We are witnessing the resounding neoliberal proclamation about existential poverty exhibited by the school. The institution has to generate discernible benefits to be blessed by the logic of the market. There is nothing to be surprised when our author evokes the image of a robot vacuum cleaner to illustrate the dominant tendency to arrange what education must achieve. The domestic appliance is autonomous, it optimizes without help its journey through the spaces that must be freed from dust and dirt. Similarly, education is devoted to the self-learning of students: the most efficient and personalized way to achieve the development of their talents and skills. Needless to say, the accessory of the figure of the teacher in this paradigm. It falls to them nothing more than the abstract task of bringing out such self-knowledge and self-development.
Contrary to such pretensions, Gert Biesta composes in Rediscovering teaching - with translation and preliminary presentation by Professor Bianca Thoilliez- an ode in defense of the essence of teaching and the figure of the teacher. The first chapter, What is the Educational Task?, begins by addressing the question of educational work. In his view, the ultimate meaning of education lies in the responsibility to interrupt the egologic of the student. To challenge him, to call him, to draw him towards an existence as a subject, but not as a subject identical with himself. On the contrary, as if it were an awakening from a state of drowsiness, the essential thing is to exist as a subject "outside oneself, that is, in a certain way "to stand out" ("ek-sist") from the world and be thrown into it" (Biesta, 2017, p. 6). During the second chapter Liberating Teaching from Learning, the author discusses the question of the relationship between teaching and learning. From a gnoseological perspective, he turns to the History of Philosophy to argue a critique, ultimately, against the dominant paradigm today: constructivism. Biesta problematizes the prominence of the self in terms of the act of understanding in constructivist logic. In his own words, "if this is the only way we conceive of our relationship with the world and our position in it, we will find ourselves significantly limiting our existential possibilities" (Biesta, 2017, p. 40). In the third chapter, The Rediscovery of the Teaching, takes as a starting point the reflection raised in the previous chapter, Is it plausible to consider that mere existence can be understood in terms of meaning, understanding and understanding? To argue his answer, he begins by analyzing the roots of the current critique of traditional education. It proposes to go beyond the surface, exposing the wear and tear of the figure of the teacher derived from such thinking, inviting us to reflect on the relationship between authority and obedience. The fourth chapter, Do not be fooled by ignorant teachers, continues to delve into this question through the analysis of the idea of the concepts of education, equality and emancipation in critical pedagogies, stopping in more detail in the thought of Paulo Freire and in the approach of Rancière (1991) as a counterpoint, analyzing the dominant interpretations of both and their current consequences. In the last chapter, Asking for the Impossible: Teaching as Dissent, he focuses on the meaning of the act of teaching. Faced with the conceptions that link teaching to a temporal logic (either in relation to the moment of development, or in terms of the acquisition of competences for the future), Biesta proposes teaching as dissent, understanding this not as conflict, but as a way of orienting the student towards the unforeseen, claiming the role of trust in educational relationships, in those situations in which it is not possible to foresee the way in which another human being will act.
In this book we find a philosophical disquisition on teaching. It does not seem possible to restrict the question of education, always returned, to an ultimate answer. It is perhaps the duty of education to keep the light of knowledge burning, to prevent the dust of oblivion from settling on the knowledge accumulated by human consciousness. This may be a first step to transmit to the new generations the love and responsibility for the world.
María Casas Bañares