Pedagogy, Culture & Society

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The pedagogic paradox (or why no didactics in

England?)

David Hamilton

To cite this article: David Hamilton (1999) The pedagogic paradox (or why no didactics in
England?), Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 7:1, 135-152, DOI: 10.1080/14681369900200048

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 WHY NO DIDACTICS IN ENGLAND?
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1999

The Pedagogic Paradox

(or Why No Didactics in England?)

DAVID HAMILTON
Ume University, Sweden

ABSTRACT This article has been written for two purposes. First, it explores a
paradox: that recent Anglo-American usage of pedagogy mirrors the
mainland European use of didactic. Secondly, it is a comment on the current
status of curriculum studies. In particular, it relates curriculum analysis to
the fields of didactic and pedagogic analysis.

The manifold European tradition of didactics is the subject of a review

recently prepared by Bjrg Gundem of the University of Oslo. It was
written for an Anglo-Saxon audience, and is one of the fruits of a
trans-Atlantic dialogue initiated in 1992 (Gundem, 1998, p. 5). I have
chosen to cite Gundems review on this occasion because it deserves the
widest circulation. Yet, I am also very aware that the cover title of
Gundems review Understanding European Didactics: an overview will
fail to attract Anglo-American readers. Why? Because didactics has a
negative valuation in the Anglo-American mind. It denotes formalist educa-
tional practices that combine dogma with dullness (Oxford English Dic-
tionary). It conjures up the unwelcome European ghosts of an unattractive
educational past.
By contrast, pedagogics is not an alien notion to Anglo-American
educationalists. It re-entered the Anglo-American educational lexicon after
1970, having lain dormant since the First World War (cf. Cruikshank, 1998).
The 1970s revival, however, was not a restatement of earlier assumptions.
Rather, fresh meanings arose that, paradoxically, have hindered
transatlantic dialogue. The European discourse of didactics is, I suggest,
very close to the Anglo-American discourse of pedagogics. Only their
language divides them.
This article is devoted to the pedagogic paradox. It not only unravels
and clarifies the transformations and tensions outlined above, it also links

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DAVID HAMILTON

them to the field of curriculum studies and, not least, to the title change of
this journal from Curriculum Studies to Pedagogy, Culture and Society.
A major reason for the change of title is that Anglo-American concep-
tions of curriculum have become both limited and limiting. Since
Curriculum Studies was founded in 1993, curriculum theorising has
atrophied. It has lost touch with the deeper questions that, for centuries,
have animated pedagogy and didactics. It has been reduced to questions
about instructional content and classroom delivery. The sense that a cur-
riculum is a vision of the future and that, in turn, curriculum questions
relate to human formation has been marginalised. The short-termism of
What should they know? has replaced the strategic curriculum question
What should they become? (cf. Hamilton & Gudmundsdottir, 1994).
In both its classical and Enlightenment senses, pedagogy denoted the
process of upbringing and the influences that might shape this human
activity. It is no accident, therefore, that the philosopher Immanuel Kant
opened his lectures on education, ber Pdagogik (1960, originally
published in 1803), with:
Man is the only being who needs education. For by education we must
understand nurture (the tending and feeding of the child), discipline
(Zucht), and teaching, together with culture. According to this, man is
in succession infant (requiring nursing), child (requiring discipline),
and scholar (requiring teaching). (p. 1)
Furthermore, the English translator (probably Annette Churton) adds the
footnote:
Culture (Bildung) is used here in the sense of moral training. (p. 1)
Curriculum Studies was founded to encourage reflection on and reaction
to these Enlightenment assumptions, categories and processes. This
article, then, re-affirms the founding intentions of Curriculum Studies.

Why No Pedagogy in England?

The sub-title of this paper is a response to a provocative question posed
by Brian Simon in 1981: Why no pedagogy in England? At that time, Simon
defined pedagogy as the science of teaching, using the Oxford English
Dictionary as his source. This notion of pedagogy as a science often
derived from Herbart circulated in Anglo-American educational
discussions towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, Simon
argued, they were superfluous to English understandings of education and
schooling. They extended beyond the amateurish and highly pragmatic
outlook used in the recruitment, training and accreditation of English
schoolteachers (p. 125).
British policy-makers or schoolmen attributed little value to
notions of mental growth, understanding, self-realisation and social
change. Instead, the political goals of nineteenth century English schooling
were more restricted and more segmented. Social classes were to be

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 WHY NO DIDACTICS IN ENGLAND?

