The opining furor of students in the current school system: resonances between education and misinformation

• Grant number: 23/00526-4
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: December 01, 2023
• End date: November 30, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Fundamentals of Education
• Principal Investigator: Douglas Emiliano Batista
• Grantee: Douglas Emiliano Batista
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• City of the host institution: São Paulo

Abstract

If the modern scholastic device sustained for four centuries an unsynthesized dialectic between Tradition and Reason - and what allowed it, in Arendtian terms, to protect the old(s) against the new(s) and vice-versa - whereas progressive education has given rise, since the beginning of the 20th century, to the polarization between the old and the new, since the school's focus on students implied the marginalization of teachers (i.e., those who are representatives of school traditions) as well as the exaltation of students (i.e., new people in the old world). Thus, the symbolic and educational transmission of teachers' epistemological, ethical and aesthetic traditions, which is also subjectivizing for students, gave way to the supposed development of the so-called students' individual psychological faculties. Such a development, in turn, would emerge from the learner's activity and protagonism since the transmission on the part of the Other (teacher), besides the teacher's symbolic alterity towards the students, became understood as oppressive (unlike emancipatory, since constitutive of the subject). Moreover, the audiovisual and technological revolutions from the 1960s onwards centered the school on the private and self-referred initiative of the student to opine fiercely about everything, a fact that not only intensified the teacher's dis-authorization but also aggravated the short-circuit in cultural and symbolic transmission. In light of this, it is worth investigating on a theoretical and bibliographical level - from Psychoanalysis and Education and through concepts such as the subject of the unconscious and symbolic transmission - if such opining self-absorption of the students at school would have contributed to the "formation" of self-referential adults, narcissistic (refractory to the Other) and anti-culturalist adults, who, taking themselves as critical protesters, act as propagators of misinformation, post-truths and negationism, propagation which has put in check the interlocution and the alterity inherent to the ordinary life in the public sphere. (AU)