Published by Homo Sapiens, the work “Pedagogy of Intentionality, Education for an Active Consciousness” will be distributed in bookshops in Argentina and Latin America. On a visit to Argentina from Chile, the authors, Rebeca Bize and Mario Aguilar, presented the book in the Jorge Luis Borges conference room in the National Library on Monday 4, July, before an audience of students, teachers, civil servants and social referents interested in the foundations of this pedagogy.
The head of the Education Sciences course in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in UBA, Daniel Suarez, emphasised that it is a “critical pedagogical essay in the wide sense. It opens doors so that different pedagogical traditions can come together and converse. It resumes discussions, and opens an unimaginable horizon of thought”. The academic showed his interest in the concept of human beings detailed in the book.
Likewise, Suarez gave the authors some challenges: explain in depth what is understood by education as a social duty and develop the “good humour” proposal in the areas of teaching presented by the authors, as one of the “five keys” of education. “These five keys of education seem to be the most suggestive and strongest of the work”. He qualified the idea of Internal Landscape as “very interesting”, given that it highlights people’s subjectivity.
As Rebeca Bize – a university teacher who focuses her educational work on developing new paradigms based on the concepts contributed by Silo – said “the book lets us look at current schools from the future, Human beings have always been pushing to discover a new reality, because daily reality doesn’t provide the desired fulfilment. There is a driving thread, which is intuition, in this search.”
“Here the inspired teachers find a proposal with a foundation. Today in the education crisis, there is lack of meaning, violence, externality and disconnection between human beings. Fortunately we are now finding light in the new generations”, analysed Bize.
Mario Aguilar – a member of the National Directive of the School of Teachers of Chile, an organisation that includes over 70 thousand teachers – stressed that “there is a lack of conformity in education, a change is needed. Those who work in this field know that things haven’t been working for some time, there is an extreme commodification”. There were demonstrations with almost 200 thousand people, mostly students, in Chile, calling for better conditions to study.
Aguilar stated that the Pedagogy of Intentionality takes contributions from Brentano, Husserl and Scheller in their meaning of intentionality and phenomenology; from Ortega as regards the social process and the topic of generations; experimental psychology from Wundt; the being in the world of Heidegger and Sartre; and fundamental proposals of Universal Humanism from Silo, among other theoretic and conceptual contributions.
María Eugenia Pirolo reported on the Current of Universalist and Humanist Pedagogy (CoPeHU), an initiative implemented by a team of young professionals from the fields of Education, Philosophy and History, working in various institutes and universities in Argentina and Chile. This Pedagogical Current forms part of the World Centre of Humanist Studies. The Current of Universalist and Humanist Pedagogy takes Pedagogy of Intentionality, Educating for an Active Consciousness as one of its fundamental documents, putting it into practice in educational projects.
To close the speeches, Andrea Novotny gave an account of her experience in the Espacio Educativo Saeta, which tries to put the basics of the new pedagogy developed by Aguilar and Bize into practice. “We work creating a learning environment based on good treatment, emotional openness, a predisposition from the teacher to connect with the students, so that they find a reason to learn”. Similarly, she said that from Saeta, they aspire to the creation of a Humanist School as a solid project for the future.
*Translated from Spanish by Kirsty Cumming*
