Especially in the applied or practical sciences such as medicine, law, economics, or education there is the temptation to believe that we know full well what it is that these sciences are concerned with as their object of study. Does not everyone know what a sick person is? Does not everyone know what justice and welfare are? And so does not the fact that everyone talks the same language in urgent and concrete situations prove that the practitioners of such professions know quite well what is expected of them? Don't we all know that children must be educated to be brought up? Now nothing is as dubious as the premise that everyone would know what a sick person is, even though there are pretty clearly many instances where that occurs. A person with a broken leg is sick in a different sense thatn someone suffering from malaria, and both are sick in a very different sense than a person who is said to have dementia paralytica, or a person who has a so-called psycho-pathological illness, or someone who is ill-afflicted with crippling symptoms of old age, or who suffers from neurotic anxieties. Should every such sick person be cured? Are some patients not better off with their illness than without it? In other words, is that which we expect as a matter of course from our physicians not often a real and unclarified problem? And, no doubt, these questions do present themselves in the day-to-day life of the practitioner. Don't we all know what is meant by welfare and prosperity? Or: Don't we all know what are the necessary conditions for a prosperous life?

I do not believe that things are that simple. We may feel that we know what is the state of our personal welfare. It has something to do with our income, with what we can do with it (or what we are permitted to do with it), and with the standard of living, social program, social justice, and so forth. Suddenly we are confronted with an expansive field of issues and questions. And as we reflect on the question of social order and on the organization of societal institutions, we realize that we must come to terms with the complexities of norms which underly the economic order. Once we have acquired knowledge of how life is to be lived, and once we have acquired a comprehension of the conditions which would make that possible, and, as well, once we have acquired an understanding as to how these conditions could be realized without violating the very norms and values which provide us with a sense of how life is to be lived in the first place; only then, and when we have acquired the social understandings and skills with respect to all this, do we also come to f fuller awareness of how little is left of economics as an exact science. It does become clear, however, how much economics is a human science of practical significance--a science which presupposes moral and human norms and suppositions. And this is a simple matter. How many ages did it take before we knew the ABC of econo mics ? And: how far have we progressed with this alphabet?

The matter of education seems much more straight-forward: we can hardly be confused about the nature of its subject matter and its task. Can anyone doubt that education first and foremost is concerned with the pedagogic situation in which we must act as educators? And what else can our educational task be than this: to make it possible for education to happen as well as to make it actually happen.

Educating and child-rearing--these are realities which concern us as immediately as the everyday life concerns of food, clothing, shelter, care, and so forth. And yet we soon learn that life itself poses questions and problems--whether these questions originate with the child or with the adult. "What is this all for anyway?" Someone asks, while someone else very resolutely, but very wrongly, seems to go "his or her own way;" and so we wonder, "Can we let that happen?" "Should that be allowed?" "What can we do to prevent it?" But how is life to be lived? and how do we live it? and what is needed for this life? We, the child's parents fail, schools fail, social services fail or are lacking. We have a feeling that others seem to somehow be doing it better than we are. How do you "learn" this? And how do you have to change, how do you have to remake yourself as it were, before you can do this? It is not adequate to simply follow an approach, to apply a model or a technique. You have to be something in order to be able to do something. And so you must humanly be worth more or amount to more than a figure who basically imposes rules, and who distributes "intellectual" rations. And thus it appears that education is no simple matter either. So we had better return to the question of the significance of the educational or pedagogic situation.

A situation is the totality of givens with respect to which we must act. Therefore, we should immediately make a distinction between the situation as we live it and the situation as we reflect on it. Is it really necessary to demonstrate the pedagogical significance of this distinction? Is it not an immediate consequence of the fact that we always hear it remarked how there exists an essential difference between theorizing and practising, between knowing about educating children, and the ability to actually do it? And is there similarly not a difference in the way that a child being educated experiences his education and the way that the child also may be reflectively involved in the process of his education? It would seem especially important to point out that it really matters in the situation who undergoes the experience, who reflects on it, and what is the nature of this reflection--in the sense of asking "what is going on here?" and "what is the interpretive perspective according to which we (must) extend influence?"