educated for the positions reserved for them in the pre-ordained and
immoveable order of things:
Each system, largely self-contained, developed its own specific
educational approach, each within its narrowly defined field, and each
appropriate to its specific social function. In these circumstances the
conditions did not, and could not, exist for the development of an
all-embracing, universalised, scientific theory of education relating to
the practice of teaching. (p. 133)
Overall, Simons answer to the question Why no pedagogy in England?
was that, for over 100 years, nineteenth and twentieth century ideologies
of human difference, predetermined mental capacity and social
containment precluded the creation and dissemination of a developmental
science of teaching. The vision of Alexander Bains, Education as a Science
(1879) and/or Herbarts The Science of Education (English version, 1892)
remained marginal. They only captured partial support that did not, and
could not persist in the circumstances that developed following World
War 1 (Simon, 1981, p. 132; see also Smith & Hamilton, 1980, passim).
Simons argument about the structure, function and conservatism of
nineteenth century English schooling was not, however, the main thesis of
Why no pedagogy in England?. It merely served as a literary device, a
prologue to Simons main claim: that the 1980s offered a fresh opportunity
for the renewal of scientific approaches to the practise of teaching. In
short, a revitalised pedagogy had again become conceivable (p. 137).
Thereafter, Simons paper turned to a discussion of principles drawn
from Vygotski, Luria and Bruner that might underpin such a science of
teaching. Moreover, Simon returned to this topic on at least two further
occasions (Simon, 1993, 1994).
Simons intervention was, indeed, well timed. It is remembered, for
example, in Defining Pedagogy (Murphy, 1996), as one of the founding
papers in the re-emergence of pedagogy in England. In short, it was a
ground-clearing exercise. By highlighting the concept of pedagogy, it both
refocused and problematised the study of teaching and learning
alongside the creation of a national curriculum for England and Wales
(introduced 1988). Despite Simons main thesis, however, his historical
preamble also begs a parallel question: Why no didactics in England?.
As suggested, notions of pedagogy and didactics circulated widely in
the nineteenth century. They seem to have had an overlapping and inter-
secting history. For instance, the 10-volume Oxford English Dictionary,
produced in the 1970s, includes the art or science of teaching among its
definitions for pedagogy, and the near identical science or art of teaching
for didactics. Furthermore, the OED also illustrates nineteenth century
usage of didactics in Britain with a quotation from J. G. Fitchs Lectures on
Teaching, published in the 1880s: The art of teaching, or didactics as we
may for convenience call it.
Such affinities between pedagogics and didactics the main concern
of this paper remain in the educational literature. Note, for instance, the

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DAVID HAMILTON

equivalence of the following definitions: Simon gives pedagogy as a

science of teaching embodying both curriculum and methodology (1981,
p. 125); and Gundem gives didactics as a science and theory about
teaching and learning in all circumstances and in all forms (Gundem, 1998,
p. 6).

Education and Schooling

The differentiation of pedagogics from didactics can be traced in the
historical record. Within the realm of available evidence from classical
Greece, pedagogues were responsible for the upbringing of pre-pubescent
males, while the education of older children was allocated to teachers with
different responsibilities and titles (e.g. grammaticus, rhetor; see, for
instance, Kennell, 1995; Atherton, 1998, pp. 222229). Furthermore, this
age-, stage- and gender-related differentiation could also denote different
conceptions of upbringing. While pedagogics related to the induction,
framing, taming or positioning of male children within an initial set of
cultural practices, other educational practices took children who had
already been framed, and relocated them in new positions. The work of
the didaskalos (teacher), for example, focused on pre-adults who were
instructed ... in activities shared with adult males in the elite (Atherton,
1998, p. 229).
As far as this article is concerned, however, the relationship between
pedagogy and didactics began to take a more elaborated form in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their new form arose in a new set of
circumstances the appearance of three new entries in the educational
lexicon syllabus, curriculum and method.
Originally circulating in Latin, these five terms (pedagogy, syllabus,
curriculum, didactics and method) provided the conceptual infra-struc-
ture of modern European schooling. At root, this formalisation arose
because the literature of education took an instructional turn (see
McClintock, 1972). That is, it began to focus on teaching rather than
learning.
Five different processes combined to create the instructional turn.
First, a new literature about instruction directed at schoolteachers
began to diverge from a longstanding literature about upbringing (i.e. for
parents, nurses, governors and tutors). Secondly, the world of existing
knowledge began to be mapped, giving rise to the notion of a syllabus
(which defined the content of instruction). Thirdly, instruction was
organised in terms of journeys across the map of knowledge, giving rise to
the notion of curriculum (the course of modern schooling). Fourthly,
knowledge was organised around a set of upbringing or presentation prin-
ciples giving rise to overlapping notions of pedagogics and didactics (the
organisation of upbringing and instruction). Finally, these assumptions
about the content, course and organisation of schooling were expressed in
the notion of method (the delivery of instruction).

