A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #28: ELEMENTS OF CONTINUITY OF EDUCATIONAL ACTION FROM CHILDHOOD TO ADULTHOOD - Paola Perullo (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In the book "Educational Emergency", "School in a globalized society", 
Franco Frabboni, who recently passed away, raised the issue of 
globalization, not only on the market side, but on the consequences of a 
similar phenomenon of globalization of knowledge, through the propaganda 
of cultural consumption models throughout the world. The result of this 
is the formation of a single thought, which annihilates plurality and 
critical thinking. For Frabboni, school should have antidotes, to 
counteract "the virus" of a mass humanity, capable of activating a 
single thought, a single mind, and pedagogy, teaching and school, could 
become the three medicines available to the entire world, to annihilate 
the negative effects of single thought, making critical and plural 
thinking prevail. Frabboni had contributed to the historical-social and 
pedagogical-didactic identity of childhood and its school, developing 
texts that are still central to the Faculty of Educational Sciences. The 
focus is on the boy and the girl, on their characteristics and on their 
way of being in the different moments of growth: on the one hand, the 
different periods or phases are understood as psychological concepts 
within which the subject is recognized as having a range of needs and 
specific ways of fulfilling themselves; on the other hand, when 
referring to personality as an overall structure, which allows the 
individual to carry out new evolutionary tasks from time to time, rather 
than a concept of maturity understood as a succession of changes towards 
a higher limit state, it is more convenient to adopt a definition of 
maturity that can be applied to any moment of life. "The mature person 
is the one who, however he defines the adult and infantile conditions,

A) knows he is an adult and is no longer a child. B) knows and accepts 
he is also a child.

C) communicates with the child who is confident of not becoming and/or 
remaining a child again.

If we replace "adult" with "older child" and "child" with "younger 
child", this definition of maturity is applicable to everyone. And in 
accordance with the aforementioned definition of maturity, personal 
development can then be conceived as a series of different maturity 
levels, achieved by overcoming the successive different crises of 
existence, throughout life.

What common denominators of educational action guarantee the 
preservation and enhancement of the ability to think, imagine, intuit, 
invent? I think there are elements that concern the relationship between 
teachers and students, which are valid at all ages. And this is 
understandable. What is more difficult to understand is that one should, 
in whatever school level one finds oneself operating, in addition to 
having a serious knowledge of developmental psychology, consider school 
as an opportunity separate from "usefulness". In other words, I think 
there is a great misunderstanding about the connection between school 
and the "real" world, which was passed off as an innovation and ended up 
instead being a connection with the job market, with rules dictated by 
neoliberalism, which have also entered the school. So we need to work to 
recover a mentality that separates itself from the useful and creates 
the conditions to live the time of school, at all ages, with the 
conviction that the useless (currently even humanistic studies risk 
being considered useless...) is the most important thing. The kids must 
discover, through knowledge and relationships with teachers, what they 
are truly capable of, what they are passionate about, making them aware 
of their thinking, independently of the job they will do. If we take 
this view, what defines significant learning for a child from three to 
six years old, can be extended up to university. In the 1991 Guidelines 
for Kindergarten, it is defined that school learning must be 
constructive-strategic-interactive. Referring to the cognitive theories 
of Piaget, Vygotskij, Bruner, Olson and Gardner, it is defined:

1) that learning has primarily a constructive character, because 
learning something does not mean recording or receiving information, but 
connecting it to information already existing in long-term memory.

2) School learning is not only active, but also has a strategic 
character: a strategy is essentially a method for tackling a task or 
more generally for achieving an objective. A strategy controls the 
cognitive processes or functions involved in the coding, transformation 
and storage of information.

3) Thirdly, school learning has an interactive character: the child or 
young person interacts in a learning situation with an educational 
context, that is, with an organizational structure that includes 
numerous variables, spaces, times, methods, materials, tools, attitudes, 
styles and expectations of teachers. If we combine all this with the 
affective-emotional dimension, as a primary human need but also as a 
result of a satisfactory relationship with the teacher, I think we can 
easily find common threads that unite the work of teachers of all 
levels. Finding these links also means, in my opinion, opposing the 
current neoliberal plan that wants to transform the role of teachers 
according to market-functional ideologies, effectively destroying the 
historical role of public schools.

Bibliographic notes:

"Educational emergency, school in a globalized society" F. Frabboni.

"Educational sciences and kindergartens" F. Frabboni

"Developmental psychology, knowledge and becoming." Marco Battacchi and 
Giuliana Giovannelli

http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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