Fabiola Xavier Leal

CONCERNS FOR EDUCATION AND SOCIAL WORK

Fabiola Xavier Leal

Introduction

This text presents a brief summary of various reflections generated at the Transforming vulnerability trajectories workshop and the possibilities of articulation with the Brazilian Social Work and its daily needs. First, some indispensable concepts for the debates on education are addressed, followed by the articulation established between the Social Work profession and issues arising from the education field.

It should be recalled that this event was proposed by the a network of researchers of Brazil and the United Kingdom, concerned with the social, economic and political context of deepening social and educational inequalities and its consequences, especially for children and young people. The reflections accumulated by this group of researchers are driven in a critical perspective, seeking not only to know and analyse the education experiences in the two countries, but, above all, to deepen the conceptions and methodologies aimed at mitigating or eliminating some of the risks affecting this population, primarily in the Brazilian context. The proposal is to train generations of master and doctoral holders who do not disconnect their theoretical productions from practical actions. The workshop was programmed to discuss varied situations that expose

low income young people to exclusion, deprivation and illiteracy as the debate of these circumstances and knowledge of experiences considered innovative are crucial to confront structural issues. The 3 days of work enabled the participants to point to essential elements for those studying, researching and acting in the educational field. That field is defined beyond the formal and traditional spaces of education policy at all its levels.

Accordingly, the Brazilian Social Work is ethically responsible for contributing to the intensification of the conception of education, as we have the theoretical, operational, ethical, political and legal competence to contribute with the materialisation of education as a fundamental social right in the construction of an emancipated society.

The characteristics of Brazilian social training, of profound structural inequalities, poverty, unemployment, lack of social protection, housing problems, racism, land ownership concentration, genocide of indigenous populations, among others, are expressed in the education dilemmas experienced in the daily life of the population. In this context, the struggle for state education remains at stake and requires us to understand the historical process of Brazilian education from a counter-hegemonic perspective of the social reality. Where any attempts to resolve these all these problems, for Florestan Fernandes (1989, p. 129), “are inevitably hindered by the low education level of the masses and awareness level of the working class”.

Back in the 1980s, Fernandes stated that

[...] education is the most serious Brazilian social dilemma. Lack of education is just as harmful as hunger and poverty, or even more so, as it deprives the hungry and poor of the means enabling their awareness of their condition, of the means to learn to fight against this situation. Therefore, it could represent a factor of diffusion of ignorance and cultural backwardness. These mechanisms and an unfair and meaningless school system lead to the reproduction of the system of inequality, to the concentration of wealth, power and domination [...] (FERNANDES, 1989, p. 126-127).

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In the pandemic context, 5.5 million Brazilian students aged 6 to 17 years old left school in 2020, according to data of the document Scenario of School Exclusion in Brazil – a Warning on the Impacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Education. In 2019, 1.1 million children and adolescents aged 4 to 17 years old had no access to education (2.7% of this population), a figure that had been falling since 2016. The scenario has become even more chaotic due to the suspension of face-to-face classes and difficulty in accessing the internet and technology. Added to this number are 3.7 million children and adolescents of the same age cohort who were enrolled, but did not have access to any school activity, whether printed or digital, and were unable to uphold learning at home. The document also stresses that this school exclusion has class and colour. The situation of low income, black, mixed and indigenous children and adolescents, in Brazil, is not a coincidence (UNICEF, 2021), but the result of a historical process of class inequality.

The living conditions in 2020 show that the rate of extreme poverty stood at 12.5% and the poverty rate covered 33.7% of the population. The total number of poor people reached 209 million, being 22 million more than in the previous year. Of this total, 78 million people were in a situation of extreme poverty, 8 million more than in 2019. Approximately 59 million people, who in 2019 belonged to the middle strata, entered into a process of downward economic mobility. These data also confirm the gaps between population groups, with poverty being higher in the rural areas, among children and adolescents, indigenous people and Afro-descendants, and in the population with lower education levels (CEPAL, 2020). In contrast, the small number of billionaires increased during the pandemic from 33 to 238, demonstrating that the State governs for the wealthy, that science and education are not priorities, being systematically disregarded (FRIGOTTO, 2020).

In addition to these circumstances, is the presence of social forces of the far right underpinned by fundamentalism, that consider the elimination of opponents, and a religious conception that subordinates science to belief. Counter-reform measures are being

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strengthened and progressively implemented, undermining social welfare and other conquered rights. These forces exalt the arming of the population and the control of freedom to teach and educate, by the proposed Non-Partisan School Project.