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 WHY NO DIDACTICS IN ENGLAND?

The convergence of instruction and schooling began in the twelfth

and thirteenth centuries. Scholars throughout Europe brought together
surviving records of ancient learning. In the process, they created a canon
that gradually became recognised, accessible and accepted throughout
western Christendom. Indeed, the size of this body of knowledge is
indicated in Southerns claim that all the basic texts on all subjects
capable of exact and systematic study would have amounted to little
more than three or four hundred volumes of moderate size (1997, p. 9).
These medieval activities of clarification, consolidation and
distribution had at least three downstream consequences. First, the
selected sources provided the basis for a new orthodoxy. Secondly,
masters of the schools where consolidation had been carried out (e.g.
Bologna, Paris and the Papal curia in Rome) became arbiters of orthodo-
xy. They were able to define doctrines and to foster their dissemination
and acceptance through associated sermons, manuals for teachers and
confessors, and handbooks of general interest (p. 7).
The third, long-term consequence of medieval educational reform
was that the original 300400 sources became fragmented by the
elaboration of minutiae and/or the piling up of mountains of accumu-
lated knowledge. In turn, Southern suggests, such writings lost their
instructional power: they became, that is, increasingly irrelevant as a
directing influence on organised life (p. 2).

Didactics and Curriculum

Modern didactics, like modern curricula, emerged from within the
framework described by Southern. Both arose, I suggest, from a crucial
distinction: the separation of the activity of teaching from the activity of
defining that which is taught (the Latin word doctrina can embrace both
meanings). Before the sixteenth century, the social practices of teaching
and the knowledge transmitted through teaching were synonymous.
Formalised medieval teaching, therefore, was merely the faithful
representation, organisation and transmission of accumulated and
inherited teachings (or doctrine). Moreover, as Southern suggests, such
teaching was a mountainous task.
Following Southern, Grafton & Jardine report the same circu-
mstances. By the early sixteenth century, they claim that the teaching of
doctrine had become problematic. A common complaint of that time,
they suggest, was that teaching is indigestible, i.e. that only those with
access to the exceptional teacher, or those exceptionally well-prepared
themselves, stand to gain from current humanistic teaching practices
(Grafton & Jardine, 1986, p. 124). Such dissatisfaction led to a
reassessment of medieval education. For example, indigestible grammars
gradually fell out of favour in an Italian curriculum revolution that,
between 1400 and 1450, supplanted Scholasticism with the Studia human-
itas (Grendler, 1989, pp. 140141 and 117 ff.) Proponents of the new
teaching regarded the old practices as a wrongheaded scholastic

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DAVID HAMILTON

enterprise. Their goals were less ambitious. The early Italian humanists
learned grammar not to deepen their philosophical understanding but,
rather, to read the classics and to become eloquent. Nothing more
(Grendler, 1989, pp. 165166).
The humanists who undertook this revision (e.g. Lorenzo Valla
(140757) and Rudolph Agricola (144485), see, for instance, Mack, 1993)
are remembered because they undertook a major reworking of inherited
sources. The works of Cicero and Quintilian, for instance, received par-
ticular attention not only because they displayed classical elegance, but
because their view of oratory also offered a framework for the trans-
formation of learning. Insofar as teaching could be deemed a form of per-
suasion (as well as a mode of presentation), Renaissance teaching
responded favourably to the literature of rhetoric, which included works
by Cicero and Quintilian.
By the sixteenth century, humanist grammar had broken away from
the commentaries and formalism of medieval practice. It became identified
with the teaching of elegant Latin. A new die was cast. The scholasticism
of the Middle Ages was replaced by a new formalism the instructional
turn. As Grendler notes:
After 1500 no major or middle-ranking Italian humanist published a
grammar text. Instead, primary and secondary school teachers and
persons whose careers are unknown to us wrote manuals that
exhibited little originality. They revised, amplified, and embroidered
previous works, because the Renaissance grammatical tradition was
set. Just as medieval grammarians developed a curriculum based on
the auctores [authorities], so the Renaissance had its pedagogical
grammatical tradition, and it permitted little deviation. (Grendler, 1989,
p. 194)
Accordingly, Renaissance reform is historically memorable for its atten-
tion to the reorganisation or restructuring of teaching and learning. It
is surely true, assert Grafton & Jardine, that until humanists had devised
a curriculum and an order or method for progressing through its
bewilderingly rich resources, humanism was bound to remain the
preserve of a small number of dedicated (and leisured) specialists
(p. 124).
Like Grendler, Grafton & Jardine report a shift in intellectual focus
from the 1510s onwards (p. 124). The ideal end-product of a classical
education (an orator, perfectly equipped for political life) was replaced by
a new emphasis on classroom aids (textbooks, manuals and teaching
drills) which would compartmentalise the bonae litterae [the received clas-
sical sources] and reduce them to a system (p. 124). By such means,
Renaissance humanist instruction became formalised and
institutionalised. The ideals of early humanism were replaced by an
institutionalised curriculum cluster (i.e. the humanities). In turn,
humanist teaching and its teachings became available to a much wider

