The considerations and reflections I have been making up to now are developments of an initial insight that is fundamental to progressive teaching principles. Namely, that to know how to teach is to create possibilities for the construction and production of knowledge rather than to be engaged simply in a game of transferring knowledge. When I enter a classroom I should be someone who is open to new ideas, open to questions, and open to the curiosities of the students as well as their inhibitions. In other words, I ought to be aware of being a critical and inquiring subject in regard to the task entrusted to me, the task of teaching and not that of transferring knowledge.
It is important to insist on this point, to insist on this kind of teaching as necessary to being a teacher and as necessary to everyone in education. And to understand its ontological, political, ethical, epistemological, and pedagogical basis. It is also important that it be something witnessed, lived.
As a teacher in an education program, I cannot be satisfied simply with nice, theoretical elaborations regarding the ontological, political, and epistemological bases of educational practice. My theoretical explanation of such practice ought to be also a concrete and practical demonstration of what I am saying. A kind of incarnation joining theory and practice. In speaking of the construction of knowledge, I ought to be involved practically, incarnationally, in such construction and be involving the student in it also.
Otherwise I fall into a net of contradictions that loses any power to convince. I become as inauthentic as someone who talks about creating a climate of equality in the school while behaving like an autocrat. Or, as inauthentic as someone who talks about combating racism but who, when asked if she/he knows Madalena, a black female student, replies: “Yes, I know her. She is black, but she’s a decent soul.” I’ve never heard anyone say: “I know Célia, she is blond with blue eyes, but she’s decent all the same.” In the phrase regarding Madalena, the black person, we find the adversative conjunction “but.” In the phrase about fair-haired and blue-eyed Célia, the adversative conjunction sounds redundant. The use of conjunctions in a sentence establishes a relationship of causality, for example: “I speak because I refuse to be silent.” Or a relationship of adversity, for example: “They tried to dominate him but they could not.” Or a relationship of finality, for example: “Peter struggled so that he might make his position clear.” Or a relationship of integration, for example: “Pedro knew that he would return.” So, really, there are many different uses of the adversative conjunction, and it is clear that the use of the adversative but in relation to Madalena is ideologically based because of her color. In other words, a black person in general could hardly be expected to be decent or competent. Whenever a black person is found to be decent and competent our innate racism draws on the adversative conjunction but to acknowledge what is clearly an exception to the rule. In the case of Célia, blue eyed and fair haired, there is no innate suspicion of her being lacking in decency or competence, hence the use of the adversarial conjunction but is tautological. The wide question here, then, is ideological, not grammatical.
To think correctly and to know that to teach is not merely to transfer knowledge is a demanding and difficult discipline, at times a burden that we have to carry with others, for others, and for ourselves. It is difficult, not because right thinking is the property of angels and saints and something to which we aspire only if we are arrogant. It is difficult because it demands constant vigilance over ourselves so as to avoid being simplistic, facile, and incoherent. It is difficult because we are not always sufficiently balanced to prevent legitimate anger from degenerating into the kind of rage that breeds false and erroneous thinking. No matter how much someone may irritate me, I have no right to puff myself up with my own self-importance so as to declare that person to be absolutely incompetent, assuming a posture of disdain from my own position of false superiority. I, for example, do not feel anger but pity when angry people, full of their own genius, minimize me and make little of me.
For example, it’s tiring to live the kind of humility that is the sine qua non of right thinking and the very basis from which we can admit our own mistakes and allow ourselves to diminish so that others may increase.
The climate of right thinking has nothing to do with preestablished formulae, yet it would be a negation of right thinking to imagine that it could flourish in an atmosphere of indiscipline or mere “spontaneity.” Without methodological rigor, there can be no right thinking.
As a teacher with critical acumen, I do not cease to be a responsible “adventurer” disposed to accept change and difference. Nothing of what I experienced as a teacher needs to be repeated. However, I hold that my own unity and identity, in regard to others and to the world, constitutes my essential and irrepeatable way of experiencing myself as a cultural, historical, and unfinished being in the world, simultaneously conscious of my unfinishedness.
And here we have arrived at the point from which perhaps we should have departed: the unfinishedness of our being. In fact, this unfinishedness is essential to our human condition. Whenever there is life, there is unfinishedness, though only among women and men is it possible to speak of an awareness of unfinishedness. The invention of our existence developed through our interaction with the material world at our disposal, creating a life support in which life, the life of women and men, became sustainable. Within this life support, our life, human life, takes on a specific qualitative difference in relation to animal life. Animals, for example, operate in given dimensions of space, confined in some cases, unrestricted in others, in which they develop “affective” boundaries necessary for their survival, growth, and development. It’s the space where they, trained and skilled, “learn” the skills of hunting, attacking, and self-defense, in a period of time much shorter than human learners do. The greater the gap, culturally speaking, the greater the time of learning of “infancy.” The nonhuman animals in the infrastructural support system do not have a conceptual language, that is, the capacity to “grasp” consciously the implication that belonging to an infrastructure would inevitably endow them with the capacity to communicate a certain awe in the face of life itself, in the face of its mystery. In this sense, their behavior, within the context of the spacio-temporal infrastructure, is explicable in reference to the species to which individual animals belong rather than in reference to the individual itself. That is, the individual does not have the freedom to opt. For this reason, we cannot speak of ethical questions in regard to elephants, for example.
This basic life infrastructure or life support system did not require or imply the use of language or the erect posture that would free the hands—the two things that in fact would make possible the emergence of Homo sapiens. The more the hands and the brain engaged in a sort of pact of solidarity, the more the support system become “world,” “life,” “existence.” In other words, as the human body became aware of the capacity of “capture,” “learn,” “transform,” and to create beauty, it ceased to be simply empty “space” to be filled in with contents.
The invention of “existence” necessarily involves the emergence of language, culture, and communication at levels of complexity much greater than that which obtains at the level of survival, self-defense, and self-preservation. What makes men and women ethical is their capacity to “spiritualize” the world, to make it either beautiful or ugly. Their capacity to intervene, to compare, to judge, to decide, to choose, to desist makes them capable of acts of greatness, of dignity, and, at the same time, of the unthinkable in terms of indignity. It’s not possible to break with an ethical code unless one has become an ethical being. It is unknown for lions to cowardly murder lions of the same family group, or of another group, and afterwards to visit the families to offer them their condolences. It is unknown for African tigers to throw highly destructive bombs on “cities” of Asiatic tigers.
