1 Introduction

The purpose of this work is to revisit the primary pedagogies of modernity, up to the contemporary theories of education, because it is believed that by taking this route, one can, as in front of a mirror, recognize the didactic identity, i.e., the praxis of the teacher’s work in contemporary times. This historical journey is not intended to be a collection of chronological and abstract facts presented as an empiricist succession. It is a bibliographical analysis reflecting the teacher’s didactic, practical, and theoretical approach in the 21st century.

To this end, this writing addresses the various pedagogical conceptions that have evolved from modernity to contemporaneity in educational work, reflecting on the underlying meanings and different approaches to education and analyzing educational thinking. It also seeks to understand the development of pedagogy as a scientific discipline, especially in the 20th century. The methodological approach adopted in this writing is qualitative, based on bibliographical research.

It is imperative to recognize that the evolution of pedagogical concepts does not occur linearly but instead as the result of a constant dialogue between advances in society and the human sciences. The transition to the modern context today has brought to light a series of challenges and complications in the field of education. The contemporary pedagogical approach is influenced by cultural diversity, which demands a re-evaluation of traditional educational practices.

In this vein, it is necessary to emphasize that we will not be starting from Comenius and his “Didática Magna” but from conceptions that represent ruptures in the pedagogical thinking of modernity to draw closer to the thinking, concepts, and propositions for Pedagogy. In order to understand the pedagogical propositions, one must initially recognize the work’s intentionality. To this end, we intend to start from Marx’s ontological definition, explained by ^{Lukács (2012}, p. 286), according to which man acts on external nature and modifies it and, at the same time, transforms his human nature, i.e., work, mediated by instruments and signs, is how human beings produce their humanity.

In this sense, education is also an activity that intentionally mediates human activity, aiming to transform natural and social reality. As if imbricated in this process of mediation, work and education converge to build the specificity of man’s existence, his humanity, and the constitution of the world of culture through human experience, historically accumulated and culturally organized to be communicated to new generations (^{LIBÂNEO, 2010}, p. 141).

In the historical construction of humanity, work and education gradually delineate themselves and acquire particularities, but they intersect and cannot be lost or distanced due to their ontological genesis. ^{Libâneo (2010}, p. 141) explains that for human experience to be communicated to new generations, social groups organize “educational actions with the purpose of inserting individuals into the culturally organized environment. This is the task we call education, a task to be carried out by Pedagogy”².

In its emphasis on the individual and the discourse for freedom, the Modern Age paradoxically, in its historical development, represents a period marked by the alienation of subjects, totalitarianism, exploitation at work, control, and the social contract. In the name of rationalism and liberalism, theories proliferated, and different areas of knowledge were unveiled in search of their essences, their objects of study, seeking to understand social phenomena, work, culture, and history. Thus, the various areas of knowledge have been structured, and Pedagogy, in particular, sets out in search of its space, focusing on the objectification of educational work.

For ^{Cambi (1999}, pp. 38-39), the Modern Age, in its complexity, is the most direct interlocutor of our contemporaneity, on which we must “fixate our gaze.” It is the period of radical rupture with the Middle Ages in all fields: political, economic, social, and cultural. A phase ideologically marked by the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

It should be emphasized that in this revolutionary scenario, Pedagogy strives to develop an education for modernity, thus configuring its secular, rational, scientific character, oriented towards social and civil values, critical of traditions, institutions, beliefs, and educational praxis, and, above all, in the commitment to reform the society that is constituted. The pedagogy of the Enlightenment developed in Europe. It proposed a revision of family, social, intellectual, and religious education, with authors such as Rousseau and Pestalozzi proposing a new Pedagogy,

theoretically freer, socially more active, practically more articulate and effective, built according to new ideal models (bourgeois: giving life to a subject-individual and placing him, constructively and at the same time critically, in society) and oriented above all towards social and civil ends (^{CAMBI, 1999}, p. 330)³

Nevertheless, above all, Marx unveils the organizational aspect of the modern world, centered on work and social control, showing that in certain situations, the work done, instead of guaranteeing the realization of the subject, becomes its negation and, in certain social-historical conditions, is transformed into its alienation. Marx distinguishes alienation from objectification since alienation is everything that mutilates and prevents the development of the human essence, which is not a historical construction. The total man, rich in objectification, guarantees reproduction, so the system of objectification guarantees human existence (^{PAULO NETTO, 2002}).

