Pedagogist: His Profession, His Practice and His Toolbox

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.