Education and communal life in times of confinement
Within the collection of “Notebooks of Latin American Critical Thought”, CLACSO presents the research: “Education and communal life in times of confinement"Of Sebastián Barros, Raúl Muriete and Antonio Romano.
Education and communal life in times of confinement
Sebastian Barros*
Raúl Muriete**
Antonio Romano***
In this text, we attempt to reconstruct the possible shifts that the link between education and the construction of a shared life has taken during this time of confinement. In Latin America, it is possible to establish different periods for understanding this link, but we can maintain that in recent years it underwent diverse processes shaped by dynamics that homogenized it under the predominance of what was termed in the 90s as “pedagogical neoliberalism” (Puiggros, 1994). During that decade, a region emerged that experienced structural transformations and redefinitions of the meanings of education and, above all, the dismantling of the educational space as part of the construction of the common good. This was the case with educational reform processes that aimed at privatization and the introduction of market mechanisms for the regulation of the educational space, as well as their tendency to be replaced by other, more efficient forms of social control. The development of targeted educational policies that fragmented the social body, decoupling the formation of the citizen into a set of programs, was accompanied by the incorporation of new technologies that promised to definitively surpass the state educational system.
However, it seems important to revisit these processes in light of the effects that confinement will have on education for several reasons. First, because some Latin American countries have seen the return of neoliberal governments that offer similar responses to the organization of educational systems, based on the same principles, albeit reformulated. In Uruguay, for example, the expansion of "privately managed public high schools" appears to be the response to the "educational crisis." But it is also true that the context of confinement has exacerbated concerns about the potential replacement of in-person teaching with more flexible mechanisms, which align with the technological solutions that neoliberalism presented two decades ago, along with new models for managing public services.
In this new crisis scenario, which shatters appearances and erases prejudices, as Arendt pointed out, there is also a kind of acceleration of time in which more radical decisions can be made than in times of normalcy. Therefore, we consider it necessary to view this context as an opportunity to reflect on the forms of organization we have established to guarantee people's rights, and particularly the right to education. Because this acceleration of time will likely lead us to adopt logics that polarize our organization around: the public and the private, the common and the particular, the in-person and the virtual, the educational and the school-based, and, in the background, new ways of framing the opposition between the market and the state in the definition of public policies.
Therefore, we can posit that confinement will have a particular impact on how we think about education and schooling. The broader objective of this text is to examine the effects of confinement on the idea of the commons, how previous frameworks defining a shared horizon are disrupted, and how this impacts teaching and educational systems—the quintessential institutions for constructing the commons. To achieve these objectives, we distinguish three levels of this impact where significant transformations can be observed. The first is institutional, the second is pedagogical, and the third is political. In all three, the question of the commons is central.
Institutional
The lockdown has a specific impact on the assumptions that shaped the organization of public education systems. It is important to clarify that public education systems are the means by which the intergenerational transmission of culture, defined as monopolistic for over a century, was institutionalized. The assumptions upon which modern education systems were organized are linked to simultaneous classroom attendance, which implies that a group of students of a certain age share the same tiempo and the same space together with a teacher.
The temporary nature of confinement, however, disrupted the seriality and repetition inherent in face-to-face interaction, altering the perception of time within the space designated for building the pedagogical relationship (which may or may not be the classroom). Weekly meetings on a specific day and time were disrupted by the emergence of a virtual relationship to be constructed, whose rhythms and routines are unknown. This is why we will speak of a dislocated work time in which responses seem to amount to an arbitrary sum of hours "in front of their own screen and in mutual indifference" (Meirieu 2020).
This experience confronts us with the remnants of the simultaneous classroom. This is not to say that the experience of technologically mediated distance education implies necessarily This disjointed nature of the teaching experience. However, given the urgency of the radical shift from in-person to virtual learning, the result has been people working without set schedules, communicating through a variety of platforms that often don't function as they should due to connectivity problems or outdated technologies, and a disconnection among students beyond the teacher's influence.
As the work order is disrupted, individual responsibility for teaching duties intensifies. Again, we do not mean to suggest that this is necessarily Thus, it is the immediate circumstance of confinement that largely triggers these processes. The work of teachers is laid bare in the open, exposed virtual platforms that were hastily set up, since the lack of physical presence means that maintaining the pedagogical connection depends almost exclusively on the teacher's actions. While this could be said to apply to any educational relationship, the difference is that with the simultaneous presence of the classroom, the student is physically present, and the teacher's interaction is almost unavoidable. In contrast, when the student is at home and also without family support, connecting online depends on their own willingness.
