Reinventing Education

03/06/2012 Leonardo Boff8 Comentários

Muniz Sodre, titular professor of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, is a well learned person. But what is different about him is that he, as few others, thinks about what he knows. The fruit of his thinking is a just released, very notable, book: Reinventing education: diversity, decolonization and networks, (Reinventando la educación: diversidad, descolonización y redes, Vozes, 2012).

In that book, he tries to confront the challenges to pedagogy and education that derive from the different types of knowledge, from the new technologies and transformations advanced by capitalism. All of this begins with our social place: the Southern hemisphere, once colonized, that is undergoing an interesting process of neo-decolonization, and a confrontation with the weakened neo-Eurocentrism, now devastated by the crisis of the Euro.

Muniz Sodre analyzes different currents of pedagogy and education, from the Greek paideia to the world market of education, that represent a crass conception of utilitarian education, transforming education into an enterprise and a market, at the service of world domination.

He unmasks the mechanisms of economic and political power that hide behind expressions that are on everyone’s lips, such as, «a society of knowledge or of information». In other words, informational-cognitive-capitalism constitutes the new basis of capital accumulation. Everything has become capital: natural capital, human capital, cultural capital, intellectual capital, social capital, symbolic capital, religious capital… Capital and more capital. But underneath, there lurks a mono-culture of mechanical knowledge, expressed as the «economy of knowledge» at the service of the market.

Nowadays a type of education has been planned that seeks to create cadres to perform «symbolic-analytic services», cadres endowed with a high capability to invent, identify and solve problems. This education distributes knowledge in the same manner that a factory installs components in an assembly line.

In this way, education loses its formative character. It falls under the criticism of Hannah Arendt, who said: we can continue learning until the end of life without ever being educated. To educate implies learning to know and to do, but above all, learning to be, to coexist and to care. It implies building meaning into life, to know how to deal with the complex human condition and to define one’s self, facing the paths of history.

What aggravates all the process of education is the predominance of the only one way of thinking. Northamericans live on a myth and on «manifest destiny». They imagine that God reserved a destiny for them, of being the «new chosen people» to bring to the world their style, their ways of limitless production and consumption, their type of democracy and their free market values. In the name of this exceptionality, they intervene around the world, including with war, to guarantee their imperial hegemony all around the Earth.   Nor has Europe yet renounced her arrogance. The 1999 Bologna Declaration, that gathered 29 ministers of education of all Europe, asserted that only she, Europe, could produce the universal knowledge, capable of offering the citizens the necessary capabilities to face the challenges of the new millennium. Previously, a supposed universality supported human rights and was even found in Christianity, with her pretensions of being the only true religion. Now, the vision is of a lesser scope; only Europe guarantees managerial efficiency, competence, abilities and skills that will bring about the globalization of business. The present financial economic crisis is opening this claim to ridicule. Most of the countries do not know how to get out of the crises they have created. They prefer to drive whole societies into unemployment and misery, in order to save the speculative, cruel and pitiless financial system.

In his book, Muniz Sodre presents these questions to the Brazilian reality, to show the challenges to our education that must be confronted in the coming years. The time has come to stand as a free and creative people and not like the mere echo of another’s voice. Sodre rescues the names of educators who imagined an education fitting to our potentialities, such as Joaquim Nabuco, Anisio Teixeira and particularly Paulo Freire. Darcy Ribeiro would speak with enthusiasm about the re-invention of Brazil, starting from the richness of the mestizaje (co-mingling) of the representatives of all the 60 peoples who came to our country.

This re-invented education should help us with decolonization, and overcoming the one-thought-only, learning from the diverse cultures and benefiting from the social networks. From this effort could be born among us the first buds of a different paradigm of civilization, also called biocentric civilization, that will have at its center, life, humanity and the Earth.

What does Caring mean?

26/05/2012 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The debates about sustainable development, one of the central themes of Río +20, have now taken over the concept of sustainability. Sustainability cannot be reduced to the present kind of development, whose logic is contrary to sustainability. Development is linear, with the limitless growth that implies the exploitation of nature and creation of profound inequalities, while sustainability is circular, involving all beings in interdependent and inclusive relationships, so that all may and should coexist and co-evolve. A situation is sustainable if, given the challenges of the environment, it can maintain, reproduce, and preserve itself, and always be positive. This derives from the combination of interdependent relationships that is maintained with all other beings and their respective habitats. Sustainability is the foundation of a paradigm that must be realized in all fields of reality.

For sustainability to actually happen, especially when the human factor capable of intervention in the natural processes enters the picture, the mechanical functioning of the processes of interdependency and inclusion are not enough. Another aspect, compatible with sustainability, must be added: caring. Caring is also the foundation of another paradigm.

