In one of the last interventions with the faculty of the previous course, we talked about the nature of the school. We talk about the need to transversally work co-education and to make the school a safe space for all children, adolescents, young people and school workers. We were collecting ideas about how you could do all this that is easily said orally.
Countless ideas emerged about what functions the school should and should have. The borders, in a way, emerged clearly: schools, the integral development of people, parity, justice, well-being, the link with the community, coexistence, critical thinking ... After all, it had to promote healthy and stimulating lives. The contents began to be listed to work to promote healthy and powerless relationships among people: non-violent communication, privileges and dispowers of men, sexual diversity, decolonality or “multiculturality”, male violence, good treatment, class oppression...
Creole words began to appear every time, a professor who spoke worried. As a teacher, he was in charge of wet students with his political thought and vision. That is, the teacher was concerned with transmitting a certain ideology. Because the issue of neutrality is not the one we often find ourselves working on formal education. Many teachers understand neutrality as the basic ethical value of their pedagogical practice, as they establish safeguards for the critical development of the child, but separating it from ideological-political action.
Many teachers understand neutrality as the basic ethical value of their pedagogical practice, as they establish safeguards for the critical development of the child, but separating it from ideological-political action.
However, we suspect that there is hardly anyone who understands the school as an aseptic space without ideology. Otherwise, how can we understand the scarcity of social participation in the creation of educational policies from the administration? Or how to understand that the parents' declaration that their children do not attend a sexuality workshop is considered a social discussion, even an acceptable opposition? Or how to understand that a writing against those of us who teach co-education has been disseminated in the educational centers of Navarra and the CAV the contents we teach in our journey for equality and good treatment are false and “anti-scientific approaches”?
Schools, because they're political spaces. That is, symbolic spaces of struggle.
Then, Soledad Trujillo reminded us of what was mentioned in the hepatic conversation of Pedadogias queer (2019). He talks about the function of the school to reproduce the hegemonic positions that occur in society, adding that in the face of homogenization, the norm (and therefore marginalized) and the rare referentiality that emerges from hegemony, cuir pedagogies can be solutions. Because both he and us are clear that if we want to expel from schools the racist, classicist and cysheteropatrial hegemony of society, “it is also necessary to fight in the means of production for the symbolic order”.