By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*
This country has gone too far in its executive, legislative and judicial indignity in the face of the formation of new generations
Since 1996, the LDB, law 9394, seeks to prepare the old school for girls and boys, atomized and often forgotten (when public) to be much more than a follower of curriculum grids and orders made by regional and national technocracy. To this end, the Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education relied on the intelligence of generations of educators who passed through the National Council of Education, CNE, which produced the good and instigating National Curricular Guidelines, only published with some dignity in 2013. they make up phenomena, values and pedagogical postures for the ethnic group and for the native, riverside, peripheral to the urban world, nomadic, special societies, from childhood to the end of adolescence, that is, for the thirteen years of schooling. He thought of curriculum as the heart of school life, inclusive, integrated, integrating and capable of thinking about Brazil and the World without blind obedience, but, on the contrary, with due curiosity and consequent critical spirit.
At the base of this cultural and normative work, there has always been the awareness that this country has gone too far in its executive, legislative and judicial indignity in the face of the formation of the new generations, those inconclusive and restless people who moved Hannah Arendt's intelligence and emotion. and the Brazilian educators who created the remarkable manifesto of 1932. It is time to deal with the factory of inculturation, that is, adult literacy (driven by Paulo Freire's thought and by the love of literacy teachers ) and the return to the condition of verbal obscurity due to the revolting absence of cultural actions, in force in the oriented continuity of look, touch, taste, emotion in the face of beauty and its readings of word and world.
This is not the time to be nice to the republic of gunmen, notability, excellence, the culture of salons and European and American copies. In each generation and in each set of mandates, people in power capable of feeling (if possible to the point of nausea) the horror of the lack of culture that moved the very slow literacy rate, the mass of disapproved students, the pandemics of abandonment could be counted and often hunted down. , everything converging on the guilt (that disgusting religious kind of guilt) of those who didn't do well and “didn't make it in life”. Not all of Michel Foucault's work would manage to convince the diffuse supporters of the republican incultural horror to overcome privileges in the name of the new generations trapped in its rigid social class cuts. No authoritarian experience criticized in modern times, be it the Taliban, the Idi Amin gang or the action of tyrants here and there, was worse than the uncultural horror of Brazil. In other words, the physical-symbolic murder operated in everyday life in Brazil, amidst highly selective liberal modernizations, was an enunciation and enunciation of the profound real that the country called Brazil means.
Such utterances and utterances were in part prophesied in Euclides da Cunha, Lima Barreto, Portinari, Clarice, Graciliano, Zé Lins, João Cabral de Melo Neto and others and others alive in the memory of some human groups who are used to reading. However, its achievement turned out worse than the artists' prophecy.
The sanitary, cultural and environmental genocides perpetrated by the uncultured anti-government, his four children and his troupe ensconced after 2019 are one more move in the old chess game of death and its symbols. Strictly speaking, his election proves the horror story, still without future immunity. Tenth economy in the world? Why, what a mess! Children out of school prove it.
Only critical radicalism can redeem a country moved by incultural horror, since it is the most radical of the dehumanizing attitudes of the “other” and of itself, as it creates explicit disvalues, is filled with guilt and never realizes itself as an effectively democratic society. He is so radical that he is able to give some examples of the “winners” in the universe of the humiliated and offended, unable to go beyond the obviousness and mediocre speech taught by the primers of basic liberalism.
But the school is a very beautiful place when it insists on being an educational-inclusive community, which is an act of choice and judgment and not a fado. Despite everything (as poetized by Mario de Andrade), the school flourished in the country's history like the flower on the asphalt of Carlos Drummond. And whoever fell in love with her ran to see her and stayed by her side. We were already two million teachers and 45 million students. The pandemic took some percentage of the teaching staff that cultivated the flower and itself (although we have known several pandemics) put millions of boys and girls on the streets, who have not yet returned and it is not known whether they will return. In this strange place called Brazil, populations lose wages, reduce food, run away from spending as soon as possible, but their children don't make public school grow. It is the old incultural horror, which pursues and complies with ambivalences and paradoxes to scare away the surviving kids. It is an atavistic phenomenon, pride of Brazilian horror.
Think, however, of the beautiful place of encounters and socializing. It still exists and, due to the consequences of history, it can grow. But he suffers a lot, without deserving.