In the first place, caring is a cosmological constant. If the original energies and the first elements had not been governed by a solidarian form of caring, such that everything maintained its proper proportion, the universe would not have arisen, and we would not be here writing about caring. We ourselves are sons and daughters of caring. If our mothers had not held shown limitless caring, we would not have been able to leave our cribs and go in search of our food. Caring is a precondition for a being to come into existence. It is the anticipated guide to ensure that our actions are constructive, rather than destructive.

Caring enters into everything we do. We care for what we love. We love what we care for. Given the knowledge we have today about the dangers that weigh on the Earth and life, we know that if we do not care for them, our species will be threatened with extinction, while the impoverished Earth will continue for centuries in the cosmos until perhaps another being appears, that is endowed with high complexity and caring, capable of enduring spirit and consciousness.

Below, we continue with the different meanings of caring, derived from many sources that will not be mentioned here, but which come from the remotest antiquity, from the Greeks and Romans, passing through Saint Augustine and culminating in Martin Heidegger, who saw in caring the very essence of the human being, in the world, together with the others and oriented towards the future. We identify four great meanings that are interdependent.

First: caring is a relationship, an attitude of loving; soft, amicable, harmonious and protective of the personal, social and environmental reality.

Metaphorically we can say that caring is the open hand extended to the essential caress, to the handshake; caring is the intertwined fingers that form an alliance of cooperation and of joining forces. It is the opposite of the closed hand and of the tight fist that subjugates and dominates the other.

Second: caring is all types of concern, inquietude, unease, discomfort and even fear for persons and realities with which we are emotionally tied and for that reason they are precious to us.   This type of caring accompanies us in all moments and in every phase of our life. It is involvement with the situations and persons that are dear to us. They bring us caring and let us live essential caring.

Third: caring is the experience of the relationship between the need to be cared for and the will and the predisposition to care, forming a collection of supports and protections (holding) that make possible this undissolvable relation at a personal and social level, and with all living beings. Loving-caring, concerned-caring and caring-protection-support are existential, this is, they are objective facts of the structure of our being in time, space and history, as Winnicott has shown us. They precede any other act and underlie everything we undertake. This is why they are part of the human essence.

Fourth: caring-precaution and caring-prevention refer to those attitudes and behaviors that must be avoided due to their injurious consequences, foreseeable (prevention) and unforeseeable, that sometimes result from the imprecision of scientific data and the unpredictability of their damaging effects to the life-system and to the Earth-system (precaution).   Caring-prevention and caring-precaution derive from our mission to care for all beings. We are ethical beings and responsible for those consequences, this is, we understand the beneficial or damaging consequences of our actions, attitudes and behavior.

As can be seen, caring is linked to vital questions that can lead to the destruction of our future or the maintenance of our life on this small and beautiful planet. Only if we radically live caring can we guarantee the necessary sustainability for our Common Home and our life.

Times of crisis – Times of caring

20/05/2012 Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

The topic of caring is a recurrent theme in the cultural reflections of our times. First it was brought up by medicine and nursing, because it represents the natural ethic of these activities. Then, it was assumed by education, and turned into a paradigm by feminist philosophers and theologians, primarily by Northamerican women, who saw in it an essential element of the anima dimension, present in all men and women. It has caused and continues to cause an on-going and tenacious debate, especially in the United States, between the basic patriarchal ethic, centered on the theme of justice, and the basic matriarchal ethic, as articulated through the essential caring.

It acquired special force in the debate over ecology, and is a central part of the Earthcharter. Caring for the environment, for the scarce resources, for nature and the Earth have become imperatives of the new discourse. Finally, caring has been seen as essential to understanding the human being, as Martin Heidegger wrote in Being and Time, taking up a tradition that dates back to the Greeks, Romans and early Christian thinkers, such as Saint Paul and Saint Augustine.

Moreover, it has been shown that the category of caring gains strength whenever there are crises. Caring keeps crises from being transformed into fatal tragedies.

The First world War (1914-1918), fought between Christian countries, destroyed the illusory glamour of the Victorian age, and produced a profound sense of metaphysical helplessness. That was when Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) wrote his genial Being and Time (1929), whose central paragraphs (§ 39-44) are devoted to caring as the ontology of the human being.

During the Second World War, (1939-1945), the pediatrician and psychologist D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971) was notable. He was charged by the British government with caring for orphan children, victims of the horrors of the Nazi bombardment of London. He developed an entire reflection and praxis around the concepts of caring (care), of concern for the other (concern), and all the caring and support that must be offered to children or other vulnerable persons (holding), and are also applicable to the processes of growth and education.

In 1972 the Club of Rome sounded the alarm about the sorry ecological state of the Earth. The Club of Rome identified the principal cause: our development model, consumerist, predatory, forgetful and with no form of caring, either for the scarce resources or the way we treat waste, much of which is harmful and not assimilated by nature. After several gatherings organized by the UN in the 1980s, it culminated in a proposal of sustainable development as an expression of human caring towards the environment, but it was still mainly focused on the economic aspect.