This arduous work almost automatically triggers highly laudable values, primarily linked to the heroism of teaching. However, these values are also strongly associated with religious undertones, linked to the representation of vocation as an apostolate. This is not entirely new in relation to the meanings that underpin the discourse on education. These same meanings, for example, present teachers' union struggles as displays of selfishness toward "the most defenseless groups," namely "children." The anxiety of building and maintaining the pedagogical relationship is related to the guilt experienced during teachers' struggles because the individual cannot escape the discursive structure of the apostolate within which they are embedded. We will return to this point when we discuss the political dimension.
This institutional framework is also spatially disrupted. The shift to virtual learning reveals that equality of opportunity or conditions for accessing education neither begins nor ends with the school's physical presence in a location easily accessible by transportation. In the case of in-person learning, physical accessibility became the metaphor for a universally inclusive and constantly expanding education system: schools were the last bastion of the public-state sphere in many places far removed from urban centers. However, virtual learning allows us to rethink this metaphor by showing us that territorial expansion, while still an essential aspect, does not always guarantee that everyone who is able to access the education system can do so. In the case of universities, it is evident that many university students who can now connect online previously had to travel long distances to attend classes, lacking the time or resources to pay for transportation, which makes it difficult for them to continue their studies. Something similar occurs in secondary education. The dislocation of institutional spatiality leads us to affirm that there is no zero moment of educational inclusion that begins when the student arrives at an educational institution or when they connect.
The disruption of the work order is not limited to the regulated time of in-person attendance, which is broken by the lockdown. A more generalized normative collapse occurs, which is a second characteristic of this institutional situation. We are facing a breakdown of the normative order of work. This happens due to events that, most of the time, exceed our usual logic. In this case, it stemmed from a natural phenomenon that generated a process of adjustment in our usual rules, both administrative and pedagogical, within the teaching profession.
The administrative regulations refer to the new working conditions as work regulated by a specific statute and defined by a system (teaching career). What has changed here are the conditions of the type of work, stipulated for a specific modality and determined by the fulfillment of a particular type of activity: being in front of students and the consequences that physical, in-person, face-to-face, collective work entails with that subject of words, gestures, and presence that constitutes us.
For the moment, that seems to have disappeared (or been suspended), and our presence has become ghostly, but in such a way that it reminds us of Hamlet's father's ghost demanding reparation for a wrong he has committed. The past of that now-departed presence demands that we continue to fulfill our commitments (the presence itself demands vengeance for the virtual world) to what was agreed upon. And, like Hamlet, this produces anguish, unease, and fear. In a way, the anguish arises from the need to make decisions that were already standardized in the face-to-face setting, and now the decision-making process appears as a radical moment. This transcends the individual circumstances of those in charge of teaching and demonstrates the need for a collective body to protect and support it (political initiatives from universities, ministries and secretariats, unions, political parties, etc.).
Pedagogical
The impact of time and space disrupted by confinement has had a significant effect on educational discourse. This discourse, rather than fostering public discussion of these problems and transforming them into political demands, has focused on the values of solidarity and heroism in teaching. The problem is that, combined with the issues mentioned in the previous section regarding teachers' working conditions and students' experiences of inequality, these values result in a discourse laden with guilt. The anguish of witnessing inequality falls on the shoulders of educators, forcing them into a stressful work environment with a job that changed in its content, forms, and tools overnight. Solidarity and heroism are double-edged swords because they are values that depend on the will of an individual who chooses them and, from them, develops a behavior toward others. With one blade she achieves heroic actions that lead to concern and care for that otherness, with the other she cuts the cord that binds him to his status as a subject of rights: I am supportive and/or I am a hero because I choose to be, not because I have the obligation to act because that other person has a right to be educated, to health, to knowledge, etc.
So, who are these individuals we are addressing, whether out of solidarity or as a matter of right? In this new educational landscape during lockdown, we initially tended to assume that their reality was very similar to that of the middle class. At first, we took for granted the availability of a computer, the peace and quiet of a private room, or adequate space for full-time dedication to education, free from caregiving or work responsibilities, assuming unlimited internet access, and so on. The lockdown confronted us with a very different reality. While virtually everyone has some form of internet access through their cell phones, this doesn't mean their data plans allow them the necessary time to follow classes, nor that they have the appropriate technology. Furthermore, the lockdown highlighted the importance of the education system as part of the family's care system. Therefore, households don't always have the time and space needed to participate in schoolwork without disrupting family life, especially in single-parent families. Addressing this unequal dynamic is especially important from a gender perspective, as women are the ones who suffer most from this lack of time and space. Education is a network of community knowledge that, as a public good and as part of a heritage that should be universal, is regulated by the State for its equitable distribution. The world of the pandemic presents us with the challenge of necessarily recognizing how all people who share community life live on a “permanent” basis.
