Franco Blezza

By Franco Blezza, Fiorella Paone, Martina Petrini and Regina Brandolini

Pedagogy, as a human and social science and as a profession, has a history that has its roots in classical Greece. It has had a particularly significant evolution as Sozialpädagogik in the eighteenth-century Mitteleuropa, as was the case for other social or psychological sciences and related professions. Today, it presents itself as an autonomous science, which is also a field of transposition and integration of inputs from other sciences and other forms of knowledge, to turn everything into specifically educational purposes. The profession, in turn, takes place at the level of the intermediate applicability between theory and practice and is highly compatible with other social and health professions and open to dialogue and teamwork. With these assumptions, it is able to respond positively to the specific and new educational problems that contemporary complexity urgently poses by calling this profession into question. The chapter offers an essential, rigorous, and organic presentation of one of the new branches of General Pedagogy: Professional Pedagogy. The pedagogist carries out a higher intellectual profession whose focus is education in all social domains, and in all ages of life. A solid theoretical and methodological basis allows the pedagogist to treat individual cases using lexicon, techniques, procedures, and conceptual and operational tools of a strictly specific nature.

Part of the book: The Essence of Academic Performance

By Franco Blezza

The aim is to offer a contribution to the problem of decision-making in the world of the higher intellectual professions, considering the pedagogy as a paradigmatic profession in the social, caring, and helping field. Pedagogy is an ancient science and profession, like medicine and jurisprudence, as it is known. The professional practice, in the social field as in the health and in other fields, consists in reconnecting the complex phenomenology of each singular particular case to a more limited number of general cases, theories, or disciplinary casuistries. It is a question of making a diagnosis, in a broad sense of the term. For this procedure, both the positive inductivist approach, from many facts to the generalization, and the idealistic and deductive approach, from general a priori ideas to the particular, are obsolete. We then examine the pragmatistic concept of abduction and, more generally, the contributions of the most up-to-date methodology, just as it is applied in the practice of professionals.

Part of the book: Application of Decision Science in Business and Management

By Franco Blezza

The profound changes that have occurred over the last few decades to the social, cultural and relational reality have added a new emphasis on pedagogy even though the emerging need for the profession of “pedagogist,” a new intellectual and social profession in common consideration, but which boasts over 2500 years of history and tradition as its reference science. This profession is at the top of pedagogical and education professions. Its conceptual and operational framework, its methodologies and procedures, its technical vocabulary and everything constituting an advanced professional knowledge were born and developed in the ancient times, beginning with its origins in classical Greece. The recent re-foundations can be found in the Sozialpädagogik, in the same Mittleuropean cultural environment where other social professions of recent birth have their ground. Re-founders of this science and profession were Mager, Diesterweg, Natorp and Durkheim Pedagogist. In this paper, we summarized the essential features of this profession, its methodology, its principles, its practical procedures, with special attention to the problems of couple and family, and those belonging to its initial education and its recognition by law which in Italy have been solved only at the end of the year 2017. The branch of General Pedagogy that includes this subject is called Professional Pedagogy.

Part of the book: Education Systems Around the World