Fisk Final - Education

Fisk Final

Education

Uberlândia - 2007

Index

1. What is education? ……………………………………………………………….. 3 2. Educating with art and the art of educating ……………………………………. 3 3. The school of the future and the conflict ……………………………………….. 5 4. Learning in distinct parts of the world …………………………………………... 7 4.1. Greece (BC) …………………………………………………………………….. 7 4.2. Europe …………………………………………………………………………… 7 4.2.1. Renaissance ………………………………………………………………….. 7 4.2.2. Positivism ……………………………………………………………………… 8 4.3. The Third World ………………………………………………………………… 8 4.3.1. Latin America …………………………………………………………………. 8 4.3.1.1. Brazil ………………………………………………………………………… 9 4.3.2. Africa …………………………………………………………………………. 10 4.4. The East ……………………………………………………………………….. 10 5. Current perspective on education ……………………………………………... 11

1. What is education?

Nobody can escape from the education. At home, in the street, in the church or at school, all people are involved in it some way: to learn, to teach, to learn and teach. Consequently, for the fact of the education is so intrinsic in people’s lives, it is almost always a propitious moment to be concerned about it, and, besides, in a way in which was started with some that are very prejudiced for their living way: the indians.

In many years in the USA, Virginia and Maryland signed a peace pact with the indians of the Six Nations. Like the promises and the symbols of the education were very adequate to solemn moments such as that, soon after the governors sent letters to the indians in order that they sent some of their young to the white schools. The tribes’ chiefs answered it thanking it or refusing it. Years later, Benjamim Franklin spread this letter worldwide and got it famous. That is a part of it:

“We are convinced, therefore, that you sirs yearn us well and we thank you very much.

However those ones whom are wise acknowledge that different nations have different conceptions and, so, you will not get offended to know that your idea of education is not the same of ours.

… Many of our brave warriors were graduated at the North schools e learnt your whole science. Nevertheless, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant about the life of the forest and uncapable to support cold and starvation. They didn’t know how to hunt a deer, to kill the enemy and to build a hut, and they were speaking our language very badly. So, they were totally useless.

We got extremely thanked for your offer and, though we can not accept it, to demonstrate our gratitude, we offer the sending of some of your young to you for we to teach them everything we know.”

Of all that is discussed about education nowadays, some points among the most important ones are written in this indians’ letter. There is not a unique model of education; the school is not the only place where it happens and maybe it is not even the best one; the school teaching is not its only practice and the professor is not its unique participant.

2. Educating with art and the art of educating

Educating is a task and not an easy one. It is delicate for its requiring love, patience, decision, sweetness, firmness.

Several books have already been written. How many times do teachers and parents, full of enthusiasm and hope, buy them in order to solve a specific problem which worries them in relation to their children’s and students’ attitudes?

In the books, it is easy: they have many theories, formulas and even advices that sound magic. However, the reality is another. When teachers and parents try to practice some of these concepts and these don’t work, they ask themselves what wrong they did being that they did exactly what was in the book. The point it that “educating is a science and an art; an art for its no fixed rules. It means that each case is different, each circumstance is unique.”

A small text, a word, a gesture, a drawing, a painting or a help in a situation that wasn’t expected can fill a life, change its way of seeing the world and open possibilities, because in many times understanding, explicating and describing is a good stuff, an exercise.

So, what can the professors and parents do when they feel afflicted? Sometimes, they want to give up or give this responsibility to others. Nevertheless, everybody knows that it is their task to give to students and children all they need. The educators (parents and teachers) are who have to teach them the sense of life and make them able to live it.

The object of education is not just in the literal meaning of the verb “to educate”, but in the manner it is done, the way it is thought, the morality of the criterions in which it is based.

Educating is like to teach someone to walk or speak (there is nothing of metaphorical in this analogy). Walking vertically and speaking is the most fundamental education of the way of being: being a human. Learning to read, to count and to dominate a technique, the scientific knowledges is the same of learning to speak.

Teaching, in the sense of educating, is much more difficult than learning. The reason is not only the fact that who teaches must dominate a bigger quantity of information and has to have it always ready to be utilized, but because teaching requires something much more

difficult, complex and powerful: letting to learn. Who really teaches pass through the learning.

What is learnt when it is learnt to learn? What is learnt when it is educated? On basis of what does the education earn its sense, its vitality and its decisive character? The answer is simple: educating is to let the man and its possibilities appear.