Whose lived experience? Is it the experience of the child or the educator? Indeed this is the question which makes the real difference. Who reflects?--the child, the educator, an outsider who involves himself in a situation? What is being seen in the reflection and to what end does one involve oneself? These after all are the critical considerations which would determine in what direction a situation should be influenced or changed or possibly left undisturbed.

And if we pose the question: whose experience is it? then the unavoidable next question is concerned with what it is that is being experienced in this situation. How often do we need to remind educators (parents, teachers, etc.) that the subjective experience o f the child in a pedagogic situation (for example, "my father at home does not care for me") does not necessarily match the so-called objective facts (for example, "father appears incapable of communicating his feelings of deep affection to the child")? And so how often do we have to remind edcators that the subjective or personal lived experience of the child is more a decisive factor in the pedagogic relations and situations than what "objectively" was, possibly, well-intended?

There is a difference between "understanding" or "knowing" a situation and "influencing" or "leading it in an appropriate direction," in the sense that "influencing or leading" a child towards a future presupposes a certain kind of knowledge as well. What then is the nature of the knowledge which an educator who experiences and gives shape to a situation must have? Can this guiding knowledge or understanding insofar as it comes from external sources find its genesis in a discipline which is not itself rooted in systematic concerns and adequate analyses of that situation--that is, the educational or pedagogic situation? Can such knowledge be found, for example, in the field of psychology even though psychology has its roots in a non-pedagogic situation? For sure, psychology must have something to contribute to pedagogy, after all, the psychological givens are also part of the pedagogic situation. And yet the contributors connection is too loose and usually lacks the essential details which pedagogically make the important difference. Indeed, not everything which is psychologically possible is therefore also desirable. For example, people can be psychologically ready to have children, but should they therefore have them? And, if not, what are the criteria which we apply to this condition? A situation is after all the totality of givens with respect to which we must act. The pragmatic character of the pedagogic situation also implies that our actions are oriented toward a view of the future. But could it be possible that we currently find ourselves in a situation without a view? That is to say, that our situation is a deadlock, a dead-end, and that our vision is: no possible future?

In order to be able to understand the origin and therefore the past of a situation we often must have experienced the situation side by side with those who live in it. It is precisely in the experience of living with their children that parents can find the most important source of coming to an understanding of how things came to be what they are. But since, for a multitude of reasons, living side by side in a situation is not always conducive to acquiring a more detached understanding of the significance of a situation, these same parents are not always capable of accounting for why things are as they are. And, therefore, a professional pedagogue (teacher, counsellor, etc.) must possess the wherewithal to obtain the relevant information in spite of the difficulties experienced by the participants of the situation in their attempt to account for the whys and hows of the way things are at present. For this reason, some clinical child psychology should constitute part of the professional preparation of all pedagogues. And this implies that pedagogy as a practical science presupposes the practice of situation analysis in the lifeworld.

A mere knowing of the goal or end of human existence is insufficient for the practical task of pedagogy, even knowing the means toward such end is not adequate. Insufficient is also knowing in a general sense, what the conditions are that make such pedagogically-oriented thinking and acting possible.

