An essay on (dis)colonization in education. Fatalism and the other modernity

Abstract

Based on two teaching experiences, we focus on the investigation of the possible causes of a very recurrent attitude in undergraduate and graduate students at the university: fatalism (a category proposed by Ignacio Martín-Baró). This is understood as a vital attitude and subjective way of thinking and facing reality, based on indolence and the conviction of the impossibility of change and transformation of the prevailing status quo. We argue that fatalism is, in our days, a mark of subalternity and otherness, defining the condition of the subject colonized by capitalism in its neoliberal fold, thought in our South American context.

Then, we trace back some proposals of Aníbal Quijano, Michel Trouillot and Suely Rolnik who provide us with elements to think about the construction of a subjectivity designed to submerge and sustain us in fatalism, in an unconscious conviction of the impossibility of change: it is not only the reproduction of the material conditions of existence and the concomitant subjective experience that change is impossible that causes fatalism, but these structural conditions are accompanied complementarily by a superstructural design that leads to the construction of a fatalistic subjectivity. And there, the mass media and, above all, formal education (perhaps designed by the colonists enunciated by Fanon) are decisive.

We drink again in the source of Simón Rodríguez to think about the possibility of the abysmal step between independence and freedom, the necessary continuity of the ephemeral material victor of the militia in persistent militiaman of thought. Also, to imagine a second birth in the womb of education, where each and every one of the subjectivities come to harbor the knowledge of their own contradiction and the way to appropriate it.