Electoral hangover

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Andreu Navarra

The dreaded hour has already come, the time to think about the European election results. The first thing that comes to my mind: we were right, the transmissivist teachers who warned us about the consequences of the competence reforms in education they were right: if you sweep away the rational knowledge from the public school, what you’ll actually collect it’s not a more docile and manageable citizenry, as the neo-Thatcherists believed, but a society given over to hatred, racism and primitivist discourses.

It will soon be a quarter of a century since the meeting in Lisbon in 2000 described the utopia of better jobs and better coexistence if the countries of the EU embraced an educations based on competence pedagogies. What happened yesterday is the result of those delusions that many well-intentioned people still consider a goal. The current dystopia, with France and Austria on the verge of falling into the hands of extremists, and with Italy building concentration camps in Albania (they call it “outsourced immigration management”), is the consequence of education based on competences that started a quarter of a century ago.

Far-right parties are taking advatage of it; a geek spewing hate on the networks gets the same results than old political parties settled for a long time so far, and the European left doesn’t seem to realize what it’s doing wrong and keeps continuosly repeating the same mistakes. Left is perplexed: it has not yet realized that the only way is the reconstruction of the Welfare State, nor that the dispossessed middle and working classes are aiming for the accelerationist battering ram, obedient to the call of the ultras against an easily identifiable “technocracy”.

Socialists and conservatives confirmed yesterday what the philosopher Éric Sadin has been saying for some years: Social Liberalism (the pseudo-progressivism of Blair, Schröder and ours Solana, Solchaga, Solbes, and now Olaf Scholz’s) is over since it has destroyed and ruined schools and health facilities and primary care.

Citizenry no longer believes and refuse to follow the social warnings of a banking club, and a banking club (I’ts getting clear day by day, but perhaps it may be too late) just does in favour of proper banking club’s pedagogies, but not the egalitarian educational and rationalist educations systems Europeans need to preserve democracy, diversity, pluralism and the rational values ​​that once defined Europe. The left seems not to realize what’s really going on, and it keeps pushing for the same mistakes, because it is much easier to build declarative sentences and laws than to build community, science, well-being, future and cultural landscape.

Who and when will begin to rebuild the school that generates citizens capable to refute and reject all kinds of visionaries, anarcho-capitalists and parasitic privatizers? For me, this is the question that must be asked in an astonihed Continent that is being swallowed by two oceans: on the right, the ocean of hatred, and on the left, the ocean of unreality. In order to have a coherent Left again, it would be necessary to start studying, to understand reality and its complexities; and it would also be necessary to make people study, because cultural dispossession is colonized by all kinds of monsters spawned by despair and exasperation turned into routines of mud and nihilism.

Aggressive hatred is not the solution against smiling racism, nor the false inclusion of the banking club has been effective. As Žižek wrote, Macronism was a patch that could not last: the solemn appearances and gestures of neoliberal politics only temporarily may the extreme right quiet, but not anymore since what was promised does not come and society continues to degrade. Just like the United States, forced to choose between right and fascism, there is no other feasible future than the construction of an enlightened and realistic Left than, though slowly, sould build a materialistic alternative against the world of visionary identities since it would find out that moral sermons they convince nobody. Is there anyone ready to change the current curse and start headig towards this goal?

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons