By ANTONIO SIMPLICIO DE ALMEIDA NETO*
The rubble was piling up in the school amphitheater, mountains of rubble, trash scattered across the courtyard and classrooms, food and paper scraps on the floor, fetid bathrooms, blowflies...
The table was barely balanced on the rubble. Plastic table and chairs, dirty white tablecloth, vase with artificial flowers, tattered banner with the name of the event: “Fuck the past educational experience: hope for futures to build tomorrows”. It would be a live with simultaneous transmission on the main social networks, many likes, but nobody saw, nobody knows, nobody followed.
The distinguished guest was a retired academic sub-celebrity from some sub-area, now working in a private foundation, sub-project management, something like that…, upturned nose, flared nostrils, stiff air, calculatedly affected speech, restrained gestures. The mediator – a young man coach neophyte, but pretentious – he expected to impress with his wool blazer from Riachuelo, jeans, white socks and sneakers.
They discussed any topic with the ease of a conjurer: public education, private initiative and privatization, game based learning, NGOs and OSCIPs, teachers, new technology, educators, skills, feedback 360º and 180º, skills, ethics, teaching, rights and learning objectives, entrepreneurship, values, historical awareness, virtual citizenship, e-learning, areas of knowledge, BNCC, foundations, minimum concepts, EaD, b-learning, essential learning, NEM, life project, Applied Human and Social Sciences, education platformization, engagement, active methodologies, flipped classroom, resist from within, disruptive education, window of opportunities, hybrid teaching, learning maker, women empowerment. The list of topics and possibilities were endless and they were… very powerful and decolonial.
The rubble was piling up in the school amphitheater, mountains of rubble, trash scattered across the playground and classrooms, food and paper scraps on the floor, fetid bathrooms, blowflies flying overhead, a nauseating smell of carrion and spoiled food, a corpse (could it be a historian, a history teacher?) lying forgotten at the back of the auditorium, fragments of explosion everywhere, putrid water and urine pooling, huge cracks in the walls, everything smelled of shit, collections of old handouts – São Paulo faz escola – faded, packages of textbooks still laminated and moldy, remains of school culture piled up on the improvised table with an interactive digital whiteboard on rusty school desks, trash cans with emojis grimy smiling, murmur-murmur-gurgle, greasy furniture, shards of neoliberal utopia, multimedia projector out of focus, partially unroofed ceiling, the weak light entered through the windows of the few intact filthy panes, ruins everywhere, opportunistic rats circulated in search of crumbs and small opportunities.
“Doesn’t this sound like a Byzantine debate to you?” said the corpse as it stood up, the only one registered in the workshop.
*Antonio Simplicio de Almeida Neto is a professor at the Department of History at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP). Author, among other books, of Utopian representations in history teaching (Ed. Unifesp) [https://amzn.to/4bYIdly]
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