An important consideration also is the question what means have been resorted to, how these means were used, and to what consequence. Responsive pedagogic acting must know the individual uniqueness, the living social context, and the moral characteristics of this particular child and of these particular parents and others who play a meaningful part in this child's life. That is, considering as well all the givens which belong to this life. This means that withion the broad field of education and culture, it makes no sense to draw distinctions between disciplines which study the child (the way psychology is sometimes seen) and disciplines which must act with respect to the child (i.e., the practitioners who must then act on the so-called "objective information" obtained or follow "the advice" provided). Knowing a situation and acting with respect to a situation in which we find children and adults responsible for the growth of these children constitute a unity of being and oriented being, of ontological rationality. Only in retrospect can we make distinctions based on external criteria. It is impossible to develop pedagogical thinking which is not based on its own reflective understading of the complexity of givens which make up a situation. Pedagogy cannot proceed without its own situation anlysis. After all, every "simple fact" which can obviously be "noted" or "observed" in a particular case, has in the life of the child and educator, the special significance of a charge of something that must be left "undisturbed," that must be "preserved" (and therefore "guarded"), of something that must be "fostered," that must be "worked on," "gotten rid of" at all cost, and so forth. In other words, the so-called "facts" about a child's life, cut off from their ontological ground -- from that which is binding, that which behooves us -- lack concrete meaning for the child and for this process of personal becoming. No matter how often an educator acts out of having a sense of knowing what a child is about and what this child is capable of, no less often should the educator reflectively wonder what exactly can be expected from this child. It is quite possible that the educator (parent or teacher) does not have a clue about the latter and it is entirely possible that the educator will never be able to get it, at least not in a time frame and in a form which will be of pedagogic help for the becoming of this child. At this point a mother or father may call on the expertise of a professional pedagogue; and a teacher may call on the advice of a colleague or a psychologist, etc. In other words, somebody who is able to come to an understanding of a situation by collecting the facts and impressions which, from the point of view of this child's education, must have relevance. In this task the professsional pedagogue may resort to means derived from psychology or say from the social science disciplines, but it should be foremost born in mind that the educator's task and his or her responsibility is essentially pedagogic. Professional preparation and professional conduct must always ensue from the normative auspices of pedagogy. This becomes even more clear when for a certain period of time the help which is extended to the child and the child's care givers becomes a systematic intervention.

It follows from the above that pedagogy as scientific analysis of the pedagogic situation -- that is, as analysis and as reflection on the praxis of giving form and direction to the situation -- forms an inseparable unity of ontic and deontic, of factual and leading-giving, of reflective and practical, of descriptive and normative moments. It speaks for itself therefore that "child study," the study of the growing child in all situations, phases and aspects, are the flesh and blood of pedagogy itself. Such child study, such anthropology of childhood, may have found its originating impetus in the appearance of developmental psychology, but also in the physiological development of the child, and also in family studies, and indeed also in the sociology of youth, and in the study of the historical and cultural contexts of the lives of children. In spite of the emerging heterogeneity of particular fields of child study we should not lose sight, from a concrete and fundamental point of view, of the existence of a certain unity and relatedness. Of course, there are various ways of integrating such fields of study. For example, the study of child physiology and physiological development may constitute an aspect of one of the medical or biological sciences. Similarly, from a sociological point of view, the study of the historical and societal contexts of child study could be applied to criminology and crime prevention. But the fundamental condition of all human becoming is that of education or child-rearing; and so the primary principle of integration, of all human intervention and of all scientific aspects of child study which we can distinguish, is the principle of the pedagogic situation and education. Child psychology, or more generally, developmental psychology, is thus one dimension of pedagogy or education. Moreover, developmental psychology is curiously dependent on the fact that its object of study (the psychological development of the child) is always already a child who is being educated. This realization stands in contrast to the fact that most developmental psychology is based on the false assumption of developmental processes which occur in accord with bio-mechanical and autonomous principles. If this has some truth then it is only noticable in a rather reductionistic sense. The more deeply we reflect on children, the more we see the totality of the developmental phenomenon of the life history of each child as a process of humanization and thus essentially as an educative phenomenon. There is no denying that within this phenomenon, developmental processes and processes of human growth are visible, but it is also clear that the process of growth itself does not represent anything psychological. The process of growth is experienced and rendered meaningful by the child and by those who live with this child first, and only then is this complexity of meaning available as subject matter for developmental psychology. Pedagogy is not only concerned with understanding the child, it also must be concerned with understanding those adults who are involved in helping this child grow up and in educating this child. Here too it is pedagogy which establishes what are the relevant facts because it is only pedagogy which knows what is going on here. Is it not precisely pedagogy which knows what it means to be an educator or pedagogue? And so whose task could it possibly be but that of pedagogy when it comes time to gather, structure, and interpret the data which pertain to the educational situation in general and to this concrete educational situation in particular?

