By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*

Educating will always mean “leading out” of impositions and “news”, out of respect for culture, the human spirit and the biology of being. Therefore, it is necessary to revolutionize

The education of generations will not do without love, in the assertion of Hannah Arendt, much less of wanting-well thought out and lived in Paulo Freire. Or the liberating attitude of the Judeo-Aramaic-Christian concept ahavah. Contrary to what erupts in the pandemic for the school in/of the future, the center of the educational system cannot be the teacher, but the subjects of the educational act, the one and the other, one and the other, that is, the community that creates and educates itself, true instituter of new curricula, whether face-to-face or via remote assistance. In education, people give themselves and donate themselves in the construction of their common good. Human speech will be central in the construction of science and emotions and the acts of education will have as their fulcrum the constitution of autonomy and freedom. Outside of that, there are lessons and illusions, common in times of plague and new commercial ventures poorly called innovations.

How is it possible for intelligent men and women to present in the countless debates under pandemic times such folly, that is, to transform the Common National Curriculum Base into a document of Brazilian equity? Is the pandemic also providing mental delays?

Strictly speaking, education does not get better because time passes, because the plague rages or because there is technological increment. Good budgets without rigorous evaluation are also worthless.

Why, then, from the perspective of the MEC, will it not be possible to see anything new in Brazilian education until 2022? Now, why is a minister chosen under the filthy breath of bullet groups, the bible (which is not the Tanakh, not o Logos, but vested interests) and the ox, a symbol of brutally conservative, anti-ecological and expansionist power. What happens again under this government will be rebellion and hopefully we will see movements similar to 1968 or even 1932, when education began to escape from the hands of the barbarian elite in Brazil.

It has always demanded and will demand boldness, solidarity, faith in knowledge towards personal and collective autonomy. So thought the New School Educators, who in 1932 launched a manifesto in Brazil. One of its strong moments was this:

“The school, which has been a formal and rigid apparatus, without regional differentiation, completely disintegrated in relation to the social environment, will become a living organism, with a social structure, organized in the manner of a throbbing community for solutions to its problems. But if the school is to be a miniature community and if in every community manual, motor and constructive activities constitute the predominant functions of life, it is natural that it initiates students in these activities, putting them in contact with the environment and with the active life that surrounds them, so that they can in this way possess it, appreciate it and feel it according to their aptitudes and possibilities”.

In 1932, a school and an educational practice were thought of, which we still don't have. The place for the systematic practice of culture and training of people should be a community of teaching and knowledge of life and the world, without repression of feelings, appreciation and the exercise of possibilities and aptitudes, which is not to be confused with competences and skills provided and enforced. This curricular, pedagogical and didactic community would be projected towards the neighborhood and the city. Education would become citizenship. It's about the city and civiltà.  

At this moment in Brazilian life, there is a behavior that is anything but educational, which moves in Brasilia towards the choice of the most conservative, most militarized and most trained by foul-mouthed gurus in order to take over the MEC. The act of, at the same time, reading the Manifesto and thinking about the fight for education that goes from Anísio Teixeira to Florestan Fernandes and from him to the educators who were humiliated and offended during the Military Dictatorship, provokes shame and disgust, because that history of sacrifice and intelligence gives way to the recent exchanges of palace pustules.

Horrors aside, there is an integrated experience of culture, education and recreation that few people know in this country, as the teaching of human sciences and arts is being suffocated and this is not new. It took place between 1935 and 1938, in the city hall of São Paulo, whose mayor was Fábio da Silva Prado. He entrusted the management of culture and recreation to the leader of Brazilian Modernism Mário de Andrade.

When the critic and professor Antonio Candido analyzed the experience, he did not overlook it: there, in truly entrepreneurial São Paulo, a “revolution in the routine” of public management took place, through advanced institutions, with a clear reading of the needs of society. people from São Paulo, through opinion polls with families and by encouraging adolescent volunteering. Likewise, the small metropolis saw the selection and hiring of specialists in all areas of culture and recreation to work alongside kindergarten schools and gymnasiums.

Imagine, from one month to the next, the city starting to receive new libraries for different audiences, recordings of music and all the broad folkloric material of Brazil, expansion of recreational spaces with effective practice of inclusion, from the neighborhoods to the center . Think of the disposal of all the cinematographic and musical technology of the late 1930s at the service of groups in social formation, or the joint and matrix work of prepared people from the areas of education, recreation, medicine, nursing, gastronomy, music, cinema, theater, all at the service of a political process understood as an indisputable common good, as Chomsky proposed much later. It was a shared advance in education, health and cultural enjoyment, especially dedicated to children and adolescence.

It was short-lived, as this revolutionary service was crushed by the authoritarian regime of Getúlio Vargas and by partisan futrication. However, the three-year experience brought scholars, public managers and European intellectuals to São Paulo to see and feel what was happening in the city until recently provincial and run by elites of dubious tastes, its operettas and its parasitism with public power, who paid the bill for their cultural selfishness, incapable of sharing their assets beyond their What our. With Mário de Andrade at the head of the Department, on the contrary, a long maturation of brilliant men and women from the arts, culture and education projected São Paulo to the world not because of its particular brilliance, but because the public service was aimed at workers, to the illiterate, to children from the outskirts of São Paulo, to the migrant and immigrant world. The Pacaembu Stadium and the Municipal Theater overflowed with people, with special appreciation for youth and planned actions, carried out with participation and evaluated by teams directed by the brilliant perfectionist, Mário de Andrade. The action was so strong that departments of culture and education throughout the country took over the organization of that directorate of culture and recreation and several contemporary projects are still stimulated by the Mariodeandradian way of doing things, despite the loss of the revolutionary spirit.

