Pedagogy

Pedagogy, both the discipline and the word itself, has had a tortured history. It has been used as a synonym for practice and acquired negative connotations that confuse it with pedantry, conferring low status on those associated with it (schoolteachers and professors of education). In the 1880s, for example, most university professors of pedagogy made a concerted effort to replace the term with education. In the 1960s, however, pedagogy surfaced again as an alternative to education in academic departments that had once openly ridiculed it. But pedagogy's fractured meaning cannot be explained…