Fear of the new doesn't seem to match education and philosophy. According to Hannah Arendt, who wrote about the crisis in education in the book Between the past and the future (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2001), “the essence of education is birth", which is why what gives meaning to the educational enterprise is "the fact that beings are born for the world". Disassociated from the new, education and philosophy seem to lack a reason. Therefore, those who are afraid of the new are not the most suitable for dealing with things of education, much less with those of philosophy.
The reason is simple: all possible philosophical educability is linked to the beginnings that the new presents to educational institutions, educators and the students themselves. And this is not new. Since Antiquity, man has shown understandings in this perspective. For Arendt, “The role played by education in all political utopias, from ancient times onwards, shows how natural it feels to start a new world with those who are new by birth and by nature."
Sometimes, however, the perspective of the new and the metaphor of beginnings in education are relegated to something small in our education system, affecting philosophy. Other times they are completely forgotten, even prevented from entering our institutions educational, of all levels, or rejected from those spaces legitimated to the practices of teaching and learn. In fact, it is philosophy that abundantly illustrates this occurrence. Historically, in Brazil, philosophy has always struggled to establish itself in school curricula as knowledge that is ready to play an educational and formative role. Maybe it's because philosophy, perhaps more strongly than other school knowledge, clings to beginnings and invests in the new as its conditions of possibility. When philosophy is not discarded and disowned, then it is treated as a ready-made knowledge, crystallized in what is called the history of philosophy.
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Nietzsche, in Schopenhauer educator (São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1983) was severe in his criticism of those who cling to the “already done" in the philosophical field as if this could be all possible philosophy, and not as part of the enterprise philosophical-educational. Nietzsche said: "the scholarly history of the past was never the occupation of a true philosopher, neither in India nor in Greece." It is that if the professor who is concerned with teaching philosophy and philosophizing clings to the "scholarly history of the past", with the "predetermined", at the most, this professional will be able to act as a "rethinker and post-thinker, and above all a scholarly connoisseur of all thinkers previous; of which he will always be able to tell something to his students." Nietzschean, will not go beyond a “competent philologist, antiquarian, connoisseur of languages, historian – but he is never a philosopher". The beginnings brought by the new seem to be specific to the philosopher and the philosophizing they educate.
It is in this measure that the new, education and philosophy meet. If tradition and history already bequeath us immeasurable wealth, the new and the beginnings placed in education also extend to philosophy, this formative knowledge par excellence. There, educability is linked to novelty, to what we can creatively and creatively build in the field of education. Let us remember that our goal, even though there is a history made, is still the man and woman who will come.
Per Wilson Correia*
Columnist Brazil School
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*Wilson Correia is a philosopher, PhD in Education from UNICAMP, professor at the Federal University of Tocantins, Campo Universitário de Arraias, and author of the book Saber Ensinar (São Paulo: EPU, 2006). E-mail address: [email protected].
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Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
RODRIGUES, Lana Julia. "The new, education and philosophy"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/educacao/o-novo-educacao-filosofia.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
