Pedagogical Lexicon and Educational Practice

Abstract

The article highlights the semantic contradiction that permeates today’s educational discourse and represents the cultural background as well as the primary obstacle to understanding the current educational crisis. Pedagogy, in fact, reads, explains and suggests solutions by making use of terms that, with respect to their original meaning, have been weakened in their semantic value. This disjunction between words and their meaning, a strong and recognisable one in pedagogical discourse, deeply affects the very idea of education as well as teaching practice and methodologies.

A reflection on the current weariness of the pedagogical debate comes with a cry for responsibility, that of striving for a cultural reconciliation between the words (and discourse) of pedagogy and human reality, and that of finding epistemiologies that can encompass and understand human, social and cognitive complexity.