For all of this, the education is essentially a pointing of possibilities, of distinctions, of relations and of humanity. Educating is opening, is questioning, is doubting, is instructing in doubting, is to be modest in knowing to help. Who must educate who then? The answer is the same of the question: “Who helps who?”

Living is learning. The time changes people for the fact that everything teaches them. Passing what passes, it is learnt what stays. A calling for a name, a help when nothing was expected or an idea touched by the enthusiasm, by the imagination, a looking of accomplishment, a conversation about what it is never able to read, but always worried, or simply the magic of a moment can mark the way and the manner of being in the world.

In the education, the essential is not the object or the content, however the perspective, the manner and the relation. The object of the education is not the theme, like, for example, Mathematics, Geography, Literature. It is the way of being that takes care, that gets involved, that lets to be involved and that lets to be.

It is heard a lot about education nowadays. But, as yesterday as today, the man is himself/herself the education, the being that takes care. Helping, calling and being accomplice of this constant choosing of the possibilities that each one has, it is possible to open the way and really educate and be educated.

The hour is a measurement, a ball is a pastime and a concept is an instrument, but each person is the whole world. They are all the worlds of the world that the education has as a theme. Like that, in any moment in any world, a word, a gesture or a looking can enter and don’t get out anylonger. If people had known to preserve and let to preserve these moments, they couldn’t just touch in what they are doing in the moment, but a whole life – and this is actually the object to educate.

3. The school of the future and the conflict

It is said, in general, that occurred three great revolutions which altered the manner of conceiving and producing the education and the teaching. The first of them was the appearing of the school as a space destined to the teaching, occasioning the systematization of the process as something deliberated, specialized and focused. The teaching quits being familiar and diffuse and turns out to be institutional and systemic.

The second revolution is the creation of the public system of the school, period marked by the State’s action in the transmition process of knowledge and culture. It is passed from the private to the public, from the administration principle of many different and private schools to the concentration principle of the teaching by nets of schools, from the religious model of administrating a school to the bureaucratic model of the administrating control. With the appearing of the journalism, this period organizes the school structure into matters and into levels.

The third revolution, when it happens definitely in Brazil, will bring vital consequences to society. It is the massed education. The average index of children in elementary school in Brazil is of 97%; it can sound good, but in Sweden there were 1% of illiterates in 1875! Anyway, Brazil is clearly starting to live the “massification” of education. This phenomenon, even in initial step, imposes some reflections, which must be done with an eye in the past, for learning, and an eye in the future, for anticipating.

In 1940, the biggest seven problems of american schools were: 1. speaking in inconvenient occasions; 2. chewing gum; 3. making sound; 4. running into the hallways; 5. not respecting the sequence of people in the lines; 6. disrespecting the rules about the way of dressing up; 7. making mess. The same research was done in 1990 and the biggest seven problems were: 1. using of drugs; 2. using of alcohol, 3. pregnancy; 4. suicides; 5. rapes; 6. robs; 7. assault.

It is evident that Brazil will pass through problems similar to the ones that happen in countries that “massificated” the teaching. The question is: what is being done to anticipate and face the expected problems?

The school is the space that society believes to be an ideal to reproduce worth that it considers important to its maintenance. But the family itself started to “give” to the school educative functions that historically were of its responsibility, changing the profile of the student’s behavior. On the other hand, the “massification” brought to the school universe a different set of students, and the current school, in the way it is organized and in the way the teachers were formed, is just prepared to deal with students of ideal and standard profile. The “massification” amplified the number of students and brought a student of a

different profile of those with whom this institution is prepared to deal. This disestablished the historic internal order. It is created the field of the conflict!

Together with this disestablishment, there are: the loss of the teachers’ acquisitive power, the amplification of public institutions without professionalism, unemployment of workerstudents and their families, the crime out of control.

The unfortunate happenings in the german cities of Erfurt and Freising, and before these in the american cities of Grundy, Littletown and Jonesboro, where the students killed teachers and classmates, are reflexes of a violent society, but, above all, result from the own conflicts of the school, that can and must be anticipated, in order to find efficient remedies like, for instance, the qualification of directors, teachers and students to the minimization of conflicts, according to what has already been done in other sites like EUA, France and Argentine, mainly.