While Homo sapiens were emerging from the basic life-support structure, intervening creatively in the world, they invented language to be able to give a name to things that resulted from its intervention, “grasping” intellectuality and being able to communicate what had been “grasped.” It was becoming simultaneously clear that human existence is, in fact, a radical and profound tension between good and evil, between dignity and indignity, between decency and indecency, between the beauty and the ugliness of the world. In other words, it was becoming clear that it is impossible to humanly exist without assuming the right and the duty to opt, to decide, to struggle, to be political. All of which brings us back again to the preeminence of education experience and to its eminently ethical character, which in its turn leads us to the radical nature of “hope.” In other words, though I know that things can get worse, I also know that I am able to intervene to improve them.
I like being human, being a person, precisely because it is not already given as certain, unequivocal, or irrevocable that I am or will be “correct,” that I will bear witness to what is authentic, that I am or will be just, that I will respect others, that I will not lie and thereby diminish the value of others because of my envy or even anger of their questioning my presence in the world. I like being human because I know that my passing through the world is not predetermined, preestablished. That my destiny is not a given but something that needs to be constructed and for which I must assume responsibility. I like being human because I am involved with others in making history out of possibility, not simply resigned to fatalistic stagnation. Consequently, the future is something to be constructed through trial and error rather than an inexorable vice that determines all our actions.
I like to be human because in my unfinishedness I know that I am conditioned. Yet conscious of such conditioning, I know that I can go beyond it, which is the essential difference between conditioned and determined existence. The difference between the unfinished that does not know anything of such a condition, and the unfinished who socio-historically has arrived at the point of becoming conscious of the condition and unfinishedness. I like being human because I perceive that the construction of my presence in the world, which is a construction involving others and is subject to genetic factors that I have inherited and to socio-cultural and historical factors, is nonetheless a presence whose construction has much to do with myself. It would be ironic if the awareness of my presence in the world did not at the same time imply a recognition that I could not be absent from the construction of my own presence. I cannot perceive myself as a presence in the world and at the same time explain it as the result of forces completely alien to me. If I do so, I simply renounce my historical, ethical, social, and political responsibility for my own evolution from the life-support system to the emergence of Homo sapiens. In that sense, I renounce my ontological vocation to intervene in the world. The fact that I perceive myself to be in the world, with the world, with others, brings with it a sense of “being-with” constitutive of who I am that makes my relationship to the world essential to who I am. In other words, my presence in the world is not so much of someone who is merely adapting to something “external,” but of someone who is inserted as if belonging essentially to it. It’s the position of one who struggles to become the subject and maker of history and not simply a passive, disconnected object.
I like being a human person because even though I know that the material, social, political, cultural, and ideological conditions in which we find ourselves almost always generate divisions that make difficult the construction of our ideals of change and transformation, I know also that the obstacles are not eternal.
In the 1960s, when I reflected on these obstacles I called for “conscientization,” not as a panacea but as an attempt at critical awareness of those obstacles and their raison d’être. And, in the face of pragmatic, reactionary, and fatalistic neoliberal philosophizing, I still insist, without falling into the trap of “idealism,” on the absolute necessity of conscientization. In truth, conscientization is a requirement of our human condition. It is one of the roads we have to follow if we are to deepen our awareness of our world, of facts, of events, of the demands of human consciousness to develop our capacity for epistemological curiosity. Far from being alien to our human condition, conscientization is natural to “unfinished” humanity that is aware of its unfinishedness. It is natural because unfinishedness is integral to the phenomenon of life itself, which besides women and men includes the cherry trees in my garden and the birds that sing in their branches. Or my German shepherd Eico who happily “greets” me every morning.
Among us women and men, we recognize our unfinishedness. And this awareness necessarily implies our insertion in a permanent process of search, motivated by a curiosity that surpasses the limits that are peculiar to the life phenomenon as such, becoming progressively the ground and foundation for the production of knowledge, for that curiosity is already knowledge.
Not so long ago, my wife Nita and I were waiting for a plane in an airport in Brazil’s northeast. It was a red-eye flight down to São Paulo. We were very tired and regretted not having changed our flight plans. Eventually we settled down and became calm, mainly due to the presence of a small child who ran about happily, motivated by curiosity and wonder. Pricking his ears at the sound of the plane’s engines approaching, he announces to his delighted mother that the plane is arriving. She confirms his discovery. So, off with him to the end of the departure lounge to exercise his curiosity at even closer range. Returning, he announces with even greater certainty and delight, “The plane has already landed.”
So here we have an interesting demonstration of curiosity leading to knowledge. First, the child, impelled by his curiosity, processes the sounds of the engines in the context of “waiting” and deduces the knowledge or fact that the plane is approaching. Second, using the adverb “already,” he temporalizes the arrival and is able to deduce that it has in fact landed or arrived. So, these two moments in the process of the child’s knowing are products of the concreteness of the facts and the command he is able to exercise in relation to the notion of time, expressed by the adverb “already”
Returning for a moment to what we were saying before, we recall that our awareness of our unfinishedness makes us responsible beings, hence the notion of our presence in the world as ethical. We recall also that it is only because we are ethical that we can also be unethical. The world of culture, which is also the world of history, is the world where freedom, choice, decision, and possibility are only possible because they can also be denied, despised, or refused. For this reason, the education of women and men can never be purely instrumental. It must also necessarily be ethical. The obviousness of this requirement is such that it should not even be necessary to insist on it in the context of technical and scientific education. However, it’s essential to insist on it because, as unfinished beings, conscious of our unfinishedness, we are capable of options and decisions that may not be ethical. The teacher of geography who truncates the curiosity of the student in the name of the efficiency of mechanical memorization hampers both the freedom and the capacity for adventure of the student. There is no education here. Only domestication.
Such domestication is little different from the fatalistic ideology current in neoliberal thought, the victims of which are, of course, the popular classes. The excuse is that nothing can be done to alter the course of events. Unemployment, for example, is inevitable as the world moves into a new end-of-the-century era. Yet the same fatalism does not apply when it is a question of trillions of dollars chasing each other around the globe with the rapidity of faxes, in an insatiable search for even greater profits. In the context of agrarian reform, here in Brazil those who “own” the world talk about the need to discipline, to “soften,” at any cost, the rowdy and turbulent movement of the landless people. And, of course, land reform itself is far from being inevitable. Only disloyal Brazilians and troublemakers propose such an absurd idea.
Let’s continue a little longer to reflect on the question of incompleteness. And of the incompleteness that knows itself to be so, which is our case but not the case of the animals. This incompleteness implies for us a permanent movement of search. In fact, it would be a contradiction if we who are aware of our incompleteness were not involved in a movement of constant search. For this reason, women and men by the mere fact of being in the world are also necessarily being with world. Our being is a being with. So, to be in the world without making history, without being made by it, without creating culture, without a sensibility toward one’s own presence in the world, without a dream, without song, music, or painting, without caring for the earth or the water, without using one’s hands, without sculpting or philosophizing, without any opinion about the world, without doing science or theology, without awe in the face of mystery, without learning, instruction, teaching, without ideas on education, without being political, is a total impossibility.
