Pedagogical Ponderings

What are pedagogical issues? They are issues that pertain to pedagogy. What is pedagogy? Etymologically, pedagogy is from the Greek and means the practice of leading children. In ancient Rome, a pedagogue would have been a slave who literally led children on the ‘school run’ as it were, to be schooled in the ways of rhetoric and to be groomed perhaps for high office in the Roman senate.

So how has such a traditionally unglamourous practice of leading children taken on such a revered aura in the terminology of educational theory today? I have my own theory. In Roman religion, the gods were like deified humans who exploited one another, and lesser mortal beings. This philosophy of life that Romans had impacted on their treatment of one another: Roman citizens will have often treated their slaves as subhumans to be exploited (although Roman slavery didn’t necessarily have the racial element of later European slavery). So how did despised Roman pedagogues lend their name to the respected field of research into the process of teaching and learning? 

I believe that pedagogy has taken on a respected mantle because of a revolutionary new incarnation of an ancient belief. Judaism was begrudgingly tolerated in the pluralistic Roman Empire: those stubborn Israelites who held that their God was the only true God. But this belief impacted on their view of one another: if men and women are self evidently created equal in the eyes of the God in whose image and likeness we are made, then we must treat each other with respect and equity, and by implication, we shouldn’t enslave one another (although slavery was tolerated in ancient Israel).

Enter the long promised Jewish Messiah onto the scene in the periphery of the Roman Empire, Himself the Suffering Slave foretold hundreds of years earlier by the Israelite prophet Isaiah. Subversively, He didn’t overthrow the oppressive, enslaving Roman Empire and impose his own Pax Judea at the point of a sword to challenge the Pax Romana of the day. Instead, He claimed to inaugurate a ‘rightside up’ Kingdom of God in the topsy turvy, tumultuous world of the Roman overlords. Rather than to abolish slavery in the Kingdom of God, Jesus described Himself as the slave of His people, not like the overbearing rulers of Rome. He declared that the greatest among His followers would be the most slavishly devoted to Him and His people. 

To some preening Roman ruler, Jesus’s teaching must have seemed like some form of sado-masochism. But the City that Jesus established has uneasily coexisted with the cities of men ever since, as described in saint Augustine’s epic work Civitas Dei (The City of God). Membership of the City of God rapidly grew to incorporate anyone and everyone from members of Caesar’s own household, down no doubt to the humblest pedagogue.

So we return to pedagogy, the humble practice of superintending the ‘school run’. In our Roman school, our precocious Roman child is learning of the superiority of the Roman Empire over the barbarian hordes beyond the border, and of Rome’s divine right to conquer and enslave the barbarian hordes. But on his way back from school, the Roman child is being told by his rather un-subservient pedagogue to have a bit of respect, and to follow him carefully, instead of carelessly straying out into the middle of the busy Roman road.

One aspect of ‘decolonising history’ is to understand where the historian is coming from. If the historian is invested in some colonialist project, he is not going to lend weight to the opinion of some humble pedagogue. But maybe that pedagogue is a humble historian in his own right, as a side hustle, and he believes in his own divine right to respect and tolerance by his unjust master, who beats him for daydreaming when he should be looking out for his son.