RENOVATION

II. – Notes for a course of pedagogy

1878- 1883

The author has set out in this work to give the Pedagogy the systematic arrangement that is needed to make it into a science. The executable plan is as follows:

To study, before all the psychological nature of the human being and his moral and legal relations;

To induce of its experimental and rational knowledge the relative laws to the system that they have been found in number of ten and seven; and in aim;

To deduce the practical part of the Pedagogy, applying these laws one by one to instructive education and to the direction of the school.

The author of empirical conceptualism of the pedagogues raises with precision and originality the following questions:

The determination and the exhibition of the general laws of the Pedagogy.

The distinction between general education and special education, and the special relations of these with the materials of instruction.

Greater extensiveness given to the idea of the general education and the correction of its divisions.

The distinction between intellectual education and instruction.

The correlation of the mental functions with relations and the phenomena that constitute the object of knowledge.

The distribution and new classification of the methods and their relations, not with the branches, but with the order of ideas that pertain to each branch.

The idea of the continuity in educational exercises and of education.

The delimitation of the theory of objectives of education.

The distribution between the ideas of writing, logography and hand writing, and the delimitation of the methodological doctrines that they correspond to.

The pedagogical doctrine in instructive education of some materials that do not exist as a habit of theoretical teaching and for the most part of special education.

The idea of the teacher and the student.

The ideas of political education and of a disciplinarian administration of the school, etcetera, etcetera.

The author thinks that, as a pedagogy consists in a set of empirical and incoherent rules, it has generated in our time the routine, the idea that the pedagogic science goes contrary to the routinized education of normal and elementary schools, and would be a cause of progress, not only by the new features that it entails, but also because it provides for professors and teachers criteria and scientific education, thanks to their ability to apply this knowledge in the correct way, by varied and unexpected circumstances.

American and European critics have been in agreement in their remarks on “Notes for a course of Pedagogy”, summed up in the following facts and appointments:

In 1880, “Pedagogic Works” was published. This volume contained three brief works called: I. How to teach. II. The teaching of language and III. Reform of Spanish spelling.

Many other publications like “Health and the School”, “Notions of public and private hygiene”, “Teaching reading and logography”, “Doctrine of the methods”, “The prizes and the scholastic verdict”, “Historic sketch of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay”, etcetera, etcetera.

One of Berra’s fundamental works, whose reading we specially recommend to all teachers, is titled “Natural laws of teaching” and was published in 1896.

In this the pedagogic schools that have been fighting for almost forty years are explained, one that has been championed by Leon Tolstoy and founded on deep respect for internal and external liberty in what one learns, and the most common in all places, that dictates that the student must submit completely to the authority of the teacher.

Dr. Berra, after examining the two schools, one authoritarian and one free, finds that both are partly correct and partly wrong: the falsity of the former in its rejection of all freedom in the alums; and in the latter […]