“Eles não estão nem aí!”: impactos da contemporaneidade sobre o ato de educar

Abstract

This paper offers social-philosophical contributions from psychoanalysis to the discussion of contemporary impacts on schools and education. Education is done by dissymmetry, by the assumption of the absence of freedom and by the valorization of the social tie, the collectivity. The act of educating, in that way, walks against the values of the society of consumption from nowadays, being them the defense of individual freedom, the struggle for equality between men and the devaluing of communitarian attitudes. There are visible signs of failure in the conception of education in our historic time, because we have a loss of the word power and the difficulty of transmitting. Today there is the decline of the Name-of-the-Father, term coined by the Psychoanalysis that represents the paternal significant which incorporates the civilian laws making them became symbolic in the process of subjectivity constitution. The social alterations have initiated with modern times promote changes in this process, since we are being inserted in an ascending scenery of individualism culture and logic of the dominating science. In school, the constructed knowledge shifted from “a” teacher’s knowledge, with their personal experience, to “the” dominating science’s logic, with resources such as books and scientific instruments, and from the tireless search for new information to the discarding of previous evidences regarding different subjects. In family, there are ever more parents who wish not to oppose their children’s claiming, to avoid confrontation, either for not knowing how to get out of it, or for not wanting the distress the opposition brings. The insecurity as well as the omission of the educational agents, in the exercise of the attribution they possess, emerge from this new society. The characteristics of nowadays and their impacts on human relations, in that way, arrive in school and in the task of educating. Based on a field research in two schools of Juiz de Fora, student’s parents reveal the recent challenges for the exercise of the educative function, pedagogic coordinators and teachers reveal the recent difficulties in working with school knowledge, and students talk about their feelings regarding the teachers, the school and the contemporary society. In these researched schools, the demoting of the teacher as a knowledge instance is reflected in the daily job: teachers talk about the difficulties of teaching and students talk about the difficulties of learning and the lack of interest of the teacher for the school. The main complaint of all school participants is the difficulty of transmitting, contemporary symptom, even more complained about than indiscipline or school violence. Some readings of FREUD (1913; 1920; 1925; 1927;1930) that talk about the malaise in modern culture, and LACAN (1970; 2002), when dealing with the dynamics of the four speeches present in the social ties, are made, together with the contribution of texts of foreign authors such as ARENDT (1972), BAUMAN (1998; 2000), GIDDENS (1999; 2000), MELMAN (2003) e LEBRUN (2003; 2004), and national such as MRECH (2005), KUPFER (1999; 2005) e PEREIRA (2005; 2006).