For the Purpose of the Pedagogue
Nicholas Rickards, Ph.D. Student
Faculty of Education, Brock University
University Lecturer & Middle School Teacher
What do Socrates, Barack Obama, and the headmaster of Hogwarts, Dumbledore, all have in common? They are all magi of pedagogy.
Pedagogy (phonetically pronounced “peh-duh-go-jee” or “peh-duh-gaw-jee”) is a noun often thrown about willy-nilly in the education profession but a word that has very little reverence within our common vocabulary, sometimes elusive even to the most educated among us. Derived from the Greek word ped for “child” and logia “to study”, the etymology of the word says a lot. Pedagogy refers to the process and method of instruction, a means of imparting knowledge, the study of or with children. We might go so far as to define it as the art of teaching.
Not solely reserved for teaching kids, pedagogy is the reason why — despite having infinite access to all knowledge always — we attend and participate in workshops, send our children to piano lessons, take our dogs to agility classes, or why we might follow a tutorial led by an instructor. Coaching is insufficient in describing this process because it misses the didactic nature of learning, exploring, and the craft of guidance that is active and reciprocal.
What this process requires, what this art needs, is a pedagogue (pronounce “peh-duh-gog”). From ped for “child” and agōgós to “guide” or “lead”, the pedagogue is one whose occupation is the teaching of our children. At worst, the pedagogue was a slave in ancient Greece, responsible for the education and general care of the master’s children. At best, “pedagogue” is now a pejorative used to describe the modern teacher left behind in time, static and fixed. He, she, or they resides in the same classroom, teaches the same thing, every year. He is pedantic, strict. He is both adored and disliked. Yet, he remains and endures. A pillar in our community, an anchor for our youth. Why?
Current discourse on AI like ChatGPT in education ranges from cautionary to completely apocalyptic. We need only look as far as the headlines in The Atlantic lamenting “The End of High-School English” (Herman, 2022), others warning us to “Prepare for the Texpocolypse” where “machine-written language becomes the norm and human-written prose the exception” (Kirschenbaum, 2023 par. 4). In his musings on the transition from homo sapien to homo deus, Yuval Harari (2015) argues that we should consider how AI and technology can affect all forms of work. Just last week, my colleagues and I received a cryptic, cautionary email encouraging us to “re-evaluate our assessments” because students are using AI “to help with projects, essays, presentations, etc.” Even now, I am unnerved by the idea this work could very well be subsumed into the insatiable, gaping maw of an AI trained to mimic the musings of a lowly Ph.D. student dubbed high-brow teacher.
Nevertheless, such concerns rely on pathos rather than logos. The rhetorical lean here is one of fear, a metonymic-slide evoking a hauntological spectre of the unknown. To whose benefit and of what benefit still remains unknown. However, what we should consider is that the apparition of automation is already upon us and it has been for some time; teachers are no longer the benefactors of knowledge. We do not have access to information that your children (our students) cannot obtain themselves. More Mentats of Frank Herbert’s Dune than the omniscient AI of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the modern pedagogue (the kind that deals with young people) is at best a curator of content, not a repository of information. That role has already been outsourced to the algorithms, the AI, the hivemind of YouTube. Students don’t need teachers to learn facts. And from this point on, they probably never will. What, then, do we make of the last piece of the board? The pedagogue is a pivotal player, and this is not checkmate.
Rather, maybe we should ask: for what do we make of the poetry?
Why?
The pedagogue is easy to miss because he is what logicians refer to as a necessary condition of the transition of knowledge, insight, debate, and critical thinking. Gravity exists whether you factor it or not. Like Atlas, the Titan of ancient Greek mythology, the pedagogue is both privileged and condemned in his task for eternity, the Sisyphean responsibility of passing on the baton of the episteme. He does this by teaching the same thing, in the same classroom, every year. The best pedagogues do it in such a way as to not pick a side or plan an opening. They just see the board (I’m still trying to figure this out).
We need only look as far back as 2020, while students were “online learning” at home, to remember that unfettered access to technology does not guarantee growth in children and young people (in fact, quite the opposite), that assuming relativism of the role of adults is dangerous, and that just because one is a parent does not mean one is a pedagogue. So long as we live under the reign of capital, so long as parents need to sell their labour and go to work, our children will need somewhere to go. We should remember that for better or worse, our children are going to attend school. What better place to send them to than the purveyors of understanding, the decoders of data, the philosophers of our young, the artists of our children.
Maybe, amidst the cacophony and alarm bells of technology and AI, through the debates and culture wars of curriculum, content, and critical race theory, we should reclaim a figure who upholds and conducts the apotheosis of a very special process. The one who witnesses the magical spark of pedagogy like the physicist who beholds the unconscionable neutron slam of atomic fission.
Maybe we should remember and reclaim the purpose of the pedagogue.
References
Kirschenbaum, M. (2023, March 8). Prepare for the Texpocolypse. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-chatgpt-writing-language-models/673318/
Harari, Y., N. (2015). Homo deus: A brief history of tomorrow. SignalBooks.
Herman, D. (2022, December 9). The End of High-School English. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/openai-chatgpt-writing-high-school-english-essay/672412/
