Viruses come in vain: an allegory of the pan-school that (will not) come

Abstract

In this article, a therapeutic allegory is developed around the problem of school (mathematics) education, dealing with it as a pandemic. The mutant virus that causes it causes several symptoms seen as crystallized belief-images that persistently manifest themselves since the beginning of modern schooling processes: the disciplinary fever, which disfigured and transformed cultural practices into fixed verbal contents; the epistemic-mentalist fever, which transformed interwoven language games into praxiological forms of life into knowledge itself, independent of the ethical-political languages ​​and grammars that guide them, which led to an unhealthy distinction between knowing-in-itself and know-how with the signs of a language; the illusion of timelessness and deterministic addiction, which prevented seeing the practices of dealing with phenomena considered random as mathematical practices, and both as practices that are interwoven in different forms of life, which prevented school (mathematics) education to directly problematize - that is, without the mediation of disciplinary glasses - the cultural practices that take place in different forms of life. Possible ways of dealing with this pandemic are thought of in an imaginary post-pandemic scenario in which the school could become a virtual pan-community focused on the therapeutic problematization of different forms of life and the cultural practices that take place in them, aiming at the purpose of to form guardians of democratic, solidary, egalitarian and non-racist ways of organizing lives in different forms of life. In this pan-school that will (not) come, deconstructed mathematics education comes to be seen as a set of language games guided by normative purposes, whose effects and affects are not always desirable and predictably controllable on lives and forms of life. equally to bioethical-political problematization.