Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family. -Kofi Annan
In the transformation of education they will also win, and even more perhaps, those who now obstruct it vehemently.
By: Juan Alberto Sánchez MarÃn (*): Carta Maior, the prestigious Brazilian leftist portal, invited me to share a reflection on questions related to education in Latin America. This is the Sua voz na conjuncture project that in its first edition dealt with the defense of public education. I answered the call and shared some general ideas on the subject thinking about the difficult circumstances facing Brazil today and with the respect inspired by Paulo Freire's homeland, without a doubt, the most relevant contemporary pedagogue. From this source comes this text.
What society do you want to build to face the serious local and global imbalances of the 21st century?
It takes a society in a position to interpret the world around, in its qualities and senses, screams and silences, links and implications, from an ethical and integral perspective. A society prepared to see itself in the mirror of its actions, with sufficient strength to recognize itself in harmonies, but also in its profound instability.
Desirable society is not the impossible one of Renaissance utopias, but it is far from being the tangible one of our time, let alone any of its many fictions. The necessary one, in my opinion, is the one capable of differentiating the facts of its simulation, the interaction of the dependency, the process of the contingent, the help of the looting or the justice of the capricious legal frameworks. Rather, as in a school test, the one that is able to distinguish the true from the false, even if it costs you the balance in the bank or life. Society at the height of its marginalized and helpless members, rather than alone in the baseness of the elites.
A society that lies distant, and at the same time is at hand, because the nation of the future is none other than the one constituted and built right now, day by day, with fortune and errors, satisfactions and dislikes. The wrong done at this time will be paid dearly tomorrow, but what is left to do will cost double.
Two or three thousand years ago, or several centuries ago, the people had the luxury of projecting themselves to the future in their sagas and offspring, and borders and territories. The founding myths were perceptible. The future, almost measurable; the fates made it destiny and in a few opportunities they made it true. Or so the ancestors figured.
When this was not the case, the world was filled with signals, surreptitious codes, poetic representations, allegorical keys, miracles. Today, however, the future is weak and volatile, and the predictions do not cross the closing of a stock market or the disturbing trills of some unhappy ancestor.
How we decipher the society that does not cease to be done and undo before our eyes, in which way we apprehend each of its entities and relationships. Essential issue. Citizens who know how to interpret themselves in possibilities, responsibilities and rights; in its structures and links, interests and stakeholders; Authenticities and inventions, certainties and manipulations are the foundations of that essential society. In other words, those who know where they are, what they do and for what (better yet, for whom).
An interpretative capacity that, among other things, is criteria, expression and communication, participation, organization. Factors, of course, too risky for the establishment. Hence, education is kept under the strict control of power with mechanisms never questioned and instituted names, which we consider favorable and even liberating.
It seems that there is no notice of the great damage that its exclusive limits entail: wealth of knowledge (mental indigestion), set of rules and behavior (submission), urbanity and good manners (capitulation), accumulated experience (hobbies), developing or perfecting the faculties intellectual and moral of the child or young person through precepts, exercises, examples (a real joke!).
Nothing is so far from the concept of education as the four meanings that the RAE dictionary sits like a slap in the cheeks. Anachronistic, utilitarian, they define with disturbing accuracy what is not and should not be. A compendium of rudiments that, precisely, alters any of the senses that it must have: frank and emancipatory, indomitable and sharp, touching and suggestive, particular and collective, bidirectional and transversal. The qualifiers remain.
And power is not a government, at most, executor; In general, no more than mandadero. The force that moves the threads is behind the democratic façades of Sainete, safely within the economic and financial bastions of progress. But it is clear in pedagogical fashions that are fulfilled because they are the guideline, worn methodologies encased in gleaming words, and innovations that safeguard the orientations.
Education serves as the provider of properly indoctrinated servants of the system. An approach that not by old loses its air of reliable. Smart cities continue to educate Emilio (Rousseau, 1762) two and a half centuries ago, who barely acceded to modernity. From that Emilio from which comes an axiom eluded by the world in which we live: "The education of man must be adapted to man and not to what he is not." Even less, I say, to what an ambitious few need him to be. In any case, that oblivion of a little kinship with amnesia is fatal.
Education is nothing more than another instrument of dominance, as are the farce and systemic decoys that make us think that we are something: political sewer, swapping groceries for carrots; the media simulation, persuading us of the reality that we do not inhabit; the social terrors of government agendas, opening the way to coercive laws and other repressions, or the powerful networks and information systems, thanks to which the machines connect and the telephone or computer keyboardists that we are face and dissociate.