Above of all, governors and educators must be aware of the fact that the conflict is not the enemy of the “order” that has been always commanded schools. The conflict is the result of the “different ones” and of the “differences” that today can live together in the school space. It must be learnt to deal with this irreversible situation, anticipating decisions, and, when the problem emerges strongly, it is possible to deal with it.

The school of before was the school of the “similar ones”. The “massificated” and future school will be the one of the “different ones” and of the diversity, what asks an appropriate school administration, from the vision of the future that is expected.

4. Learning in distinct parts of the world

4.1. Greece (BC)

The flourish of the Roman Civilization is not without the contact by Hellenism. According to Horace’s words: “The conquered Greece reached its wild winner and brought the civilization to the rude Lacio.” Nevertheless, the great length that separated the “rude

Lacio” from the high cultural level reached by the Greek was quickly surpassed, as a consequence of the enormous Latin’s facility to adapt and assimilate the customs of other civilizations, in particular the Hellenist one.

It is said, however, that there had been existed some resistance to the Hellenism. The peasants of Lacio, for instance, protected themselves against the foreign innovations for the respect for an ancestral tradition – the mos maiorum. According to this tradition, the objective of education is the practice and it is social. It is expected that the education provides the children the necessary knowledge to the practice of her/his profession. The goal is to form the citizen – civis romanus.

In the second century BC, the pater familias concede to the mother the rights under the education of her children during the first years. But, around 7 years old, the education of the child is under the father’s responsibility or, in his absence, under the uncle’s. The father must teach his children moral and civil education.

This form of education is based on the natural worry about associating cultural worth and collective ideal. It exalts the “pietas” that stands for the respect for the ancient. In the traditional patrician families, the ancient represented the models of behavior, repeated generation after generation.

When the adolescent, around seventeen years old, finally gets rid of the praetexta of the infancy to enter in the virile life, it starts the learning of the public life, the tirocinium fori. The youth will follow his father. During one year, he will obtain knowledge about rights, about public practice and “the art of speaking”, roman conception of eloquence.

4.2. Europe

4.2.1. Renaissance

Renaissance influenced directly on the education by means of the Heliocentric Theory. Consequently, it intended the formation of a burgher man, for the fact that this theory was favored by the capitalism, the Great Navigations, etc.

Main educators:

•

Vitorring da Feltre defended an individualized education.

• Erasmo Desidorn – for him, the truly way should be created by the man, who is an intelligent and a free being. •

Juan Luis Vives was one of the first to solicit salary for the teachers.

• François Rabeles defended the idea that the most important wasn’t the books, but the moral and ethic education. It should first takes care of the body, of the hygiene, of the cleaning, of the physical exercises, etc. • Michel de Motaigne believed that children should learn what they will do in the future.

4.2.2. Positivism

Positivism consolidated the burgher conception of the education. Its great defender was August Comte (1798 – 1857), who has as a main work the “Course of positivist philosophy”, published in 1830 and 1842. Comte was against religion at schools, though he proposed an institution, which he called “humanity’s religion”, to substitute the Church.

Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903), disciple of Comte, left the religious conception of his master and valued the principle of scientific formation in the education.

Émile Durkein (1858 – 1917) considered the education as an image and a reflex of the society.

4.3. The Third World

The pedagogy thought of the Third World is originated by educational experiences of the colonized countries, like the Latin and African ones. On the emancipation fight, these countries built an original theory. Europe colonized both continents, dividing territories and making them more and more dependents and subdeveloped.

European combated the native education and culture imposing their habits and making slaves the natives of each region.

In Africa, the colonists imposed only one language in order to catechize them in a universal religion. Nevertheless, this program did not work for the fact that the African tradition values the oral word, and not the writing word as do the European.

In the seventy’s, together with the African countries freedom, enormous alphabetization campaigns were made, in spite of being considered a failure by the European. Even so, the African obtained good results. These campaigns aimed the incorporation of these popular masses in a national educational project.

4.3.1. Latin America

The methodologies in use at schools have a verbal perspective: the professor exposes the ideas gotten from books, which allow the student to get all his/her formal perception of knowing.

The school could sound as a factory, where the teacher speaks and the student absorbs the information passed. All the institutions just gave the students the work of memorizing the answers, being that those did not make these to think.

Nowadays, the diversity of information turned the communication out to be something more differentiated among the communities and also in relation to its nature. The visual and sonorous perceptions are fundamental to the knowing act.

