By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*
It is not time to deceive ourselves about the new meanings of education in a society that understood itself to be global and, suddenly, stopped in the face of a pandemic
Before the didactic actions, which mean the do education through the work of educators' creativity, we will have to confront pedagogical reflection and apprehend within it what we forget, what we leave behind, what we do not value and what can be a bridge to the education of children, adolescents and young people in the near future. We need, therefore, to encourage, with due urgency, the construction of curricular experiences as typical of educational communities, which will place us in the set of new pedagogical thoughts.
Continuously, this exercise will lead us to immersion in history and other scientific knowledge that encourage thinking about the country, its people, its diversity and its inequalities; consequently, we will start to live the didactics of everyday life, which suggests ruptures within knowledge, in order to become renewing and, perhaps, transforming.
It is not time to deceive ourselves about the new meanings of education in a society that understood itself to be global and, suddenly, stopped in the face of a pandemic, which results from human attitudes contrary to the healthy environment of Mother Earth. Pests in history have always had to do with health and social imbalances and ecological violence. The break of 2020 taught that it is not in global abstraction or on virtual platforms that one educates (perhaps one informs oneself…), but in the educating communities that think and act in favor of their people and the people of the world.
The physicist-ecologist Fritjof Capra is right[I] when he stated in an August 2020 interview: “The pandemic emerged from an ecological imbalance and has dramatic consequences due to social and economic inequalities” […] “The coronavirus must be seen as a biological response from Gaia, our living planet (… ). In the same interview, a little further on, he makes suggestions for indispensable economic, social and cultural changes and asks: “We already have the knowledge and technology to embark on all these initiatives. Will we have the political will that is lacking?
The best boat to carry these objectives of technological change, respect for nature, clarity of social differences and construction of citizenship/solidarity is education and, especially, the school. In addition to many other reasons, it fits the place and the action because it brings people together, thinks and discusses knowledge and values generation after generation. It takes place, therefore, as the basis of society for a future different from the present.
Here we come to the point: reflection on pedagogical values and didactic exercise will make up the school's new study curricula breathe, with a new spirit, the airs of here and there, of everyday life and its own overcoming, of diversity as an ecological force towards the time of social equity. In the same way, curricular education at the basic level of the Brazilian school will provide answers to our failures in international comparisons and will signal new attitudes that must be taken by Brazilian higher education, that is, instead of the latter simply lamenting the problems of the first major stage after thirteen years of school, it will be in tune with a two-way behavior, composing the common project via research and extension and opening space for those who come from an enriched and community curriculum.
Indeed, the university also has something to learn. Therefore, on page 27 of the National Curriculum Guidelines for Basic Education, created and published by the National Education Council (CNE, 2010), it reads:
The Basic Education school is a collective space for conviviality, where exchanges, welcome and warmth are privileged to ensure the well-being of children, adolescents, young people and adults, in their relationships with each other and with other people. It is an instance where one learns to value the richness of the cultural roots of the different regions of the country, which together make up the Nation. In it, the inherited culture is re-signified and recreated, rebuilding cultural identities, in which one learns to value the roots of the different regions of the country. (emphasis added by this author)
Just as an abstract curriculum, or one imposed by the authorities, is no longer justified in the knowledge society, in the same way the didactics and pedagogy are no longer committed to the interlocutor subjects, who are present in the different communities where it takes place. the education of generations. The action of these educating communities institutes the Political-Pedagogical Project (PPP) of the schools, whose heart is the curriculum, expression of choices, analyses, research, commitments, objectives and decisions of the communities. Each and every contemporary educational act, at a time when the so-called social and economic progress is called into question by ecology, will have to be a totalizing act of the relations between these subjects, who signify and represent their communities, their condition of person and of to be towards societies distinct from those built after the revolutions that Hobsbawn studied well. They left models, bureaucratic structures, abstract values and, passi passu, there was a lack of solidarities, critical spirit, sense of community and connection in language acts.
Educating yourself through collectively constructed curricula allows you to face the social, economic and cultural changes that are already underway and that are leading influential nations to plan for 2030, 2040 and 2050. If educational communities do not have the obligation to simply adjust to global movements around energy, ecological challenges, new geopolitics and cultural scenarios driven by various forms of artificial intelligence, their educational responses lead to the construction of documents that are their own and not imposed “from the top down”, since all these great themes go to be part of a common language of the near future and nobody better than educational action to think about them freely, guide students to reflect on what is being researched and will be researched, as well as enabling them to analyze and interpret the future that is going to be making gift.
