Do lume do Open Democracy Jornal.
by Ivonaldo
Leite
Every day, everywhere in
the world, the educational adventure is being recreated by devoted teachers who
are eager to help children, youth and adults to get educated even in the most
adverse conditions. In universities, a lot of professors have spent a great
deal of their professional lives trying to serve students with research and
teaching, seeking the improvement of school systems and engaging in passionate
public debates about educational policies.
Thus, the role of the researcher in education is not disconnected from practice educational.
Thus, the role of the researcher in education is not disconnected from practice educational.
Somehow,
the educational researcher is a kind of lawyer for an educational system of
quality and relevance in the lives of people. In this way, he seeks to expand
the frontiers of knowledge considering it could be made a powerful democratic
mean for social change.
But
historically the workings of schooling and its relationships with politics have
justified and reproduced social inequalities. Actually, the impacts of
globalization on the public education systems have caused several situations of
social exclusion. As Torres affirms, a number of elements intervene to produce
this outcome, including school tracking, racist behavior, elite networking,
disciplinary sanctions, lack of relevance of subject matter for people’s life,
inefficient resource allocation and lack of efficacy of schooling as measured
in drop out and repetition rates or irrelevant pro forma learning.
Traditional
schooling usually reproduces, for instance, classists and patriarchal
relationships. This is result of the authoritarianism of administrators and
political projects, but also of the authoritarianism of knowledge production,
distribution, exchange and consumption.
Therefore,
contemporaneously, the educational research has several analytical challenges
to focus. In this way, we can point out some of them, according to they are
described below.
The first
challenge refers to the fact that schooling and knowledge has commodified
social relations. Even in the radical camp there is a culture of consumption
prevailing. Consequently, there is, for example, a cottage industry of
Paulo Freire’s. There is a large number of intellectuals, many of whom
previously were advocating social transformation, that now act as a new class
of managers and defended the dominant
social order. These new intellectual managers cut across all races,
ethnicities, sexual dispositions, genders, religions, and the like.
The second
challenge is result of information technology revolution and its impacts on the
education. Schooling is losing ground as part and parcel of socialization
devices compared to the mass media.[1]
The schools are losing relevance; the written word is losing relevance facing
the hidden curriculum of the mass media There is a growing sense of
fragmentation and isolation in terms of social relationships and relationships
of learning and knowledge. There is a kid of solipsism, which may in the end
result in political apathy, nihilism, and social disorganization. There is an
increased power of unconventional relationships taking over everyday of people.
There is, finally, a breakdown in family relationships, in the connections between
youth culture and adult cultures, in the connections between teachers and
pupils, in the structured mechanisms of social controls, in the rule of the
law, and in community intimacy.
In several
ways, the lack of relevance of schooling is being augmented with the phenomena
of globalization. The dialectics of the global and local show that school,
rather than being a space for emancipation is an space for control and social
reproduction. The dynamics of the global are demolishing the dynamics of local
control of educational establishments.
Last but not
least, the third analytical challenge is related to a reality in developing
actually. In short, schooling has been more valuable as a park lot for children
and youth, helping their parents forget about taking care of them for few
hours. Schools resemble more boarding warehouses than learning places. They
have lost the edge as state instruments acting in locus parenti
helping children and youth to become socialize in morality, and
cultivated in the disciplines of spirit and the body.
One
consequence of restricting the debate about school just pedagogical issues is
that there has not sufficient attention paid by education theorists to the
development of a more rigorous set of analytic categories that might enable us
to make sense of the profound changes which characterize education actually.
Consequently, this has tended to result in hyperbole and crude argument about
impacts of globalization on education. Usually, globalization is shown as
a unicausal mechanism and a process without a subject. But this is not true.
Globalization is the outcome of process that involve economic and political
actors with real interests. So, the educational research can’t to analyze the
contemporary school phenomena without taking this into account.
[1] Torres, C. A. (2000), Opening Adress, ISA’s
RC0$ Midterm Conference of the Research Comittee on Sociology on
Education-International Sociological Association on Outcomes and Governance of Schooling,
University of Groningen, The Netherlands, July 3-5, 2000.
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