Education: between "amor-mundi" and "philia": curricular choice, personal development and care for the world

• Grant number: 17/05206-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: April 01, 2018
• End date: June 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Fundamentals of Education
• Principal Investigator: José Sergio Fonseca de Carvalho
• Grantee: José Sergio Fonseca de Carvalho
• Host Investigator: Etienne Tassin
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7, France

Abstract

This research project aims at analyzing the responses that the National Curricular Guidelines gave to a challenge common to both teachers and legislators, educational theorists and public policy makers: that of living in a time marked by the absence of safe and stable parameters concerning the establishment of criteria for curricular choices that should guide educational action. In dialogue with the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière two central aspects of the discourse of the Guidelines will be analyzed. The first concerns the kind of attitude our society - marked by presentism as a regime of temporality - establishes with the different legacies of symbolic achievements received from the past and in which we intend to initiate our young people, reflecting upon the consequences of a supposed centrality of the Young people in establishing curricular choice criteria. The second is the notion, recurrent in contemporary pedagogical discourses, that the school should organize its curriculum and its practices in order to contribute significantly to the "overcoming of socio-cultural and socioeconomic inequalities." In dialogue with the writings of Rancière, we intend to discuss the assumption that there would be a convergence between school logic and productive logic, so that we could think of the former as reproducing the social order, or as a tool for the reduction of its Inequalities. Thus inequality is taken as the starting point and equality as a future goal, which ends up reinforcing the present as the space-time of inequality and postponing to the future the equality which is never realized. In opposition to this conception, we suggest taking school experience as an opportunity for verification and attestation of an equality embodied in the present. It is, therefore, a question of conceiving educational action as the creation of a formative space and time in which practices are not regarded as means to achieve social equality in a future, but a way of affirming it in the present. (AU)