**1. Introduction: a historical contextualization**

Education has faced in the second half of the twentieth century a heavy crisis, which is not finished yet. It is the correspondent crisis society and culture have met in the same period. It was a real epochal transition, from an Evo that lasted less than 2 s to one that, perhaps, was not yet started.

This crisis involves major social issues such as family and, conceptually before it, the couple and genres. We may adopt in this regard the inclusive concept of 'system' that was introduced in Italy since the 1968 dispute [1] to indicate the whole of sociocultural phenomenon. 'The system' had a profound crisis and owing to it, we understood how and to what extent the system was relying on a peculiar way of raising a family, of living partnership, on a particular construction of genders (i.e., polarized to their extreme extent, functional to the entire system, besides being the very root of it).

The basic features of this crisis were represented, quite obviously, by the dizzying acceleration of the evolutionary rhythms, by the evident extension of the explicit lifelong education, by the multiplication of access to and dissemination of information, by the generalization of mobility, until the current globalization took place.

In times, chronologically not too far away, although culturally remote, one could at least suggest an education consisting of the replication of some set of patterns. In order that it might actually work, an explicit kind of family education limited to a relatively short period of human life, about a dozen years, and an evolutionary rhythm not too high was necessary. In other words, what we will call 'a quasi-static hypothesis' with a transfer from thermodynamics would have shown its value: that is to say, becoming a process that could be strictly treated as if 'the system' were in every moment of its evolution in a static equilibrium. For these reasons, evolution need not happen according to frantic rhythms, as it would have happened sooner or later, but effectively along those centuries. In addition, the gaps were not to be too long, in compliance with an explicit education that began in childhood and ended, as it was claimed, in adolescence.

### **2. A social revolution: new paradigms of couple and family required**

The evolution that occurred includes a profound *shift* of *paradigm* with a Kuhnian meaning [2]. We are facing a '*scientific revolution,*' which was born more or less around the 1960s or shortly before, and whose problematic content is a big part of our dealing today, and for the next decades. The educational problems posed are direct and mainly dwell on a specific professional sector.

We are problematically leaving a historical age that lasted about two centuries, or less, which properly came after the one that was historiography called 'Modern Age'. The term 'Postmodern' introduced by Jean-François Lyotard [3] was impressive, and effective, to appoint the end of the previous age. The term "post" resulted totally inappropriate and misleading when applied to the history and the humanities. It could have a partial success as well as ephemeral in the domains for which it was coined, that is, in literature and architecture, but had no plausibility in the human sciences and in pedagogy in particular.

The Postmodern Age, put properly next to the 'Modern' one, so-called by history and culture (sixteenth-seventeenth-eighteenth century, about), had its roots in the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century: in a definite set of ideas and orientations, economic and social upheavals, and spread in the West during the following century. In this specific regard, Der Wiener Kongress formed an unrealistic restoration of political regimes specifically 'modern,' that is to say absolute, which no longer had any cultural, economic and social coherence.

The nineteenth-twentieth century society had as its primary cell a peculiar type of family called by Durkheim "*famille conjugale*" [4, 5] and by Le Play "*famille nucleaire*" [6]. Its acceptance, with all the heavy sacrifices which involved especially the woman, went hand in hand with the claim that it was the kind of family that 'existed since the ancient times' (or 'natural'), 'traditional' or 'the result of millennia of civilization,' apparently powerful and mutually contradictory and that therefore could only have had a rhetorical function of persuasion and compliance. In fact, it was an absolutely dated and contextualized phenomenon, with its specificity: this paradigm of family completely peculiar and absolutely original has taken the place of the two pre-existing paradigms that remained in the West for many centuries: that is, the *noble* and *patriarchal* paradigm.

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*Pedagogist as Social Professional: Sozialpädagogik and Professional Pedagogy*

The paradigm of nuclear family postulated (and required) a particular type of couple, the so-called overlapping couple, built through polarization of the genders pushed to the extreme, enhanced by a target education in line with its goals.

The dominant educational paradigm in the short Evo XIX-XX was transmissive and consisted of the replication from one generation to another of strict and fixed idealized models, that the teacher had first received and made his own, in such an integral way to feel unconditionally committed to replicate them as closely and impersonally as possible with her/his pupils. Moreover, she/he was considered uncritically entitled to use any tool she/he considered fit for the purpose.

The current information and mobility would be enough to explain the practical impossibility of a transmissive education, especially if focused on fixed models, and this is because these would have lost soon every plausibility and would have proved outdated, overcome by some others as time went by, at least before the end of a dozen years or slightly more. In addition, the longest lifespan of the 'explicit' education in a reality characterized by an increasingly frantic and quick evolutionary rhythm would make obsolete any model or fixed principle, despite its primal validity and soundness, to be checked by information and interpersonal mobility

**4. The new social need of the professional at the top of the pedagogical** 

This particular crisis today is clearly a problematic situation for pedagogy: we refer to a pedagogy that, properly and by its very nature, cannot have any form of detachment, just like, for example, the separation of the historian or what has been

In cases like these, it is manifested more clearly than elsewhere in the application framework that is its true essence, not reducible to merely speculative, philosophical or 'theoretical' thought, but inseparable from taking charge and care of whosoever is going to be educated, in any interpersonal relationship and as a social requirement, and from the organic relationship with the experience of the object of

This, among other things, is more consistent with the etymology of a term [7] that is present and common in Romance languages, as well as in German and Slavic languages and also in Hungarian, Finnish, Basque or Albanian, while it is still facing difficulties in English. We should not forget that the same term has appeared in the

This means that pedagogy is characterized more clearly today than it was in the past, as a domain of study that can be called upon to express its own profession: an upper intellectual profession, working in the social and in all of its instances, whose most proper name is "Pedagogist" (Pädagoge, paedagogist…not to be confused with

Strictly speaking, the profession of the pedagogist has emerged (or better, reemerged) as a social profession only in the twentieth century. This can be compared to the professions of the psychologist, sociologist, psychotherapist, and in some respect to other intellectual occupations such as the accountant or the social worker. For all these professions, and others, a wide methodological framework is to be found in the previous century, mostly *in Mitteleuropa*, in the central European world German-speaking, or in its immediate vicinities. For example, a psychologist would refer to Wundt, Weber, Fechner, Helmholtz, Mach; a sociologist to Auguste

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91335*

**3. The XIX-XX paradigm of education**

like in our days with no ancestors in human history.

attributed to clinical physicians for a long time.

**culture**

its study and intervention.

West in 1495, as a mold from Latin [8].

the educator, l'éducateur or die Erziehrer).
