Order, Sanitation and Germination: regulation of life in the military-civic school

Abstract:

This essay aims to fabulate school insurrections where the militarization is more powerful. In this govern, the military-civic school became the teaching model. Allying the discourse of order and progress to the school militarization, the president prospers a dirty image of the public school attacking all the bodies. Recent conservative policies have invested in the sanitation of the life accomplished by surfactant elements. Thus, fabulation as a resistance to the militarization, scenes of small insurrections of the school functioning. About crumbling of the life, the research proposes to think the school insurrections as a way to evaluate the relation and the affects sewed between bodies, highlighting the educative character of the infinite differentiation of life.

Keywords:
Life; Fabling; Military school; Insurrection; Surfactant

Resumo:

Esse texto objetiva fabular as insurreições escolares onde a militarização é mais latente. No atual governo, as escolas cívico-militares tornaram-se modelo de ensino. Aliando o discurso de ordem e progresso à militarização escolar, faz-se prosperar uma imagem suja da escola pública atacando todos os corpos. Políticas conservadoras mais recentes investiram na higienização da vida realizada por elementos tensoativos. Eis as fabulações como resistência à militarização, cenas de pequenas insurreições no funcionamento da escola. Sobre o esfacelamento da vida, a pesquisa propõe pensar nas insurreições que ocorrem dentro das escolas como modo de valorizar as relações e os afetos tecidos entre corpos, ressaltando o caráter educativo de diferenciação infinito da vida.

Palavras-chave:
Vida; Fabulação; Escola militar; Insurreição; Tensoativos

Sanitization of Order

Surfactant. A chemical term common in High School that means nothing more than a substance capable of interacting with the medium, indifferent to its filiation, to sanitize the target of every dirt, fat and impurities. In sum: surfactants sanitize. And, in schools, the sanitization must always be done with the strongest materials. School life is so invasive, so full of germs and viruses, that the surfactants work non-stop, being replaced one after the other, without any rest.

This is the current political scenario at the schools: a sanitization group settles in each hallway, each room. They are professors and principals, but also students, family, attendants, cooks, doormen. The sanitization refers not to keeping the floor clean, but to keep the school free from the germs of life. The sanitization is of the order of ideas.

When sensible, ideas are mocked by excellence (Corazza; Aquino, 2011), they don’t court with formality, with the secular rituals and the too heavily soothing scenarios.

There lies the danger of school and, consequently, the need of surfactant bodies in the current political scenario: fearing a cluster of live misfit bodies, the educational policies start to multiply the figures of social sanitization. There is imminent danger in every corner and, to avoid the assault waves from germs of life, it’s established a network of sanitization and security. In the school plan, the military school is established as a model to be followed for the civilian schools (Brasil, January 2, 2019) and, as if it were not enough, they indicate the return of a nostalgic nationality that should be celebrated with the intonation of the national anthem (Cafardo, 2019a). Associated to this normalized peculiar formation, the religious, military and economic assumptions work as support to conduct the ideological sanitization, affecting the ways of life, the ways of producing and even the teaching methods in the schools.

We find ourselves, at the start of 2019, before this almost comic scene in which the teacher is constantly threatened by the political figures and blamed for the social problems. We are attacked with economic contingency and hate speech; we have been called indoctrinators and our students have been called to use their cell phones to record our classes in the most accusatory of intonations. And we are not afraid of any of that.

This text is not a scientific article in its normal sense; it brings not the result of a research, but instead, a fabulation about school. We propose, instead, to create school scenes supported on news and educational laws that emerge in this context of multiplication and enforcement of surfactants. We depart from the principle that, yes, we are highly dangerous or, otherwise, we wouldn’t have been so emphatically attacked in the light of the current govern. The current minister of Education, Abraham Weintraub, has declared that the country has already reached its quote of doctorates in humanities and, as such, should now accept the end of research grants in this area, seeing how, to him, there is no impactful research in the human sciences (Ministro…, 2019). In a public interview conducted in the United States of America, in the morning of May 15, the Brazilian presidential figure called every protester that took to the streets in defense of education “[…] useful idiots, morons that are being used as a bunch of sheeple by a cunning minority that make up the core of many of Brazil’s federal universities” (Bolsonaro…, 2019, online, own translation), claiming that we don’t know simple mathematical calculations or base chemical compositions. That is, just as his management has affirmed at all points, it is denied to us any possibility of creation and comprehension of the world in scientific knowledge terms. Thence his emphasis in making the military school the basis of education. And, if the school has been called to militarization, so do we feel called to this space of excellence and organization/standardization. The military school, in the perspective of the current government, is the space of maximum knowledge and order, perhaps even of obedience. Everything is done without questioning, or, when questioned, done only as to reach higher grades or to show a better competence.