The society to be built must be aware, at least, of the kind of world it inhabits. Knowing well the dimension of local and global frailties that undermine it daily and hinder its genuine development; be clear about the debased links that prevail in the interaction of the present, and filter the deceptions that overflow it.
-What kind of development project - and State - is necessary to achieve it?
This unbearable calm, this annoying calm, are possible because of the ignorance in which societies have plunged. Tranquility is inconceivable when you understand what happens throughout the planet and discern the reason for the horrors in your name. Social unconsciousness, together with apathy, are as opportune for the oligarchies as the peace of the graves they impose themselves.
The individual learns something and does not know what happens. A crowd thinks they know what is happening and deploys their cerrical hatred against the innocent and the different, far from the true causes of disruption. The manipulation does its thing, of course, but less in the episodic action or as a particular operation, and more like something intrinsic stuck inside when stepping on the initial school or attending the first media sononete.
We do not become the poor in spirit referred to in the Sermon on the Mountain of Jesus of Nazareth (Mt 5, 1; 7, 28). We do not even recognize the tremendous weaknesses of our own, nor do we have bliss, nor will the kingdom of heaven be ours. The spiritual poverty of our societies is not constituted by the perception of limits, but rises from the dominant obscurantism. And education is more perhaps than the other moldy pieces of castration.
Ignorance allowed politicians to fool people and bad administrators to be re-elected. - Malala Yousafzai
The one who studies even the most disdained and discarded empacho; the learned ends up being another poor cretin. Consented ignorance abounds, of course, barbarism for convenience, which is sought and cultivated because it is believed to achieve some moral acquiescence or achieve some kind of ethical amnesty. Nothing more erratic. On the other hand, the ignorant infiltrators, slippery, traitors proliferate; who convince the illiterate (tarnished) of his erudition and self. Or entire societies, that knowing how much their leaders lie and how criminal they are, are always willing to endorse them with the vote.
For example, in Colombia, a country in which the right and the extreme right choose and re-elect a leader like Alvaro Uribe Vélez or his chosen one, with full awareness of the criminal ties of his political structure. Or in Spain, whose population José MarÃa Aznar lied to him with his reliable reports that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They never found such weapons in Iraq. “Not only were there not, but it was always known that there were none. (...) In spite of everything, the voters of the PP did not find reason enough to change their election ”(Fernández Liria, 2007). They did not care about them then, nor would they care about the two million four hundred thousand dead (Davies, 2010), and that a country had been completely destroyed.
In Brazil itself, say, almost fifty-eight million people voted for Jair Bolsonaro in the second round, who in the campaign made clear the homophobic, misogynist and racist mood. Something added very clearly: "You have to expel Paulo Freire." And that influx of people who voted for Bolsonaro did not vote against Freire (or Lula da Silva or Dilma Rousseff), but against popular education that took it into account. That is, he undertook it against herself. Voters knew and voted for it, and the former captain gives back the way genetics sends him: with school militarization.
Or in the United States itself, whose politicians boast so much about the system that they still believe they invented and who only turned on the washers that the English failed to include, and that is still one of the toxic western democracies, where 65 853 516 people voted for Mrs. Clinton knowing the cruelties she was capable of and 62 984 825 voted for Mr. Trump having clarity about what she would soon carry out. Where, in addition, again and thanks to these attached tricks, the lower number of voters was higher than the highest. And there is Trump ruling.
In all these cases, as in many others, a committed and selfish ignorance that does not excuse a society, or a considerable part of it.
Some imbalances that are feasible and do not stop growing because those who forge the political, economic and social structures have done so in their own way and convenience over the years. Or of the centuries, because it is a practice that comes from remote antiquity.
But in the livelihoods of oppression are also the potential for liberation. We will have to find them in the mechanisms of participation, now established for the opposite; in education, the great utility of the system, and, since the dawn of the nineteenth century, the main and cynical guardian of the status quo; in the dominant media, currently, with the irreplaceable function of accommodating events to the narrative provided. And so.
The environments of autonomy are uncomfortable for power, which warns in them the most challenging scenarios. Therefore, the plans of educational institutions remain under strict inspection. Therefore, laws that undermine public education are enacted.
