Foundations of pedagogy: discipline or school ethos?

This article examines a long-standing tension in the history of pedagogy arising from two competing conceptions of education and its organization: mechanistic and humanistic. The familiar opposition between natural-scientific and humanistic paradigms is revisited to encourage reflection on the legacy of classical didactics. We analyze the historical conditions under which didactics emerged, when scientific explanation relied on mechanics and mathematics. These mathematical and mechanistic modes of understanding shaped J. Comenius’s design of a didactic system. From the broader rationalist tradition, we highlight G. Leibniz as an emblematic case of the claim that a mathematical calculus can organize reality. The resulting “mechanical order” and numeration informed the structuring of time and space in schools and underpinned school discipline. A synoptic account of disciplinary education is provided with reference to M. Foucault. The contrast between disciplinary pedagogy and humanistic pedagogy is framed as “mechanism vs. organism,” “mechanical aggregate vs. organic system,” drawing on arguments by the Russian philosopher and psychologist A. Arsenyev. We then consider school designs that treat the school as an organic system, using the cases of Moscow Experimental School No. 91 and the Univers School in Krasnoyarsk. To explain how education is organized in these schools, we use A. Tubelsky’s concept of the school’s uklad – rendered here as school ethos – and relates it to what English-language scholarship terms the hidden curriculum, that is, the formative influence of the school environment and informal life on students’ worldviews. The article concludes with a description of the project by I. Frumin and B. Elkonin implemented at Univers, titled the “School of Growing Up.” Its core idea is to differentiate age-bound and all-age spaces within the school. Agebounded space is organized around staged growing up; age features are reflected in the regulation of classes and in the architecture and design of learning spaces. All-age space is a shared arena for inter-age communication and encounter.