Evidently it is first of all the task of pedagogy to study the process and the processes of child-rearing and education.

No specific psychological theory of learning is necessarily pedagogically significant, in fact it hardly ever is of much pedagogic significance. Some psychology of learning by the child in an educational situation or with respect to an educational end is typically pedagogic work. In the latter case "learning" is not considered in some clinical or abstracted learning context, devoid of pedagogic meaning, rather it is an organic part of being educated, or being brought-up, or being involved in a self-formative process. Of no less importance than the above is the knowledge of the pedagogic situation gained in very different areas; the influence on the personal development of the child through close and intimate relationships with others, the acquisition of tendencies towards certain sensitivities, the learning of particular ways of expressing or suppressing aspects of oneself and one's experience, identify oneself with certain cultural forms of life, the deep living of a life history -- all these too find their source in the primordial meaning of pedagogy.

If we now go back and read over the above comments in order to determine what approaches, what methods there are which could assist us in acquiring knowledge which is pedagogically worthwhile, the following picture emerges.

It is possible to distinguish methods which help to realize (to make real) educational growth, or some aspects of it; these are the practical methods, and then there are methods of inquiry, research methods. Now we are concerned with the latter. But whether we are actively involved in educating children or doing research, we must be careful not to confuse the two kinds of methods. For example, when we assign a test in order to evaluate the results of the educational process we usually are doing two things at the same time: we assess what our students should have learned (and thus we find out if we may have to go over some material again) and in this manner we are pedagogically involved; however, we also and simultaneously gather evidence about the successfulness of the approach we have used in teaching the material. And thus we have arrived at (or crossed) the border of the practical methods, in the sense that, at the hand of a good assessment, we obtain insights which extend beyond our particular educational situation. We may now begin to entertain conclusions such as: "children with this kind of background can(not) handle this" or more tentatively "children of this kind of intelligence can(not) handle this." Then the question arises whether we should corroborate our tentative conclusions with groups of children from different educational backgrounds; and with this we find ourselves in the midst of research methods. This is an essential pedagogic course of action: from the concrete, pedagogical situation to the more general research task. Going the other direction often leads to discomfort; for then we do not know whether the methods we employ are still derived or descriptive of pedagogic situations or how these methods might need to be interpreted or possibly altered. Our concern is not to deal with methods which are analytically or conceptually derived from pedagogic situations in general, instead, we are only concerned with those methods which are specifically related to the pedagogically fundamental aspects of this situation.

When we are concerned with methods of a longitudinal character or when we need to look further ahead towards the prospects for a child then the pedagogical task is also of prime importance. When we look at the educational experiences of children from such larger frames then we can no longer assume that existing school structures, forms of education, curriculum methods, curricular divisions of subject matter, standards of evaluation, etc. will remain unaltered. Only too often do experimental test methods assume such static educational circumstances.

So it is clear that predictive measurements derived from experimental methods must remain extremely tentative; and yet we should not doubt that there is a need for predictive methods of a concrete pedagogical nature. Next to the tentative and unsatisfactory vagueness of such predictive pedagogical principles, there is our responsibility to provide the child and his parents or teachers with the opportunity to demonstrate the incorrectness of our predictive prognosis so that, ongoingly, we can bring about corrective interventions in our initial pedagogical policy decisions. and with this observation we arrive at the most essential element of all methodological insights which have a bearing on all pedagogical practices: the aim of all pedagogy is to help this child to realize his best possible potential given his concrete life circumstances (this mother, this father, this milieu, etc.)