It is in our incompleteness, of which we are aware, that education as a permanent process is grounded. Women and men are capable of being educated only to the extent that they are capable of recognizing themselves as unfinished. Education does not make us educable. It is our awareness of being unfinished that makes us educable. And the same awareness in which we are inserted makes us eternal seekers. Eternal because of hope. Hope is not just a question of grit or courage. It’s an ontological dimension of our human condition.1
This is a fundamental foundation of our educational practice, of our teaching preparation. Ideally, educators, students, and prospective teachers should together be conversant with other forms of knowledge that are seldom part of the curriculum. They should incorporate into their way of life the ideal of permanent hope-giving search, which is one of the fruits of our essential (and assumed) unfinishedness. A fruit that begins as knowledge and that with time is transformed into wisdom. Something that should be in no way strange to us as educators. When I leave the house to go to work with students, there is no doubt at all in my mind that, given an openness to curiosity, to search, to hearing, based on awareness of our unfin-ishedness, “programmed but to learn,”2 we will exercise our capacity to learn and to teach so much the better for being subjects and not simply objects of the process we are engaged in.
Another kind of knowledge necessary to educational practice and grounded in the same principles as those just discussed is the knowledge that speaks of respect for the autonomy of the learner, whether the learner be child, youth, or adult. As an educator, I have to constantly remind myself of this knowledge because it is connected with the affirmation of respect for myself This principle, once again, is a question of the ethical implications of being an unfinished being. Respect for the autonomy and dignity of every person is an ethical imperative and not a favor that we may or may not concede to each other. It is precisely because we are ethical beings that we can commit what can only be called a transgression by denying our essentially ethical condition. The teacher who does not respect the student’s curiosity in its diverse aesthetic, linguistic, and syntactical expressions; who uses irony to put down legitimate questioning (recognizing of course that freedom is not absolute, that it requires of its nature certain limits); who is not respectfully present in the educational experience of the student, transgresses fundamental ethical principles of the human condition. It is in this sense that both the authoritarian teacher who suffocates the natural curiosity and freedom of the student as well as the teacher who imposes no standards at all are equally disrespectful of an essential characteristic of our humanness, namely, our radical (and assumed) unfinishedness, out of which emerges the possibility of being ethical. It is also in this sense that the possibility of true dialogue, in which subjects in dialogue learn and grow by confronting their differences, becomes a coherent demand required by an assumed unfinishedness that reveals itself as ethical. For this reason the lack of respect or even the denial of this ethical basis of our unfinishedness cannot be regarded as anything other than a “rupture” with “right thinking.” What I’m saying is that whoever wants to become a macho, a racist, or a hater of the lower classes, may of course do so. But I do not accept that this choice does not constitute a transgression of our essential humanity. It’s of no use coming to me with arguments justifying genetically, sociologically, historically, or philosophically the superiority of whites over blacks, men over women, bosses over workers. All discrimination is immoral, and to struggle against it is a duty whatever the conditionings that have to be confronted. In fact, it is in this very struggle and duty that the charm, even the beauty, of our humanity resides. To know that I must respect the autonomy and the identity of the student demands the kind of practice that is coherent with this knowledge.
It is important to be constantly vigilant and rigorously evaluate any practice in the light of common sense. But even without such thorough reflection, simple good sense dictates that the sort of insensitive formalism in carrying out my duty as a teacher that would lead me to refuse a student’s homework, even when accompanied by convenient explanations, constitutes a negative attitude on my part. It is my good sense that will tell me that exercising my authority in the classroom through the decisions I make, the activities I direct, the tasks I assign, and the goals I set for both individuals and the group is not a sign of authoritarianism. It seems that we have not yet solved the dilemma arising from the tension between authority and freedom. And we invariably confuse authority and authoritarianism, freedom and license.
I don’t need a teacher of ethics to tell me that my pointed criticism of a postgraduate thesis would be unacceptable if another examiner had exceeded him/herself in severity. Should one of the examiners act in such a way, even if I happen to agree with the content of the argument, I could have no option but to publicly sympathize with the student and share with him or her the pain of such exaggerated criticism.3 I don’t need a professor of ethics to tell me that. My good sense is sufficient.
To know that I must respect the autonomy, the dignity, and the identity of the student and, in practice, must try to develop coherent attitudes and virtues in regard to such practice is an essential requirement of my profession, unless I am to become an empty mouther of words.4 It serves no purpose, except to irritate and demoralize the student, for me to talk of democracy and freedom and at the same time act with the arrogance of a know-all.
The exercise of good sense, which can only add to our stature, belongs inherently to the “body” of curiosity. In this sense the more we practice methodically our capacity to question, to compare, to doubt, and to weigh, the more efficaciously curious we become and the more attuned becomes our good sense. The exercise or the education of our good sense will consequently overcome, by degrees, the merely instinctual elements in it, by means of which we frequently judge events in which we are involved. In addition, if in the context of a moral assessment that I make regarding some issue, I see that good sense is not enough to orient or ground my tactics for any given struggle, it can nevertheless still have a fundamental role in my evaluation of the scene, with the ethical implications that are integral to it.
My good sense will tell me, for example, that it is immoral to affirm that the hunger and misery that afflicts millions of Brazilians and millions of others worldwide is an immutable destiny in the face of which all we can do is to wait patiently for change to come. Far from being immutable, such a calamity—caused in great part by the greed of an insatiable minority—can be challenged. I can affirm, for example, with scientific rigor that a key element in changing this situation is an appeal to simple and disciplined rationality.
My good sense tells me that there is something to be learned from the fearful, faraway silence of Peter, hiding from himself. It will tell me that the problem is not so much related to the irrepressible energy, the tumult, the vitality of the other children. It may not tell me exactly what I want to know, but it will tell me that there is something I must know. In this case, good sense leads into critical epistemology, without which good sense is likely to lead to erroneous conclusions. However, critical epistemology without good sense, without the capacity to “divine,” to follow a hunch, to be open to doubt, to be humble enough to know that one can err, is a recipe for failure. I feel pity and sometimes fear for the researcher who exhibits undue confidence in his/her certainty—an author of truth. And who is unable to recognize the historicity of his/her own knowledge.