The budgets of public educational institutions are small; universities are led to ruin to facilitate their privatization, or, what is the same, private enterprise is involved in the adequacy of the curricula, that is, an educational modernization is carried out that leads head to the times of the Industrial Revolution, when the educational system manufactured factory workers.
A different society will not be conquered through schemes subject to particular, social or sectorial purposes. Much less, based on the current situation of lack of sovereignty, absence of common goals and human perspectives (humanitarian and humanistic).
The nature of the educational plan corresponds to an economic and political calculation. The curriculum is not the concretion of a certain culture or the exceptional place where epistemological notions converge with ancestral knowledge, the sociological varnish with the flights of praxis, the anthropological conjecture with the specific physiognomies of the educator and the student. It cannot happen otherwise since the intentionality of the educational system, corrupted in the background, does not look different in form.
The state that aims to address the imbalances, there is no other, should start by confronting its framework and its own character. The first step is not to know who the citizens are, which is certainly useful for coercion and tax burdens, but to pave the way for the citizens themselves to know themselves: that they know where they live and where they come from, by What are they like, what are they good for? Fertile crops of education.
And where the fortitude of a people begins. Only citizens who have an idea of where they stand give a society a dignified quality. The conversion that arises in different terms, or the proposal under the hostile states that prevail today, must be fraudulent and the objectives must be weak, if not remote.
-What is expected of the University in this journey?
It is time that the universities in our societies are not the centers of molding fragmented subjects and carriers of the virus of knowledge by segments. As long as the university remains a center of instruction, that euphemism that encompasses the slow and persistent exhumation of wisdom will be difficult to conquer different living conditions. And the realization of another world will hardly be possible.
The impact of a transcendent educational renewal will surely take time, and it can be a process of years. But the modification of a curriculum and a pendulum, the first steps, would be something short, immediate, if there was a political will to do so. Something elementary that there is not and will not be in societies governed by the perverse and utilitarian logic of capital.
In the university, the school, the school, the supports of the authentic transformation lie. The educational center will have to be a question center; in that articulation, the university cannot be anything other than the major generator of critical thinking, which is not only the dismantling or digestion of a reality, but, above all, the open door for social proposition and construction.
The power and validity of data, retentive and hypothesis is never in the dead letters that consign or formulate, but in the ability we have to break down your senses and see them move through the window. Society requires suspicious beings, elusive in the face of what they hear and see, and deeply suspicious of canned knowledge, great ideas packed in a vacuum and manual artifice to succeed. There are no such.
Doubt is a useful tool to be art and part of the reality that we have for our, sometimes elusive, sometimes effective. In these distressing repairs, the secret may lie so that we are not simply reciters of his theatrical snacks. In the university the questions are constructed, and, as soon as possible, the great answers reached are disarmed.
-How should intellectuals and democratic forces act in the construction of this rearrangement?
The role of intellectuals and democratic forces, in that rearrangement, has a lot to do with projecting due emphasis and encouraging reflection around the only effective grip that the transcendental on earth has: the everyday. Everyone from their perspective, areas and competencies.
There lie the keys, the metaphorical ones, the allegorical ones or the symbolic ones, those that are wanted and in sight, such as The Stolen Letter (Allan Poe, 1844), in “a cardboard card holder with trinket filigree, hung by a dirty blue ribbon of a ring… ”The quid to better understand what we are and achieve the unequivocal commitment to what we do.
The attitude of the intellectual is not conformity because yes or discrepancy because no. Rather, the truceless dispute against iniquities corresponds to him; resistance against injustices and anger with the unreasonableness of everyday life.
From his expression should raise alarms, restlessness, despair and hope in a single sentence. The commotion of the intellectuals should be the ballast on the backs of societies, and especially the academy. But rarely is that so.
Many intellectuals, writers, thinkers, have great capacity to convene, and their reflections could enliven that impulse without which any authentic transformation is unfeasible: motivation. And in this world of insecurities, exclusion, fascism, racism, supremacies and all conceivable imbalances, social transformations are increasingly inescapable and urgent, beginning with the cultural one.
It seems that integration is advocated and praised in countless texts by writers held and held incommunicado. It is not too late to not realize that the hours and years are going away.
The struggle for the transformation of education, however, as a determinant for the future that awaits the human being, will not cease to be a battle of that category defined with success by Flaubert (1911): "Always bloody" and always with two winners, "the one who won and the one who lost". Because in that achievement they will also win, and even more perhaps, those who now obstruct it vehemently.
(*) Juan Alberto Sánchez MarÃn.
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