Para uma crítica da educação e por uma compreensão da violência

Abstract

This thesis seeks to contribute to a critique of education, understanding violence as part of it and as a social phenomenon. This criticism is based on the studies of Walter Benjamin, where he proposes the understanding of violence through mythical and divine contradiction. Benjamin, in the text “For a critique of violence”, only names education as an example of divine violence and from there we started the research that brought to light the unilaterality of this statement. A statement that we found to be one-sided because it did not encompass the reality of education, which was shown in a dubious way like the two forms of violence described by Benjamin. In this context, it is possible to glimpse the dialectic overlapping of the classification proposed by Benjamin for violence, in a kind of conceptual shift: we can concretely perceive mythical education and divine education. In the course of the thesis we unveil these two aspects of education, exposing their contradiction. We worked directly with the two main Benjaminian influences: historical-materialism and anarchism, influences that supported the points raised for this critique of education. To do so, we tread the dialectical path through various elements in a writing linked with contemporary facts that dialogue with the authors and with the discoveries that this dialogue provided, taking us beyond the appearance of education. We then demonstrate that education is constituted by the violence that is shown in this contradiction, in which we unveil this duplicity: the first one that turns to the market, to bureaucratic processes, to the maintenance of the State and the law, which is the mythical education; and the second, which is shown in the fissures, debris and deviations, in a happening made present in the now-time that is not controlled, but whose existence we can evaluate by its results and its break with oppression: divine education. Finally, this enables another role for the educator, it enables another understanding of what education is, of its emergence as mythical education or divine education, and which also involves understanding violence. From these premises launched so that education is not a project limited to the conditions of capital, we need to know what kind of education we are promoting. The thesis, in this sense, helps us to perceive if we are reinforcing the mythical education, in the bases explained here, that uses the violence of the capital as a form of maintenance and establishment of the cycle of domination and oppression; or, if we are constantly attentive to every revolutionary instant that divine education can compose to resist and revolutionize society from its first structure.