It’s my good sense in the first place that leads me to suspect that the school, which is the space in which both teachers and students are the subjects of education, cannot abstract itself from the socio-cultural and economic conditions of its students, their families, and their communities.
It’s impossible to talk of respect for students for the dignity that is in the process of coming to be, for the identities that are in the process of construction, without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them to school. I can in no way underestimate such knowledge. Or what is worse, ridicule it.
The more my own practice as a teacher increases in methodological rigor, the more respect I must have for the ingenuous knowledge of the student. For this ingenuous knowledge is the starting point from which his/her epistemological curiosity will work to produce a more critically scientific knowledge.
Reflecting on the duty I have as a teacher to respect the dignity, autonomy, and identity of the student, all of which are in process of becoming, I ought to think also about how I can develop an educational practice in which that respect, which I know I owe to the student, can come to fruition instead of being simply neglected and denied. Such an educational practice will demand of me permanent critical vigilance in regard to the students. The ideal, of course, is that, sooner or later, some mechanism whereby the students can participate in such an evaluation should be worked out, because the teacher’s work is not simply “with” him- or herself but makes sense only in the context of the teacher-student relationship.
This critical evaluation of one’s practice reveals the necessity for a series of attitudes or virtues without which no true evaluation or true respect for the student can exist.
These attitudes or virtues—absolutely indispensable for putting into practice the kind of knowledge that leads to respect for the autonomy, dignity, and identity of the student—are the result of a constructive effort that we impose on ourselves so as to diminish the distance between what we say and what we do. In fact, this diminution of the distance between discourse and practice constitutes an indispensable virtue, namely that of coherence. How, for example, can I continue to speak of respect for the dignity of the student if I discriminate, inhibit, or speak ironically from the height of my own arrogance, if the testimony that I give is that of an irresponsible omission of duty in the preparation and organization of my practice, in the question of rights, in denouncing injustices?5 The exercise of the art and practice of teaching (a specifically human art), is of itself profoundly formational and, for that reason, ethical. True, those who exercise this art and practice do not have to be saints or angels. But they ought to have integrity and a clear sense of what is right and just.
The teacher’s responsibility is considerable, though often we are not aware of it. The formational nature of this art and practice tells us already how the teacher should exercise this responsibility. For example, his/her presence in the classroom never escapes the student’s judgments. The worst of which could be to conclude that the teacher’s presence is an “absence.”
Whether the teacher is authoritarian, undisciplined, competent, incompetent, serious, irresponsible, involved, a lover of people and of life, cold, angry with the world, bureaucratic, excessively rational, or whatever else, he/she will not pass through the classroom without leaving his or her mark on the students. Hence, the importance of the example the teacher shows in terms of clarity in regard to the task and in terms of his/her capacity in regard to both rights and duties. The teacher has the duty to give classes, to perform his/her teaching role. And to fulfill this duty, certain conditions are necessary: hygiene, proper physical space, an aesthetic environment. Without these “spaces,” pedagogical “space” will suffer. At times, the lack of such spaces creates an environment in which it is pedagogically impossible to operate. And this constitutes an offense toward both educators and learners and to the art of teaching itself.
If there is something that Brazilian students should know from their earliest years, it is that respect for educators and for education itself includes the struggle for salaries that are worthy of the status of the teaching profession. And that this struggle is a matter of solemn duty. In this sense, the struggle of teachers’ defense of their dignity and rights should be understood as an integral part of their teaching practice. Something that belongs essentially to the ethical basis of such practice and not something that comes from outside the activity of teaching. Something that is integral to it. The struggle to bring dignity to the practice of teaching is as much a part of the activity of teaching as is the respect that the teacher should have for the identity of the student, for the student himself or herself, and his or her right to be. One of the worst evils done to us in Brazil by the constituted authorities ever since the foundation of our society is to force us into a fatalistic and cynical indifference, born of existential weariness, caused by the almost complete abandonment in which they have left the educational system. “There is nothing we can do about it,” is the tired refrain we often hear but that we cannot accept.
My respect as a teacher for the student, for his/her curiosity and fear that I ought not to curtail or inhibit by inappropriate gestures or attitudes, demands of me the cultivation of humility and tolerance. How can I respect the curiosity of the students if, lacking genuine humility and a convinced understanding of the role of the unknown in the process of reaching the known, I am afraid of revealing my own ignorance? How can I consider myself to be an educator, especially in the context of open-minded and enlightened teaching practice, if I cannot learn to live—whether it cost me little or much—with what is different? How can I be an educator if I do not develop in myself a caring and loving attitude toward the student, which is indispensable on the part of one who is committed to teaching and to the education process itself. I can only dislike what I am doing under the pain of not doing it well. I have no reason to exercise my teaching function badly. My response to the offense committed against education is to struggle conscientiously, critically, politically, and in a strategic manner against those who commit such an offense. I may even arrive at the state of weariness where I am tempted to abandon it in the search for something better. What I cannot do is remain in it and drag it down by a sense of frustration and lack of esteem toward myself and toward the students.
One of the forms of struggle against the lack of respect for education on the part of the constituted authorities is, on the one hand, our own refusal to transform our teaching into a mere sideline and, on the other hand, our rejection of a domesticating, paternal attitude toward the students.
It is in our seriousness as professional people with a competence for political organization that our strength as educators resides. This picture of our strength is really how we ought to see ourselves. It is in this sense that our teaching unions and other bodies ought to give priority to ongoing education among us as an important political task. And this political task will, obviously, bring up the question of the strike as an instrument of struggle. As something that may be, ought to be, rethought. Not that we will necessarily not use it any more. But given that it is a historically conditioned form of struggle, perhaps there is a need to look at new or reinvented forms.
Another kind of knowledge fundamental to educational practice is that which is linked to the very nature of this practice. As a teacher, I need to have clarity in regard to what I am engaged in. I need to know the various dimensions that are part of the essence of this practice, which can make me more secure in the way I approach it.
The best starting point for such reflections is the unfinishedness of our human condition. It is in this consciousness that the very possibility of learning, of being educated, resides. It is our immersion in this consciousness that gives rise to a permanent movement of searching, of curious interrogation that leads us not only to an awareness of the world but also to a thorough, scientific knowledge of it. This permanent movement of searching creates a capacity for learning not only in order to adapt to the world but especially to intervene, to re-create, and to transform it. All of this is evidence of our capacity for learning, for completing our incompleteness in a distinct way from that characteristic of other mammals or of plants.