However, coming from a theoretical perspective that does not take control as the maximum instance of life, we do not believe that militarization would be able of ending every insurgence and insurrection. In fact, we do not even wish for that.

We find, in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2016) and in Gilles Deleuze (2013), the theoretical support to say that life comes before any attempt at control, that, before power acts to regulate life, life spreads. It would be possible to say that it is, in a way, chaotic, even though it comes together and create ways of collective life. And that is exactly what control fears.

When there is a large scale investment into the militarization of schools, we see, certainly, the fear that the powers have of life. It isn’t us that fear the power, but them that fear us. Thence the necessity of using increasingly stronger surfactants, be them these technological communication devices or the present-bodied vigils. In the policies of militarization of life, the subjects are drenched in normalizer ideologies. Those who persist - students and teachers that go through the sanitization yet survive - are called misfits.

Our interest lies exactly there: to fabulate the scholar insurrections where militarization is more latent. We are interested in the misfits, in the insurgent bodies, in the bodies that resist the surfactants. If the current politics want insane obedience - Order and Progress! -, we exercise stories in which the escapes are real, in which the bodies are covered in the mud that make up the living. Invitation extended, let us sing the anthem.

Surfactant: chemical element that regulates life

“You called, Sir?”

Thus begins the scene between a 13 year old boy and the principal.

“You have been accused of architecting the performance of the national anthem at today’s entrance,” the principal presented. “Do you confirm your duty?”

“Yes, Sir,” is all the boy answers with.

They both stare at each other.

The scene, to an outsider’s eyes, doesn’t seem more than a short conversation between two people. The principal’s eyes, however, are a mix of disgust and strangeness. The student’s answers are exactly those he learned in that space: short and to the point.

“You are aware that the national anthem performance must obey a set of rules written out by our legislation? You are aware that disrespect of the anthem performance is punishable?”

“Yes, Sir.”

The principal sits down, but does not gesture the student to do so himself.

They stare at each other for a while longer.

“Your punishment has already been decided,” the principal underlines. “Much unwillingly, I agreed with your parents’ decision to keep you in the school. Know, however, that until the end of the year, you will have extra time of dedication in our institution.”

“Yes, Sir,” answered the student again, keeping his eyes trained on the principal’s face.

“You will be entirely responsible for the anthem performance weekly, being required to arrive at school at 6 o’clock and properly present yourself at 7 o’clock alongside your classmates.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“You must choose who will fly the flag and keep vigil during the performance.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And accompany the band’s training for the special performance on the month’s first Wednesday, each month, when the band shall play the anthem.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Every single one of the band’s training,” the principal hissed.

“Yes, Sir.”

The annoyance started to make itself present in the principal’s face.

“Anything else I may do, Sir?” asked the student after a long silence. In his voice, only the monotonous military tone could be heard.

Silence.

“Twice a week, you must remain available to help every teacher with whatever they need, and will only be allowed to leave after all of them have vacated the building.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The student’s eyes didn’t even falter, sustaining the principal’s anger placidly.

The silence dragged on for another while.

“Dismissed.”

The dialogue above is the limit of military strictness. In the boy there is almost nothing beyond the possibility of an immediate response in the short and dry, Yes, Sir! The boy puts himself entirely in service of the one who requests the hierarchy. Everything else, he discards. And perhaps it is precisely that which annoys the principal.

Faced with a scene that should be threatening, the student does not hesitate for a moment. Despite knowing he is in an unfavorable situation, he clearly does not fear any of the alternatives that might befall him. Contrary to Agambenian’s logic of a bare life there is, in fact, a life that is possible to be lived when the human element is taken away from the body (Agamben, 2010). The principal, the judge in this scene, is the one who puts his body in the place of the bare life, where nothing can respond to the actions taken against it. And the body acts exactly within the expectations: nothing responds, they make use only of the language that they are allowed to. However, the body does not die when it is robbed of every political affirmation; rather, it learns that there are politics where even language is inexistent. The principal endorses punishment, raises punishments, creates events and scenes, but the boy stays omnipotent in his obedience: hears everything and agrees with everything, despite doing exactly the opposite of what is expected, when doing so. Obedient, the kid opposes the expected, the foreseen fear before a punishment. Certainly, it’s before this almost volcanic force that the controlling fear creates space for the surfactants to spread and do their job.

