translated from Spanish: The pandemic of education in the pandemic crisis

Nothing better than a pandemic to screw on the true depth of our ill education with performance, control and sanction. A new pandemic is attacking the education system – as always more than each other – within the crisis for the health pandemic that COVID-19 entails. As a true virus is being attacked by what they call virtual education, online education, cyber education, tele-education. 
The stubborn insistence of trying to move the educational process into the virtual space – just like – is becoming relevant in times of crisis like the one we are experiencing, because it is based on a limited conception of education that has been forged in our country for decades. This limited understanding of education is based on the model of standardization and accountability that governs us: thousands of children, young people and adults governed by an educational idea that forces us to certain types of school learnings and routines, necessary to demonstrate the fulfilment of certain goals driven by the ideal of economic growth.
Much on this issue has been discussed in recent years, but this seems to be nothing next to what comes today in times of crisis: of the social crisis that began five months ago and of the pandemic crisis that began just weeks ago. Educational and pedagogical neoliberalism seems to want to seize this crisis as an opportunity. And he’s doing it! Virtual education, networked, between nodes, between cameras and screens, seems to be here to stay: Business as usual. It’s the best times.
The new great idea of Sebastián Piñera’s Mineduc is tele-learning and tele-teaching.
This innovative way of tele-disciplinary, now via tele-work, lashes out as yet one more opportunity to continue colonizing the educational experience – with the masquerade of the noblest values – from the logics of online performance, the cyber-efficiency and the robotization of pedagogical work. Restricting the educational experience to completing guides, reading books, witnessing online classes, refers to the old pathological link between power and education that we thought learned, but which returns today in all its magnitude, disguised as good intentions Pandemic. 
In this logic of continuous monitoring of the educational experience, children and young people must be accountable to their families for the tasks carried out justifying their merits; families should justify their commitment to the educational process by holding the teachers entrusted to them; teachers, for their part, must be accountable for the work done to the management teams of educational establishments, thus justifying the payment of their salaries; and the management teams of educational establishments must be accountable to Mineduc de Piñera – or to the families themselves – of the measures taken, to justify the use of resources. All of the above in a vicious and uninterrupted circle of actions aimed at avoiding punishment, which end up placing learning in the last place of priorities.
The speech in which Mineduc has insisted these days on online education as a means to guarantee the right to education are just words of good intentions. Not only is it a questionable discourse in educational terms, but it also covers up the fact that in our country virtual education is not accessible to everyone. When we decide to do online activities a large group of students is excluded. Those who do not have the possibility to access a computer or a high quality internet connection; who – and especially women – must take care of others or perform household chores; and those in crisis situations should set aside studies to get the resources that allow them to pay for the basic expenses of life or those same studies.
The pandemic of neoliberal discourse in education fails to recognize that the situation we are experiencing is a great moment of learning. It is a unique event to learn about health and life, collaboration and mutual help. If it is to be assumed that education prepares us for life, for what comes, for the unexpected, it is not possible that when that happens, when it presents itself right in front of us, as it happens today, we stick to the idea that the most relevant thing is to continue “studying “, instead of living, feeling, dialogue, finding old and new senses for our lives.
It never hurts to remember what true education is, let’s put it this way: the philosopher Martin Buber warned that in a true educational relationship students do not do what they do simply for the duty to fulfill a task, as if they were repeating something automatically; but it’s not about – and that’s what we want to emphasize – an activity in which the teacher designs an outcome that he could know or predict in advance. A genuine educational relationship is never a relationship between things, between objects or between institutionalized roles. But rather, it is one in which the class develops, usually for students and teachers, as an unexpected, open, emerging relationship, with “multiple surprises”. This is also a sincere conversation or a true embrace and not of pure formality, it is a relationship in which “the essential does not happen in either the participants or in a neutral world”, it is always something that happens “between” the two , something unique.
What should we do most rightly to make this experience we are experiencing a new beginning to build a genuine education? The antidote to this neoliberal pandemic in education is precisely to recover the subversive sense that was born in Chile on October 18, to reorient our education towards a life that we think and do authentically in community.

Original source in Spanish

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