Adrian Costache, “Cum să nu predăm? Studii de didactica disciplinelor socio-umane”, Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2025, ISBN 978-606-37-2652-1

Abstract

Adrian Costache’s book provides the readers, first and foremost, with dif­ferent approaches, which are philosophi­cally inspired, to better understand what pedagogy and the act of teaching is all about. His book is divided into five chap­ters, each representing an autonomous study on ardent problems concerning education. His overall goal is not to offer the potential teachers reading the book with a full-fledged account of how teach­ing should unfold, but rather, he gives cer­tain hints towards the way in which the pedagogical methods can be strength­ened and improved.

For example, and as we are go­ing to see, he discusses the dialogue be­tween student and teacher, the role of metaphorical analogy, the limits of cer­tain thematizations in education sci­ence, but also, an assessment of the notion of the Cartesian method in the process of teaching. His main interest involves the so-called humanities disciplines, wherein major improvements are meant to take place, to facilitate the overall process of learning.

His approach is mainly hermeneutical, although here and there he inserts theories and notions pertaining to the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and to different approaches in pedagogy and didactics.

From the very commencement of his first study, Costache regards the question (and answer) between student and teacher to be paramount. He appeals to Gadamer’s notion of dialogue between I and Thou to describe how the process of living spoken interaction between the two actors of the educational process unpacks. Costache appeals, though critically, to the method of active participation of the student to the course, and not to his or her passivity, since he acknowledges from the very beginning that the learner in not a recipient in which the teacher pours knowledge, but rather, the student and teacher participate via dialogue into the overall process of education, each contributing to this dialogical event. Costache traces the method of dialogue to the maieutic of Socrates, wherein certain convictions were challenged by Socrates to arrive at different conclusions and to a different view upon a certain aspect of the world.

Costache then tackles the phrase of dialogue with oneself, a saying very dear to Gadamer, to point how the pedagogical process can be carried further by the student even on his or her own (outside the class), bearing always in mind the questions which we address to ourselves and the tentative answers which we can provide at a certain moment in time.