Where does violence in schools start? Educators and legal authorities are asking themselves about the origins of the violence in order to find ways to end or at least mitigate it. It might make sense to also reflect on your own school experience. I invite you to remember. Traditional classrooms prohibit curiosity and expression while encouraging competition among students. To stand out, you have to push forward a reaction dictated by the teacher as quickly as possible and silence the others. Encouraging competition in this way creates an aggressive culture in which many lose so one can win. Sometimes you decide not to stand out, not to speak, in order to maintain friendships. The catastrophic consequences of this choreography, which include loneliness, depression and violence, should not surprise us, although we appear to have failed to recognize the causal connection between official repression and youth disobedience. Rebellion triggers more repression, and in the spiral between authoritarianism and resistance, the original sin does not lie with the students.
It is necessary to change the choreography of the classroom, all classrooms, subject, etc. Rounding the square room into circles and work tables is a cost-effective change and a great socio-emotional, civic and cognitive achievement. It is difficult to establish peace and coexistence with academic content; They tend to be boring because they are predictable and familiar. On the contrary, it is achieved through different forms of cooperation that allow people to interact with each other in different ways and to be citizens who admire other citizens. Living in a circle means recognizing everyone face to face and recognizing yourself as a member of the group. It does little to address the issues of justice and respect through conferences where the issues remain slogans and do not have much influence on behavior. The thing is, behavior changes based on new behaviors, perspectives, and new voices by focusing attention on all people in the classroom, recognizing the opportunity to build authority among everyone.
How to cultivate the joy that comes from learning the lesson, and not just heal the pain the student feels from not learning it? The challenge of moving from the cognitive to the emotional appears difficult when met institutionally. Generating satisfaction and even joy through curriculum texts may not seem feasible, and I fear that this challenge is not one of the primary goals of education authorities. The focus of most cutting-edge educators today is more on improving mental health to improve academic outcomes. And although there are no improvements in national testing, socio-emotional education prevails, apparently for reasons of restorative justice and coexistence.
However, so far the bet has not yielded satisfactory results. Violence continues to increase and reading comprehension is declining. Families, local authorities and the World Bank, which wants to promote effective practices to justify its support for ministries and education ministers, are disappointed. We would certainly rather see improvements than over 80% of children not understanding simple texts. Despite statistics showing an increase in literacy rates, reading comprehension statistics show declines. The digital activities that young people engage in on high-speed communication networks endanger education, even though they appear to be practicing reading and writing. Reading and writing take time because they go beyond simply obtaining information and involve interpretation and critical thinking. Intelligence literally means “reading between the lines”. Today, more people can read and fewer people understand what they read.
The spirit of leisure (“school” in ancient Greek), which reduces the unnecessary conflict between play and work, is regularly revived in alternative education, for example by Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Rabindranath Tagore, Paulo Freire and others. Today it is renewed in a simple variant that is easy to replicate and scale. It’s called Pre-Texts and it’s a methodology that can be learned in just 15 hours of training. Its playful, almost mischievous name is an allusion to the process that seduces even people who are reluctant to read, because the texts serve as raw material, an excuse to create something of their own, original. The fuel to understand a challenging text and make it your own is emotions, sometimes even rebellion. And the result, a win-win situation, strengthens both mental health and school development. Pre-Textos collects good everyday practices and honors them as vehicles of the most progressive pedagogical avant-garde. It offers a rigorous and friendly, effective and affordable education.
Someone reads a text while we draw a cover for a personal edition. The scene combines two popular Latin American practices. One of these is that of the “reader” in the tobacco factories, who reads out literary, historical and philosophical texts selected by the workers. The other “cardboard” practice is that of recyclers who make good, pretty, cheap books from used cardboard. We start this way because we facilitators assume that most students don’t like reading. That’s why we don’t give readings or give sermons about them. At the beginning we cordially invite everyone who would like to read aloud. After the reading is over, each person asks a question about the text, also out loud. In pre-textos, no one asks people questions because they are not the subject of the examination. They are researchers who question a text.
After the main concern of creating art with a text, another iconoclastic step follows. It’s about “beating around the bush,” giving vent to curiosity, reading for pleasure, looking for texts that relate to what we read in class, and “publishing” the findings on the clothesline “. Unlike teachers who insist that we don’t beat around the bush—that we don’t daydream, wander, or ask irrelevant questions—in Pre-Textos we exploit concerns to encourage more reading. Bringing a “branch” and displaying it for everyone to see requires that you have read the post, researched it, tested it, and thought about how to defend the post in relation to the source text. In this way, intellectual curiosity and appreciation for other people’s contributions develops. They seem interesting because of their different interests and viewpoints. Diversity enriches knowledge and deepens interpretation.
If we were to adopt a text on restorative school justice as a starting point for collaborative research and speculation, what practical suggestions would we come up with to address the current twin crises of justice and education? Thanks to the teamwork of their classmates, students, together with their mentors, ensure peace as a necessary condition for the development of their creative and exciting works based on challenging texts.
Doris Sommer She is a professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University and the founder of Pre-Textos and the NGO Cultural Agents. Part of this text was published in the Bogotá magazine Escuela y Pedagogía