Educação e barbárie: formação de professores na prevenção a catástrofes

Abstract

It is proposed that the reconstruction of Walter Benjamin’s theory of barbarism allows to evaluate coherently some of the pedagogical premises that gave support to authoritarianism and the different disasters which from there were derived within the recent history. In methodological terms the reconstruction is done based on the GermanJewish philosopher’s own suggestion that history is no longer presented as the continuous and linear chain of events according to the dominant accounts, but from the precise cuts and intervention that direct the way of counting these same events. The proposal articulates based on the relationship between the allegory of Baroque Drama, its underlying theatrical representation and the School as the stage of these representations. Our first hypothesis is that the Baroque Drama not only served to impose a type of theatrical representation, but of equal luck, it determined the model of school that developed in the same period with the Catholic Church, Protestant and the modern state; and which was resized, in a kind of new catechesis, with the illustrated primers and textbooks from modern industrialization. The second hypothesis is that the Baroque allegory besides marking an authoritarian structure which, in the theater and at school, reproduced a fixed message, drawn from the selection of biblical fragments grouped arbitrarily in a linear fashion, and which sought to console with the promise of future salvation, provided the following elements that were configuretes as different versions of the brazilian founding myth. In a similar way to what Benjamin equals to the pedagogy of Baroque drama and modern industrialization, we reconstruct some aspects of the history of Brazilian education, based on the colonial baroque and the industrial period. Among the results achieved, the following stand out. First there is a link between the baroque allegory in its different versions and the contemporary catastrophes. Second, the scheme of baroque allegory proliferated in Jesuit education and modern pedagogies, provoking the authoritarian relationship between a fixed message to be transmitted and a passive viewer. Thirdly, in a prospective sense, it is possible to reshape a new allegory in which it no longer conveys a message but proposes a riddle to be deciphered or simply a meaningless allegorical form as it serves to awaken in the spectator the need to resize the senses.