In approaching education and community involvement, it seems fundamental to keep a certain distance from it in order to get to its sub-stantiveness, its deepest significance. In the final analysis, considerations and analyses of the relationships between community involvement and educational practice start with a critical understanding of both. Such considerations and analyses should focus on how we become obligated, when practicing education with a progressive perspective, to engender participation in the educational practice by anyone connected with educational work, directly or indirectly.
Let us leave the understanding of a particular variety of educational practice, the progressive one, for later, and let us now inventory the aspects of educational practice that are present whether that practice is progressive or whether it is meant to maintain the status quo, whether it is neoliberal, postmodern conservative, or postmodern progressive. What is of concern now is to identify certain fundamental cores that enable us to say, This is not an educational practice. This is an educational practice.
The first aspect to emphasize is that educational practice is a necessary dimension of social practice (as are productive, cultural, and religious practices). As a social practice, education, in all its richness and complexity, is a phenomenon typical of our existence and thus is exclusively human. For this reason, also, educational practice is by nature historical. Species is not the all-determining point in the trajectory of human existence. As they invented existence, with the “materials” that life offered them, men and women invented or discovered all the possibilities that freedom implies, a freedom they did not receive but had to create and fight for. They are undeniably programmed beings, but as François Jacob (1991) points out, “programmed to learn,” and thus are curious beings, a characteristic without which they could not know. Thus, men and women take risks, venture, and educate themselves in the game of freedom.
Had it not been for the invention of language, none of this would have been possible. On the other hand, language, which cannot exist in the absence of thought (although thought is possible without language) did not appear until the animal turned human. Loose, freed hands, working instruments for the hunt, hands that extend the body, thus expanding its range of action, played an undeniable role in the social construction of language. It has been a long time since Sollas said, “The work realized by hands is the materialization of thought” (Montagu, p. 3). There is no doubt that language developed and develops while things are being done by individuals, for themselves or for others, in cooperation. It is necessary, however, to recognize that the use and creation of tools were not enough nor was work that was not isolated. Other animals use tools, and what is more, hunt together, but that does not enable them to speak. “The activity specific to human beings,” says Josef Schubert, “is the cooperative use of tools in the production of food and other goods” (p. 61). And, for that, language became necessary.
It was through reinventing themselves, experiencing or suffering the tense relationship between what they inherited and what they received or acquired from the social context—which they create and which created them—that human beings gradually became these beings who need to continue being in order to be, these historical and cultural beings who cannot be explained solely on the basis of biology or genetics or culture. Human beings cannot be explained exclusively on the basis of their conscience, as if instead of having been socially constituted and having transformed their bodies into conscious bodies, conscience became the all-powerful creator of the world around them. Nor can human beings be explained as the mere result of the transformations that take place in this world. These are beings who live, within themselves, the dialectics of the social, without which they could not be, and the individual, without which they would become dissolved into the social, without a mark, without a profile.
These historical and social beings that men and women are—conditioned but capable of recognizing themselves as such and thus able to overcome the limits of their very conditioning, programmed beings but “programmed to learn”—they necessarily have had to surrender to the experience of teaching and learning. The organization of their production, the education of their younger generations, their reverence for their dead, as well as their astonishment before the world, before their fears, and before their dreams, which are some sort of artistic “writing” about their reality, one they “read,” long before the invention of writing; or their ever-present attempts to decipher the mysteries of the world through divination, through magic, and later, through science; all that would follow men and women as their creation and as an instigation to more learning, to more teaching, to more knowing.
Let us now focus on educational practice itself, such as we realize it today, and let us try to detect within it the signs that characterize it as educational practice. Let us seek to identify its fundamental components, those in the absence of which there is no educational practice. In simple fashion, schematic indeed, but not simplistic, we can say that every educational situation implies the following:
If human beings had not become capable of choosing, deciding, breaking away, and projecting, capable of remaking themselves as they remake the world, due, among other reasons, to the invention of conceptual language; if they had not become capable of valuation, of dedication to the point of sacrifice to the dream they fight for, of singing and praising the world, of admiring beauty, there would be no reason for talking about the impossibility of neutrality in education. But there would not be any reason to talk about education, either. We speak of education because we are able, even as we practice it, to deny it. The exercise of freedom leads us to the need to make choices, and this need leads us to the impossibility of being neutral.
Well then, the total impossibility of being neutral before the world, before the future—which I do not understand as an inexorable time, a given fact, but rather as a time to be created through the transformation of the present, through which dreams also gradually become materialized—presents us with the right and the duty of positioning ourselves as educators. The duty of not omitting ourselves. The right and the duty to live our educational practice in a coherent fashion with our political options. That is how, if one opts for progressiveness, for substantive democracy, one must—while respecting the right of learners to choose and to learn how to choose, which they need freedom for—give them testimony of the freedom with which we too choose our options (or of the obstacles we may have found in doing so). And one must never attempt to (deceivingly or not) impose one’s choices on them.