Well, it is not possible to resurrect Mário, Anísio, Durmeval, Florestan, Cecília, Rubens Borba, Oneyda, Levi-Strauss, Luís Saia and the entire revolutionary team. Even worse would be to imagine that it is possible to replace them with representatives of the united order, offspring of the foul-mouthed gurus, bloodhounds and parasites of power. Or by the moderates on duty, who justify everything and pontificate their technological wisdom, although they deny indispensable changes based on the horror that is experienced in Brazil and the lack of love for education. It also happens that the greatest active and transforming intelligence, today, is in research, in laboratories, in certain spaces of universities, in some entrepreneurial actions, in the arts and in literature.

After the dictatorship, which drained the blood and energy of millions and threw them onto the sidewalks and tombs of thousands, redemocratization in the 1980s found consensus ultraliberalism favored by new systems and cybernetic traps. And this has nothing to do with the pleasant use of cell phones and other tools in the day-to-day teaching process. Education has remained between the handouts of the latest trends in the economic centers and the strong mark of Freire's pedagogy, which has also become obscure due to poor reading and the terrible game of irreconcilable oppositions, in which, to remind Barthes, dialogue reaches zero degree of linguistic elaboration.

The government that is currently on duty in Brasilia assumes and breaks its face daily for squinting and mediocrity. It manages to achieve the feat of doing nothing in education, nothing in human rights, nothing in environmental and ecological issues and nothing in health. a government in nothing, just to play with a word from Great Sertão: Veredas.

However, the country has more than 2 million male and female educators, indispensable people in the community development of education. It would not, therefore, be impossible to create public services of common good integrated and evaluated in continuity and rigor.

But there are requirements for this. It matters, and a lot, to deny even the last penny of contingency; suggest to the president and his children that they stop meddling in what they don't know and never knew what it is; in this case, education. Continuous act, demand an empathetic and supportive relationship between university/institutes and basic education, not exclusively for circumstantial research and extension, but effective commitment for a few centuries, continuously; going back to 1996 and stimulating a national reading of the updated LDB (Law 9394), of the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN) for youth education, created and revised following the LDB until around 2014 and reaching the documents that deal with the training of educators and educators; cut military spending and bank usury, as well as going back in the arms field, with full application of these resources in public basic sanitation and in the reorganization of the territory for the establishment of beautiful, cheerful schools with a full curriculum built by the community; After reading the Curriculum Guidelines, move on to thinking about the new BNCC, Common National Curricular Base (2017-2018) in the light of those, which are more comprehensive and make an educational reading for the huge and distinct country, with its indigenous nations, quilombola communities, nomadic groups under seasonal work, fishermen, rubber tappers and other forms of work that involve millions of children and adolescents.

It should also be considered that there is an illusion in the pandemic air: remote classes and distance learning. Such activities can never be more than auxiliary in basic education, especially through the scientific reading of human growth and its psychosocial needs. Mário de Andrade's board was revolutionary in the use of the technologies of the time, but at the service of community constitution, the meeting of the self and the other. If necessary, return to Piaget. Furthermore, non-mediated human speech will always be indispensable, regardless of the stage or level of education. Any response to the pandemic will have to go far beyond it. Or, in Drummond's memory, we'll be waiting for the next one, like yellow and fearful flowers.

Another illusion in the air: foundations, campaigns and educational movements are always waiting for a new MEC leader to create a task force, call for institutional support and respect the constitutional proposal of the solidarity work regime between government instances. There is no mistake in that; on the contrary, it is good. But without a line of principle and a process of strategies that consider the recent history, post 1996, from the Guidelines to Conae and from this to the National Education Plan (2014), that is, the documents that guide Brazilian education, any task force it will be an innocuous action, a stimulus for many guesses and little integration in favor of a true public policy for the common good; and the most outstanding common good that we have today, after a year and a half of nothing, it is education and its related areas in joint action. The biggest risk is that of stuffing yourself with technology and BNCC and ending up with brush in hand, but without a ladder to paint higher.

The almost 45 million male and female students (considering that there are a few million out of school, a growing process in the pandemic) cannot show all their anger over the nothing in education of the government on duty. The greater, constructive anger has to be built and lived by those who educate and educate. Despite this anger not moving a straw in the government that is “organized” between the autocracy and the plutocracy, from the genuflection before Trump to the powers of the “bible”, the ox and the bullet, those who educate and those who want to educate have an obligation to maintain the most rigorous evaluation, by all the networks, of this government of nothing. And move forward to build and enjoy the rebellion. Educating will always mean “leading out” of impositions and “news”, out of respect for culture, the human spirit and the biology of being. Therefore, revolutionizing is necessary.

* Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior professor at ECA-USP.