The context, therefore, is challenging and requires a critical analytical perspective based on class struggle. Intellectuals or political militants who do not think and act along the lines of the class struggle will not be successful in the education and organisation of the working class, or consequent pointing to ways out through transforming education.

Education and some of its dilemmas and challenges

“Education as a means towards collective self-emancipation of the oppressed and conquest of power by the workers”. Florestan Fernandes, 1989, p.10.

In Brazil, state education reveals the echoes of societal disputes. As argued by Mészáros (2005), when addressing its meaning in the metabolic system of capital, education under capital is converted into force in benefit of our actual dehumanisation. The historical pathway of Brazilian education imprints an education policy in terms of a social and human right that has not yet been universalised, and its subordination to the general form of goods, extended widely through social life. In state education institutional spheres, we find antagonistic perspectives and structures, both in the form of thinking and conducting pedagogical practices, and in the form of recognising social subjects and envisaging he place and meaning of education in the production of our humanisation (ALMEIDA; PEREIRA, 2020).

In the current stage of capitalism characterised by an intense application of capital to work, the education offer is based on three needs of capital: a) the subordination of science to market laws, accelerating the production of new knowledge to ensure competition between companies, imposing technological innovation, encouraging

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competitiveness, pragmatic entrepreneurship and productivity; and b) the opening of new fields of profit-making, where education is not a profitable business for the international and local segments of the new bourgeoisie of education services; c) the construction of strategies envisaging consensus around the bourgeois project of sociability (LIMA, 2020). Thus, all processes involving education, whether in the institutional field of conduct and implementation, in legal rulings or in funding, should not be disconnected from the more general dynamics of the hegemony of financial capital and State counter-reform (ALMEIDA; RODRIGUES, 2020). In his analysis, Seki (2020) argues that capital requires human qualification based on the needs of capitalist production and reproduction of our present time. Capital seeks capillarity of intervention in the formation of culture in all aspects, whether in private or public education institutions, in school management, in books and educational and teaching materials, in forms of assessment, in the training of teachers, in computer systems, in learning platforms etc. These topics are all interlinked and interwoven in what is embodied as the phenomenon of the financialization of education. “Capital itself takes up the role of being the educator, forging the hearts and minds of a future that does not fit beyond the very strict limits of capitalist societies” (SEKI, 2020, p. 41).

And in this field of reflections, the workshop took on, and has obviously not exhausted, the task of elucidating these aspects as the backdrop against which to discuss educational practices to counter hegemony in the different realities. The researchers discussed the European and Latin American perspectives, and based on the presented experiences, understood that thinking about education along the lines of Paulo Freire, for example, means sustaining articulation with the struggle of the oppressed, of those coming from beneath, of the different working class segments, who are excluded on a daily basis from the appropriation of socially produced wealth and the conquered rights. It should be highlighted that the event took place during the centenary year of Paulo Freire – patron of Brazilian education – keeping him present through his works and legacy in all reflections, as well as various Marxist critical authors.

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The experiences presented by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) of the municipality of Jaguaré (north of the state of Espírito Santo), by the Social Projects of Morro do Quadro and Piedade (districts of the municipality of Vitória-ES), by the indigenous organisation of the Kambeba do Alto Solimões (Amazônia), by the practices involving the racial ethnic issue in education spheres, among many others reported, indicated that hope is necessary in barbaric times, following Paulo Freire. The reports and discussions inspired and moved us to carry on.

Social Work and Education

The reflections presented point to the importance of addressing the Brazilian Social Work in the field of Education. Almeida e Pereira (2020) suggest that this is a necessary and required political and academic tasks due to involving a field of State intervention and a socio-occupational sphere for social workers.

At the Social Work and Education axis is another crucial aspect which is articulation between vocational training and professional exercise based on an inseparable link between the scientific interpretation of reality and militant action. The Brazilian Social Work is tasked with reaffirming on a daily basis that Education is not merely relegated to formal education spheres, but rather that professional intervention spaces should be powerful and revolutionary as they are organically tied to the needs and struggles of the working class (FRIGOTTO, 2020).

