The Struggle for the Right
What is at stake again is the predominance of the reasons for the crisis in which Dilma Rousseff's government became entangled, and the alternatives for getting out of it, now being advocated by the conservative media and, above all, by the rising nationalist populism of the Brazilian right.
Written in collaboration with Vinícius Madureira Maia, who works in the Legal Department of UECE.
"I will dare
Disturb the universe?"
(TS Elliot)
It is necessary to provide context to the controversial editorial in O Globo, dated July 24, 2016, which proclaims the end of free public education in Brazil, considered “unfair” [1] as far as its title is concerned.
“(...) To combat an unprecedented crisis, ideas never before applied are needed. In this sense, why not take the opportunity to end free higher education, which is also a mechanism of social injustice? Those who can afford it will pay, those who cannot will receive scholarships. This works, and works well, in private education. And in advanced countries, with many more centers of university excellence than Brazil. (...)” [2]
How is this news related to Bill No. 193/2016, which defines the "School Without Political Parties"? In short, this bill aims to prohibit teachers from engaging in political party propaganda in the classroom and inciting their students to participate in demonstrations, public acts, and marches (Article 5, item III)?
In mid-2010, when the English government promoted a massive cut in the higher education budget, the then Minister for Universities and Sciences, David Willetts (a politician and theorist of so-called “civic conservatism”), publicly defended, in addition to the suspension of scholarships granted to professors, the tripling of tuition fees for British students –– a supposedly “fairer” taxation system[3] ––, also insinuating that all undergraduate courses would soon be paid for, with the exception of predominantly STEM curricula (science, technology, engineering and mathematicsA few months later, Willetts himself presided over the publication of Lord Brownie's Reportwhich, among other measures, signaled cuts of up to 80% in the UK's education budget.
Last year, Japan’s own Minister of Education recommended to the 86 national universities the urgent adoption of measures to abolish academic curricula in social sciences and humanities in favor of areas of knowledge that address what would be the real needs of society [4].
According to Martin McQuillan, the underlying idea is that the State will no longer invest in these areas of knowledge, and individuals who wish to afford to study them will have to be content with paying for them; it is the very privatization of the Kantian "public use of reason," in an abstract degree ("The Privatization of the Humanities”) [5].
These episodes are circumscribed within the diffuse consequences triggered, at the beginning of the millennium, by the reform of higher education in the European Union based on the Bologna Process, whose motto lies in the pragmatization of the specificity of education, aimed at the increasingly broad production of socially useful knowledge for a rich range of... seekers (businesses, public sector, non-profit organizations) etc.), to the detriment of the classical education of citizens of yesteryear, today solvers Endowed with employability and international competitiveness, best suited to (and by) the dynamics of global economic capitalism.
It is not difficult to find today the Bolognese precepts and objectives also embedded among the statutory purposes of Brazilian universities, including UFC (art. 4°, paragraph “d”) and UECE (art. 29, item V), to mention here only the most important higher education institutions for the Ceará public.
Nearly a century in advance, and with the precocious experience and authority of someone who had also been a tenured university professor at the age of 24, a renowned European philosopher denounced the scandal of this "new" tectonic perspective:
"The entire German higher education system has lost its most important thing: the end, as well as means Towards the end. He forgot that education, formation It's the end. (...) –– What the “higher schools” in Germany actually achieve is brutal training, in order to, with the least possible loss of time, make useful, usable for the State a large number of young men. (...) –– No one is given, in Germany today, the opportunity to provide their children with a noble education: our “higher” schools are all geared towards the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching goals. And everywhere there is an indecent haste, as if something were lost if the 23-year-old was not yet “ready,” did not yet have an answer to the “big question”: what profession?”[6]
And further on, in another section of the same book, Nietzsche made the following observation: “What is the task of all higher education? –– To make man a machine.” [7].
At this point, it seems impossible to ignore the subtle message that state technocrats and bureaucrats in power barely disguise when making these decisions:Wouldn't these reforms be clear proof that those in power are well aware of the subversive potential of seemingly "useless" theoretical reasoning??”[8]. The question is by Slavoj Žižek [9].
Isn't it symbolic, then, that the "School Without Political Parties" program has chosen as its antipode the author of the classic "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (1974), precisely the one who most advocated education as a political act inseparable from the teaching process, rebelling against the so-called banking model of learning?
