PRESENTATION
The Omnipresence of Education
This issue of Interface presents an opportunity to reassess the multiple dimensions of Education and its relationship with Healthcare and Communication, thus forming a tripod whose roots are deep-seated in the contemporary age. This set of articles leaves no doubt as to the universality of the educational issue in the historic moment at which we find ourselves. The increased speed of transformation, backed by technological innovation, has had consequences for all levels of human activity, raising questions that go being the realm of formal education within a school environment. Within this context, willingness to learn becomes necessary in the exercise of all social practice, not only for reasons of professional improvement, but also to enable suitable positioning vis à vis the panorama of complexity with which we are faced.
The five essays presented here focus on different aspects of the educational issue. The first one, by Axt and Schuch, discusses learning within virtual reality environments, which the new means of data processing and communication have rendered possible. The authors turned to two scientists from the biological era, Piaget and Maturana, both of whose work was relevant to Cognitive Psychology, in order to understand how the educational experience takes place by means of virtual reality.
The Tozzoni-Reis essay discusses the problematics of Environmental Education, based on a theoretical perspective focused on the man-nature relation. The author believes that man's interventions in nature, market by the determinations of capitalist production, constitute the matrix for thinking about the sense of Environmental Education. From this point of view, the objective of Environmental Education could be considered as changing human intent vis à vis nature, in search of less destructive forms of interaction.
Mazzotti, in the third essay, tries to retrieve the thoughts of Karl Marx on Education. The issue of education would not peter out in the search for better professional training for the field workers, but would imply in guaranteeing conditions enabling human beings to fully exert their citizenship. These conditions include the practice of work, even if under adverse conditions, and the availability of free time for workers to organize themselves, assess their experiences and possibly transform the said conditions.
In the next article, Novelli retrieves several current aspects of Hegelian philosophy, according to which education concerns the practice of freedom and is not reduced merely to obeying rigid methods and techniques, but implies in learning dialectic rationality. Therefore, the process of education would be one in which the individual comes to understand how concepts contradict and overcome each other, leading to an integrated view of the world that is both individual and historical.
The last essay, by Morosini, deals precisely with the dominant trend in the Brazilian State, i.e., of obtaining improved higher education by means of evaluation processes based on standardized procedures. The author sets out some fairly relevant questions as regards the efficacy of these processes, and questions, in particular, whether the concept of quality implicit in them is not opposed to creativity and critical capabilities, both of them factors equally important in the process of education.
In the section of articles and reports, Cunha presents a study focusing on the experiences considered significant by students enrolled in undergraduate programs that lead to their qualifying as teachers, whereas Menezes proposes that a relevant instance to evaluate medical training should be the Intensive Care Unit, where the practitioner faces ethical dilemmas that call for an integrating reflection.
The debates section is dedicated to a discussion about the Family Healthcare Program, a discussion that has become necessary. To what extent does this program offer a humanizing opportunity in the training of physicians and of continued professional education? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to take into account the recent history of Brazil's healthcare policies, determining the context within which the program was designed and put into practice. Campos and Belisário, in the article that triggers the debate, carry out a broad retrospective assessment of the conditioning factors and the objectives of the program, steering the discussion toward the role of schools in the medical field in their implementation and consolidation, as well as toward the relevance that taking part in the program might have in terms of professional training. The members of the debate, Nemes, Merhy, Paim and Puntel, underscore not only the difficulties that the program has faced, but the aspects that struck them as positive as well, with a view to encouraging greater integration between university and the society.
In the interview with Cromberg, what is discussed is the current status of Psychoanalysis, highlighting certain topics of this practice in which the educational dimension is manifest. During the process of listening, the analyst must learn about the life experience of the patient in order to attain a suitable level of involvement. The very word "psychic" implies constant relearning, because, as the interviewee states, "an event that was previously configured in a certain way is given new significance, in another way, as a result of a subsequent event". She furthermore defends the idea that psychoanalysis "played a radical part in the transformation of a new way of regarding women and feminism", based on the learnings of Freud with "women classified as hysteric".
Closing this issue, in the paper Space for Clinical Practice does not present a geographical space, but the context of a meeting that is "difficult", involving anguish and suffering, and of life, "which seeks a path in order to come true". This provides space for the physician to also learn about human experience with patients. In these dramatic circumstances, once again the omnipresence of education shows itself.
Alfredo Pereira Junior
Departamento de Educação, Instituto de Biociências,
Universidade Estadual Paulista, Unesp/Botucatu
July, 2001
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
18 May 2009 -
Date of issue
Aug 2001