The surfactants, in this school model, are applied explicit and shamelessly. The proposal of this school model is the control of every kind of insurrection. Deleuze (2013) used to say that soon identity proposals for disciplinarization would no longer have an effect. In his text, Gilles Deleuze announced that the control would be exerted in a more tactical way, no longer stopping that which goes around the rules, but acting before any limit might be broken. That is, if in Foucault (2014) the disciplinary society was the society that aligned the architecture to the limits of life and affirmed the no as a method of production, in the control society, life is produced less by denial and more by constant threat.

In the logic of control, passive threats are created so the body will fear any escape, avoid any getaway. This is the job of the surfactants: guarantee the constant sanitization, even if nothing gets dirty.

The surfactants try, at any cost, to prevent escapes.

But its activity is limited to its specialty and to superficial tension, to interferences and to the virus that infiltrates the agency.

“So, how was it?”

“Hahaha, it was exactly as we thought,” answered the boy. “He talked, talked, talked… and all I answered was…”

“Yes, Sir,” they both answered at the same time.

He was now in the canteen with a group of friends that waited excitedly for that story.

“Hahahaha, you guys should’ve seen his face,” the boy continued, “I managed to keep the right tone of salutation in every answer. Man, I don’t even know how many punishments I got. The daft man mentioned 20 of, at least!”

The whole group laughed.

“You know you only escaped this ‘cuz of dough, yea?”

“And your father’s position.”

“Why, how else would I take advantage of my family’s money and my dad being a coronel if not to annoy people?”

“You’ll get in trouble any time now, dude, be careful!”

The boy grinned even largely at that.

“I know, man, but it’s been four generations of Fonsecas here. I don’t even know how many Deodoros my family’s raised, man. I can’t get outta here, I’ve got to get to the end to raise hell here. Right now, I’m just any other…”

“Only if it’s any other misfit. HAHAHAHA.”

Here, perhaps, we face a battlefield. If, in the logic of control and discipline, the regulation is effected by the surfactants and punishment is of hierarchy’s responsibility, then we continuously find misfit bodies. In chemistry, the molecules tend to aim for equilibrium to guarantee their stability, reacting to one another so they may organize themselves. The surfactants also produce stability, but by breaking the superficial tension and reorganizing the structures into a new sanitized order.

The tension is eliminated and any attempt at disparate activity is cut off. And, with that, life, that has no univocity (Comitê Invisível, 2016).

Chemically speaking, the surfactants substances act by breaking the current stability and creating a new stability at any cost. Socially speaking, we stand before a crazed necessity of government policies to put an end to all public institutions so as to create a new military-economic order that claims to be stable and of higher quality. If surfactants have a sanitizing job, we are all dirty in this military-economic logic.

In 2018, Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign was entirely devoted to attacking the figures claimed as left-winged. We have been attacked through many ways, having our classes recorded and having teachers dismissed, being more heavily watched by our students’ family because of the content of our classes. We have been called indoctrinators, which, in popular Portuguese, began to mean something dirty and dangerous.

Therein, then, our close connection to dirt and the surfactants, that is, with the horde of watchmen and the policies that continuously maim education. Because we are dirty, we are continuously faced and threatened with being sanitized through different optics. The Escola Sem Partido³ [No Party School] bill - which is frequently adapted and put to appreciation by many different bills and in different cities and states - is, before anything else, a sanitizing of educational modes. By accusing us teachers of being indoctrinators, they do nothing but call us germ dirt.

And what we spread in the status of dirty-bodies is simply the advertisement of body-affective experiences of different orders. In the conversation between friends, one of Deodoro da Fonseca’s classmates call him a misfit, and, if the chemical function of the surfactant is to create and maintain the new order, the term may perhaps make sense. There, misfit is not because he does not fit, but rather, because he does not accept that life be reduced to new rules and regimen.

