Abstract:

Since the 1980s, scholars in China have been reflecting and reconstructing pedagogics as an intellectual discipline or field of study. In the framework of metatheory of education, many a researcher has been intellectually enthusiastic about the pedagogical issues such as pedagogics’ connection with other disciplines and its intertwining between past and present, West and China, knowledge and action. In recent years, a pedagogical shift has emerged from the epistemological dimension to the sociological one concerning the institutionalization of pedagogics, i.e. the establishment of faculty and development of courses and textbooks. This paper attempts to depict and interpret the emergence and logic of the institutionalization of pedagogics in some European countries using a historical and comparative method. It has been found that pedagogics was institutionalized in the eighteenth century in Germany, in the form of textbooks, chairs, seminars and faculties. This process sought to meet the demands for welltrained teachers in secondary grammar schools and the philanthropic movement sparked by Rousseau’s discovery of children, and was rooted in the intellectually free atmosphere of modern universities. Later, pedagogics displayed diverse institutionalization when spreading to Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, UK and France etc. In general, the institutionalization of pedagogics was to meet the practical or even political demands for training and educating teachers for the nationstates, rather than theoretical or knowledge interest. This institutionalization to a certain degree shaped the traditions of pedagogical knowledge, including the normative paradigm in Germany, “comprehensive social science”mode in France, and “foundations disciplines”mode in UK. And also the institutionalization served to construct pedagogics as a professional identity. With the accumulation of pedagogical knowledge and the multiplication of interdisciplinary interactions, pedagogics has produced the strong awareness of its own professional identity from its reliance on other disciplines in the early stage of institutionalization. Meanwhile, it has been struggling to legitimize itself as an academic discipline, not simply driven by practical demands.

Key words: pedagogics, institutionalization, Germany