The author of the paper tries to show that general pedagogy has its philosophical distinction, e.g., comparing to philosophy of education. Johann Friedrich Herbart’s essay On the Dark Side of Pedagogy is an important point of reference in the analysis. Starting from the essay, the author justifies the necessity of an approach to general pedagogy with its most important goal, i.e., defining the basic pedagogical thought. The thought is “basic” as it combines theoretical and practical knowledge on education and has to be defined over and over again, and not because without it education cannot be imagined. The history of philosophy is full of evidence that education can be “deduced” even from the theories that have nothing in common with educa...