The didactic

learning at Goethe's knee

Lytle Shaw

pp. 194-204

in: Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr (eds), Poetry & pedagogy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

In one still influential model of progressive educational theory, pedagogy would be a self-reflexive discourse about the methods and aims of teaching, while didacticism—with its traditional links to rote repetition of precepts—would be a phase in educational history that we are now, thankfully, beyond: the phase of teachers. For it was teachers who devised precepts about writing, and who set students to work memorizing them. And there was more to dislike about teachers, of course. Teachers also enforced 'standard English" as an abstract authoritarian value, independent of context.

Cited authors

Goethe Johann Wolfgang