The misfit is of the logic of the dirt that sticks, of someone who battles to survive.

This sounds like physics law. The more the social order loses its credibility, the more it strengthens its police. The more the institutions retract, the more watchmen appear. The less the authorities inspire respect, the more they seek to keep us respectful by force. […] The order maintenance is the principal agency of an already failed order (Comitê Invisível, 2017, p. 135, own translation).

Life Germs

One of the teachers enters the classroom - Geography -, one of the strictest teachers in the institution. He enters, look straight at Deodoro and tells the student he shall remain in the room after class. Every student knows what to expect. “Yes, Sir,” is all he responds.

When the class finishes and the students leave for the canteen to get lunch, Deodoro walks closer to the teacher’s desk while his classmates walk away. At the same moment, some cell phones start blaring the national anthem in an unusual version. Funk beats fill the classroom while every student walks away. Deodoro’s posture remains the same. He doesn’t blink, he doesn’t smile. The teacher gets angry, but does nothing. He only gives one extra assignment as form of punishment. One, two or three. “Dismissed.”

It hardly matters what are our ways of fighting, our possible ways of resistance, a body always creates ways of living, even while standing in the eye of a hurricane. Thus is the concept of resistance.

Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet (1998) state exactly that when they speak of the life politics. According to them, there is no single force that does not react to the set of forces that act over it and, as such, does not create a life condition that belongs to itself. Living is, minimally, creating conditions to multiply its existence.

In 2019 we see local and worldwide attacks plague the possibilities of existence. It is true that a good expense of Amazonia, Pantanal and Cerrado will never be recovered, and that many different species of animals and green life will have serious problems to recover their habitats, however, life is creative enough to create visceral survival strategies. What we do in schools and what we shall do in the civic-military ones is just that.

If the proposal of surfactants is to reduce the level of superficial tension in a pot of heterogeneities, then life’s function is to proliferate fungi, bacteria and germs among those substances. Faced with a politic of a neurotic increase in the number of pesticides used in plantations, finding a caterpillar in a lettuce leaf seems to be the pinnacle of vital resistance. We must have the strength of a caterpillar, of a cockroach, of a fungus, to go unnoticed under the police-like’s eyes that watch and regulate the current educational policies.

In sum, we outright refuse the whole idea of peace, tranquility and security offered in official speeches and the global development logic. There is no possibility of peace when every life is infinitely different.

The illusion of peace - often advertised by security policies, other times by almost eugenic logic - serves to create a common enemy with which we shall fight to the end of existence itself. That is, peace would only be possible through infinite death, sullying the existence of bodies with the un-life. For that we so avidly face the sanitization logic and the promotion of surfactants in the improvement processes of pedagogical work and in school life. “To abandon the idea of peace is the only true peace” (Comitê Invisível, 2016, p. 45, own translation). Peace, the authors guarantee, is not a sign of kindness, but “[…] either deep stupidity or of complete bad faith”, seeing how the “[…] tactical refusal of confront is, in itself, an example of war cunning” (ibid., p. 168, own translation). Paradoxically, this statement is overly ethical.

In 2013, many protesters that took part in the June’s protests became political prisoners for rebelling against the forms of government that were then in power (Mendes, 2017). As stated in the account of one of those political prisoners, the aesthetic of a human meat butchery is overly clean and calm. “Within that place, I stared at the white walls, the cold and hostile environment. Everything was too clean, contrasting with the content there practiced” (Mendes, 2017, p. 54, own translation).

Why, if we provide this body with the concern listed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2016) about how we now live in an eternal search for security, we become aware that peace is a forged more to jail us than to allow us to live well. Under the logic of fearing everything and everyone, we make of the Hobbesian human a lunatic body that multiplies the wolves ad infinitum, where fear would become “[…] an empty significant, where every kind of frightening ghosts could appear” (Negri; Hardt, 2016, p. 39, own translation).

If fear indicates a challenge to reach peace, we would never be able to picture a peaceful scenario when fear dwells in everything and everyone, when fear becomes a threat to the bodies so they will act this or that way. To the threats we are faced with, we are forced to say the empty Yes, Sir.But with which strength and effect do we say this Yes, Sir?

Math’s class. Bháskara had always been one of the favorite teachers of the class. Strangely, that day his rigor was methodical.

“When I call your name, come forth to take your test.”

The teacher started calling them.