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 WHY NO DIDACTICS IN ENGLAND?

section of society (cf. the sixteenth century educational revolution

explored by Stone, 1965, chapter 12; and by Joan Simon, 1966).
Sixteenth century reworking of the key rituals, assumptions and
methods of earlier humanists, revolutionised secondary schools and arts
faculties in Renaissance Europe (Grafton & Jardine, 1986, p. xi). A key
process in this revolution was the partition of the medieval unity of teach-
ings and teaching. Two separate realms of practice emerged. First, as
noted, bodies of doctrine (i.e. teachings) were reconstituted through the
identification, mapping and representation of bodies of knowledge (i.e.
curricula); and, in parallel, teaching was reconstituted through the identi-
fication of procedures for the efficient transmission or inculcation of
received curriculum knowledge (i.e. didactics or instruction).
This differentiation seems to have been under consideration by the
end of the sixteenth century. Ann Blair, for instance, notes that the Renais-
sance humanist, Jean Bodin (1529/3096), called for a clear division of
labor between disciplines. In his eyes, it would be wrong, she suggests,
to discuss the order of presentation of a discipline ... alongside the
content of the discipline (Blair, 1997, p. 42).

Instruction and Method

If curriculum mapping was inspired by the efforts of Renaissance explorers
and cartographers (e.g. Christopher Columbus, 14511506; Gerhardus
Mercator, 151294); the reorganisation of teaching, as suggested, was
inspired by innovations in oratory or rhetoric. Renaissance lawyers and
Reformation preachers John Calvin was both of these may have served
as mediators. In short, newly-devised curricula were to be delivered along
the same lines as courtroom speeches and ecclesiastical sermons.
In an important sense, then, teaching became a form of argumenta-
tion. Humanists took the logic developed by late medieval scholastics and
transposed it into a rhetorical framework. In effect, the new argumentation
was less about the minutiae of (scholastic) truth and more about the
nuances of (humanist) persuasion. Through such attention to both rhet-
oric and logic, lawyers, preachers and teachers fashioned their own
theories of courtroom advocacy, pulpit preaching, and schoolroom or
instructional didactics.
However, what about method? This was the final twist to the in-
structional turn. In its classical Greek sense, a method was merely a set of
procedures. By the sixteenth century, however, method had acquired a
new and revolutionary meaning. To methodise a practice was to increase
its efficiency. It was rethought, that is, in terms of short cuts.
Teacher questioning provides a clear and perhaps persuasive
example. Questioning has figured in the literature of educational practice
since Plato popularised the exhaustive procedures of Socrates
(469399BC). Nevertheless, teacher questioning also underwent a major
yet relatively unresearched reappraisal towards the middle of the six-
teenth century. Inherited questioning practices whether Socratic

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DAVID HAMILTON

dialogues or medieval disputations were refurbished. A new and efficient

form of teacher questioning arose a short cut to doctrinal delivery that is
still remembered as catechesis (see, for instance, Green, 1996).
Thus, the modern conception of didactics had its origins in the
methodisation of doctrinal delivery. Wolfgang Ratke (15711635) reacted
against earlier corrupt, dreary, irksome, false and inaccurate practices
(Turnbull, 1993, p. 389). He fostered the convergence of Greek and Latin
notions of telling into a Latin neologism didactica which, Martial
reports, had its earliest use in 1613 (Martial, 1985, p. 22).
Sponsored by various German patrons interested in the advancement
of schooling, Ratke and coworkers marketed didactics as the art of teach-
ing (die Lehrart). As an art ars is the Latin equivalent of the Greek word
techne didactics was represented as an instrument or method which, in
Ratkes case, was a catalogue of prescriptions or maxims (e.g. instruction
should start with religion ... Everything should proceed according to the
method of nature ... Only one thing at a time ... All things in harmony (see
Turnbull, 1993, p. 390).
Ratkes didactics projected an active view of instruction (or telling)
and, as a result, a passive view of learning: All work falls to the teacher,
he concluded, leaving young learners to sit still, listen and be silent
(quoted, for instance, in Michel, 1978, p. 65; see also Comenius, 1953,
p. 107; Turnbull, 1993, p. 391).[1] Such notions are the origin of the aura of
dogma and dullness that, as suggested, still suffuse English-language
understandings of didactics.