It even suffers when well-intentioned people impose new obligations on the place of the formative processes of the new generations. In recent times alone, at least three major challenges have fallen on the back of the school, namely: the climate emergency, the fate of media networks and violence against women. The three tentacular problems are strongly structural. While the president and his pop-criminal-agro group (strong, but not general or exclusive) set fire to the forests and replace them with the thinned heads of animals that produce harmful gases (for international exchanges and profits), educators must fight for ecological awareness among brutally disproportionate forces. It is the most banal asymmetry. Another uncultural horror. For its part, the machismo that leaves countless schoolchildren orphans across the country must be worked on by a stake that drives the conscience of secular evil, directly associated with the incultural horrors derived from the modes of production of the colony, the empire and the weak and frivolous republic. In the third case, all forms of traditional domination are now strengthened (and have the sympathy of vast youth) by what Muniz Sodré called the “technological framework of the world”, that is, extraordinary extensions that create meanings in the vastness of the communications to operate by the narrow hegemony of the planet's large data mining corporations. It is clear that the various forms of artificial intelligence can contribute to science and the arts, but it is necessary to be very attentive if our fingers are torn off and we are left with a wrist without thumb and index finger, indispensable for everything, physically and symbolically. Data mining by tightly controlled powerful algorithms is similar to mining in the Amazon rainforest. It only serves some and disgraces all.
Think clearly. The three challenges are undoubtedly a school thing, a systematic place of human culture driven by two complementary forms of curriculum: the common base and diversified knowledge. The LDB determined that in every school there should be both parts of the curricular work. The BNCC (Base Nacional Comum Curricular) organizes the projects, programs and plans of the scientific matrices (nature and culture), arts, languages and physical-symbolic languages. The diversified curricular dimension is organized as values and knowledge (also scientific and aesthetic) of the municipality, the environment, the region and the social needs in which the school is inserted. It includes emerging themes that move between other knowledge and needs. This dimension makes inter, multi and transdisciplinarities move. The three themes-challenges are composed in all their greatness, interactions and social relations. They are also part of society's and students' rights and produce daily impacts. Both curricular dimensions take place in a great process of confluence and dialogue, without everything being the same thing. Curricular distinctions, their scientific reason, their aesthetics and ethics are what create the great cultural values (because they converge without losing distinctions) and contribute to taking the kids to high school, in which the formative curricular processes, either for qualified professional practice at that level, or for the increase of unequivocal rights to the university. Especially after the departure (may the angels say amen!) of Milton Ribeiro and the troupe of all institutions associated with the MEC.
Why do such grand themes feel like impositions?
Because the people around whom such issues pass (executive, legislative and sectors of the field of law) do not understand curricular composition, educator training, salary appreciation, cultural unevenness of the entire community internal and external to the school and do not know that the cultural horrors are still present in the country's 8 million square kilometers. And it seems that they ignore that all the factors mentioned must be considered in the very act of introducing new themes in the integral curriculum of the educational community.
The idea of thematic imposition comes from the false assumption that “the school will turn around and do anything”, which is an act of violence. Men and women educators are tired of doing something. They want to educate integrally, which implies integral appreciation of the teaching profession and its communion with the students and other professionals in the community.
Although it is true in many places that the school does something (and sometimes very well!) most of the time it becomes impossible to compose a continuous, recurrent and integrated curricular action in time and space. And the reasons – in addition to the bureaucratic ones – often reside in the communities from which the students come, which project their authoritarianism onto the school. But the educational technobureaucracy is also more realistic than the king and creates biases in how things should be studied, which is part of the secular uncultural horror. In addition, each new theme requires study and research processes, because the education of children and adolescents is not a depository of things done, especially by a divided, irreconcilable, fragmented society, accustomed to projecting its horrors onto its “state apparatuses”. . See the Bolsonarist nonsense of the non-party school. See, too, the evil that the denial of the good debate on gender and sexual orientation means, evidently arranged at the appropriate times and ages of children and adolescents. In practice, since it is impossible to research and clarify gender in its various aspects, it will also be impossible to reflect on violence against women. Did deputies and senators not think about that? Not the courts or the executive?
It is the same with the other themes. Only freedom in curricular organization, research and community inclusion (which guarantee the educational community and overcome the solitary school) will allow thinking about the future of communication, the future of the means of production that lead to the concentration of power and the environmental disgrace of the nation. Consequently, only new ways of thinking and building the school will lead to the transformation of the vast majority of students and families into activists for the dignity of life, which is the new name for ecological action.
Will this country still learn to dignify the school?
Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP.