Why is Brazilian education so bad nowadays? (Part 2)

(Rodrigo Contrera)

Other reasons for the current poor state of Brazilian education largely stem from accepted customs and behaviors by those involved in discussing education, which are not adequately considered as undermining the country's challenges in this regard.

One of these customs is the insistence on treating education as a separate matter, with its own logics and procedures when it is a topic that permeates the entire lives of families, communities, and individuals, inevitably at the center of any valorization or devaluation of life. This becomes evident when the audience involved in education is treated as clientele, and individuals who cease to invest in it as a means of personal or social ascent are dismissed as mere dropouts, when in fact they are often those who believe in education the most but disagree with how it is treated and how it treats the people involved. In other words, education is treated as a market, not as an environment that encompasses everyone, even when its treatment is scorned by those who view it from afar.

Another custom is the understanding that the learner is preferably a passive subject in the relationship with knowledge, which is given as established when the learner is a subject in prior opposition to everything that exists simply because they are not taken as the beginning of something that can be unprecedented. This happens because established knowledge is assumed with a character of supposed sanctity that is absolutely incongruent with the history of education. In other words, the students are assumed to be beneath knowledge when they are simply there, seeing knowledge as the beginning of something (learning) that can potentially overturn everything. This may stem from a past linked to institutions of domination

(church, state) that insist on assuming roles that are unquestionable at the limit when closed education is not real education, and open education tends to attribute insecurity to teachers and established hierarchies. The conflict between these realms is often seen through the lens of discipline when it has no relation to authority or obedience but to respect.

Another aspect to be considered here is that schools always move forward when, many times, the student does not necessarily want to advance but to enjoy the stay in something that makes them better simply by being amidst authors who engage with them without aiming first for results, second for acquiescence, third for accommodation, and fourth, not even sympathy. The conflict between human beings, as we know, occurs through only partial coexistence, but schools generally aim for acquisition, acquiescence, passivity, and moving forward when knowledge does not necessarily move forward but usually sideways and often backward.

I will soon comment on other aspects related to the poor quality of current Brazilian education.

(Rodrigo Contrera)

Translated by ChatGPT