Instructional Machines, Large and Small

Reformation innovators are remembered because they were consummate
formalisers, methodisers and populariser. Their diverse efforts found
expression in a European constellation of catechisms, textbooks and
manuals that encompassed, for instance, the Scottish Book of Discipline
(1561), the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum (1599) and Johann Amos Comeniuss The
Great Didactic (1632). The net result of this formalisation was that curricu-
lum began to denote a fixed body of teachings (doctrine) that could be
delivered using an instructional technology (didactics) valid for all
learners.
Preacher/teachers took such a technology or expertise (another
translation of techne, see Atherton, 1998, p. 223) from church community
to church community (Strasburg, Geneva, Basel). One image associated
with this movement is the Nuremburg Funnel (die Nrnburg Trichter).
This benign image is attributed to a Nuremburg poet, George Philipp Hars-
drfer (160758), who also edited an educational work on reading, writing
and arithmetic in 1653 (see Dobbie, in Comenius, 1986, p. 206n). Fashioned
according to Ratkes didactics, the Nuremburg Funnel would quickly,
safely and comfortably fill the heads of young people with knowledge
and/or doctrine (Schaller, 1992, p. 116).[2]

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 WHY NO DIDACTICS IN ENGLAND?

Didactics underwent a further mechanisation in Comeniuss Didactica

Magna. Between the Czech edition of 1632 and the Latin edition of 1657,
Comenius seems to have refocused his views about instructional
technology. The didactic funnel was re-engineered as a filling machine.
Learners minds could be imprinted in the same way that hundreds of
thousands of books could be run off in a printing workshop (Comenius,
1896, p. 317). Indeed, Klaus Schaller has suggested that Comenius revision
of Ratkes maxims marks the origins of modern schooling as a teaching
and learning machine (Schaller, 1992, p. 116).
If Ratke and Harsdrfer devised the small didactic, Comenius
fashioned the great didactic. Indeed, since the seventeenth century this
distinction between small and great didactics has resonated around
Europe. In some European contexts, like Spain and Portugal, didactics is
still regarded as a classroom handicraft conducted by artisans (Hand-
werker). In other countries, however, didactics can also be regarded as
the responsibility of system architects (Baumeister), educational planners
who have overall responsibility for designing, constructing and steering
systems of schooling.
As important, Comeniuss Great Didactic also seems to mark the
original extent of Anglo-American interest in didactics, itself marked in the
international exchange of ideas among Comenius and his followers (see,
for instance, Greengrass et al, 1994). English-language interest in the work
of Comenius and Ratke did not return until the second half of the nine-
teenth century. It was aroused, for instance, by R. H. Quicks Essays on
Educational Reformers (1868), by M. W. Keatinges translation of Comen-
iuss Great Didactic in 1896 and by Turnbulls MA thesis on Ratke,
submitted to Liverpool University in 1913 (reprinted, in part, in Turnbull,
1993). Indeed, Quick noted in his preface that on the history of Education,
not only good books but all books are in German.

Kant and Herbart

Over the same period, educationalists in mainland Europe retained their
earlier didactic interests. They struggled, for instance, with the corpus of
ideas left to them through Immanuel Kants ber Pdagogik and,
furthermore, in two volumes written by Johann Friedrich Herbart: All-
gemeine Pdagogik (General Pedagogics, 1806) and Umriss Pdagogischer
Vorlesungen (1835; English translation as Plan of Lectures on Pedagogy,
1908).
Herbart occupied Kants philosophy chair at Knigsberg university
from 1809 to 1835. Like Kant, Herbart also had systemic interests. His
aspiration was to devise, from first principles, an educational system. He
worked, therefore, towards a general theory of pedagogics (i.e. Allgemeine
pdagogik) which, in an inadequate translation, became the Science of
Education (Herbart, 1892). Although Herbarts educational ideas were
devised as a grand system, his Lectures written in his final years as a
professor in Gttingen also included a set of formal steps of instruction