Our capacity to learn, the source of our capacity to teach, suggests and implies that we also have a capacity to grasp the substantiveness/ essence of the object of our knowing. Mere mechanical memorization of the superficial aspects of the object is not true learning. Such a relationship with the object makes the learner into a kind of passive instrument who “transfers” some contents, but this so-called learning is a denial of critical epistemological curiosity, which is a participation in and a construction of knowledge of the object. It is precisely because of this capacity or skill for seizing the substantiveness of an object that we can take a negative learning experience, in which the learner was a mere passive receiver of a transference on the part of a teacher, and reconstruct it in terms of critical epistemological curiosity.
Women and men that we are, we are the only beings who have socio-historically developed the capacity for “seizing” substantively the object of our knowing. For that reason we are the only beings for whom learning is a creative adventure. Something much richer than the simple repetition of a lesson or of something already given. For us, to learn is to construct, to reconstruct, to observe with a view to changing—none of which can be done without being open to risk, to the adventure of the spirit.
I believe that I can state without equivocation, at this moment, that all educational practice requires the existence of “subjects,” who while teaching, learn. And who in learning also teach. The reciprocal learning between teachers and students is what gives educational practice its gnostic character. It is a practice that involves the use of methods, techniques, materials; in its directive character, it implies objectives, dreams, utopias, ideas. Hence we have the political nature of education and the capacity that all educational practices have in being political and never neutral.
In being specifically human, education is gnostic and directive and for this reason, political. It is artistic and moral as it uses techniques as a means to facilitate teaching; it involves frustrations, fears, and desires. It requires of a teacher a general competence that involves knowledge of the nature of knowledge itself as well as the specific knowledges linked to one’s field of specialization.
As a teacher who claims to have a progressive orientation and if I am coherent with that progressive posture, I cannot fall into a type of naivete that will lead me to think that I am equal to my students. I cannot fail to know the specificity of my work as teacher and reject my fundamental role in positively contributing so that my students become actors in their own learning. If I work with children, I should be aware of the difficult transition or path from heteronomy to autonomy. I should always be alert that my presence and my work could either help or impede students in their own unquiet search for knowledge; if I work with youths or adults, I should not be any less attentive to what role my work may play in either motivating the students or sending them the message that there is something deeply wrong with them that needs fixing.
In essence, my position has to be of a person who wants or refuses to change. I cannot deny or hide my posture, but I also cannot deny others the right to reject it. In the name of the respect I should have toward my students, I do not see why I should omit or hide my political stance by proclaiming a neutral position that does not exist. On the contrary, my role as a teacher is to assent the students’ right to compare, to choose, to rupture, to decide.
Recently, a young man who had begun his university studies told me, “I do not understand how you defend the rights of landless peasants who, in reality, are nothing but troublemakers.” I responded that you do have some troublemakers among the landless peasants, but their struggle against oppression is both legitimate and ethical. The so-called troublemakers represent a form of resistance against those who aggressively oppose the agrarian reform. For me, the immorality and the lack of ethics rest with those who want to maintain an unjust order.
Our conversation went no further than that. The young man shook my hand in silence. I do not know how he dealt with our conversation afterward, but it is important that I said what I thought and that he heard from me that what I thought was right and should be said.
This is the road I have tried to follow as a teacher: living my convictions; being open to the process of knowing and sensitive to the experience of teaching as an art; being pushed forward by the challenges that prevent me from bureaucratizing my practice; accepting my limitations, yet always conscious of the necessary effort to overcome them and aware that I cannot hide them because to do so would be a failure to respect both my students and myself as a teacher.
Furthermore, my involvement with educational practice in its political, moral, and gnostic context has always been characterized by joy, which obviously does not mean that I have always been able to create it in my students. But I have never ceased to try to create a pedagogical space in which joy has its privileged role.
There is a relationship between the joy essential to teaching activity and hope. Hope is something shared between teachers and students. The hope that we can learn together, teach together, be curiously impatient together, produce something together, and resist together the obstacles that prevent the flowering of our joy. In truth, from the point of view of the human condition, hope is an essential component and not an intruder. It would be a serious contradiction of what we are if, aware of our unfinishedness, we were not disposed to participate in a constant movement of search, which in its very nature is an expression of hope. Hope is a natural, possible, and necessary impetus in the context of our unfinishedness. Hope is an indispensable seasoning in our human, historical experience. Without it, instead of history we would have pure determinism. History exists only where time is problematized and not simply a given. A future that is inexorable is a denial of history.
It needs to be clear that the absence of hope is not the “normal” way to be human. It is a distortion. I am not, for example, first of all a being without hope who may or may not later be converted to hope. On the contrary, I am first a being of hope who, for any number of reasons, may thereafter lose hope. For this reason, as human beings, one of our struggles should be to diminish the objective reasons for that hopelessness that immobilizes us.
In my view, it is therefore an enormous contradiction that an open-minded person who does not fear what is new, who is upset by injustice, who is hurt by discrimination, who struggles against impunity, and who refuses cynical and immobilizing fatalism should not be full of critical hope.
Recently in Olinda, one rainy yet sun-filled tropical morning, I was walking through a ghetto with Danilson Pinto, a young grassroots educator. Our conversation was something special, with Danilson revealing, with great fluidity of speech in almost every word and reflection that he emitted, the coherence with which he lived his democratic, grassroots convictions. In that environment of every kind of negation, both psychological and physical, in an environment of violence and the threat of violence and of despair, offense, and pain, in an environment where weaving the threads of life is possible only at the cost of courageous obstinacy, there we walked and talked with our hearts and minds curious and receptive, open to the world. As we walked through the streets of this place, hurt and offended by abandonment, I began to remember experiences of my youth in other ghettos of Olinda and Recife. Conversations with men and women whose souls seemed to have been torn by the cruelty of life. We seemed to be trampling on human sorrow as we talked about the different kinds of problems peculiar to this place. What can we possibly do, as educators, working in a context like this? Is there something we can do? And how can we do it? What do we as so-called educators need to know to be able to take the first steps in bringing together women, men, and children whose humanity has been betrayed and whose existence has been crushed? Prisoners without options, decisions, freedom, or ethics. “What can be done? The world is that way anyway,” would become a standard response, as predictable, monotonous, and repetitive as human existence itself. In such a deterministic scenario, nothing new, nothing revolutionary, is possible.