All this will not have to be done in the official language of centralized governments; on the contrary, the greatest value of a curricular practice – within a Pedagogical Plan – is its balance between knowledge, disciplines and transversal attitudes, components of the curious and even daring harmony of common base and diversified activities, as directed by the LDB, Law 9394/1996. In the same way, the central governments, of the nation and of the states, cannot be anything other than democratic, as they will see that the continent-country can only advance through community intelligence, which builds citizenship and, as a nerve, the school curricula.
It is therefore very important that the educational community does not allow itself to be surprised by a world that is necessarily unstable, in global disputes, quick decisions and changing modes of development. The school will be a community interpreter of the “moving” world. Any government that does not understand this will be authoritarian, perhaps fascist.
It is therefore convenient for post-pandemic Brazilian education (which may not be the last) to overcome historical doubts and assert itself as a open text of curriculum education. In other words, to live and coexist with the educational, historical and scientific knowledge and practices that predispose to the didactics of the educational routine; therefore, go deep into a new process of community curricular decisions. Decisions about day-to-day educational practice are, as they should, the responsibility of the communities, made up of managers, educators, students, support staff, families and surrounding collaborators. Such innovative, democratic practice wants to give the best credit to a continuous thought that comes from the 1988 Constitution and its educational heiress, the law of Guidelines and Bases of Education, from which derives a sequence of values, that is, the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN), understood here as the guide that leads to the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) of 2017 and 2018.
It is essential, therefore, that we overcome prescriptions, abstraction and much less centralized impositions. Educational documents need to be understood as languages educational, blocks that only gain meaning, concrete meaning, when treated as bundles connected (not juxtaposed) to the life of the educating communities.
Again, there is no room for doubt: the educating communities will take the pulse of official documents and norms; immediately, they will create their project and establish it in the communities now expanded beyond the school walls. The school's new security is its community force, life arranged in curricular acts and, therefore, builder of autonomy, which is the new meaning of permanent education.
Of course, the prevalence of the Common Curriculum Base about the CNE guidelines, as these resulted from research, confrontations with reality, debates and meticulous elaboration sponsored by the Council, the creation, consultation and standardization body of the Brazilian state.
The BNCC/2017-2018 does not exist in a historical void, nor is it an object of desire for Brazilian education. In fact, it complements a curricular pedagogy committed to an immense country and to this frenetic world to be understood and shaped by the youth. Nor does the BNCC make sense without the knowledge of thousands of professors who offered their contribution in the many assemblies held by CONAEs throughout Brazil.
Curriculum, in short, is a bundle of languages, whether the common base of sciences and arts, or diversified studies and activities, which constitute the deployment of the common base in favor of a full curriculum to coexist with the needs and desires of the social groups in whose territory the school is located. . This curricular language is not the nomenclature of disciplines or contents, but its entire organization of knowledge, its elaboration, its practice and its social sharing. These languages of education guarantee meanings and reframings, as they guarantee dialogue between community and society and between disciplines and their transversal movements, from which broader and more solidary knowledge derives.
The new curricular practice of the communities will guide the training of scientists, fishermen, public agents, indigenous leaders, politicians, educators, artists, male and female teachers and other professions and skills, whether old but necessary, whether brand new and, preferably, innovative This multiplicity of youth needs and desires requires transversalities, full harmonic curricula and continuous plans (without cuts or repressions), as these people to be formed will need a strong base in aptitudes, associated with complementary diversities to the base. This means that we will direct the training of artists and fishermen who do not ignore natural sciences, alongside scientists and researchers with an artistic and humanistic spirit.
If humanity encounters serious obstacles, such as pandemics, plagues and other conflicts, it will have people prepared to think broadly and perhaps work on prevention. If international social progress flows well, the demand will be the same, with a view to not stagnating it. And when we form (in open and full curricula) nomadic groups and indigenous leaders in the territories where they are required, we will do it with art and science; finally, with a wide range of readings of the word and the world.
It will be a dangerous step backwards to simply start handling pre-pandemic content and try to “recover and compensate” for anything. Even though everyday life demands the teaching of “subjects”, there is a larger subject that requires study and research by the Brazilian teaching profession, that is, the construction of the curricular education of the future-already-present, an action that has the educator community as the main subject of the project. new time.
*Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP.
Note
[I] Folha de São Paulo, August 9, 2020. Interview of the week.
