Controversial Questions of the Methodological Profile of Pedagogy

The controversy about the scientific profile of pedagogy is basically a controversy regarding its method. It is also strongly influenced by the conception of the pedagogical image of man, for man and his development is the sense of all pedagogical processes. Representatives of the unilaterally finalistic conception of pedagogy prefer investigating aim components and teleological relationships. In socialist pedagogy (the determinist point of view of Marxist- Leninist (philosophy enables causal and teleological thinking to be joined. The author shows -that bourgeois pedagogy was unable to resolve the dispute between the so-called understanding and explaining pedagogy. Nor was it able to answer the question whether pedagogy which refuses to use the traditional processes of classical natural science can be an explaining science at all. In this connection the author discusses the nature of scientific fact in pedagogy. He refers to Lenin’s ideas about the character of scientific fact and about the way of dealing with facts. An asset of the Leninist era is the substantiation of the dialectical character of modern science, for which facts become dead material unless studied in broader contexts and as a whole. The author shows the necessity of the structurally systemic approach in pedagogy, which was first used in educational theory and practice by A. S. Makarenko, and to which considerable attention is also paid by Soviet scientists. The ambiguity and to a certain extent the vagueness of pedagogical phenomena cannot hinder pedagogy from becoming an explaining science. It is in keeping with the specific features of pedagogy, which Makarenko called the most dialectical, the most elastic and the most varied science, that the character Itself of its explanations is complex, (multi-dimensional and dialectical. The author analyses the relationship of the causal and the final approach in pedagogy •in its dialectical unity and takes note of its reflection in the methodological profile of this science. Today an ever-increasing number of arguments tend to promote an integrated conception of pedagogy as an empirically ascertaining and theoretical science. The controversy about the method of Marxist pedagogy is, last but not least, also a controversy about its logical structure, about the application of the unity of induction and deduction In pedagogical research.