I have a right to be angry, to show it and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle, just as I have a right to love and to express my love to the world and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle because I live in history at a time of possibility and not of determinism. If reality were pure determinism because it was thus decided or planned, there would be no reason at all to be angry. My right to be angry presupposes that the historical experience in which I participate tomorrow is not a given but a challenge and a problem. My just anger is grounded in any indignation in the face of the denial of the rights inherent in the very essence of the human condition. We stopped in the middle of a narrow footbridge that leads from the ghetto to a less neglected part of the town. We looked down on the bend of a polluted, lifeless river, more mud than water, where tufts of weeds suffocated in the stench. “Worse than the weeds,” said Danilson, “is the waste ground of the public rubbish dump. The people who live in the area search among the rubbish for something to eat, for some garment to wear. This is how they survive.” From this horrible dump, two years ago, a woman dug out the pieces of an amputated breast and cooked it for the family’s Sunday dinner. The press got hold of the story and I also wrote about it in my recent book Pedagogy of the Heart. I do not know what reaction it provoked among pragmatic neoliberal thinkers, except perhaps the usual fatalistic shrug of the shoulders that says: “It’s sad, but nothing can be done about it. That’s the way things are.”
Reality, however, is not inexorable or unchangeable. It happens to be this just as it could well be something else. And if we so-called progressive thinkers want it to be something else, we have to struggle. I confess that I would feel extremely sad, even desolated, and without any meaning for my presence in the world if there were strong and convincing reasons for saying that human existence is ultimately deterministic. I cannot, therefore, fold my arms fatalistically in the face of misery, thus evading my responsibility, hiding behind lukewarm, cynical shibboleths that justify my inaction because “there is nothing that can be done.” The exhortation to be more a spectator; the invitation to (even exaltation of) silence, which in fact immobilizes those who are silenced; the hymn in praise of adaptability to fate or destiny; all these forms of discourse are negations of that humanization process for which we have an unshirkable responsibility.
Adaptability to situations that constitute a denial of humanization are acceptable only as a consequence of the experience of being dominated or enslaved or as a form of resistance or as a tactic in political struggle. I pretend that I accept the condition of being silenced now so as to fight, when the opportunity arises, against what constitutes a denial of my own humanity. This legitimization of anger in the face of a fatalistic acceptance of the negation of the process of humanization was a theme implicit in our conversation during all that morning.
One of the first kinds of knowledge indispensable to the person who arrives in a ghetto or in a place marked by the betrayal of our right “to be” is the kind of knowledge that becomes solidarity, becomes a “being with.” In that context, the future is seen not as inexorable but as something that is constructed by people engaged together in life, in history. It’s the knowledge that sees history as possibility and not as already determined. The world is not finished. It is always in the process of becoming. The subjectivity with which I dialectically relate to the world, my role in the world, is not restricted to a process of only observing what happens but it also involves my intervention as a subject of what happens in the world. My role in the world is not simply that of someone who registers what occurs but of someone who has an input into what happens. I am equally subject and object in the historical process. In the context of history, culture, and politics, I register events not so as to adapt myself to them but so as to change them, in the physical world itself. I am not impotent. For example, our knowledge of earthquakes has helped us develop the kind of engineering that now makes it possible to survive earthquakes. We can’t eliminate them, but we can minimize their effects. So, by our capacity to register facts and occurrences, we become capable of intervention. And this generates new kinds of knowledge far more complex than simple adaptation to a given and “unchangeable” situation. For this reason I do not accept (because it is not possible) the ingenuous or strategically neutral position often claimed by people in education or by those who study biology, physics, sociology, or mathematics. No one can be in the world, with the world, and with others and maintain a posture of neutrality. I cannot be in the world decontextualized, simply observing life. Yes, I can take up my position and settle myself, but only so as to become aware of my insertion into a context of decision, choice, and intervention. There are insistent questions that we all have to ask and that make it clear to us that it is not possible to study simply for the sake of studying. As if we could study in a way that really had nothing to do with that distant, strange world out there.
For what and for whom do I study? And against what and against whom? What meaning would Danilson’s life and work have in that subworld of misery that we were walking through if some imperiously powerful force were to decree that those people had no option but to remain victims of the cruel necessity that has devastated their lives? The only thing he could possibly do would be to improve the people’s capacity to adapt themselves to that inevitable negation of their existence. Thus, his practice could be no more than a hymn of praise to resignation. However, to the extent that the future is not inexorably sealed and already decided, there is another task that awaits us. Namely, the task of discussing the inherent openness of the future, making it as obvious as the misery that reigns in the ghetto. Also making it obvious that adaptability to suffering, hunger, disease, and the lack of hygiene, experienced intimately by each one, can be a strategy not just of physical but also of cultural resistance. It is resistance to the abusive abandonment in which the poor have to live. Essentially, both these aspects of resistance are strategies necessary for the physical and cultural survival of the oppressed. Afro-Brazilian religious syncretism is one example of how African culture in the context of slavery defended itself against the domination of the white colonizer.
It’s necessary then, for us to have the kind of resistance that keeps us alive. It is also necessary that we know how to resist so as to remain alive, that our comprehension of the future is not static but dynamic, and that we are convinced that our vocation for greatness and not mediocrity is an essential expression of the process of humanization in which we are inserted. These are the bases for our nonconformity, for our refusal of that destructive resignation in the face of oppression. It is not by resignation but by a capacity for indignation in the face of injustice that we are affirmed.
One of the basic questions that we need to look at is how to convert merely rebellious attitudes into revolutionary ones in the process of the radical transformation of society. Merely rebellious attitudes or actions are insufficient, though they are an indispensable response to legitimate anger. It is necessary to go beyond rebellious attitudes to a more radically critical and revolutionary position, which is in fact a position not simply of denouncing injustice but of announcing a new utopia. Transformation of the world implies a dialectic between the two actions: denouncing the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society.
On the basis of this knowledge, namely, “to change things is difficult but possible,” we can plan our political-pedagogical strategy. It is of no importance whether our commitment be in the area of adult or child literacy, health, evangelization, or the inculcation of new technical skills.
The success of Danilson and educators like him derives from the certainty that it is possible to change and necessary to change. For it is clear to them that allowing concrete situations of misery to persist is immoral. Thus, this type of knowledge that the historical process unfolds leads into a principle of action, thus opening the way in practice to the contribution of other kinds of indispensable knowledge.
Obviously, it is not a question of inciting the exploited poor to rebellion, to mobilization, to organization, to shaking up the world. In truth, it’s a question of working in some given area, be it literacy, health, or evangelization, and doing so as to awake the conscience of each group, in a constructive, critical manner, about the violence and extreme injustice of this concrete situation. Even further, to make it clear that this situation is not the immutable will of God.
I cannot accept the philosophy or the tactics of those who believe that the worse the situation is, the better. At the same time, I reject categorically realpolitik, which simply anesthetize the oppressed and postpone indefinitely the necessary transformations in society. I cannot stop the oppressed, with whom I may be working in a ghetto, from voting for reactionary politicians, but I have the duty to warn them of the error they are committing—of the contradiction they are involving themselves in. To vote for a reactionary politician is to guarantee the preservation of the status quo. If I consider myself to be coherently progressive, how can I vote for a politician whose rhetoric is an affront to solidarity and an apology for racism?
