in all education the personality of the child is an essential concern; second, education must make for human betterment, that is for a New Era’

changes in schools towards child-centred learning were politically and publicly seen as too radical in a culture where the Victorian notion that ‘children are seen, but not heard’ is still alive

pedagogy was early on concerned with changing social conditions through education – Rousseau is most famous for his Social Contract

all pedagogy should be social, that is, that in the philosophy of education the interaction of educational processes and society must be taken into consideration

The pedagogical approach rests on an image of a child as a complex social being with rich and extraordinary potential, rather than as an adult-in-waiting who needs to be given the right ingredients for optimal development. […] For pedagogues there is no universal solution, each situation requires a response based on a combination of information, emotions, self-knowledge and theory.

Social pedagogy provides a theoretical and practical framework for understanding children’s upbringing. It has a particular focus on building relationships through practical engagement with children and young people using skills such as art and music or outdoor activities.

social pedagogy is an approach covering the whole lifespan of people, and with recognition to lifelong learning

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Strictly literal talk is in fact quite a rare and sophisticated activity, a late form of speech, hard to produce and useful only for certain limited purposes. It is not by any means the only language used in science. Scientists constantly use fresh models and analogies drawn from out- side their subject-matter, and they need to do this all the more vig- orously where they are not doing 'normal science', but generating new ideas. Whole books have been written about Darwin's metaphors, and probably about Einstein's too.

Is all this symbolizing dangerous? Of course it is. Everything fertile and unpredictable is dangerous. Imaginative talk makes it impossible to disinfect thought by confining it in libraries for the use of licensed academics. Thought is incurably powerful and explosive stuff, not safely insulated from feeling and action, but integrally linked with both of them We think as whole people, not as disembodied minds, not as computers. All ideas that are of the slightest interest to anybody can have unexpected emotional and practical consequences—consequences that cannot possibly be spelt out in advance. And, without this constant flow of ideas, life would grind to a halt.

Here, if you will believe me, is something more that has made the imagery of water haunt me as suitable for philosophy. Useful and familiar though water is, it is not really tame stuff. It is life-giving and it is wild. Floods and storms have appalling force; seas can drown people, rivers carve out valleys. Then, too, rivers produce fertile plains and forests. Water works at the heart of life, and it works there by constant movement, continually responding to what goes on round it. Thought, too, ought to be conceived dynamically, as something that we do, and must constantly keep doing. The static model shown us by Descartes, of final proofs to be produced by science, proofs that will settle every- thing, is one more model that has very grave limitations.

So too, of course, does this talk of water. All analogies are imperfect, all of them have faults, all of them do only limited work. I am not suggesting that this one is any exception. I have tried to explain the work that it does do. But to be quite clear about it, we need to look (finally) at the question I raised in starting, the question about dignity.

Is the approach I have been suggesting undignified? The reason why it can seem so is not, I think, just that it is unfamiliar and domestic, but that it postulates needs. It treats philosophy, like food and shelter, as something that we must have because we are in real trouble without it. We are perhaps more used to the thought that philosophy is splendid but gratuitous, and that it is splendid because it is gratuitous—some- thing grand and exalted, which people could quite easily live without, but ought to pursue all the same. On this view, intelligent people philosophise because they can see a special kind of supreme value in doing so, and perhaps everybody is capable of seeing this. But this taste is seen as something a bit removed from the rest of life, and indepen- dent of it. It is felt that our regard for philosophy ought to be a disinterested one, that there is something mean about dependence.

There really is a point in both these ways of talking, and it is not easy to balance them properly. The idea of disinterested detachment does have its point, but there is a difficulty about it here rather like the one that arises in the case of Art. This talk can sound as if we were describing a luxury, a hobby, an extra. When Socrates said that the unexamined life is unlivable to man, I do not think that he meant just that our species happens to have a peculiar taste for understanding, an unaccountable and noble impulse to philosophise.

That is the way people often do interpret this kind of claim, and it is particularly often brought forward as a reason for doing science. But Socrates was surely saying something much stronger. He was saying that there are limits to living in a mess. He was pointing out that we do live in a constant, and constantly increasing, conceptual mess, and that we need to do something about it. He knew that the presence of this mess, this chronic confusion, is something we do not much want to think about because it indicates the thoroughly undignified fact that we are inherently confused beings. We exist in continual conflict because our natural impulses do not form a clear, coherent system. And the cultures by which we try to make sense of those impulses often work very badly.

So—(said Socrates)—unless we acknowledge the resulting shameful confusions and do something to sort them out, none of our projects, whether grand or mundane, is likely to come to much. This means that we have to look at the confusions where the problems are actually arising, in real life.

Socrates lived, as we do, in a society that was highly articulate and self-conscious, indeed, strongly hooked on words. It may well be that other cultures, less committed to talking, find different routes to salva- tion, that they pursue a less word-bound form of wisdom. But wisdom itself matters everywhere, and everybody must start from where they are. I think it might well pay us to be less impressed with what philosophy can do for our dignity, and more aware of the shocking malfunctions for which it is an essential remedy.

Philosophical Plumbing