The professional project of Brazilian social workers is directed at the collective defence of an emancipatory education. And, accordingly, the workshop aimed to dialogue with the social workers of the United Kingdom, presenting the need to unveil the political and economic processes of the capitalist State, of companies and the different institutions comprising civil society. It is important to stress that theoretical mediations with the field of education have taken root over the history of the profession. In 2013, the Federal Council and the Regional Councils of Social Work published the

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document Subsidies for the Action of Social Workers in Education Policy, aimed at contributing to the professional action in this policy being coherent while at the same time strengthening the professional ethical-political project. This project defends education as a right that is public, secular, free of charge, face-to-face, of quality and socially benchmarked, thus boosting humanising forms of sociability (CFESS, 2013). The document begins by presenting a conception of education, and in that perspective, the workshop participants mentioned herein directed their reflections in a dialogical way with other perspectives that were presented.

Education is a complex component of social life, with an important social function in the dynamics of social reproduction, i.e., in the forms of reproduction of the social being, in a society organised around a basic contradiction between those who produce social wealth and those who exploit its producers and expropriate their production. This complex predominantly takes the nature of ensuring the reproduction of social contexts, ways of apprehending reality, sets of technical skills, forms of production and socialisation of scientific knowledge that continuously and extensively restore the inequalities between classes and the necessary conditions for relentless accumulation. Together with other aspects of social life, this includes the set of social practices required for perpetuating ways of being, forms of sociability that characterise a particular society. Its social function, therefore, is marked by contradictions, projects and societal struggles, which are not restricted to educational institutions, but these clearly represent a privileged space for objectification (CFESS, 2013, p. 16).

Thus, understanding the educational reality in Brazil and in the worldwide context based on this notion of education enables grasping the reach of education strategies applied under the hegemony of financial capital. In other words, it enables grasping the limits of those strategies, especially those considered formal, and

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thus redirecting policy on professional action. That, as stated in the document, is a challenge which the profession has the theoretical and policy underpinnings to overcome. And thus, understand that Education Policy is a social right that should be universalised as one of the moments of the processes of social mobilisation and struggle. However, it is but a means and not an end in itself to achieve a new social order (CFESS, 2013).

The conception of emancipation substantiating the conception of education indicated and advocated in the debates of the event mentioned herein, depends above all on the guaranteed respect for human diversity, the unconditional affirmation of human rights, the respect for free sexual orientation and expression, free gender identity, without which it is impossible to envisage a non-sexist, non-racist, non-homophobic/lesbophobic/transphobic education (CFESS, 2013).

Social workers must recreate their work, considering their contribution to the reproduction of the material life of the subjects, by providing quality social services, to the educational aspect tied to the culture of the working classes. Whether via ways of perceiving, living or feeling life, the collective aspect of social struggles must be strengthened (IAMAMOTO, 2019). The tasks ahead are challenging, calling us to stimulate reflection and dialogue with those with whom we act on a daily basis. And thus, understand education and the processes derived thereof as a political act. And a political act is also educational (SANTOS, 2020). In that regard, we revisit Gramsci (1987) who said that,

By our actual conception of the world, we will always belong to a specific group, precisely that of all the social beings who share the same way of thinking and acting. We conform to some conformism, as we are always mass-humans or collective humans. The problem is as follows: what historical category of conformism and mass-human are we part of? (GRAMSCI, 1987, p. 12).

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And with that question, we continue to challenge, to ask new questions and propose alternatives for our interventions. Thus we reiterate that the critical conception of education and different spheres of action among social segments is embodied as a scenario able to foster a revolutionary practice.

Closing comments

This event, held at the end of the second year of the covid-19 pandemic, first and foremost brought us the challenge of holding it in those circumstances. New reflexive elements were incorporated as we progressed in an attempt to understand the economic and health crises in which we are plunged. However, before the event was held in November 2021, it is important to note that this was only possible due to the existence of a group of powerful and qualified researchers in the two countries involved, who idealised an exchange of their reflections and experiences. Addressing a topic such as Education was and continues to be challenge heavy with possibilities.

At the end of this brief reflexive summary, it is important to reaffirm the principles that move us, that make us believe in practices able to transform reality, even if initially they are one-off and focused. And acknowledge that the action of different professionals acting in Education Policy and in spheres of other education interventions is taking place in a battlefield of social classes that requires increased types of interventions and strategies. It is clearly required that we look at the educational dimension of our professions as consisting of wider social processes.

We finalised the workshop without finalising the discussions. We left quite exhausted with reflections and with the task of proposing new spaces for exchange of ideas. The question that moves us, still remains: How to theorise education in a broad sense as a human and universal right, able to construct a fair and egalitarian society?

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References

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