143
DAVID HAMILTON

(see Hayward, 1903, pp. 4142). Moreover, these formal steps could also
be translated into a series of classroom activities and used, therefore, in
the planning and conduct of instruction. The first Herbartian stage (clear-
ness) entailed the analysis of previous notions and the addition of new
matter; the second stage (association) focused on the collation, comparing
and contrasting similar phenomena; the third stage (system) was directed
towards the establishment of generalised notions; and, at the final stage
(method), practical applications were drawn from the results of the earlier
stages.
Herbarts ideas about lesson planning and the organisation of
instruction were, however, intimately bound up with his philosophical
ideas. Scepticism surrounded Herbarts philosophy for 30 years and, as a
result, his ideas about formal stages suffered a similar neglect. By the end
of the century, however, followers of Herbart reversed this judgement. His
philosophical assumptions yielded to the instructional or didactic features
of his educational theory; notably, its adaptedness ... for educational
purposes and for social reform and its strength in those aspects ... which
touch upon the work of the teacher (Hayward, 1903, p. 33).
The revival of Herbarts instructional theory was associated with the
names of Volkmar Stoy (181585), Friedrich Wilhelm Drpfeld (182493)
and Twiskon Ziller (181782). Stoy, for instance, refocused educational
practice on the notion of interest, itself derived from Herbart. Drpfeld
emphasised the importance of a Lehrplan, a definitely thought-out scheme
of studies in which every subject should have an organic place ... [not the]
loose aggregate of studies such as is indicated on the average British Time
Table (sic) (Hayward, 1903, p. 47). Ziller revived the moral training
dimension of didactics through a series of books on notion of educative
instruction (erziehenden Unterricht) ranging from Einleitung in die
Allgemeine Pdagogik (Introduction to General Pedagogy, 1856), through
Grundlegung zu Lehre vom Erziehenden Unterricht (Foundation of a system
of Educative Instruction, 1865) to Vorlesungen ber Allgemeine Pdagogik
(Lectures on General Pedagogy, 1876). The culmination of this restoration
work was a series of texts, written or edited by Wilhelm Rein (18471929),
that included Theorie und Praxis des Volksschul-unterrichts nach Herbart-
schen Grundstzen (Theory and Practice of Instruction in the Elementary
school According to Herbartian Principles, 1878) and the Encyclopdisches
Handbuch der Pdagogik (189599).
Herbart focused on education, while the secondary herbartian
literature focused on the organisation of instruction. If the notion of formal
steps had its origins in Herbarts philosophy, it was resurrected in the era
of mass schooling and mass instruction. According to Gundem, for
instance, the:
most important contribution of Herbart, and to some degree the
Herbartians, was to extract didactics from general educational theory,
turning it into a discipline on its own, dealing with instruction under
the conditions of schooling as distinct from other instructional settin-
gs. But in doing so, the Herbartians changed Herbarts analytical tools

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 WHY NO DIDACTICS IN ENGLAND?

into schematic sequences pre-forming any hour and minute of teaching.

(Gundem, 1998, p. 23)
In turn, this rigid, schematic approach to teaching (p. 24) was countered
by another reform movement that also looked back to Herbart and Kant.

Didactic Analysis
The new movement launched a didactic theory based on the work of Wilh-
elm Dilthey (18331911). A new generation of German educationalists took
a fresh look at educational theory. The notion of a general or universal
theory of education valid for all times and places was set aside (see, for
example, the account of Uljens, 1997, p. 8). Didactics was re-invented as a
human science (Geisteswissenschaft): that is, as something distinct from
natural sciences (Naturwissenschaft). Educational thought and practice
were to be built upon an analysis of the lived experience of practitioners,
an awareness of the historicity of practice, and an anticipation of the
life-worlds of future practitioners (cf. what should they become).
To this extent, didactics returned to the study of teaching as a
situated schoolroom craft steered by a constellation of other assumptions
about the past, current and future lives of learners. In turn, didactics could
not be reduced to a set of teaching methods. It embraced both the small
and large didactics of the seventeenth century the Handwerker, as well
as the Baumeister. It began to be associated with an expanded conception
of instruction that Gundem describes as didactic analysis (chapter 5) and
that, in German, were known as Geisteswissenshaftliche Pdagogik or
Bildungstheoretische Didaktik (see Klafki, 1995, p. 13; Hopmann & Riquar-
ts, 1995, p. 5). Didactic analysis, then, began to entail a combination of
historical, social and cultural deliberation. The creation of a teaching plan
necessarily included the posing of deliberative why? questions alongside
what? and how? questions. Indeed why? and/or what should they
become? questions became paramount, relegating how? questions to a
subsidiary field of analysis methodik.
As suggested, neither Herbartian nor deliberative (cf. hermeneutic or
critical) forms of didactic analysis found favour in Anglo-American circles.
In fact, they were eclipsed by a different movement the advent of applied
psychology or scientific management thinking in education (cf. Callahan,
1962: Selleck, 1968). New technologies of teaching were devised, which
ignored the deliberative dimensions of either pedagogic or didactic
analysis. Within the USA, the downgrading of these Germanic views is
neatly captured in two sources.
First, Paul Monroes A Cyclopaedia of Education (1913) links pedagogy
to upbringing, but relegates it to an inferior status in the organisation of
schooling:
Since the Renaissance educational reformers have drawn more and
more attention to the significance of the process of education as con-
trasted with that of the subject matter taught. The study of this

