Lessons Learned
Where Should We Move the Pendulum? : Necrophilia and Biophilia in the Last Sixty Years of Chilean Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrea Campana
This year – 2023 – marks the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup d'état in Chile. This research paper examines the last sixty years of education in Chile from a Frommian perspective by proposing that the year 1973 emerges as a turning point in the educational history of our country wherefrom massification, mechanization, and standardization have become constitutive components of the educational system. By surveying the major milestones in the Chilean educational arena before and after the coup d’etat, this paper documents the progressively necrophilic movement in education, that was, in turn, a response to the neoliberal logic adopted by the dictatorship of the time. The study discusses the preponderance of epistemological views and policies aligned with the intricate systems of competition and measurement (the “supply” and “demand” of economics) that predominate in one way or another to this day and the need to achieve a balance between the biophilic and necrophilic orientations that will allow the opening of epistemological and ontological paths in education, which highlight the importance of timing, rhythm, and emotion.
Metabolism from Biology to Critique of Capital View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Egidijus Mardosas
This paper explores the appropriation of the notion of metabolism for the critique of capitalist societies. The concept, originally developed in biology, was used already by Marx to analyse the relation between society and natural environment, with such conceptual formulations as “social metabolism”, and “the metabolism between humanity and nature”. The notion of metabolism received a renewed attention in recent decades due to human induced climate collapse and the Anthropocene theses. Marxist leaning critics of environmental destruction now use concepts of “metabolic rift” and “metabolic shift”. Thus, the idea of metabolism becomes key notion in social-ecological critique of capital. In this paper I explore the history of this appropriation of the notion of metabolism for social ecology and will comment on some challenges faced when attempting to use the notion from life sciences for social sciences.
The Task of the Translator in the Collapse of Roman Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ben Garceau
During the 6th Century, Italy experienced a series of shocks that tipped Roman society into collapse. In this study, I focus on the efforts of the senatorial class to maintain the Classical system of education through this chaotic time period, efforts that were superseded by a variety of monastic orders. It may come as some surprise that a central issue in the drive to preserve Roman education was the translation of Greek texts into Latin, and that the heroes of the day were the fidi interpretes working in the circle of the Symmachi, such as Macrobius and Boethius. Intriguingly, these translators continued to use the “word-for-word” and “sense-for-sense” binary familiar to us today, but they interpreted what we might understand in terms of equivalence in a radically different way. As Italy plunged ever deeper into war, famine, and plague, the translator’s work was understood to change, moving from a more secular transfer of knowledge between idioms toward a revelation of divine truth. Through comparison with the works of St. Augustine and Cassiodorus, and with nods to Walter Benjamin’s idea of “pure language” [die reine Sprache] and Jacques Derrida’s archival apocalypticism, I track how the exigencies of post-Roman Italy transformed the task of the translator at the dawn of the early Middle Ages in Europe. The lessons of the translators who lived and died during this fractious era have much to say to a modern world that seems to threaten its own end times.
