By MARCIO LUIZ MIOTTO*

Brazilian universities are being affected by the increasingly notable absence of a reading and academic culture

It is well known that Brazilian universities suffer from several external attacks. But there is something happening within them that may pose other dangers to their very existence. This is the increasingly notable absence of a reading and academic culture.

The lack of reading culture concerns the notable repulsion (systematic? growing?) of many university students in facing texts, arguments, formula deductions, observation memorizations (in short: challenges, internal logic, problems inherent to the contents they study), making “higher education” transform into a series of shallow contents and programs, fit into simplified manuals and platforms easily aimed at online.

These widespread lack of foundation and/or negligence, which probably originate outside the university (via social media, the “horror of long texts” cultivated in recent years, the pandemic, training problems, etc.), in certain aspects become internal to it, as universities often find it difficult to combat a certain non-reading common sense and attitudes that are resistant to studying. At university, one should learn to read complex texts, languages ​​and arguments, to deduce formulas, to (re)construct logic and conceptual architectures, etc.

This leads to the erosion of academic culture. Without a basic common sense of reading or a certain spontaneous disposition towards a reading culture, the other practices that constitute the university tend to crumble or implode. And the university tends to transform itself, or at best to become confused with other types of education that are not necessarily university-related, such as technical, professional, etc.

The visible result of the erosion of academic culture is the weakening of research, extension, student assistance (which would allow greater dedication to university activities), academic projects linked to teaching (tutoring that should be introductions to teaching and not mere reinforcement classes, reduction of monographic research, rarefaction of scientific events or scholarships for academic activities, etc.), in short, of what makes up the university in what it has of public and universalist.

These threats to academic culture are perhaps reinforced by some reactions from universities themselves to this. A notable example is the perspective that reduces pedagogy to the pedagogue, that is, that individualizes teaching in the simple figure of the teacher, making him a kind of self made man, of “entrepreneur of himself”, in short, transforming him into something like an entertainer, someone whose strategies must necessarily and sufficiently guarantee education (since pedagogy, in short, has been reduced to the pedagogue).

If there is no background scenario defining what it means to study and what the horizons of study should be, or even if this scenario has lost its value, in the end the individual figure of the teacher is left with the thankless task of transforming pedagogy into a circus ring (under scenarios that, by the way, are also pressured by the issue of university dropouts). From then on, the formulas for teaching success and failure tend to be summarized in personal recipes, ego convictions, social media profiles and channels, and expressions such as “yes, but with me it's (not) like that".

The reduction of pedagogy to the pedagogue occurs due to the erasure of a background culture, one that would serve as a basis for forming eventual pedagogical projects and bringing together individual actions. And this reduction, as well as this erasure, are especially seen in the disciplines of human sciences.

In the natural sciences, for example, there are recurring debates between those teachers who do not give up on form and rigor (after all, a formula is independent of circumstances) and others who argue that rigor cannot be deprived of pedagogical concerns linked to the students' profiles. Whatever the outcome, both terms of these debates concern (or should concern) fundamental pedagogical criteria, which presumably serve as a horizon for the work of any professional in the area, regardless of their individual pedagogical choices.

After all, whether you lean towards one side or the other of this debate, something remains the same: a student who is faced with a subject in the exact sciences knows that there will be questions directly or indirectly linked to calculations, experiments, etc., and it is up to pedagogy to ask how to best offer these rationalities.

Something similar could be seen in biological sciences: unless the teacher deceives the student, regardless of the scenario, a subject like anatomy, in order to be reasonably taught, will always require detailed analytical rationality, based on observation methods and certain rituals of analysis and memorization. Without this, it would be possible to imagine an ophthalmologist who does not know the anatomy of the eye, a neuroscientist who does not know the locations of the brain, a physiotherapist who does not know the anatomy of the body, etc.

In the humanities, however, the erasure of a reading and academic horizon in the background, and the reduction of pedagogy to the pedagogue, are sometimes even more visible, giving rise to very different practices – and judgments. This is what fuels prejudices such as the idea that humanities courses lack objectivity, are riddled with mere opinions (“lame courses”, as some São Paulo slang calls them), or are even unnecessary or superfluous.

Or, conversely, there are also judgments that humanities subjects would be attractive not because of their rigor or content, but because of occasional and arbitrary motivators such as group discussions, moments of “relaxation” or the individual charisma of the teacher, the emulation of memes, the confusion between scientific dissemination (so well done by people like Leandro Karnal or Mario Cortella, among others) and the study of science, etc.

This individualization of strategies, combined with the erasure of culture from the text, is very well described by texts such as The structural reading method, by Ronaldo Macedo (MACEDO, 2007). The simple need for reading methods to be taught to those entering higher education shows that reading is no longer an obvious and natural item (as it was in the days of photocopies – because even if people only photocopied, that did not disguise the fact that there was a material injunction directed at generalized reading…), and the effort of teachers to ensure that students read means, once again, the simple lack of a widespread reading culture.

But there is more: Ronaldo Macedo demonstrates in his text some research in which Brazil would have been among the last places in the “reading” category (MACEDO, 2007, p. 14). Reasons? It is not about sustaining the old prejudice of the difference between “rich” schools versus the “poor” ones, as Macedo points out that the same losses would occur in both. It is, rather, a matter of showing that when Brazilians study, and even in the so-called “best” schools, they do not study to understand and articulate the logic of a text, but rather to solve questions demanded by tests (when, on the contrary, they do not abandon themselves to simple opinion-making).