Thus, from the perspective of unveiling the constitution of pedagogical work in the modern historical context, this text seeks to dialog and reflect on its propositions and intentions and, above all, its mirroring in the 21st century.

2 The meanings and conceptions of education

^{Libâneo (2010}) elucidates that, given the etymological meaning of the term education, some authors point to the Latin origin of two terms: Educare (to feed, care for, create, referring to plants, animals, and children); Educere (to take out of, lead into, change a state). The term Educatio (education) synthesizes the two Latin terms: “creation, treatment, care that is applied to learners in order to adapt their behavior to the expectations and demands of a given social environment” (idem, p.72⁴). Thus, in a broad sense, education is a human and social practice materialized in effective action for the formation and development of individuals in concrete socio-cultural and institutional conditions, implying peculiar procedures and results aimed at qualitative changes in students’ learning.

According to ^{Libâneo (2010}), in the structural-functionalist conception, education aims to adapt the behavior of individuals and groups to specific social requirements (family, school, church, factory, among others). In this sense, it is the educator responsibility to transmit principles, values, and customs to children, young people, and adults to adapt and adjust to society. In this conservative understanding, education is a reproducer of social life, as it always has the same function for the same society.

According to the author, the critical view ruptures the concept of individuality since the individual and environmental spheres are linked to the concrete conditions of material and social life. In this context, education is an activity that intentionally mediates practical human activity, operating the theory-practice link aiming to transform natural and social reality. In this way, the educational process is a social phenomenon of contradictions in the struggles between groups and social classes, so the idea of human formation is configured in the clashes of social praxis.

The critical and historical-social perspectives developed within the socialist-Marxist conception have as their crucial idea the overcoming of the contradiction between the individual and social ends of education. In the link between the educational and the global social practices, the fact that it represents the dominant interests and transmits the ideology that responds to them emerges. In these conceptions, human praxis can mediate the rupture of reproductive educational practices, (re)creating new practices so that individuals have the appropriate knowledge to understand power relations and, consequently, act in the political formation of the dominated classes (^{LIBÂNEO, 2010}). In this view, education contents (knowledge, skills, procedures, values) are constituted in space, time, culture, and social relations.

Complementing ^{Saviani (2011}, p. 20), for the Historical-Critical conception, “education is the act of producing, directly and intentionally, in each individual, the humanity that is produced historically and collectively, by all men” is therefore, according to the author, a requirement “of, and for, human work.”⁵

Therefore, every intentional educational practice corresponds to one pedagogy or pedagogies (family, professional, etc.). Specifically, school pedagogy investigates structures, facts, processes, and contexts relating to school education, instruction, and teaching. It assumes attributes that bring it closer to other institutions outside its framework. It thus requires that its objectives, contents, and methods open themselves to broader relationships between the individual and the human, social, physical, ecological, cultural, and economic exterior world (^{LIBÂNEO, 2010}).

3 Modern, secular, and rational pedagogy

Secular education and pedagogical rationalism were constituted, especially in the 18th century, and its greatest exponent was Jean-Jaques Rousseau (1712-1778). Born in Geneva, Rousseau articulated his pedagogical thinking according to two complementary models, Emilio and The Social Contract (published simultaneously in 1762). The first is aimed at men and the second at citizens. The latter model approaches the need for socialized and regulated education under the state’s intervention.

In the pedagogical novel Emilio, the central theme is the natural education of man, characterized by the essential needs of the child, his pace of growth, and the appreciation of the different stages of human development until adulthood. As ^{Cambi (1999}, p. 346) explains, Emilio presents a “Copernican Revolution,” which places the individual at the center of educational action. Cambi (1999, p.346-347) presents the three Rousseaunian aspects of pedagogy: puericentrism, motivated learning, and the dialectic of authority and freedom.

