Why Do Good Pedagogical Ideas Die? (On the Occasion of Prof. Dr. Metod Resman‘s 80th Birthday)

Zdenko Medveš

Summary:  This article was written on the occasion of Prof Dr. Metod Resman’s eightieth birthday. His professional and scientific work has been characterised by a great sensitivity to the humanistic and social dimensions of schools and by his development of ideas and operational solutions that have strengthened the spirit of humanism and harmony in education. In his ideas, he very often follows intuition and rational judgement, but he rarely explicitly commits himself to a theoretical discourse or paradigm although there are enough hints in his work to suggest theoretical and paradigmatic backgrounds. He has developed a number of helpful pedagogical ideas, and this article discusses class conferences as an important innovation in educational practice and the profiling of the work of the school counsellor after 1999, when the Programme Guidelines were adopted and radically changed the previous concept of the work of the school counselling service professionally, theoretically and methodologically. They defined the »counselling relationship« as the fundamental form of its work. This shifted the work of the service from the development of pedagogical strategies, organisation and quality of objective work processes to individual psychological counselling. Some of the greatest ideas, however, only lived for a short time in educational practice, and this paper tries to uncover their theoretical backgrounds, the theoretical discourses that guided Resman’s work, and attempts to answer the question of whether a more precise identification of their theoretical or paradigmatic discourse might have protected good pedagogical ideas from dying prematurely.