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DAVID HAMILTON

process has been for several centuries referred to as pedagogy. The

philosopher Kant denominated his lectures on education as ber
Pdagogik. They dealt especially with the formation of habit, and moral
training and instruction. Thus defined, pedagogy concerned that aspect
of education commonly held to be most childish and least interesting, a
phase of life relegated to nurses, mothers, and pedagogues, and felt to
have little in it to command the thoughtful attention of the strong in
mind or will. (p. 621)
The second judgement is also a signifier of the low status of curriculum or
didaktik analysis: one cannot understand the history of education in the
United States during the 20th century unless one realises that Edward L.
Thorndike won, and John Dewey lost (Ellen Lagemann, quoted in
Kansanen, 1995, p. 106; for the marginality of Deweys role see Kleibard,
1986, passim).

Curriculum and Pedagogic Analysis

Sustained Anglo-American reaction against earlier instructional turns
eventually came in the 1970s. In effect, German didactic analysis (which,
by then, took many forms) resurfaced in the English-speaking world as
pedagogic analysis. The substitution of pedagogy for didactics seems to
be have been the result of two seminal interventions. First, Paulo Freires
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1971) shared Anglo-American distrust of the
seventeenth century didactic inheritance (which he characterised as the
banking conception of education). Freire rejected, that is, a
dullness-and-dogma view of education where the teacher talks and the
student listens meekly (p. 46).
The other seminal text was Basil Bernsteins (1971) On the classifica-
tion and framing of educational knowledge, which appeared in Youngs
Knowledge and Control: new directions for the sociology of education.
Bernstein explicitly acknowledged German influence upon his thinking:
that is, the many valuable suggestions and the constructive criticism of
Wolfgang Klafki and Hubertus Huppauf of the University of Marburg (p.
68n).
Bernsteins model had three features. First, it linked curriculum to
the formal transmission of educational knowledge. Secondly, it identified
educational knowledge codes, which denoted the underlying principles
which shape curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. Finally, Bernsteins
model proposed that:
Formal educational knowledge can be considered to be realized
through three message systems: curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation.
Curriculum defines what counts as valid knowledge, pedagogy defines
what counts as the valid transmission of knowledge, and evaluation
defines what counts as valid realization of this knowledge on the part
of the taught. (p. 47)

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 WHY NO DIDACTICS IN ENGLAND?

The historical importance of Bernsteins argument, like that of Freires

banking model, was that it injected a pluralism into curriculum studies.
Consciously or unconsciously, Bernsteins parallel reference to different
codes or message systems on the one hand and to differences in class and
control on the other, cleared the way for new analyses that focused upon
the inter-relationship and interaction of education and politics. Different
forms of teaching and learning expressed in terms of pedagogy,
curriculum and didactics could be analysed in terms of their historical,
social and cultural modulations (e.g. with respect to gender, race,
sexuality and ethnicity).
Initially, Bernstein typified these categories as codes, but after his
Class and pedagogies: visible and invisible (1975, chapter 6), they also
became characterised as different pedagogies. Indeed, in this lexical shift
from codes to pedagogies, it may be significant that Bernstein wrote
Class and pedagogies: visible and invisible, around periods of attachment
to Pierre Bourdieus Centre de Sociologie Europenne in Paris (see
Bernstein, 1975, p. 14): that is, in a country where, perhaps, pedagogie has
more currency than didactique.
The impact of Bernsteins and Freires ideas on Anglo-American
educational thought can also be judged from other sources. For instance,
the proportion of entries that include the word pedagogy rose 5-fold
between 1970 and 1997 in the Federally-funded US data base ERIC.
Furthermore, one of the leading US proponents of pedagogic analysis,
Henry Giroux, also points to the importance of the 1970s: radical
pedagogy emerged in full strength as part of the new sociology of
education in England and the United States over a decade ago (Giroux,
1988, p. xxiv).
The differential influence of German ideas, Freire and Bernstein can
also be discerned in the catalogue of the US library of Congress. Use of
pedagogy in the Kantian sense of early education is suggested by titles like
A Contribution to the Pedagogy of Arithmetic (1914) and Experimental Studies
in the Psychology and Pedagogy of Spelling (1935); whereas older German
usage in the sense of instruction also seems to have survived in theology,
sports and music teaching (e.g. The Pedagogy of Gods Image, 1982;
Pedagogy and Didactics of Physical Activity, 1976; and Cello Pedagogy, 1972).
The more recent association of pedagogy with historical, social and
cultural analysis that is, connected to Freire and Bernstein is manifest
in such titles as The Pedagogy and Politics of Failure (1977), Critical
Pedagogy and Cultural Power (1987), Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age
(1988), Learning to Question: a pedagogy of liberation (1989), Researching
Lived Experience: human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (1990),
Pedagogy of Domination (1990), Feminist Pedagogy (1988), Texts for a
Pedagogy of Possibility (1992), Communication Pedagogy (1992), Towards a
Poetics, Politics and Pedagogy of Literary Engagements (1992), Aboriginal
Pedagogy (1991), Dialogic Pedagogy (1994), Pedagogy of Healing (1997),
Gender-Sensitive Pedagogy (1997), Pedagogy of Power (1998), Eco-feminist
Literary Criticism: theory, interpretation, pedagogy (1998) Engaged Pedagogy

