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Dean of the Faculty of Education Sciences and leader of the group Critical Pedagogy and Didactics for Social Transformation at the Externado de Colombia University.
This condition of schools without connectivity, without water and without basic services is not a particular situation, it is rather a reality that extends throughout the country and that, as other academics have already said, has been reflected even more with the pandemic conditions. The country has a debt …
ANALYSIS
Doors can be locked, schools can’t
Cecilia Dimaté Rodríguez
Dean of the Faculty of Education Sciences and leader of the group Critical Pedagogy and Didactics for Social Transformation at the Externado de Colombia University.
This condition of schools without connectivity, without water and without basic services is not a particular situation, it is rather a reality that extends throughout the country and that, as other academics have already said, has been reflected even more with the pandemic conditions. The country has a historical debt to education, which has always worked with much less budget than it needs, and this is no exception. There is an immense debt with the infrastructure, that is, with the locative conditions to provide the education service. That combination of schools without infrastructure and without water becomes even more difficult because, now, in the middle of a pandemic, how are they going to wash their hands as often as needed? The pandemic has added to these inequities, but that cannot be a reason for schools and education to disappear at various levels. We are running out of educating children in stages that are fundamental to their social, cognitive and human formations. Sure, there are cases of committed teachers who implement strategies to get to where it would seem impossible, but the State has to get to strengthen them and provide tools to facilitate the work of these teachers. If we allow schools to start closing, we would be allowing a generation not to be educated and that would severely affect the future of the country. A Nation without education is condemned to barbarism, to disgrace. What it means to be a teacher (in this scenario in which 538 schools will not be able to implement alternation models) is not to let those schools disappear, we reach students where there is connectivity, but we also reach where there is none. If the students cannot go to the classrooms then we must go to them by going back to what we used before like radio or television, for example. Here what should be clear to us is that doors can be closed, schools cannot.
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