If we opt for democracy, and if we are coherent in that choice in such a way that our practice does not contradict our discourse, it is not possible for us to do a number of things not uncommonly done by people who proclaim themselves progressive. Let us consider some of them:
Teaching and learning are, to the coherent, progressive educator, moments in the broader process of discovery. For this very reason, they involve search, live curiosity, misunderstanding, understanding, mistakes, serenity, rigorousness, suffering, and tenacity; but also satisfaction, pleasure, and happiness (see, to this end, Snyders, 1986).
It is easy to realize that such practices reek with authoritarianism. On the one hand, they denote no respect for the critical abilities of teachers, their knowledge, their practice. On the other hand, there is the arrogance with which half a dozen specialists who judge themselves enlightened develop these packages, which teachers, then, must tamely follow to the specifications of guides and manuals. One of the connotations of authoritarianism is total disbelief in the possibilities of others. The best that authoritarian leadership is capable of doing to preserve some semblance of democracy is their sparse attempts to hear the opinions of teachers about programs, but only when those are already being implemented. Instead of betting on the expertise of educators, authoritarianism banks on its own “proposals” and on subsequent evaluation, conducted with the purpose of determining whether the “packages” have been adhered to and properly followed.
From the point of view of coherently progressive, thus democratic, educators, things are quite different. Improvement in the quality of education implies the permanent development of teachers. And permanent development must be based on analyzing their practice. Only by thinking through their practice, naturally with the support of highly qualified personnel, is it possible for teachers to realize the theory built into their practice, whether this theory has been noticed, has been fully realized, or has been embraced.
Coherent, progressive educators cannot hesitate between “packages” and permanent development; they must always opt for development. They know all too well, among other things, that it is unlikely that critical thinking will be achieved by learners through the domestication of educators. How can educators provoke in the learner the critical curiosity necessary to the act of knowing, their taste for laughter and for creative adventure, if they do not trust themselves, do not take risks, if they are themselves tied to the “guide” from which “banking” concepts are to be transferred to the learners? This authoritarian form of betting on the packages rather than on the scientific, pedagogical, and political development of teachers reveals just how much authoritarians fear freedom, restlessness, doubt, uncertainty, dreaming; and how eager they are for immobilism. There is much necrophilia in the authoritarian, as much as there is biophilia in the democratically coherent progressive (see Fromm, 1980).
This said, I believe it is possible for us to begin a critical reflection about the issue of participation in general and community participation in particular.
The first observation that needs to be made is that participation—although an exercise in voice, in having voice, in involvement, in decision making at certain levels of power, although a right of citizenship—is in direct and necessary correlation to progressive educational practice, if the educators who realize it are coherent within their discourse. This is what I mean. It constitutes a glaring contradiction, a loud incoherence, to conceive of an educational practice that intends to be progressive but that is realized within such rigid, vertical models as to leave no room for the slightest doubt, for curiosity, criticism, suggestion, for a living presence, with a voice; an educational practice in which educators are subjected to packages; an educational practice whose learners are limited to studying without questioning, without doubting, subject to their teachers; an educational practice in which the school’s other personnel—groundskeepers, cooks, security guards—are not also educators with a voice; an educational practice in which fathers and mothers are invited to the school only for end-of-year parties, or to hear complaints about their children, or to become involved as volunteers in repairing the school facilities, or even to “participate” in collections for the purchase of school materials. In these examples, we have complete prohibition or inhibition of participation or else false participation.
When I was education secretary for the city of São Paulo, being committed to creating an administration that, coherent with our utopia, took the issue of popular participation in the destiny of schools seriously, as it should, my team and I indeed had to begin from the beginning. In other words, we began by undertaking administrative reform so that the Department of Education could work in a different manner. It was impossible to create a democratic administration, one that was for the autonomy of public and popular schools, within an administrative structure that could only make viable authoritarian and hierarchical power. Such structures affected all, from the secretary to the immediate directors and department heads who, in turn, extended orders to the schools. In the schools, principals would then add their own demands to those orders, thus silencing the groundskeepers, guards, cooks, teachers, and students. Of course, there were always exceptions, without which the work of change would have proved excessively difficult.
It would not have been possible to bring the public school system up to the level of the challenges that Brazilian democracy presents us with in terms of learning by encouraging our society’s authoritarian tradition. It was necessary, on the contrary, to democratize power, to recognize the right of students and teachers to a voice, to decrease the personal power of principals, and to create new venues of power, such as School Councils, which played both a decision-making and a consulting role and through which, first of all, mothers and fathers could gain involvement in the destinies of their children and of the school and which, secondly, could engender in the local community a sense of ownership of the school and make it active in the implementation of educational policy within the school.