In 1991, the United Nations Program for the Environment, (PNUMA), The World Fund for Nature, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, developed a thorough strategy for the future of the planet, under the motto, Caring for the Earth, 1991. That document states:

The ethic of caring applies both on the international and national level, and the individual level as well; no nation is self sufficient, all will benefit with world sustainability and all will be threatened if we not achieve it.

Following this line of thought, after eight years of work at the world level, in March, 2000 the Earthcharter was completed in Paris. The category of caring and the sustainable mode of living constitute the two principal articulating axes of the new ecological, ethical and spiritual discourse proposed by this document. In 2003, UNESCO officially assumed the Earthcharter and offered it as a substantial pedagogical instrument to build humanity’s collective responsibility for our common future.

In 2003, the ministers and secretaries of the environment of the Latin American and Caribbean countries developed the notable document, Manifesto for life, for an ethic of sustainability which included the category of caring in the idea of an effectively sustainable and radically human development.

Caring is especially present in the two extremes of life: at birth and at death. The child cannot exist without caring. The moribund needs care to leave this life with dignity.

When a group creates a crisis that generates tensions and divisions, the wisdom of caring is the best path for listening to the parties, for encouraging dialogue and seeking agreement. Caring prevails when a health crisis occurs that requires hospitalization. Then, the caring by physicians, male and female nurses who decide on the best treatment is called into action.

Caring is absolutely necessary in practically all spheres of existence, from caring for the body, for nourishment, intellectual and spiritual life, and the over-all handling of life, up to crossing a busy street. As the Roman poet Horacio observed, caring is «like a shadow that always is with us and never abandons us because our existence started with caring».

Today, given the general crisis, be it social or environmental, caring becomes essential for preserving the integrity of Mother Earth and safeguarding the continuity of our species and our civilization.

Sustainability and Education

13/05/2012 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Sustainability, one of the central themes of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Río+20, that will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from June 20 to 22 of this year, is not produced mechanically. Sustainability results from a process of education, through which humans redefine all the relationships maintained with the universe, the Earth, nature, society and with themselves, within the criteria of ecological equilibrium, of respect and love for the Earth and the community of life, of solidarity with future generations and of building an unending socio-ecological democracy.

I am convinced that only a generalized process of education can develop, as the Earthcharter seeks, the new minds and hearts capable of carrying out the paradigmatic revolution demanded by the global threat under which we currently live. As Paulo Freire often said : «education does not change the world: education changes the people who will change the world». Everyone is urged to change now. We have no alternative: either we change, or we will know darkness.

I will not address here the many aspects of education so well presented by UNESCO in 1966: learn to know, to do, to be and to live together; to these, I would add, learn to care for Mother Earth and for all beings. But even this education is insufficient. The changed world situation demands that everything be ecologized, this is, that every human being lend his and her cooperation to protect the Earth, to save human life and our planet. Consequently, the ecological moment must permeate all knowledge.

On December 20, 2002, the UN approved a resolution proclaiming the years 2005 to 2014 as the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. That document defines 15 strategic perspectives towards a sustainable education. We will mention some:

Socio-cultural Perspectives, including human rights, peace and security, equality among the sexes, cultural diversity and inter-cultural understanding, health, AIDS, global government.

Environmental Perspectives includes natural resources (water, energy, agriculture and biodiversity), climatic changes, rural development, sustainable urbanization, prevention and mitigation of catastrophes.

Economic Perspectives, whose objectives are reducing poverty and misery, and building responsibility and accountability of business. Thus, the ecologic moment must be present in all disciplines. Otherwise, generalized sustainability will not be attained.

When the ecological paradigm burst, we all became aware of the fact that we all are eco-dependant. We participate in a community of interests with all the other living beings that share the biosphere with us. The basic common interest is maintaining the conditions for the continuity of life and of the Earth herself, understood as Gaia. That is the final goal of sustainability. Starting now, education must quickly include the four great tendencies of ecology: environmental, social, integral, and mental or profound (the one that deals with our place in nature).

Among educators, this perspective is ever more present: to educate to live well, which is the art of living in harmony with nature, and of deciding to share equitably with other humans the resources of culture and of sustainable development. We must understand that it is not just a question of making corrections to the system that caused the present ecologic crisis, but to educate for its transformation. This implies overcoming the still prevalent reductionist and mechanical vision, and building a culture of complexity, that allows us to see the interrelations of the living world and the eco-dependencies of the human being. This awareness requires environmental questions to be addressed in a global and integrated manner.

This type of education creates the ethical dimension of responsibility and caring for the Earth and humanity’s common future. It makes the human being become the caretaker of our Common House and guardian of all beings. We want democracy without end (Boaventura de Souza Santos) to assume socio-ecologic characteristics, because only that way will it be suitable for the ecozoic era, and respond to the demands of the new paradigm. Human beings, Earth and nature mutually belong to each other. That is why it is possible to forge a path of peaceful coexistence. That is the challenge of education in our days.