Editorial Why educate?

Abstract

"Instead of making explicit the asymmetries, the violence, the coercions and the domination that shape relations in work and school, a paradise of supposedly non-directive education is simulated, because students evaluate and criticize the procedures permanently, without being able to decide nothing about the meaning and purpose of the educational device itself "(Zamora, 2017, 30). This affirmation subjects our educational discourse, supposedly autonomous and unrelated to socio-political conditions, to debate. And not only our discourse is put in question, but the very institution of the school. There is a disturbing question that must be answered from the honesty of those who seek to form responsible citizens, that is, people who assume ethics as a rule of life. Who benefits or interests our discourse and our educational practice? It is evident that both in the discourse and in the educational praxis there has been a lack of critical analysis of what we are doing. We have taken our practices for good and we have assumed a pedagogical discourse that is supposedly democratizing of civic life. We have moved between the contradiction of helping the formation of autonomous and free people, on the one hand, and the submissive adaptation to the existing order, on the other.