These days, alongside “Count Gramsci”, the educator Paulo Freire was curiously nicknamed Nosferatu by the coordinator of that same movement, the lawyer Miguel Nagib: both intellectuals would suck the independence of the student spirit dry with their teeth [10]. The invocation of the living dead is not done here in a vulgar or accidental way, he recalls Žižek: In current discourse, indefinite judgments are used precisely when efforts are being made to understand phenomena capable of undermining habitually established differences (of class, gender, race). etc.), such as those between the dead and the living [11].
The unusual aspect of this proposal is not exactly its much-touted "ideological neutrality," a sham whose position is far from being true. evokes the Weberian postulate of freedom from value judgments [Werturteilfreiheit] (or “axiological neutrality”) of historical-social knowledgeEven those least knowledgeable in socio-philosophical matters –– who recently mistook Engels for Hegel in an iconic mistake from birth [12] –– also acknowledge it [13].
Its problematic nature paradoxically lies in the very opening of the arena for ideological dispute, in which the social agents involved have always fought over the narrative that will prevail among the many ideological interpretations and to determine, finally, the general perception of a given historical moment or conflict –– for example, in Brazil in 1964, the military won the struggle for the explanation of the political-economic crisis of the Jango government and, even more, the way to “overcome” it: their plot was the plot of the imminent danger of the international communist conspiracy [14]. "Therein lies the truth of the paranoid stance: it is itself the destructive plot against which it is fighting..” [15]
What is at stake again is the predominance of the reasons for the crisis in which Dilma Rousseff's government became entangled, and the alternatives for getting out of it, now claimed by the conservative media and especially by the rising nationalist populism of the Brazilian right – a political phenomenon, as can be seen, not restricted to contemporary Western Europe alone. Ideological neutrality should be understood here bluntly as the annulment of the opposition, as the obscene instrumentalization of genuine political acts with a view to their subsequent delegitimization.
Therefore, it's not just about the blatant defense of issues such as torture, rape, homophobia, anti-immigration, and the privatization of public education and healthcare. etc–– all very much in vogue today around the world ––, but even their mere pseudo-innocent, “tolerant,” “non-pedantic” invocation as legitimate topics of debate, are in themselves defeats inflicted on the left and, ultimately, examples of the gradual emptying of the great axioms of modernity stemming from the French Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals more or less integrated into immediate domain of ethical substantiality [Ethical Lifeof global society.
It is from this clash that we finally receive the sober and fearless call of the Slovenian philosopher: “We cannot allow the right to define the terms of the struggle” [16]. Every specific struggle is part of a single ubiquitous struggle. If we falter here, if we make any concessions to it, we will be doomed to a resounding universal failure.
The "School Without Political Parties," far from being an attack on academic freedom, will be a clear victory for obscurantism, preventing us from knowing the full extent of humanity's adventures on Earth: with its victories and its tragedies. And here's an unfortunate observation: it cannot be said to be anti-human, since it originated from a human mind. But it proves that, after the Holocaust, humanity has shown itself capable of anything.
FOOTNOTES
[1] http://oglobo.globo.com/opiniao/crise-forca-fim-do-injusto-ensino-superior-gratuito-19768461.
[2] Id., ibid.
[3]http://www.bbc.com/portuguese/noticias/2010/11/101110_protestoestudantes_pai.shtml
[5] http://ranciere.blogspot.com.br/2010/10/privatization-of-humanities.html.
[6] NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006, pp. 58-59, italics in the original.
[7] Id, P. 80.
[8] Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the end times. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2012, p. 298.
[9] Incidentally, in his role as an "invader" in Slovenia in the documentary "Where to invade nextIn his film "In 2015," the ever-subversive director Michael Moore, before being received by the Rector of the University of Ljubljana and the President of Slovenia himself, in order to define the terms of his country's "surrender" and then "usurp" the idea of "free higher education for all," comically narrates that Žižek's home, alongside dozens of other states around the world—except for the USA and the UK, targets of his perpetual criticism—"is a fairytale land, home to the rarest mythical creature, the university student without any debt."
[10] http://www.revistaforum.com.br/semanal/o-escola-sem-partido-e-farsa-da-ideologia/
[11] Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the negativep. 113.
[12] http://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2016/03/11/politica/1457653658_976504.html
[13] http://politica.estadao.com.br/blogs/fausto-macedo/para-ministerio-publico-federal-projeto-escola-sem-partido-e-inconstitucional/
[14] Here we use an excerpt from the column “What is an authentic political event?” in https://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2014/02/17/zizek-o-que-e-um-autentico-evento-politico/
[15] Žižek, Slavoj. How to read Lacan. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2010, p. 31, italics ours.
[16] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/04/dear-britain-letters-from-europe-referendum
* This is an opinion article, the responsibility of the author, and does not reflect the opinion of Brasil 247.