From the pedagogical point of view those methods are absolutely fundamental which lead to individualized knowledge. These are the methods which carry the decisive responsibilities for generating, not a generalized, mechanistic, but an insightful and action-oriented kind of practical knowledge for the benefit of this particular human child.

Characteristic of every practical science (such as law, medicine, education) is the inseparable unity of the interpretive-empirical and the practical-ethical determinants -- even though these only make available pedagogical possibilities which concern the growing development of the person. the practical sciences are distinguishable from each other by the object of their study and the respective praxiology which belongs to it and which produces the normative levels and the value structures which in turn render interpretive sense to object and conduct. To separate the normative and the practical moments in education, as indeed is suggested by the very departmental and scholarly divisions made at faculties of education, is in essence undesirable and even unscientific. This happens, for example, when the philosophy of education, the psychology of child development, and the methodology of pedagogy are offered and pursued in isolation of each other. If these divisions are not born merely out of professional ambitions then they are only intelligible as divisions of labor within pedagogy.

Those who, from the viewpoint of "realism" and "science" are involved in research, often feel offended by applying the name "scientific" to a discipline that is obviously normative in nature. They would rather use the term "arts" or "crafts" for such endeavor. And to the extent that such attitude reflects a desire to earn higher respect we will just leave this issue to their vanity. However, there may be a deeper significance associated with such nomenclature. This is the case when one identifies "reality" with "nature" and when one attempts to reduce subject matter of the human spirit such as human institutions and human relations to objects of study that are a-normative. And connected to this "scientization" of the human world there is the second error of reducing pedagogic action to some sort of technical intervention usually associated with managerial or mechanistic knowledge--and now pedagogy has been converted into a collection of artful procedures and tactics which aim to serve the efficient execution of the business of education. In this kind of framework terminology such as "technique," "therapy," "method," are employed easily and unquestioningly.

In the context of this kind of trend I would like to make just a few remarks. We need to remain mindful of the fundamental notion of pedagogy: that human beings are after all the only beings that need to be humanized to come into their own. The human being is the animal educandum: "the animal that needs education." In other words, the human being needs to be educated or brought up in order to become truly human. This is the requirement of humanization. Every action of the adult is therefore a showing of where one stands: either the action humanizes or it does not humanize. And this indicates already that pedagogy is concerned with action that is normative. But that humanization, and the education which that process of humanization subsumes, does not result in identical products as would happen under some system of technology which produces its goods according to certain designs, rules and calculations. After all we are concerned here with pedagogic action (parenting or teaching) which is fundamentally creative, in the sense that its object (the child) wants to be somebody him or herself, and he or she often co-determines our actions. And in other respects too, the child subsumes in his or her own actions the actions of the adult in accordance with an increasingly personal and yet always singular image.

The distinction between "practical" and "theoretical" sciences is sometimes referred to as "pure" and "applied" research, and this dintinction rests on the intention of the practice of science: one does research because one wants to know how things are or one does research because one wants to know how to act. In the former case the intention is theoretic in the latter case it is practical.

If one wants to relate pedagogy to such classification then it is clear that pedagogy is a science which starts from the experience of life, that it is a human science (geesteswetenschap), and that it is a normative discipline in which one engages with practical intentions. It is an experience-based science because it locates its subjectmatter (the educational or pedagogic situation) in the world of everyday experience. It is a human science because the educational or pedagogic situation rests on the human intention of a particular human being, this child. After all, we do not just abandon the young child to his or her "natural state" or interpret the being of the child in a manner that is characteristic of natural objects. Rather, we interpret the subject matter of educational research at the least as a product of human living, and as an expression of human spiritual activity and of cultural form. Pedagogy is a normative science because it is based on moral choice, on what one considers good for this child and good for human beings, and on what one disapproves of. Pedagogy as a science is practical because one wants to know how to bring one's understanding to bear on one's active living with children and on one's understanding of everyday life situations so as to be able to give direction to them.

Unpublished draft translation

Sept. 1988

© Max van Manen, 2002
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