“Deodoro.”

The boy got up.

“You need to study more, Deodoro. You know that, yes?”

The boy looked at his test with a big 10 written on its front.

“Can’t you see this? See how grotesque this is?” the teacher asked pointing at one of the corners of the test.

There, hidden, was a cipher of an arrangement he knew well.

“I hope you devote yourself more to this. I don’t want to have to talk to you again.”

“Yes, Sir,” answered the boy, this time almost weakly.

The boy became flustered and sat back down. He’d thought he had some allies between the teachers as well. It seemed he was wrong. As soon as he sat down, one of his friends took his test to look at it. She gaped instantly.

“Fonseca! Have you seen this?” she whispered to him.

“Of course I saw it, didn’t you hear how I was scolded for…”

Underneath the cipher, a note: “Nice drumming last week”.

I’ll devote myself, he thought.

Today, it is so emphatically spoken about a culture of peace that it makes eyes shine or tear up. However, faced by peace, we do nothing but fall silent. The peaceful body is the body of impossible response, of eternal concurrence. In our opinion, that is nothing but a production of the emptiness of life. Because that is the product of a peace that pretends to be true: the un-life or, at least, a pacified life, a controlled life.

Deep down, rejection of war expresses only a childish or senile refusal to admit the existence of otherness. War is not the killing, but the logic that regulates the contact between heterogeneous powers. It is fought everywhere, in countless ways, and mainly through peaceful means. If there is a multiplicity of worlds [and of aesthetics], if there is an irreducible plurality of ways of life, then war is law of coexisting in this land (Comitê Invisível, 2016, p. 167, own translation).

Pacified, life would lack the courage to disagree, to laugh louder, to bother the other. Or better said, it would lack not the courage, but the possibility of any dissonance.

And, if doubt is still present, then we need remember only that it is in the name of peace that in the favelas it is possible to hear the sound of fireworks without any light bright up in the sky. As by Rolnik’s (2018, p. 71, own translation) words, we are faced with these self-declared peace-makers that are nothing but “[…] dealers of recipes of redemptive peace”.

In a way, it is expected that a mugentsukuyomi⁴, such as the one a certain villain of a mangá wanted to cast over humanity, be cast over our bodies. Stuck in the illusion, we would live eternally happy and immutable dreams. Life inside the infinite tsukuyomi would allow no leeway, it would never be anything but what we already know. In truth, we would see it as being all good things, however, life would know no more mutations - that is - resistance would cease existing. We would all be captured by isolated and incommunicable organelles, living the dream of unrestricted peace: “The bonds that tied this world to destiny were cut,” announces the villain, “Everyone… their pain… their suffering… their hollowness… they were cut off of all of that.” Thus the defense of a tyrant peace is the same claimed in the West by every world organization that declares their concern with the humankind: the end of war, the end of pain, the end of death. Any body that tries to question it is then answered such as the villain spoke: “Who are you to intervene in the happiness of others?” (Kishimoto, 2014, p. 13, own translation).

Living in a dream, is what is said about the bodies captured by the tsukuyomi, the bodies emptied of life in a celebrated eternal peace. Why, that’s when we ask ourselves, then, what would be the functions of school faced with this scenario of militarization of educational institutions. We know that, secularly, school has been associated with the act of teaching. Certainly, no one disagrees that the priority role of school is exactly that. As teachers, we teach as a survival condition. However, what do the military schools want? Are we facing the return to a technical meritocracy?

In an attempt of a public mockery of the student category, the elected president Jair Messias Bolsonaro said that students don’t even know what is the formula of water or how to calculate 7x8. It could certainly be said that perhaps a child in early childhood education does not, effectively, know the formula of water or how to make that calculation. It would even be viable in some other stages of school life. However, when spoke that critic, the president chose to allude his critic to college students. Which sounds quite tragicomic. Obviously, not only was the critic badly received but acidic responses were given to the president.

In response to the question, the two ministers of Education - Ricardo Velez and Abraham Weintraub - seem to invest, without delay, that what they want the most is money for private education institutions. It is not about a desire for school, nor about a vision for education, but about the destination of funds. And that becomes quite evident when, for example, the Federative Pact’s CAP, proposal made by Jair Bolsonaro and his minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes, foresees the release of the political power from having to create schools in needy regions to cover certain levels of social inequality (Caram, 2019).