If I take as a starting point that the condition of misery in which the oppressed live is first and foremost a condition of violence and not an expression of the will of a punitive God, nor the fruit of laziness or miscegenation, then as an educator my task is to become ever more capable and skilled. If I do not, then my struggle loses its efficacy. What I am saying is that the kind of knowledge I have just spoken of, namely, “to change is difficult but possible,” the kind of knowledge that gives me hope and spurs me into action, is not sufficient for the kind of efficacy I referred to above. Firmly rooted in such knowledge, I must at the same time review other specific kinds of knowledge in which my practice is based and that nourish my curiosity. How, for example, can I hope to engage in literacy without precise knowledge about the acquisition of skills in the area of teaching how to read and write? On the other hand, how can I work in any field, whether it be in literacy, in production, in cooperatives, in evangelization, in health, without at the same time acquiring a knowledge of the skills and crafts, even the astuteness, with which human groups produce their own survival?
As an educator I need to be constantly “reading” the world inhabited by the grassroots with which I work, that world that is their immediate context and the wider world of which they are part. What I mean is that on no account may I make little of or ignore in my contact with such groups the knowledge they acquire from direct experience and out of which they live. Or their way of explaining the world, which involves their comprehension of their role and presence in it. These knowledges are explicit, suggested, or hidden in what I call the decoding of the world, which in its turn always precedes the decoding of the word.
If, on the one hand, I am unable to adapt myself or be “converted” to the way of thinking (ingenuous knowledge) of grassroots groups, on the other hand, I cannot insofar as I consider myself to be progressive, impose in an arrogant fashion, the “truth” of my way of thinking. Through dialogue, grassroots groups can be challenged to process their social-historical experience as the experience that is formative for them individually and collectively. And through such dialogue the necessity of going beyond certain types of explanations of the “facts” will become obvious.
One of the most objectionable errors of political militants, especially those of the messianically authoritarian kind, has always been a total ignorance of grassroots comprehension of the world. Seeing themselves as bearers of the “truth” that no one can refuse, they regard their sublime task as one not of proposing such truth for consideration but of imposing it without question.
Recently I heard a debate in which a young working man, speaking of life in a ghetto, said that he no longer felt shame because of where he lived. “I am proud,” he said, “of what we have achieved through our struggle and our organization. In fact, if we really had a clear awareness of our condition and its structural causes, we would see that it is not we who should be ashamed of where we live but those who live in comfort but do nothing to change the misery that surrounds them.”
It’s possible that this young man’s statement produced little or no reaction in the minds of any authoritarian or messianic militant. One could imagine some negative reaction from someone more in love with revolutionary ideas than actually committed to them. In essence, the way the young man talked was a demonstration of how he was able to “read” his world and his own experience in it. If in the past he was ashamed, now he was capable of perceiving that the condition in which he found himself was not of his making. And especially, he had learned that that situation was not unchangeable. His struggle was much more important in bringing about his new awareness than the rantings of any sectarian, messianically obsessed militant. It’s important to stress that the breakthrough of a new form of awareness in understanding the world is not the privilege of one person. The experience that makes possible the “breakthrough” is a “collective” experience. However, usually someone or another will, individually, put forward and explicate a new perception of this social reality. One of the fundamental tasks of the educator who is open-minded is to be attentive and sensitive to the way a given social group reads and rereads its reality, so as to be able to stimulate progressively a generalized comprehension of this new reality.
It’s important always to bear in mind that the role of the dominant ideology is to inculcate in the oppressed a sense of blame and culpability about their situation of oppression. And this sense of blame and culpability becomes transparent at certain times. A case in point is one I came across in a Catholic institution in California. A poor woman was telling me about her problems and difficulties, of how great an affliction she was suffering. I felt impotent. I did not know what to say. I felt indignation for what she was going through. In the end, I asked her: “Are you American?”
“No,” she replied, “I am poor.” It was as if what was uppermost in her mind was her sense of being a failure. And that that was her own fault. Something she almost had to ask pardon for from the society that she was part of, namely, North America. I can still see her blue eyes full of tears, tears of suffering and self-blame for having been a personal failure. People like her are part of a legion of wounded and marginalized who have not yet understood that the cause of their suffering is the perversity of the socio-political and economic system under which they live. As long as they think like this, they simply reinforce the power of this system. In fact, they connive, unconsciously, with a dehumanizing socio-political order.
For example, literacy circles introduced in poor areas only make sense in the context of the humanizing process. In other words, they should open up conjointly the possibility of a socio-historical and political equivalent of psychoanalysis whereby the sense of self-blame that has been falsely interjected can be cast out. This expulsion of self-blame corresponds to the expulsion of the invasive shadow of the oppressor that inhabits the psyche of the oppressed. Of course, once this shadow is expelled, it needs to be substituted in the oppressed by a sense of autonomy and responsibility.
It is worth noting, however, that in spite of the political and ethical relevance of the effort of conscientization that I have just spoken of, it is insufficient in itself. It is important to go on from there to the teaching of writing and reading the word. We cannot, in a democratic context, transform a literacy circle into either a campaign for political revolution or a space totally given over to an analysis of what is going on in our world. The essential task of those like Danilson, with whom I identify myself, is to try out, with conviction and passion, the dialectical relation between a reading of the world and a reading of the word.
If we reflect on the fact that our human condition is one of essential unfinishedness, that, as a consequence, we are incomplete in our being and in our knowing, then it becomes obvious that we are “programmed” to learn, destined by our very incompleteness to seek completeness, to have a “tomorrow” that adds to our “today.” In other words, wherever there are men and women, there is always and inevitably something to be done, to be completed, to be taught, and to be learned.
In my opinion, none of this makes any sense if attempted outside the socio-historical context in which men and women find themselves and within which they discover their vocation to find “completeness,” to become “more.”
To me, the epitome of negation in the context of education is the stifling or inhibition of curiosity in the learner and, consequently, in the teacher too. In other words, the educator who is dominated by authoritarian or paternalistic attitudes that suffocate the curiosity of the learner finishes by suffocating his or her own curiosity. There is no possible ethical foundation for denying the expression of curiosity in the “other.” A parent’s curiosity that expresses itself in policing how and where the child’s curiosity is going ends up becoming stale and withered. The curiosity that in essence tries to silence the other is, in fact, a denial of itself. A proper democratic and pedagogical environment in which to work is one in which the learners progress in learning through their actual experiences and one in which curiosity as an expression of freedom necessarily has limits, limits that are being constantly called into being. Limits that are ethically integrated by the learner. My curiosity does not have the right to invade the world of the other so as to expose that world to the scrutiny of all.
