Facing the challenge of guaranteeing the right to education in increasingly unequal societies should be the main focus of the education system in the new school year that is beginning, assured the sociologist and researcher Emilio Tenti Fanfani, who considered “urgent” to create the necessary alliances “to improve public education for the great majority.”
Professor and researcher at the National Pedagogical University (Unipe) and holder of Sociology of Education at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the UBA, Tenti Fanfani stressed in an interview with Télam that for learning to take place it is necessary to put all the necessary resources to ” guarantee the basic social needs of children and their families”.
-Télam: He maintains that there is, in the world, a growing inequality and social exclusion. What is the role of education in this context?
-Emilio Tenti Fanfani: I believe that the school institution has a specific responsibility in the development -hopefully egalitarian- of certain powerful knowledge among the new generations, understanding that currently complex knowledge is capital, a wealth that contributes to determining the position that boys and girls will occupy in the society of the future. The school is the only institution that can develop this precious capital in the new generations in a more or less equal way, that is its specific task.
T: Within this framework, does the school have the necessary capacity to promote the social advancement of those who attend it?
– ETF: The school contributes to social advancement as long as other conditions are met, that is, it cannot do it alone. Without school, powerful knowledge cannot be developed in children, but school requires that other social conditions be in place for the school to be effective. For there to be learning, it is necessary that children and their families have resolved food, affective support, health, a healthy environment, decent housing. Knowledge does not have the capacity to determine ascending social trajectories, it is also necessary for children to develop social capital and for the labor market to have the capacity to absorb.
T: The school, especially the public one, is one of the most strongly questioned institutions and, on the eve of a new school year, the debates around it intensify even more. What conclusion do you draw from the current conversation about the education system?
ETF: What really worries me today is knowing who is really interested in equality in this society, what collective actor is interested in improving public education, which is mostly attended by the middle and lower sectors. Is education interested in the upper classes who are the decision makers in society? It is not enough with teachers and their unions, with the popular sectors, students and progressive intellectuals to gather the necessary force to determine policies or budget allocations. This question cannot be postponed in the field of politics when deciding what types of alliances must be established in Argentina to improve public education where the great majority go.
T: What is the main demand for the educational system after two school cycles in a pandemic?
ETF: We must ask the school for those things that only the school can do, that is to guarantee the appropriation of powerful knowledge. There are a lot of institutions that can develop values, attitudes or social relations as the school does, but not the powerful content. That is why we must ask the school to guarantee those things that are essential for the happiness of the children and their future careers, and that only the school can do. The educational system and the children can hide that they have developed and acquired knowledge, we can make the children advance in the school system without having effectively developed knowledge. That is why it is important for the family to be aware of this and demand that they learn this fundamental knowledge.
T: Do you think that distance education revalued the role of each of the actors in the educational community?
ETFs: Totally. Knowledge is not something that is “distributed”, as is often thought, but is the result of a co-production team involving teachers, families and children. In learning, what the teacher puts in is just as important as what the apprentices and their families put in.
The demand of families has to go through raising the quality of the demand for education, concentrating it on the issue of knowledge. That parents worry about children learning to read and write, to calculate, to speak another language, that they accompany them in the learning process, this should be the fundamental objective.
T: You point out that there is an increasingly noticeable intergenerational distance, how does this impact education?
ETF: There has always been a difference between the young and “the old,” but today the generation gap has increased. Those of us who were children 50 years ago, our cultural consumption was closer than that of our parents. The boys now have preferences and tastes of which the parents have no idea.
In fact, 50 years ago adolescence did not exist as a social category, it is a relatively recent social category. That’s why we have more challenges in middle school than in elementary school. Sometimes the old generations don’t know what to do with the new generations. As the school is a meeting between generations, this distance sometimes hinders the communication and dialogue necessary for collaboration between them.
T: And how could this generation gap be reduced in the school environment?
ETF: This intergenerational distance can be narrowed by introducing into teacher training the knowledge of the new generations not only from the traditional point of view of psychology but also from the social position and subjectivity. The teacher must be an expert in children and adolescents, must know their cultural consumption, their passions, feelings and emotions, their fantasies, projects, problems and interests. This knowledge will be useful both to build his authority and to decide what is the most appropriate pedagogical strategy to guarantee the effectiveness of his work as a teacher.
