Post-pandemic school education. sociological notes

Abstract

The closure of schools and the alternative solutions to “attendance” have accentuated a trend that came from before: instead of discussing the meanings and purposes of the school system in the contemporary world and in Argentina, we discuss the means. Topics that are legitimate but suppose a prior discussion of the meanings, fines and objectives that should govern the development of schooling in contemporary societies.

This displacement of the discussion about the purposes and meanings of school education is accentuated by the need to attend to the emergencies of the serious situation caused by the pandemic that uses the closure of educational centers in most of the world. However, I propose to preserve a place to debate the structural problems that have afflicted the old school systems since long before the pandemic in a world that presents worrying features from the point of view of the social, political and cultural consequences of a certain model of education. economic growth. Without this debate, there is a risk of rebuilding the old pre-pandemic order, that is, restoring the lost balances.

In this chapter I intend to develop three sets of contents: a kind of synthesis of some development trends typical of the contemporary world, a list of structural characteristics of the main cultural challenges with which school education cannot fail to be measured and some indications about of certain axes can sense and contents that the social sciences suggest for the structuring of a school program for the present century.