By FERNANDO LIONEL QUIROGA*
The teacher's adjectives and the machine that grinds the past
The adjective is a linguistic resource that qualifies, characterizes or attributes nuances to a noun. A good adjective, like a good critique, is one that reinforces the power of the noun. It illustrates its indescribable nuance and illuminates, like a beam of light, that which language itself is capable of capturing. Furthermore, the adjective is what sets the fixity of the word in motion; it is the resource that animates, that breathes life into what, without it, would remain an archaeological vestige.
However, this is just one way of looking at the adjective. A brief reflection is enough to reveal the corrosive power it can exert on the noun. In general, this is the derogatory form that aims to extract value and corrupt its essence. Without this negative aspect, irony or humor, for example, would not be possible.
That said, let us think about the adjectives that teachers have been called in recent decades: “mediating teacher”, “advisory teacher”, “coordinating teacher”, “supervising teacher”, “content teacher”, “facilitating teacher”, “reflective teacher”, “collaborating teacher” or, simply, “tutor”. But what underlies this classification? Could it simply be the consequence of the transformations in what it means to be a “teacher” in a complex society?
Or, from another perspective, could they be symptoms described by Marilena Chaui in “The Death of the Educator”, when reflecting on the transformation of the figure of the educator, replaced by a technical professional, a “service provider”? As Max Weber would say, someone who provides “products” in the same way as the traditional merchant, that is, someone who “sells his knowledge and his methods in exchange for my father’s money, just as the greengrocer sells cabbages to my mother”.
In this ambiguous terrain, what remains of the teacher are almost only his adjectives, as if his “essence” were sucked out by them. The teacher who possesses cultural capital in an embodied state (and not just in an institutionalized state) has become increasingly rare and difficult to find. The distinction between these types of capital is essential to understanding this issue.
According to Pierre Bourdieu, cultural capital takes three forms: in the embodied state, through cultural dispositions and skills acquired through socialization and education over time, such as knowledge and ways of thinking; in the objectified state, through the acquisition of cultural goods, such as books, works of art and musical instruments; and in the institutionalized state, through the formal recognition of cultural capital through titles and qualifications, such as diplomas and certificates.
Today, with the exponential growth in the value of diplomas, the correlation between the institutionalized state and the incorporated state has lost its causal relationship. Someone can hold significant cultural capital in an institutionalized state and still be miserable in terms of incorporated capital. This is the greatest educational contradiction of our times.
Thus, excluding the adjectives that produce a positive effect on the teacher – such as those that originate in the European higher education system, such as “tenured professor”, “adjunct professor”, “tenured professor”, whose difference is marked by specific distinctions and prestige – the avalanche of adjectives that has haunted the noun “teacher” has brought it ever closer to a bureaucrat at the service of the market.
In effect, teachers are forced to reject the past to the detriment of the innovative dimension of capitalism. And when they do not follow the ideological playbook of innovation, they are thrown into the ditch of obsoleteness and archaicity. The force of fashion expels them from “resistance”, replacing them with “resilience”, that is, teachers must be adaptable to changes as if they were inevitable. It is the naivety of progress as something neutral and irrefutable that drags on from generation to generation.
Since this type of adjective is not used for social recognition, it has served the interests of the economic elite, which intends to eliminate education as a social right. Once converted into a “mediator”, “tutor” or “facilitator”, the teacher does not need to have a deep command of the subject he teaches. He can even receive a degree in Literature without having read a single work of fiction during his academic career.
As a general rule, if he knows how to follow the reading of slides for about twenty minutes (the rest of the time is often used for students to conform, without realizing it, with what they do not understand because it is so uninteresting), he will be ready for the “challenges” of teaching.
These adjectives, which act as hostile voices around the teacher, diminish his figure and ultimately explain the logic underlying his multiplication.
Interestingly, society has also been given a wide range of adjectives in recent years: “liquid society”, “society of the spectacle”, “excited society”, “transparency society”, “digital society”, among others. Could this be a symptom of the erosion of the very idea of society, something that, in a similar way to the professor, has been eroded by the devouring gears of capitalism, this machine that grinds up the past?
*Fernando Lionel Quiroga is a professor of Fundamentals of Education at the State University of Goiás (UEG).
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