Pedagogy

Pedagogy, both the discipline and the word itself, has had a tortured history. It has been used as a synonym for practice and acquired negative connotations that confuse it with pedantry, conferring low status on those associated with it (school teachers and professors of education). In the 1880s, for example, most university professors of pedagogy made a concerted effort to replace the term with education. In the 1960s, however, pedagogy surfaced again as an alternative to education in academic departments that had once openly ridiculed it.But pedagogy's fractured meaning cannot be explained away as a matter of technical jargon or political fashion. To do so conceals the power struggles between scholars and professional teachers that continue to this day. In this unusual and unprecedented volume, Salvatori uses pedagogy as a key term for understanding how American education evolved in the early twentieth century. She traces its contested meaning in a fascinating group of documents - dictionary and encyclopedia definitions, early treatises on pedagogy, professional literature, and debates about "the place" of pedagogy - and offers a critical framework for reading them.The past that these documents uncover, Salvatori hopes, will incite sustained and responsible critical investigation of current institutional, political, and theoretical interests that, by continuing to construct pedagogy as essentially practical, a-theoretical, and anti-intellectual, simultaneously justify its ancillary status to theory within the academy.