Going Back to the Sources. About the Educational Discourse from the First ‘Textbook for Pedagogy’ Based on Selected Books of the Old Testament

Abstract

Being aware of the importance of cultural heritage for the development of the human species, this reconstruction of the biblical discourse, which sees it as an educational practice that systematically shapes attitudes, is an activity aimed at extracting universal principles of humanity. And it is not just about something that some would like to close as an axiom in the space of religious education. Because it is not about moving only within such a space referring directly to the concept of imitatio Dei here, but about the analysis of everyday practices and universal principles into which this everyday life fits. On the contrary, I would like to say that my actions will aim at achieving some kind of distance from religion.

As part of this scientific reflection, which becomes a walk in the humanities, which has been my participation for many years, I get to know the human being in the context of the decisions made and the effects that they generate. Thus, it seems that the cause-and-effect pattern is inscribed in the nature of being human, and any attempt to ignore this principle reveals a direct reluctance to think or outright ignorance. In these few pages, I reach the determinants behind the decisions made, to finally reconstruct the attitude of the Educator himself, useful in the contemporary theory of education.

Although the linguistic category of ‘discourse’ has become very fashionable in the statements of scientists, there may still be an unconscious mistake in using this word permanently. This error is a kind of personification of this conceptual category ascribing human characteristics to abstract concepts. Perhaps many authors unknowingly make a mistake here, which casts a shadow over the entire scientific argument and, at the same time, on the logic of the presented theories. For example, when we read the following text: ‘discourses … took up timeless social, cultural or religious problems’. After all, it was not the discourses that took up the problems, but people using such a linguistic scheme described the phenomena of communication that were interesting to them.

My approach to discourse theory results from the belief that there is no possibility of reaching the educational reality in itself, the reality is produced in time understood as a scalar quantity that determines the sequence of events as well as the intervals between occurring events. Secondly, that in the educational social relations analyzed in this text, we can include the categories of educating authority as the main source of shaping the community described in the pages of the Bible, and especially in the pages of the Old Testament. Thirdly, it seems that in the history of history, biblical history can be talked about its discursive understanding. Such an approach, which is characteristic of building the structures of understanding phenomena using a language, leads to the situation of constructing an educational dialogue, the effect of which is the exchange of information in order to shape specific attitudes. The continuity of the educational discourse understood in this way leads to the creation of a framework in which inviolable traditions and their characteristic shape turn out to be a guarantee of a successful future for happy people.