The lockdown also raises questions about the type of mediation that new technologies and their use bring about. On the one hand, we assume that on the other side of the screen are people who are “digital natives,” but experience tells us that we encounter students who have great difficulty accessing the platforms, using them effectively, and sustaining remote learning. Digital technology, rather than being seen as a means of learning, seems to be viewed as an aspect of entertainment consumption. A similar process occurs among those of us who teach and who generally do not use this technology as part of our daily teaching work. Finally, it is important to highlight that there is also no experience regarding how to sustain an educational program with the scale of in-person instruction in a remote format.
In this context, under these new conditions, a kind of hybridization is occurring between in-person and virtual formats, which are more akin to a simultaneous classroom than to distance education. This implies that a new form of organizing teachers' work is beginning to take shape, one that is still in its early stages and which, without some form of regulation, will either deepen the disruption of work time mentioned in the previous section, or further distance educational opportunities, thus accentuating exclusion, even for those who do have access.
Because not only has content been virtualized, but also an entire system of practices that are not necessarily transferable from a face-to-face format to a virtual one. It will be necessary to recognize the different mechanisms for rationalizing behavior, practices, belief systems, and thought structures that these new practices activate. What we are experiencing is not just a technological change, but a whole system of pedagogical transfer. To be more precise, let's take assessment as an example. We know that there would be no reliable accreditation of knowledge in modernity without an assessment system. With the advent of the modern state, knowledge is not freely available but is regulated and administered by states. Therefore, one of the most important challenges of virtual learning is the certification of that knowledge.
Teaching is what constitutes the pedagogical bond; it is the otherness that enables a subject's contact with their cultural heritage. Therefore, the problems we reviewed in the previous section regarding the construction of this bond—"each person in front of their screen and in their indifference," an individualized approach that represents the teacher's self-imposed entrepreneurship—lead us to a crucial question for building a shared understanding. It confronts us with the question of the nature of the social bond that will result from these processes.
The individualizing nature of teaching risks exacerbating processes that were already underway before the pandemic as a consequence of the hegemony of the competition principle. It is important to connect the discourse on new forms of market regulation with the emergence of “life skills” as structuring principles of pedagogical practice. In both cases, the exacerbation of individualism imposes a subject whose only limitation is that which arises from their own will. In this context, the figure of the educator that emerges is not that of someone responsible for transmitting knowledge, but rather someone expert in detecting learning difficulties in a student whose failure to learn is attributed to their own deficiency, incapacity, or lack of will. Paradoxically, and simultaneously, this student, who is individually required to confront any difficulty through the individualization of teaching strategies, is a student whose potential is weakened by the critical context they are experiencing, which we described in the previous section.
While we are aware that we are in a moment of teaching during a health emergency mediated by technology, and that, as we said, everything seems to be part of a temporary situation, the questions we ask ourselves remain fundamentally important because the public sphere has become private, a private matter. And we believe that “to educate is the verb that accounts for the legal action of registering the subject (symbolic affiliation) and the political action of distributing inheritances, designating the collective as heir” (Frigerio, 2004). In this way, the private sphere is contrasted with the logics/practices of the common, in a shared, sensitive world, in the terms we are using here.
Political
Pointing out the problems that lockdowns and the closure of educational institutions have caused for teachers' work and the establishment of the pedagogical relationship does not romanticize the situation before the crisis. The institutional weakening of the teaching profession due to the deregulation of the labor market was a reality even before the coronavirus crisis.
However, the dislocation situation that emerges from the pandemic does not have linear effects.
Dislocation forces the need to constitute a new form of representation capable of establishing a new sense of order and recreating the pedagogical bond. The notion of dislocation is central because it offers an opportunity for new possibilities. This does not mean that the experience of dislocation is automatically positive. The dislocation of certain modes of representation and identification has an ambiguous effect. On the one hand, it negates and threatens the existing identities of a teaching profession that creates the pedagogical bond and assumes the responsibility of transmitting a heritage. But, on the other hand, dislocation forces that subject to be free. After forms of representation are destabilized and dislocated, new meanings and identities are needed. This implies that dislocation is a condition for new possibilities for action.
The effects of a dislocation are traumatic because they fragment and dissolve the pedagogical bond that, under normal circumstances, is not problematized. The dislocation of what we assume as the teaching task means that new forms of identification are required to give coherence and meaning to the experience we are living through. But it is important to point out that these new identifications have no a priori content. What emerges from the crisis, what is summarized in the question of “post-pandemic scenarios,” will be the result of a political struggle. This in two senses.
On the one hand, education symbolically includes us as full members of a collective that operates as the subject of sovereignty: the people. This places us squarely within the relationship between education and the constitution of a political body that transcends the particularities found within the social body. The task of education is to highlight and expose the differences and inequalities that may exist among these particularities, allowing us to recognize an otherness within that inequality and to learn that with these othernesses we must build something common.
