I. Siede, 2007
Paidos, Buenos Aires
$13.14 (pbk), 250 pp.
ISBN 978‐950‐12‐6153‐0
In this work political education is the topic which connects the role of the school and the task of the teacher with citizenship, social mores and moral autonomy in Argentina. The collection comprises 10 essays in which, together with the clear intention of opening up routes to educational action, the author offers critical analyses that, without deviating from rigorous logic, are linked to metaphors that make them easier to read. The challenge that serves as the guiding thread of the essays can be formulated as: How, and for what purpose, ought the school to focus on the political education of children and young people in ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman)? This question is based on the suppositions that the state has stopped being the support for social identity and that the homogenisation which has taken place has lost its point and utility. The general conclusion, to which the work points, is that the school can contribute to the construction by children and young people—with autonomy—of criteria which enable their social conduct to be characterised by inclusion, solidarity and respect for differences. In order to facilitate this, the school functions as a public forum in which public issues are identified and debated.
Throughout the work the author proposes criteria for establishing norms that should be used by the school that aspires to work on political education. These criteria, although having a pedagogic prescriptive tone, are central to the authoritative analyses in which the author displays an informed understanding of political philosophy and ethics, as well as the history of his country: Argentina.
In the first essay Siede analyses pedagogical discourses about the relationship of school and society in order to convince the reader to avoid both the pessimistic criticism which paralyses and the ingenuous optimism which disregards the reproductive character of formal education. In the second essay, festivals and wars are used as rhetorical symbols of institutions which give cohesion to societies and can be used to build bases of political loyalty. The author opts for the activation of festivals and the de‐activation of wars as means of political education.
The following four essays refer to the history of Argentina. In the first, Siede uses the metaphor of the desert to refer to that which isolates and impedes the construction of the public sphere and organised action. A review of the history of the country reveals ‘sedimentary beliefs’ (Foucault), which impede crossing the desert, as well as current language usages, which exclude. The topic of values that sustain citizenship in a plural society, such as that of Argentina, gives form to another essay, which, in turn, sets up the two that follow. In one of those, ‘bodyprints’ and ‘memory’ are the metaphors that allude to the painful processes of the history of the country and the impossibility of forgetting and, at the same time, ask for explanations from the agents of schooling. In the next essay, the metaphor of Leviathan is revived to discuss nationalism and cosmopolitanism in relation to patriotism and human rights.
The last four chapters focus on schooling models and programs. In the first, arguments are given for sustaining the problematisation that follows conceptualisation as a didactic strategy. The second chapter criticises authoritarian schooling and proposes schooling with justice that contributes to living together in dignity and education in and for democracy. In the third chapter school rituals are examined, and the last essay reviews the political meaning of teaching practice, comparing the figure of the teacher with those of Superman, Frankenstein, Sandokan, Peter Pan and the genie in the bottle, and concluding that teaching process must be motivated by desire and commitment.
Although the work concentrates on education in Argentina, the arguments go beyond it, as their validity does not depend on the particular history of that country, but on the conclusions derived from the analyses made. The author is not complacent in regard to Argentina’s history and is cautious with the use of concepts. For those reasons, the arguments are convincing and the proposals are reasonable.
Siede’s recommendation is to educate students in the exercise of power and the construction of the common good and to teach them to see the present in the context of history. The value of his work resides, on the one hand, in directly confronting a complex and difficult reality and, on the other, in building bridges between apparently extreme positions. Thus, aware that power is currently exercised by dissolving collective meanings, the author continues to view politics as the convergence of convictions and as the place where self‐care becomes a collective project. Also, without abandoning the focus on the individual and on differences, the author endorses the communal dimension of politics. Finally, while recognising the universal nature of individual rights, the author advocates giving renewed attention to social inequality and diversity.
Whilst in this work one does not find all the answers to the way in which the moral fibre of a society is woven, nor the role of citizenship and self‐care in formal political education, the merit of the author is to demonstrate that there is much more theoretical work to undertake and that schools have been ineffective in connecting those dimensions in practice. However, reading the work also convinces us that not advancing on the path of political education as outlined here is, from the beginning, to condemn future generations to live as barbarians.
© 2009, Teresa Yurén