The paper mainly focuses on the relationship between didactics and pedagogy during an historical voyage from the European Renaissance up to about 1970 in Norway. While Didactics was the prospering term in the 17th century, formulated as a set of principles and rules of thumb for the planning of teaching, a competing term, pedagogy, surpassed it in public interest, and reached a higher level of academic acceptance. Through the 19th century Didactics remained as a major topic in Norwegian teacher education, and was regarded as an equal term to "pedagogy". "Pedagogy" was introduced with vigour by Immanuel Kant, and followed by a line of philosophers with experience of being personal teachers for children of the nobility. Jean Jacques Rousseau set the stage for upbringing as a relationship between the elder and the novice, while Didactics was established on the premises of the chaotic classroom with communication "one-to-many". On its way to Norway, pedagogy gained a superior status first by the very end of the 19th century, reinforcing a notion of the "one-to-one"-relationship as the default relation. When teacher training also was introduced to the University of Oslo, the subject of pedagogy was regarded as highly unsuitable for a University and was soon excluded from the University institution. On the other hand a remarkable political and social movement established an academic institution in Trondheim for pedagogy, in which the term Didactics survived, but only barely.During the 20th century the term didactics was very little focused, until it was re-discovered by the 1960-ies and 1970-ies. Teacher training institutions used the term, and was gradually reintroduced to the universities during the dawn of educational technology.The conflict between the "Art of teaching" and the "Art of Upbringing" played a significant role for the "Positivismusstreif" in Norway, accusing "Didactics" of being a part of a technological approach to teaching. The criticism accused the subject area of "Didactics"to be ignorant of the genuine one-to-one relationship of the supposed anti-positivist notion of "dialogue" and Critical pedagogy. Only about 1980 the term gained some importance again in the academia, in journal articles and in teacher training.Recent research show that "teaching" has lost its impetus on Norwegian curricular texts, and this paper suggest some of the historical reasons for that. The paper raises questions regarding the fruitfulness of keeping "Pedagogy" as the superior term, rather than establishing a dynamic relationship between "Didactics", "Socialisation" and "Upbringing" as closely related terms.

Philosophy and History

The paper suggets that Didactics should be reintroduced as a main discipline within the academic field of education.