Education shapes the social bond by connecting us individually to something larger than ourselves and collectively assigning us a place within that larger context. Education is not merely about acquiring instrumental knowledge; it is also the institution that shapes and enables the transmission of heritage. Therefore, it is the passport that grants entry into communal life and all that this entails in terms of our relationships with others who share the city, the territory, the neighborhoods, and so on. This is precisely what the shift to virtual learning disrupted: the in-person interaction that shaped education and, consequently, the nature of the social bond. The same applies to the normative and symbolic frameworks that established the conditions for its understanding and to the self-representations of the educational sphere.
On the other hand, education is a process analogous to what Claude Lefort called the political, to differentiate it from politics. The political is the instituting moment of the social; it is its getting into shape This author tells us (1988: 20-21). It is not difficult to intuit that education also has this constitutive character: there would be no possible formalization without a systematized, regulated, and in some way accredited transmission of the knowledge and heritage that constitute us as part of society. As Cornelius Castoriadis puts it when he reaches the conclusion of a text on the nature and value of equality:
“Likewise, we cannot ignore (and this is the least that can be said) that which It is these equal individuals whom we want to participate equally in power that is decisively determined by society and its institutions, by virtue of what I called earlier the social fabrication of individuals or, to use a more classical term, their paideia, their education in the broadest sense of the word” (Castoriadis 1994, 144).
Education, as an instituting moment, has the task of creating which those equal individuals are in a community that aims to govern itself.
The political struggle over the distribution of the inheritance to be passed on and the political struggle to shape the social fabric. These are the challenges that the lockdown crisis imposes on us.
Conclusions
We examined three registers in which we evaluated the impact of the lockdown on the education system from an institutional, pedagogical, and political perspective. The disruption of the normative order that the situation produced opens up possibilities for a reorganization of the education system along the lines of a new educational neoliberalism, or alternatively, for an expansion of the logic of rights that embraces the new challenges to produce a new paideia.
This possibility arises if we are able to reconcile the individual and the collective within an educational system that transcends the simultaneous classroom model. Virtual education modalities have brought to the forefront both social inequalities and the difficulties the educational system faces in responding to the uniqueness of educational trajectories. Neoliberal pedagogy will likely tend to reinforce the logic of individualization and overcoming the “educational crisis” through the expansion of virtual platforms. The reaction of teachers' unions may frame the debate within a restorative logic that promotes the past demand for in-person instruction as the only way to reestablish a space for building common ground. The responses of the market and the state offer two different versions of the reorganization of teachers' work within the educational system. The market will likely advocate for greater deregulation to give more initiative to stakeholders; unions will likely demand a greater state presence to guarantee adequate conditions for students and families to access a quality education.
The education system, faced with this dilemma, risks being exposed to opposing forces. If swift action is not taken on the fundamental dimensions we have identified here (institutional, pedagogical, and political), social fragmentation is highly likely to be exacerbated. Acting in this context does not mean restoring a previous order, a voice from the past demanding our presence, an order that was also unjust in terms of education and equal opportunities. Acting means critically examining the responses to the health crisis. It is not teachers against the government, or against their students, or against technology and the virtualization of the learning process. It is society facing inequality, the loss of rights, the deprivation of the bare minimum (which for many is the ultimate), and a dilemma that is no longer solely about health (life or death) but also about the very existence of an education system capable of contributing to the development of a commons policy, where the possibility of building a future in which everyone can feel part of a shared destiny is also at stake.
Highlighted
Castoriadis, Cornelius. (1994) “Nature and value of equality”, in The domains of man. Crossroads of the labyrinthBarcelona, Gedisa.
Frigerio, Graciela. (2004). “Conceptual sketches on institutions”, in Nora E. Elichiry (ed.) School learning. Developments in educational psychologyBuenos Aires, Manantial.
Lefort, Claude. (1988). Does the political theology remain?Buenos Aires, Hachette Bookstore.
Meirieu, Philippe. (2020). “The school after… with the pedagogy of before?”, translated and made available online by the Popular School Cooperative Movement (MCEP), Madrid. Available at http://www.mcep.es/2020/04/18/la-escuela-despues-con-la-pedagogia-de-antes-philippe-meirieu/Last accessed June 10, 2020.
Puiggros, Adriana. (1994). Re-educateBuenos Aires, Ariel.
* Coordinator of the CLACSO Working Group on Education and Community Life. PhD in Political Science, University of Essex. Professor at the National University of Patagonia San Juan Bosco and researcher at CIT-Golfo San Jorge, CONICET/UNP, Argentina.
** Member of the CLACSO Working Group on Education and Community Life. PhD in Education, University of Buenos Aires. Full Professor of Educational Planning for the Teacher Training and Bachelor's Degree in Educational Sciences at the National University of Patagonia San Juan Bosco, Argentina.
*** Member of the CLACSO Working Group on Education and Community Life. PhD in Education from the National University of La Plata. Associate Professor and Director of the Department of History and Philosophy of Education, University of the Republic, Uruguay.
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