1. the discovery of childhood as an autonomous age gifted with specific characteristics and purposes, quite different from those of adulthood [...] 2. the link between motivation and learning placed at the center of Emilio’s intellectual and moral formation and which requires that, when teaching any notion, it always starts from its usefulness to the child and from a precise reference to their concrete experience [...] 3. the attention paid to the antinomy and contradiction of the educational relationship, seen by Rousseau as sometimes decidedly oriented towards antinomy, sometimes necessarily conditioned by heteronomy; between freedom and authority, in the educational act, there is no exclusion, but only a subtle and also paradoxical dialectic [...] (^{CAMBI, 1999}, p. 346-347)⁶.

A large part of contemporary pedagogy contains the three Rousseaunian aspects explained by ^{Cambi (1999}). In Emilio, Rousseau openly and consciously polemicizes against the pedagogies of his time, especially those developed in Jesuit colleges and those applied to aristocratic education. He criticizes Jesuit pedagogy for its artificial, intellectualist, bookish, and authoritarian education; as for aristocratic education, he criticizes the unnatural preparation of children by their parents, aimed exclusively at good manners and the art of oratory.

After Rousseau, the view of childhood, the role of the educator, and awareness of the structures of social function and politics changed. Thus, many theorists dedicated to understanding the pedagogical act for this new modern subject-individual looked at Rousseau’s pedagogy and outlined new contours, conceptions, and theoretical applications for educational practice. Among them, Pestalozzi and Dewey stand out.

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), philosopher, theologian, and educator born in Zurich (Switzerland), was influenced by Rousseau’s thinking in his youth. He lived in the context of the French Revolution (1789/1799) and the Swiss Revolution (1798) and participated intensely in particular moments of German thinking, such as the political and social reform in 1815 advocated by the German Confederation movement. He was a founder, teacher, and principal of schools, and his ideas “demarcated a branch of traditional pedagogy called Intuitive Pedagogy, whose basic characteristic is to offer sensitive data to the perception and observation of students” (^{FREITAS & ZANATTA, 2006}p. 2)⁷. He developed most of his works in intellectual education and, in 1801, concentrated his ideas on education in a book entitled “How Gertrude Teaches Her Children,” in which he explained his pedagogical method. Around 1825, she wrote “The Tale of the Swan” (a pedagogical testimony) and letters about children’s early education.

Pestalozzi’s romantic pedagogy was based on sensualist psychology and argued that mental life is structured on sensorial data (^{FREITAS, ZANATTA, 2006}). For him, learning should be natural, spontaneous, and without coercion since the child develops from the inside out and is a pure being. Pestalozzi presented organic development as a fundamental principle for reforming education, which had to follow natural laws: first, the intellectual, resulting from man’s relationship with the environment; second, the moral and religious (ethics), based on man’s relationship with other human beings and with God; and third, the physical, expressed in motor activities.

He emphasized that these three aspects work concurrently and must be in harmony with the organism, which is why they are considered mind/heart/hand, according to the principle of integral education. For this thinker, learning should be mainly conducted by the student, based on practical experimentation, intellectual, sensory, and emotional experience of knowledge - the idea of “learning by doing” (^{AZEVEDO, 2013}, p. 34-35).

Pestalozzi opposed old-fashioned education because it did not enable students to increase their power. It only taught words, and he believed children acquired concepts/ideas, culture, and knowledge without any connection to reality. From his perspective, the educational act must take place spontaneously so that education fosters the self-development of individuals’ inner energies by complying with the personality’s laws. As in Rousseau’s Emilio, the teacher contributes nothing to growth; he plants and waters, but knowledge occurs according to nature. Knowledge of nature is the center of the curriculum. Also, it should develop “in and through the ordinary activities of life” (^{EBY, 1962}, p. 397)⁸, starting from the known to the unknown/new, the concrete to the abstract, and the particular to the general.