4.3.1.1. Brazil

The pedagogic Brazilian thought changed due to the illuminist thought brought by students who were not very concerned to the Church. The Jesuits diffused on the popular classes their religion, which, even nowadays, has remarkable characteristics, in order to teach them.

Rui Barbosa was primordial in the Brazilian education. He preached the obligatory instruction, and he inspired according to the educational system from England, Germany and United States.

In the beginning of this century, the education had great interests in the anarchist movements, which preached that if deep changes on people’s mentalities did not happen, the desired social revolution would never reach its objective.

Years later, the educator Maria Lacerda de Moura combated the illiteracy, the arrogance, the egoism, the ambition, the prepotency, and the incompetent teaching.

In 1944, the National Institute of Pedagogic Study published the Brazilian Magazine of Pedagogic Study, which has precious process of the educational brazilian history, and has been a source of information to the brazilian educators so far.

Paulo Freire was the greatest contributor of the alphabetization of young and adults. Florestan Fernandes, defender of the public schools, had a sociologic mentality, which created a new style of thinking about the social reality. For Luiz Pereire, the solution of problems inside the school depends on the solution of problems outside it, involving economic and social aspects. Rubem Alves believes the educator is a living being in which its sensations are involved in its work. Antonio Muniz affirms the education is a permanent process of human improving.

According to Durkeim, the positivism in Brazil inspired Velha República and the military trick of 1964. As stated by this ideology of order, the country would be governed by the rationality of efficient scientists: the technocrats. In Brazil, the positivism influenced the first project of the educator’s formation in the end of the passed century.

It can be said the pedagogic brazilian thought has been defined by two general tendencies: the liberal, which defends the freedom of teaching, and the progressist, which defends the formation of a critic and participating citizen. The pedagogic brazilian mentality is very ample and is in movement.

4.3.2. Africa

The African culture does not develop in a unique manner in its whole territory. The differences in the culture levels explain the distinct freedom movements’ behaviors.

In the pre-colonial Africa, there were no schools. Even so, the children were educated. They learnt things living in contact to the older. Listening to elders’ histories, they learnt the tribal histories and the relationship of their tribes with others. The education was informal then.

The educational system in Tanzania was cooperative and not individual. The concept of quality and responsibility was concerned to any ability, both the agriculture one and the economic one.

The illiterate people are not necessary ignorant. The knowledge is passed in an oral way, from generation to generation, even without the existence of schools.

4.4. The East

The transmission of knowledge in these countries was based on the value of the tradition, of non-violence and of the meditation concerned to religion.

The primitive education based on an animist vision, in which it was believed everything in nature hold a soul similar to the man’s. The education occurred in a very spontaneous and natural way. There was nobody destined to teach, however everyone contributed to the teaching, for the reason that education came from the imitations and the orality.

Taoism is the oldest educational doctrine. It recommends a simple honest life. Confucio created a moral system that adored the death, and later tuned out to be a religion. He idealized a family in which the father centralized the whole knowledge without considering the knowing of his children.

The Hinduism tended to the reproduction and contemplation of society’s classes. The spirit was exalted. The ones who were exclude from society, like women, did not have access to education.

Egyptians were the first to be aware of the importance of the art of educating. They founded instruction institutions, where it was learnt to read, astronomy, music, etc.

Hebrew people let concepts that even today are followed.

5. Current perspective on education

The Traditional Education is conceived by a process of individual and personal development. It reproduces worth and culture of the society, it is a transmission of stored knowledge by the professor, through expositive classes. The student has to listen in silence in order to obtain much knowledge.

In contrast, the New Education has as an objective teaching the student to produce knowledge.

In the fifty’s the Permanent Education appears. Educators and politicians think about an internationalized education. It is created the Pedagogia Comparada, which divulges innovations of the countries more developed.

In 1968 the Student Movement appears, and it has as a main objective allowing better autonomy of participation and definition of the educational politics, contesting the equality of schools and systems. It proposed a new orientation named Permanent Education, and its main concept is that the men educate theirselves the whole life.

Observing the educational development of the twentieth century, it is possible to affirm the socialist countries reached a high grade of it. However, the capitalist ones are in crisis, mainly the ones of the Third World.

A unique and popular school shouldn’t be standardized in the patterns of the burghers in which the goal was to discipline the worker class.

The solution for such problems would be the fight for the organization of the popular power. It would be necessary to use the creativity to reach new educational means which should have a great capacity to reach a big quantity of the population.