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DAVID HAMILTON

(1998), Know and Tell: a writing pedagogy of disclosure (1998), Progressive

Pedagogy (1998), and Teaching Popular Culture: beyond radical pedagogy
(1998).
The key feature of Anglo-American pedagogic analysis is that it is
interpretative. It assumes, following Freire, that there are different
pedagogies; it accepts, with Bernstein, that these different pedagogies
entail different outcomes; and it recognises, with Klafki, Gundem, and
other mainland European didacticians, that the task of an educationalist
whether Handwerker or Baumeister is to deliberate and make choices
among these different codes.
A crucial feature of such forms of analysis whether they are
characterised as curricular, pedagogic or didactic is that teaching is as
much about codes as it is about methods. Put another way, a code is a
framework for practice, not a prescription of methods a stance that is
also reflected in the forms of teaching discussed by Schwab (1978), Simon
(1981) and Stenhouse (1975). Indeed, one of the best illustration of this
difference between methods and codes can be found in Peter McLarens
Life in Schools (3rd edition, 1998). McLaren starts with the assumption that
pedagogy must be distinguished from teaching and continues by quoting
Roger Simon who, in his turn, echoes Basil Bernstein: viz.
pedagogy [refers] to the integration in practice of particular
curriculum content and design, classroom strategies and techniques,
and evaluation, purpose and methods. All of these aspects of
educational practice come together in the realities of what happens in
classrooms. Together they organize a view of how a teachers work
within an institutional context specifies a particular version of what
knowledge is of most worth, what it means to know something, and
how we might construct representations of ourselves, others and our
physical and social environment. (p. 165)

Conclusions
This article has been written for two purposes. First, it explores a paradox:
that recent Anglo-American usage of pedagogy mirrors the mainland
European use of didactic. Secondly, this paper can also be read as a
comment on the current status of curriculum studies. In particular, it
relates curriculum analysis to the fields of didactic and pedagogic
analysis.
All of these fields originally arose as part of an instructional turn
nourished in the social, political and confessional circumstances of the
Renaissance and the Reformation. The problematics of pedagogy,
curriculum and didactics intersected, and became cornerstones in the
construction of modern schooling. However, these problematics were not
eternal. As suggested, they changed in the Enlightenment, in the wake of
positivism and, in turn, alongside twentieth century movements variously
described as child-centred or post-positivist.

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 WHY NO DIDACTICS IN ENGLAND?

Although times have changed, the problematics discussed in this

paper are not dead or doomed. The moral question, How should they be
framed?, that engaged humanist educationalists in the Renaissance, is no
less important than Kants educational question, how might they be
nurtured, disciplined and instructed?. Both of these questions are
implicated in the global dialectic of national identity and cultural
difference identified and analysed in Walter Feinbergs Common
Schools/Uncommon Identities (1998), and in the analysis of capabilities
and cultural universals in Martha Nussbaums Sex and Social Justice
(1999, chapter 1).
This article has tried to clarify the context of such curriculum,
didactic and pedagogic analyses. Curriculum Studies has engaged with
these questions for nearly a decade. Its successor, Pedagogy, Culture and
Society, will continue to provide a forum for such analysis, deliberation
and debate.

Correspondence
David Hamilton, Institutionen fr pedagogik, Ume Universitet, SE-90187
Ume, Sweden (david.hamilton@pedag.umu.se).

Notes
[1] The sixth century Rule of the Benedictine order of Monks include the
stipulation that it is the office of the master to speak and to teach, and of the
disciple to keep silent and listen (quoted in Southern, 1997, p. 195).
[2] Harsdrfers image of a funnel also appears in the works of Juan Luis Vives
(14921540). Crane writes: Vives also cautions teachers to respect the small
capacity of the boys minds, like a vessel with a narrow neck, which spits out
again the too large supply of liquids which the teacher attempts to pour in.
Let instruction therefore be poured in gradually, drop by drop (Crane, 1993,
p. 65).

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