As a teacher, I ought to know that I can neither teach nor learn unless driven, disturbed, and forced to search by the energy that curiosity brings to my being. To exercise any curiosity correctly is a right that I have as a person and to which there corresponds a responsibility to struggle in defense of this right. If my curiosity is domesticated, I may obtain a level of mechanical memorization of certain aspects of things but never a real grasp or an essential knowledge of the object. The construction or the production of knowledge of the object to be known implies the exercise of curiosity in its critical capacity to distance itself from the object, to observe it, to delimit it, to divide it up, to close in on it, to approach it methodically to make comparisons, to ask questions.
To stimulate questions and critical reflection about the questions, asking what is meant by this or that question, is fundamental to curiosity. Otherwise, all we have is the passivity of students in the face of the discursive explanations of the teacher and answers to questions that have not been asked. This does not mean, of course, that we ought to reduce our teaching activity to the simple to-and-fro questions that may also become tedious and sterile, all in the name of defending the necessity of curiosity. The need for dialogue does not in any way diminish the need for explanation and exposition whereby the teacher sets forth his/her understanding and knowledge of the object. What is really essential in this process is that both the teacher and the students know that open, curious questioning, whether in speaking or listening, is what grounds them mutually—not a simple passive pretense at dialogue. The important thing is for both teacher and students to assume their epistemological curiosity.
In this sense, the good teacher is the one who manages to draw the student into the intimacy of his or her thought process while speaking. The class then becomes a challenge and not simply a nest where people gather. In the environment of challenge, the students become tired but they do not fall asleep. They get tired because they accompany the comings and goings of the teacher’s thought and open their eyes in wonder at his or her pauses, doubts, uncertainties.
Even before attempting to discuss methods and tactics for the purpose of creating dynamic classes like these, the teacher must be clear and content with the notion that the cornerstone of the whole process is human curiosity. Curiosity is what makes me question, know, act, ask again, recognize.
It would be an excellent weekend task to propose to a group of students that each one single out the most striking curiosity he or she has experienced, connected with TV news propaganda, a videogame, a gesture of someone they know—any circumstance at all. It does not matter. What type of response did they make to their curiosity? Was it easily forgotten, or did it lead to other curiosities? Did this process involve a consultation of sources, the using of dictionaries, computers, books, or other people? Did this curiosity constitute a challenge, a provocation for some provisional knowledge, or did it not? What did one person feel when she/he discovered someone else working on the same curiosity? Finally, the students should consider the question of whether or not a person can be curious if prepared to think about his/her own curiosity.
The experience could be refined and deepened to the point, for example, where a seminar could be organized on a twice-weekly basis so as to debate the various types of curiosity and their implications and consequences.
The exercise of curiosity makes it more critically curious, more methodically rigorous in regard to its object. The more spontaneous curiosity intensifies and becomes rigorous, the more epistemological it becomes.
I’ve never been an ingenuous lover of technology; I do not deify it nor demonize it. For that reason I’ve always felt at ease in dealing with it. I’ve no doubt about the enormous potential for technology to motivate and challenge children and adolescents of the less-favored social classes. For that reason alone, as secretary of education for the city of São Paulo, I introduced the computer to the city’s schools. In fact, my grandchildren are able to tell me about their curiosity and how it has been inspired by the computer, which for them is a normal part of living.
The exercise of curiosity convokes the imagination, the emotions, and the capacity to conjecture and to compare in tracing a profile of the object to be known as well as its raison d’être. A sound, for example, may provoke my curiosity. It focuses on the space where I think it is happening. I sharpen my ear. I compare it to other sounds that I already know. I investigate the space a little closer. I develop several hypotheses about the possible origin of the sound. Then, by process of elimination, I arrive at a satisfactory explanation.
Having satisfied one curiosity, a further search continues. There could be no such thing as human existence without the openness of our being to the world, without the transitiveness of our consciousness.
The more skill and methodological rigor I acquire in handling these various operations, the greater will be the exactitude with which I approach the objects of my curiosity.
One of the fundamental types of knowledge in my critical-educative practice is that which stresses the need for spontaneous curiosity to develop into epistemological curiosity.
Another indispensable type of knowledge in this field is that which enables us to handle the relationship between authority and freedom, which is an area of permanent tension between discipline and undiscipline.6
Resulting from the harmony between authority and freedom, discipline necessarily implies respect of the one for the other. And this respect is expressed in the admission that both make regarding the limits that cannot be transgressed on either side.
Authoritarianism and freedom with no boundaries are ruptures in the tense harmony between authority and freedom. Authoritarianism is the rupture in favor of authority against freedom. And unbridled freedom is the rupture in favor of freedom against authority. Both authoritarianism and freedom with no bounds are undisciplined forms of behavior that deny what I am calling the ontological vocation of the human being.7
So, as there is no room for discipline either in authoritarianism or in unbridled freedom, both lack rigor, authority, and freedom. Only in those practices where authority and freedom are found and preserved in their autonomy (that is, in a relationship of mutual respect) can we speak of a disciplined practice as well as a practice favorable to the vocation “to be more.”
Here in Brazil, our authoritarian past is now being challenged by an ambiguous modernity, with the result that we oscillate between authoritarianism and boundless freedom. Between two types of tyranny: the tyranny of freedom and the tyranny of exacerbated authority. And sometimes, we experience the two simultaneously.
A really good exercise would be to explore the tension involved in the confrontation between authority and freedom. With such an exercise, one could evaluate the degree to which these opposites, in becoming themselves, remain autonomous in situations of dialogue. For this exercise to be possible, it is indispensable that both contrary concepts, authority and freedom, become increasingly convinced of the ideal of mutual respect as the only road to authenticity.
Let us begin by reflecting on a few of the qualities that democratic authority in teaching needs to incorporate in its relationship with the freedom of the students. It is interesting to note that my learning experience will be fundamental to the teaching I will be doing in the future or that I may happen to be doing now. It is in living critically my freedom as a learner that, in large part, I will prepare my authority as a teacher in the future or recover it in the present. To this end, as a student who dreams of becoming a teacher tomorrow or who is already teaching, I ought to have as the object of my curiosity the experiences I have lived with various teachers, as well as my own experiences with my own students. What I want to say is the following: I must not think only of the programmatic contents that are the themes of our discussions in the various teaching departments. I must reflect at the same time on the question of whether this or that teacher teaches in an open, dialogical way or in a closed, authoritarian way.