The Pestalozzian school should be a general institution, open to all citizens, and a protagonist in the democracy of the people (^{AZEVEDO, 2013}). As ^{Cambi (1999}, p. 420) explains:

We can say that Pestalozzi, better than Rousseau, grasped pedagogy and education in their problematic historical centrality and density. This is why he remains one of the great masters of contemporary pedagogy (^{CAMBI, 1999}, p. 420)⁹.

However, the Intuitive Pedagogy formulated by Pestalozzi failed to overcome the “passive position of the student in assimilating the knowledge transmitted through the use of the senses” (^{FREITAS, ZANATTA 2006}, p. 3)¹⁰. Finally, ^{Gadotti (2003}, p. 93) observes that this new and revolutionary educational theory of Enlightenment pedagogical thought, which affirmed the rights of individuals and dealt with the categories of humanity, culture, and reason, “at the dimming of the lights,” did not guarantee the equality of men with its project, as some ended up receiving more education than others, which produced a different education for the dominant class and the workers.

John Dewey (1859, 1952) was born in Burlington, in the US state of Vermont. He studied arts and philosophy and became a professor at the University of Minnesota. He wrote about philosophy, education, art, religion, morality, the theory of knowledge, psychology, and politics. His interest in pedagogy originated from the observation that the schools of his time were still primarily guided by traditional values, had yet to incorporate the discoveries of psychology, and had not kept pace with political and social advances. Loyal to the democratic cause, he took part in various social movements. He created an experimental elementary school in the Department of Pedagogy at the University of Chicago. He began to organize work that provided the basis for his later studies in the books “Education and Society,” published in 1899, and “Education and Democracy,” in 1916.

Dewey opposed the traditional education system, developing the theory of the New School, where he proposed a teaching-learning model focused on the student as the subject of this process. The theory also predicted that learning should start by problematizing the student’s previous knowledge. Dewey’s thinking is intrinsically related to his conception of knowledge. Thus, John Dewey’s thinking stems from his epistemology (^{CUNHA, 2008}) and is part of North American pragmatism.

For Dewey, as a social institution, the school must be geared towards the students’ interests based on their natural curiosity. The teaching content must be integrated, based on a logical organization linked to students’ lives, interests, and needs, to develop their potential and responsibilities concerning society. The curriculum, thought of in this way, is based on situations or problems in community life. The concept of education through work is present in his work, not as vocational education, but in the view that it is necessary to know the world of work as the starting point for understanding man in history. Above all, he values scientific education because the concept of science serves as a model for educational methodology at all stages of education.

According to ^{Brubacher (1961}, pp.26-27), Dewey distinguishes five stages in this process: 1) Activity - the teacher begins his work with something that the child is already engaged in doing. 2) Problem - due to some unforeseen circumstance that interrupts the continuity of the activity, the problem arises. Once they realize the problem’s existence and have defined it, the teacher and student set about the next step. 3) Data collection - at this stage, the teacher and student look for data or information that can enable them to overcome whatever frustrates the original activity. 4) Hypotheses - using the data or information gathered, the teacher and student formulate a hypothesis for a specific solution to the problem. 5) Experimentation - this phase consists of putting the hypothesis into practice to prove it or check whether the consequences corroborate the predicted results. In this way, Dewey brings the scientific method used in the laboratory into the classroom. Dewey’s work influenced several countries, including the Escola Nova movement in Brazil with Anísio Teixeira.

Paradoxically, ^{Saviani (2008}) observes that, instead of solving the problem of marginalization concerning schooling, the Nova Escola aggravated it since, by emphasizing the quality of teaching, it shifted the axis of concern from the political to the technical-pedagogical sphere, fulfilling at the same time a dual function: to contain the expansion of schooling within limits that the dominant interests could support and to develop a type of teaching that suited those interests.

