Acessibilidade / Reportar erro

For a pedagogy of balance

We discuss in this article Pedagogy as a practical science that links the teaching and learning activities to a solid scientific foundation explaining and prescribing knowledges and procedures for intervening in, and developing, education. We analyze in a critical way the physicalist view that reduces Pedagogy to a technical training program without its own object or methods. A novel worldview is presented which recognizes the balance between reason and experience, considering the importance of the latter in the construction of new knowledge, and recovering the historical evolution of the concept and its role in learning and, therefore, in teacher education. Likewise, we stress that the conscience of experience can be a way to make the human being ethically responsible for the cycle of scientific production, since the modifications or transformations brought about by science take place in a world inseparable from the being in which mind dwells. Thus, apart from cognitive aspects, the discussion about experience involves also the ethical dimension of human actions. In this context, there emerges a Pedagogy of Balance constituted by the symbiosis of the complex categories of totality, motion, tension, and overcoming in education. We conclude that the Pedagogy of Balance is founded not just on the certainty of premises and rules of rational reasoning or scientific theorizing, but on an equilibrium of numerous other factors based on ethical values and principles that allow the human being to walk his or her path of conscience and emancipation towards a world 'novel, but viable' inspired in the Freirian utopia.

Pedagogy; Experience; Ethics; Balance


Faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo Av. da Universidade, 308 - Biblioteca, 1º andar 05508-040 - São Paulo SP Brasil, Tel./Fax.: (55 11) 30913520 - São Paulo - SP - Brazil
E-mail: revedu@usp.br