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8/9/2019 Ernesto Trevio Ronzn - Education and Conflict
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Education as a worldwide political object: the atonement of
conflict1
By Ernesto Trevio Ronzn
My purpose in the following pages is to explore the theoretical
implications of the exclusion ofconflictin educational thinking because
of the action of some international organizations. For this, I start taking
into consideration, as a theoretical resource, the discussions about
making people and the citizen as elaborated by Popkewitz and Hacking
in their respective works. After this, and as a referent for discussion, I
speak about some ideas deployed in documents of worldwide
implications like those produced by of UNESCO and OECD-PISA. I close
the paper with a general reflection on the mutual implications of these
topics.
I find quite interesting our recent discussions on making people.
Although I am fully familiar basically through Heidegger, Foucault and
Derrida with the ontological premises of the idea that people or
individuals dontjust existbut exist in mobile contexts of power, values,
nomination, the way in which Hacking (1986) and Popkewitz (2008) put
it is useful because is closely related with things that are going on in our
current and somehow shared existential experience. In this sense,
although I have not yet explored deeply the philosophical implications of
Hackings dynamic nominalism and others of his assertions, I do think
1 This paper was written as a reaction paperfor the Seminar:Reform and Change in Curriculum,Fall 2009, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mail: [email protected]
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he provides a provocative language to inform a debate about education,
and I think that Popkewitz shows this in his discussion on the
implications of the process of making the cosmopolitan citizen and the
practices of abjection.
In this line of thought, the idea of the cosmopolitan citizen
connects deeply with a process of global interest for thinking of
education as an object of global concern: governance, regulation, design.
We could date this to the foundation of UNESCO (1946), although I
prefer to take, as a more recent marking point, the publication of Edgar
Faures document Learning to be. The world of education today and
tomorrow (UNESCO, 1972), a document specifically oriented to
encourage a worldwide agenda for education and where ideas like
lifelong education, democracy, development and education among
others,came to circulation in such a scale. And for the last three decades,
international organism including the World Bank, the OECD and others
have had their word in education, emphasizing its importance for the
economical, cultural, sociological and technological development of the
world dressing it with the vocabulary of competitiveness, quality,
innovation.
In this context, education seems to me, more than before, a
political objectin the sense that, although education has always
implicated the encounter and imposition of visions about the world,
about society, about school, about what should be taught, who should be
the teacher, who the student, and further, today, is actively linked to the
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economical, environmental, democratic future of the world, and
constructed as a referent of national security in some countries (See for
instance documents such as The partnership for 21st century skills,
2008). However in the past century thinkers like Fritz Machlup
developed wide analysis of these aspects, it is until recently that they are
a concern for public discussion and public policy worldwide. This we can
see in initiatives like PISA, through which we are informed about the
proficiency of students, but most of all, about the success andfailure of
some countries on achieving the sort of excellence reflected on the charts.
This sort of global technology (PISA) has lead to several thinkers
and politicians do adopt positions labeled as politically progressive. One
sub-sort of this positions is of particular interest to me, the one which
sees education as a social field or human right, where there is no space or
time for dissent, where words such as conflict, difference and struggle
dissent relatives- are legitimate as long as they allow us to settle our
differences or to understand each other, in our deeply and common
human nature; and to get better in our educational performance,
because,problem solving is a something that we must know to grasp
the future and for this reason is something we have to evaluate. That
is to say, as long as they are detached from their political affiliation, taste
or bloodline, to be used as a curricular or administrative tool o content:
problem solving, recognition and acceptance of diversity and others, as
school subjects.
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This way of facing dissent or conflict is also quite common, for
other reasons, in several fields of thinking: cultural studies, politics,
gender, multiculturalism, TIC, among others, where is related to specific
facts in various realms of social life. Some of them are quite dramatic
and have left profound scares on the face of several societies to a point
that consensus or mutual understanding, emerges as a the most
desirable object--state of being-- for education.
However, in the process of seeking this technical achievement, or
human reconciliation we can observe a process of social and political
closure, the construction of a sort of dispositif or device (in the
Foucaultian sense) for conflict-atonement with the properties of the
Greek oxymoron: one which through its very existence provides both,
plausible forms for the understanding or betterment of some social
conflicts, and the seminal substance that kills also promising elements
that could lead to exploitation of difference. What is going on, for me, is
that, for more than one reason, international organizations (as well as
public and private sectors, educational thinkers) are using these words in
senses that castaway the possibility for seeing the difference, the dissent
and the conflict as a legitimate political way of being in the world.
Apparently, the words of international organizations should not be
challenged, there is no room to say that I'm not interested, as a citizen or
as a country, in being regarded through a technology like PISA, or that a
particular agenda, or an item in that agenda, should be debated, because
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saying so implies ruptures, conflicts, the delay of progress, of
improvement, it implies unproductive political conflicts.
Evidently, neither difference nor conflict, consensus or dissent,
can be understood in plain, these terms emerge in a wider web of
meaning and this implies the challenge to construct them. Here is where
the theories of making people are useful to understand these global
discourses, but also, if we are interested, in creating new ways of
constructing conflict and difference. The sociological construction of
dissent and conflict as an undesirable thing in the world of education
leads to the field of impasse and affirmative exclusion.
Is not that I believe that total detention of political difference is
possible, such a thing is a sort ofontological impossibility, but what I
believe is that the right to dissent and to battle for this dissent in
theoretical and political fields is a productive way to challenge some of
the dominant cosmopolitan thesis, the conflict-atonement dispositif,
attempting to make the citizen a programmable entity somehow
indifferent, ashamed or scared toward conflict.
References
- Hacking, Ian (1986) Making up people. California: Stanforduniversity press.
- Popkewitz, Thomas (2008) Cosmopolitanism and the Age of SchoolReform. NY: Routledge
- The partnership for 21st century skills (2008) Transition brief policyrecommendations on preparing Americans for the global skills race.EUA.