reification and reduction of educational thought which together with the trend that
an expertise in pedagogik is not needed in order to teach within‘the core of
educational sciences’, is an obvious risk that a reductionist understanding of edu-
cation for teachers becomes solidified.
12.4 The Marginalization of Pedagogik(K)
As for our third point, modern education in Sweden as well as in Norway is a
combination of educational psychology and social engineering (Säfström 1994 ). It
was established as a response to the need to build a new society after the Second
World War, a society for the (liberal) democratic man, and the‘welfare’state.
Influences come mainly from United States of America, and Swedish social
researchers were trained in the emergingfield of statistical based research in the
USA. In Sweden, the prominent social engineers in education come from military
psychology and the solutions they established on the problem of building a school
system for the new age, were based in what was called differential psychology (see
further Säfström 1994 ). For Torsten Husén, a majorfigure in establishing modern
pedagogik, pedagogik was not at all a science in its traditional sense, that is, it was
not a‘discipline’forming traditions of thought and knowledge but rather a response
to pressing societal problems that needed to be solved by scientific methods (see
Husén 1988 ).
The Anglosaxian tradition of education, in contrast to the tradition of pedagogik
(k), is not an independent and autonomous academic discipline, it is rather
dependent on other disciplines, in particular psychology, sociology, philosophy and
history. Neither Hammer (in Sweden) nor Anderssen (in Norway) considered
pedagogik(k) as a hyphen-subject in which pedagogik was completely dependent
on other disciplines. True, they both used different philosophers in their theoretical
works, but that did not transform the works into some kind of philosophy of
education. The reason being that their theorizing was not philosophical by nature.
Rather than theorizing on the terms and premises of philosophy, they theorized on
the terms and premises of pedagogik(k). They simply made use of pedagogical
thinking, which is a completely unique way of thinking, quite different from other
discipline’s ways of thinking, including philosophy (Saeverot 2014 ). In contrast to
the Anglosaxian tradition of education, where it is impossible to examine education
based on pedagogik(k) the Hammer-Anderssen tradition of pedagogik(k) makes it
possible to investigate education based on pedagogik(k). It is the language of
pedagogik(k) that steers the thinking. Unlike the Anglosaxian tradition of educa-
tion, where the validization of education so to speak goes through the four major
disciplines mentioned above, the Hammer-Anderssen tradition of pedagogik(k) is
structured in such a way that the validization of education goes directly through
pedagogik(k).
Since the mid 1990s, however, this way of structuring pedagogik(k) has become
marginalized in Sweden and Norway. The reason for this is that pedagogik(k) has,
12 Doing Harm to Educational Knowledge: The Struggle over Teacher... 187