It was thus necessary to democratize the Department of Education. It was necessary to decentralize decisions, to inaugurate a collegiate governance that limited the power of the secretary. It was necessary to redirect the teacher-development policy, overcoming the traditional summer teacher programs that focused on theoretical discourse and instituting a concern for discussion about their practice so as to enable teachers to put theory into practice. This is an effective way for us to live out the dialectic unity between theory and practice.
Something I want to make clear is that a greater level of democratic participation on the part of students, teachers, mothers, fathers, the local community, on the part of a school that, while public, intends to continually become popular, requires light structures, adaptable, decentralized structures, which allow for quick and effective government action. The heavy structures of centralized power, in which decisions that require speed drag along from department to department, waiting for approval here and there, are identified with and in the service of authoritarian, elitist, and above all, traditional administrations with a colonial flavor. Without the transformation of such structures, which wind up profiling us to their image, there is no way to think about popular or community participation. Democracy requires democratizing structures, rather than structures that inhibit an active presence of civil society in the command of public things.
That is what we did. I must have become the education secretary for the city of São Paulo with the least personal power, but for this reason, I was able to work effectively and decide with others.
Recently, a graduate student (Margarite May Berkenbrock, whom I thank for allowing me to cite her interviews) in the Supervision and Curriculum Program at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and who is working on a thesis titled “Popular Participation in the School: Democratic Learning in the Country of Exclusions,” heard the following response from one of the mothers in a discussion group, when she asked, “Do you think the School Council plays an important role? Why?”
“Yes,” the mother answered. “It is good because, in part, the community can find out what the school is like from the inside. What is done with our children, how the money is used. Before, the community was kept outside the school gate. We would only come in the school for grades and complaints about our children. In the old times, that was all parents were called for—or to bring food to the parties. With the councils, space was created for a parent,” she continued, “as they come into the school, to begin to learn about the school from the inside. Through the council, we were able to provide lunch for the second grade, because their schedule didn’t allow for having lunch at home.”
The resistance we had to face from principals, pedagogical coordinators, and teachers who “hosted” in themselves the elitist, colonial authoritarian ideology! “What is this?” they would at times question, somewhere between offended and surprised. “Will we now have to put up with suggestions and criticism from these ignorant people who know nothing about pedagogy?”
Ideology, whose death has been proclaimed but that remains quite alive, with its power to dull reality and make us nearsighted, prevented them from realizing that the experiential knowledge of parents, the first educators, had much to contribute to the growth of the school and that the knowledge of teachers could help parents better understand problems experienced at home. Finally, the residue of authoritarianism would not allow them even to intuit the importance, toward the development of our democratic process, of dialogue between those knowledges and of an intimate, popular presence in the school. To the authoritarian, democracy deteriorates whenever the popular classes become too present in the schools, on the streets, out in public, denouncing the ugliness of the world and announcing a more beautiful world.
I would like to conclude by reiterating that community involvement in the area I focused most on, school, in search of autonomy, must not imply omission on the part of the state. School autonomy does not imply the state escaping the responsibility of providing quality education in sufficient quantity to meet social demand. I reject certain neoliberal positions that, seeing everything the state does as perverse, defends a peculiar privatization of education. The idea is to privatize education but to have the state finance it. The government, then, would transfer funds to schools that would be organized by civil society leaders. Some popular groups have lent support to this position, without realizing the risk they are running: that of encouraging the state to wash its hands of one of its most serious obligations—commitment to popular education.
Popular groups certainly have the right to organize and create their own community schools and to fight to constantly improve them. They even have the right to demand that the state cooperate with them through nonpaternalistic cooperation agreements. They must be aware, however, that their mission is not to replace the state in its obligation to meet the educational needs of all in the popular classes and of those in the privileged classes who may seek out the public schools. Nothing should be done, therefore, in the direction of helping the elitist state to be excused from its obligations. On the contrary, within community schools or public schools, the popular classes need to fight hard for the government’s fulfilling of its duty. The struggle of an autonomous school is not against a public school.
Fromm, Erich. 1980. El Corazon del Hombre. Vol. 21. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil. New York: Harper & Row.
Jacob, François. 1991. “Nous sommes programés, mais pour apprendre.” Le Courrier de l’Unesco (February).
Montagu, Ashley. 1983. “Toolmaking, Hunting, and the Origin of Language.” In Bruce Bain, ed., The Sociogenesis of Language and Human Conduct. New York: Plenum.
Schubert, Josef. 1983. “The Implications of Luria’s Theories for Cross-Cultural Research on Language and Intelligence.” In Bruce Bain, ed., The Sociogenesis of Language and Human Conduct. New York: Plenum.
Snyders, Georges. 1986. La Joie à l’école. Paris: PUF.