In short: many Brazilians read texts (when read) in a merely provoked and directed manner, that is, in a heteronomous and third-party-oriented manner, as if they were answering test questions, and this in areas in which chose study. This is not in vain reminiscent of Richard Feynman's criticism of Brazilian physics teaching in the 1950s, in which “students had memorized everything, but did not know the meaning” of their subjects (FEYNMAN, 2017).

In view of this, beyond the erasure of the culture of the text and the reduction of initiatives to individual pedagogical strategies, it may not be useless to remember that all human sciences also have a background culture. To detect this culture, it would be enough to go back to the 19th century and the dispute over the methods of the Germans – the same one that established scientific psychology (such as that of Wilhelm Wundt), the debates about explanation versus understanding since Wilhelm Dilthey, the explanatory and comprehensive approaches in sociology, the positivist counter-reactions and so on. Since their emergence, whether by subordinating themselves to the natural sciences or – on the contrary – by appealing to their irreducibility and specificity, the human sciences have never stopped claiming for themselves a space of their own.

And if there is an allusion to a space of its own, this would mean at the very least that there is something like a field (however dispersed it may be, and é, which does not mean that it does not have a history and logic), with specific contributions and rationalities. Within the so-called “human sciences”, no matter how differentiated a study of contemporary dance, an indigenous tribe or the history of philosophy may be, there is a more general assumption that such studies do not immediately imply the same type of rationality as that practiced by a physicist or a biologist. Which does not mean that there is no other rigor, found in the specificity of each branch of the human sciences, with its own study, texts and logic.

There is, indeed, a background culture in the humanities, and it permeates conceptual rigor (even if it is not that of calculation, experiment or anatomical descriptions) and textual analysis, as well as other methods developed in each specific area. Which, once again, implies the following: beyond the individual choices of teachers, there is or there should be a background scenario, a figure of rigor, however minimal and comprehensive it may be, is in fact guiding individual performances. Roughly, as was said at the beginning of the 20th century, regardless of whether the human sciences desire or contest a naturalist objectivity, they are, each in their own way, “rigorous” sciences.

This should concern, as illustrated above, a reading and academic culture, one that would allow a student to point the finger and say “that’s the humanities” – without reducing the issue to the mere charisma of the professor or to prejudices about the laxity of the content. If a student of exact sciences recognizes calculus as one of the rationalities inherent to the field, and a student of biological sciences recognizes analytical-anatomical reasoning, why do humanities students often point the finger at the professor when they say good or bad about the subject, and when they point the finger at the field they usually see uncertainty (when they see anything at all)?

Shouldn't there be a general recognition that, when faced with a humanities subject, there would be a rationality based there? under in text analysis and conceptual rigor? Because these two components – rigor in relation to the text and concepts – are, in the end, common in all areas.

A humanities student who is going to study statistics spontaneously recognizes that there will be calculus involved. Since this is stated on his/her resume, he/she also recognizes that, even if he/she does not use statistics later, his/her education will be precarious if he/she does not learn it, since it will serve as a formative component. And the same occurs for those who need to study anatomical specimens or observe tissues and cells under a microscope.

After all, university is not limited to professional courses. But why, then, is there some doubt about the correlation of this in human sciences (and even in some training courses)? Why, when the subjects are in human sciences, does the need to read texts and analyze concepts (at the broadest and most general level, since it is known that it is not limited to that) appear in so many scenarios as something that is not spontaneously obvious? Why does it appear as something that could or should even be minimized or diverted by other subterfuges?

In any case, as suggested, the crisis of rigor, or of academic culture, does not belong only to the humanities (the above quote from Feynman says so). And the crisis of universities is not only internal, although internally it also concerns a certain erosion of a reading and academic culture.

But the resolution of this crisis cannot be reduced to individualizing criteria, since these are the same ones that make up the problem. There are those who would like to completely undo the academic character of universities, reducing them to courses online under pre-formatted content, without research and extension.

Likewise, there are those who want to reduce teaching to a kind of naive evolutionism (abandoning each teacher to a formula of individual “effort” and “efficacy”, which inevitably results in survival and herd behavior, cartels and alliances of convenience to mitigate the primacy of competition); there are those who want to reduce pedagogy to the pedagogue. Because this is also where precarious and temporary employment relationships lie, as well as the impossibility of long-term research and extension. The reduction of pedagogy to the pedagogue and the individualization of teaching processes ultimately contribute to the very things that should be fought against.

The recognition that each field has its own specificities, the defense of each rationality inherent to the field, the composition of background pedagogical scenarios, may not end the erosion of academic and reading culture (since much of it is, as has been said, external to the university). But the university, and each teacher, are not passive in the face of this. The greatest proof is that the simplest choice sometimes occurs through individual means. But after all, this also proves that there is a choice...

*Marcio Luiz Miotto Professor of Psychology at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).

REFERENCES

FEYNMAN, R. Richard Feynman: on education in Brazil. Medium, 2017. Available at:https://morenobarros.medium.com/richard-feynman-sobre-a-educa%C3%A7%C3%A3o-no-brasil-de5515c6b3f0>.

FEYNMAN, R. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! [sl: sn].

MACEDO, R. The structural reading method. GV Law Notebooks, v. 4, no. 2, 2007.

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