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8. About Pedagogization: From the Perspective of the History of Education
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8 About Pedagogization: From the Perspective of the History of Education* M. Depaepe, F. Herman, M. Surmont, A. Van Gorp & F. Simon Es ist die Überzeugtheit des Rechts zur planenden Manipulierung des ‘ganzen Menschen’ unter dem Aspekt und der Verantwortung der ‘Bildung’ und ‘sozialen Gerechtigkeit’. Das ‘Totalitäre’ darin ist die Pädagogisierung des Menschen und der Gesellschaft, die hier als selbstverständlicher Anspruch vorgetragen wird.1 (Schelsky, 1961, p. 161) For history researchers, it is not a needless luxury to consider from time to time the content and the significance of the basic concepts they use, certainly if they have the ambition to interpret and/or explain history in addition to purely describing it. This self-reflection, compelled by the annually recurring dialogue with educational philosophers (cf. Smeyers & Depaepe, 2006),2 need not necessarily place an emphasis on philosophical abstraction but can just as well start from an examination of the history of one’s own research. Such an approach need not succumb to navel-gazing. Instead, such historical self-reflection possibly points to the creeping (and thereby largely unconscious) shifts in meaning that accompany various fashions (consider the swirling ‘turns’ of recent years), which affect the social scientific vocabulary (historiographic, philosophical, pedagogical, psychological sociological, etc.). * Originally published in: P. SMEYERS & M. DEPAEPE (ed.), Educational Research: The Educationalization of Social Problems (Dordrecht, Springer, 2008) 13-30. 1 “It is the conviction of having the right to plan the manipulation of the ‘whole person’ under the aspect and the responsibility of ‘education’ and ‘social justice’. The ‘totalitarian ’ here lies in the pedagogization of the person and of the society, which here is presented as a self-evident entitlement.” 2 Since the 1990s, Leuven has been home to the framework of the activities of FWOVlaanderen , an international research community dealing with the philosophy and history of the educational sciences. It has laid the foundations not only for this publication but also for the series in which it will be appearing. Part II. About the Educationalization… of the West 178 By rendering such developments explicit, the epistemological wrestling with the stream of experiences we call ‘history’, a process that can be chaotic, may in the future perhaps be somewhat less sloppy. Admittedly, even the most critical concepts that emerged from our own work (which is discussed here) were not always used with methodological care and/or theoretical purity. ❙ ❙ Pedagogization as a Container Concept It is generally felt that the concept of ‘pedagogization’3 appeared at the end of the 1950s and was coined by the sociologist Janpeter Kob while working in Germany (see Höhne, 2002, 2004). He wanted to indicate, from an educational perspective, the trend that had emerged within virtually all societal institutions of a modernizing society. The Western welfare state revealed itself primarily as ‘pedagogical’. This characteristic was related to professional groups’ corporatist hunger for power and has been criticized by Helmut Schelsky (1961) and others. They would have aimed, among other things, for the expansion of pedagogical power because of the better prospects for employment. In contrast to related concepts such as ‘industrialization’ and ‘bureaucratization’, the concept initially had difficulty in securing acceptance. In German pedagogical historiography, it was only granted legitimacy in the 1980s (cf. Giesecke, 1996). By the same token, pedagogization has only recently been accepted as a legitimate term within the Dutch-language arena, where the BelgischNederlandse Vereniging voor de Geschiedenis van Opvoeding en Onderwijs (BNVGOO: The Belgian-Dutch Society for the History of Education) elevated ‘pedagogization’ to the central topic of a congress that took place on 14 and 15 November 1985 in Amsterdam. Judging from the title of the collection of congress texts (Pedagogisering, 1985), the intention was to investigate what this phenomenon had meant for the two countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When using this relatively new but primarily fashionable term, the organizers were (by implication) referring to the increasing attention being given to the educational aspect of many sectors of everyday life and (in relation to this) the increasing significance 3 Originally as Pädagogisierung, of which the English translation is rather problematic. In our former studies we have also used ‘educationalization’ as ‘pedagogization’, and even ’educationahzing’. A search on the Internet showed that ‘pedagogization’ is used more frequently than ‘educationalization’. Therefore, we have chosen this term as the overall concept for this article. [54.173.221.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:21 GMT) 179 About Pedagogization: From the Perspective of the History of Education of professional assistance. Nevertheless...