4 The psycho-pedagogical turn in the second half of the 20th century

Pedagogy in the 20th century was substantially influenced by the ideological, political, and scientific growth inspired by the matrices of knowledge, especially Durkheim, Weber, and Marx (respectively pragmatism, idealism, and Historical-Dialectical Theory) and has thus redefined its role, both as experimental research and epistemological reflection (^{CAMBI, 1999}).

According to ^{Cambi (1999}, pp.608-609), the great interpreters of the psycho-pedagogical turn “on learning and the construction of language and concepts in research into the theory of instruction that mediates between learning and teaching”¹¹ were Piaget and Vygotsky. With these researchers, pedagogy turned its attention to the problems of learning and instruction.

In order to understand the critical vision of education, in which the individual and environmental spheres are united with the concrete conditions of material and social life, we begin by studying the centrality of Vygotsky’s thinking.

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934) was born in Orsha, Belarus, graduated in law from Moscow University, and became, through his studies, a philologist and semiologist. Based on the theoretical and methodological propositions of Historical-Dialectical Materialism, developed by Marx and Engels, he sought to understand the phenomena of the human mind, thus laying the foundations for a Marxian psychology. In partnership with pedagogues, psychologists, neuropsychologists, and especially with Leontiev and Luria (from 1924 to 1934), he formulated the theoretical foundations of Historical-Cultural Psychology, which aims to investigate the genesis and development of the human psyche as “socially, historically and culturally mediated processes, encompassing cognitive processes, emotions, consciousness, activity, language, human development and learning” (^{LIBÂNEO & FREITAS, 2007}, p. 40)¹².

Despite his premature death at the age of 37 from tuberculosis, Vygotsky left numerous theoretical contributions. Highlights include “The Instrument and the Symbol in Child Development” (1930), “The History of the Development of Higher Psychological Functions” (1931), and “Thought and Language” (1934), among other works. Due to censorship under the Stalinist regime, Vygotsky was ignored by the West but was rediscovered in 1956 (the date of the Soviet reissue of “Thought and Language”), and in 1962, the same book was published in the United States (1930s). In Brazil, it was only in 1984 with the publication of the book “Social Formation of the Mind.”

The centrality of Vygotsky’s theory refers to how higher psychological processes are constituted and, according to his studies, these processes occur from the historical and cultural relationship shared between subjects, mediated through instruments and signs (especially language), which are internalized and objectified. Vygotsky (2003, p. 71) distinguishes that instruments are used externally for work in nature, while language is oriented internally. The combination of these two phenomena operates in the child’s psychological formation. Vygotsky also investigated the link between these mediation activities in the development of phylogenesis and ontogenesis.

According to ^{Vygotsky (2003}, p. 75), these operations with signs, which he calls internalization, consist of a series of transformations that begin through an external activity that is reconstructed internally; thus, it is a process that begins interpersonally, on a social or inter-psychological level and is transformed into an intrapersonal process, i.e., to the child’s inner level - intra-psychological. This transformation is a continuous and culturally reconstructed result and, above all, according to Vygotsky (²⁰⁰³, p. 76), “The internalization of socially rooted and historically developed activities constitutes the characteristic aspect of human psychology [...]”¹³.

In this sense, the relationship between the constitution of intelligence and learning in the child, studied by Vygotsky and his collaborators, generates a new outline for pedagogical reflection because in order to teach, one must distinguish the Zone of Actual Development, i.e., the psychic level already reached by the child, from another indicator which is the Zone of Proximal Development, “which is manifested by what the child is not yet capable of doing alone but is already capable of doing in collaboration with a more experienced partner” (^{MELLO, 2004}, p. 137)¹⁴. In this way, the child’s learning occurs when teaching focuses on the Zone of Proximal Development collaboratively between the educator and the child, surpassing their level of development. To this end, the school must direct its educational work toward the stages of development that children need to reach, motivating them and pushing them toward new knowledge. It depends on the educator to plan their work competently, proposing activities with groups of children of different ages and levels of development and, above all, in an active way from the educator’s point of view.

From the perspective of the Vygotskyan school, other theoretical models emerged that were also significant for psychology and teaching, among them the studies of A. R. Luria in the 1930s, with the expansion of theories on Neuropsychology and Neurolinguistics and A. N. Leontiev with Activity Theory. A third generation of Historical-Cultural Theory took shape in the 1960s-70s with V. V. Davídov and developmental theory, also based on Leontiev and Elkonin. New debates on Vygotsky’s propositions continue, and specifically in Brazil, studies of Historical-Cultural Theory, Socio-Historical-Cultural, or even Socio-Historical-Cultural Activity have proliferated, presenting new contributions to contemporary schools (^{LIBÂNEO & FREITAS, 2007}).

^{Castorina (1995}, p. 12), in his comparative analysis, points out that Piaget develops a universalist/individualist theory and, therefore, produces an active, abstract, and epistemic subject, “which makes learning a derivative of development itself” (idem, p. 12)¹⁵. In contrast, Vygotsky’s Historical-Cultural Theory of Development proposes an active and mainly interactive subject by postulating the formation of higher psychic functions as internalization mediated by culture.

5 Possible considerations

By framing the primary modern pedagogies, it can be inferred that their projects propose the autonomy and objectivity of the subject through rational activity. Their theorists also point to an understanding of mental development, the apprehension and re-creation of scientific and technological knowledge, and the fundamental rights of humanity to be communicated to new generations. A universal, secular, and rational education is projected from Rousseau to Vygotsky and his contemporaries. However, these theories differ in their epistemological stance toward the subject and object of knowledge and their approach to the educational act and its relationship with culture, work, politics, society, objectives, and contents.

Contemporary educational work is surrounded by propositions that present new attitudes and confrontations in the so-called post-modern context. Other names for this scenario, such as post-industrial, post-market, and knowledge societies, are also given. In general, what is implicit in this discourse is a set of economic, political, scientific, technological, information, and communication transformations based on a new idea of human reason considered alongside the affective, moral, cultural, aesthetic, and, in particular, communicational dimensions, bearing in mind the centrality and linguistic plurality for understanding different social, gender and ethnic groups (^{LIBÂNEO, 2005}, pp. 42-44).

In this new way of thinking, educational practices are reduced to linguistic interpretation of the school universe. It is the teacher’s responsibility to analyze the student’s discourse and reality, dialoguing with their daily lives and the different types of knowledge in the curriculum. The universality of culture and man presented in modern pedagogies has been deconstructed to favor diversity, thus structuring culturally different schools and, above all, different pedagogies that privilege human subjectivity.

Despite today’s modern discourse, work and education contribute to man’s historical, social, and material constitution. Pedagogy also proposes practical materialization for the formation and development of individuals, considering their concrete socio-cultural and institutional conditions, which implies specific procedures and results that seek qualitative changes in students’ learning.

^{Duarte (2008}) draws attention to the fact that pedagogical theories centered on learning to learn, including, in this sense, the studies of Piaget, Vygotsky, and their scholars, represent bourgeois liberal pedagogies. However, criticism of this conception, according to the author as mentioned above, comes from a critical analysis of bourgeois society in the contemporary educational field and, from the point of view of Didactics, bourgeois educational thinking has never overcome the models of the traditional school and the Nova Escola.

This is the educator’s challenge: to (re)encounter in the historical path of pedagogy the reflection of their educational and pedagogical praxis because it is only possible to theoretically overcome bourgeois liberal pedagogies with the actual overcoming of the contradictory social reality from which these pedagogies were born.

Recognizing pedagogical work and its importance in shaping human culture and unveiling this practice in contemporary times means understanding that the modern project is perpetuated, regardless of the various cognitive guises, as explained by ^{Saviani (2013}, p.440), neoescolanovismo, neoconstructivism, neotechnicism and, above all, under the social condition of exploitation and class contradiction. Finally, it depends on the teacher to recognize that their work has the function, as ^{Ventura (2010}) indicates, of recovering their condition as a social subject, of reading the truth hidden by the current mode of production and class condition.