In the narratives of the elected president and his government policies, the country finds itself in crisis because of economic mishaps left behind by previous governs and, as such, a befitting educational growth would be necessary to make the economy develop. Therefore, his response is the militarization of the bodies and the technocratic development of knowledge.

Related to the militarization of the body, we need to see the body not only as that which allows me immediate touch. We are bodies but, at the same time, we compose other bodies in relation with people, things, ideas and others. A body is expressed, in the Deleuzian’s philosophy (Deleuze, 2002), as something capable of affecting and being affected. Ideas, songs, books, games, people, animal - everything capable of affecting becomes a body. Therefore, bodies are capable of keeping memories, effects of the affections that pass through them. If we find ourselves with a book, we can be affected by them: we can cry, get happy, get angry, create friendships, laugh. The same, evidently, happens in the encounter between human bodies and non-human bodies. A life form can be affect by the human work around it, but can also be affected by unexplainable temporal conditions. A body is that which, in some way, allows to pass the affections of their environment and reacts to them.

Like this, by putting as goal the militarization of the bodies, they speak precisely about the limitation of possibilities of affection of a body. Military, when detached from the verb militate, is associated with a decrease in the degree of affect of life. To militate, in its vitalist sense, derives from a logic of action ruled by control, by immediate command. When fear is so generic and lurks in each corner, in every body, to militarize schools would be, in a way, to multiply the fears and the radical ways of reacting.

Thus, militarization acts over the bodies too open to the affections of life, over the lives capable of affecting themselves by minimum movements. Hence why it is pertinent for us to understand the militarization of schools as a process of sanitization, a proximity with the surfactant-function. After all, to “[…] preserve the innocence of the children from the teachers’ spurious influences”, it is necessary to “[…] well purify the school environment, or well remove the young from school” (Centelha, 2019, p. 69, own translation).

We live precisely in this dual movement.

If, as the Comitê Invisível (2016, p. 89, own translation) suggested under the guise of a Foulcaultian’s reading, “[…] to govern is to conduce the thoughts of a people […] so as to maximize and orientate liberty”, to militarize becomes a new modality of governance taken to the extreme of ordering logic and its affective apathy.

The motto in our flag - order and progress - shows all of its perversity in the militarizing speeches of our current politics.

Under the allegation that we need to strengthen the national education to highlight the so expected progress, we see an increase in privatist technocratic investments. On the limit, it is even plausible to increase the grade of private higher education institutions that offer their laboratories to sporadic use of public schools (Cafardo, 2019b). It does not matter what is done in this laboratories and, certainly, it is best not invest in the creation of laboratories in the public education system. The cost would be too expensive. No, instead of, let us make private universities gain recognition for offering their laboratories, after all, the quality of higher education is calculated not by its knowledge, but from the public/private partnership.

Curiously, this calculation does not take into consideration the whole network of Federal Institutions with their vast and well-developed laboratories that, certainly, could be used as resource for state and municipal schools throughout the country. This evaluative calculation of the education systems even disregards that these same Federal Institutions (FIs) are much less costly and present much better revenue in the large-scale assessments applied in our country (Escolas…, 2019). Between the FIs and the military schools, the crown falls to the FIs. However, the intention of governmental investments is to bring together the civilians and military.

And that is because, in the current political scenario, the school role seems to have a multiplicity of meanings too different between themselves, and, despite teaching still presenting itself as the initial proposal, we live in a pretentious disturbance of that meaning. Teaching, here, seems to resume the meaning assigned by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, when they toyed with the word ensignar, that is, to impose signs of order and command (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011). After all, in the current scenario, public schools and universities have been babbling.

Method: fabulation

The text presented here is a fabulation. We write creating characters, creating life where the forms of control make themselves too loud. Therefore, they resist. We fabulate as school life seems to decrease the degree of activity of the bodies and the affective contact between the ways of life. We fabulate and, however, do not make fantasy, fables as does Esopo. We fabulate by creating an intimate relation with reality, for we know it well. We are teachers in schools, we have friends in military schools and, for a while, we have exchanged experiences and ideas with these teaching spaces. However, this does not seem to be our only option. In the beginning of 2019, when the previous minister of Education asked schools to record a video singing the national anthem, an internet video of military schools’ students recording, dancing and singing the anthem in a funk beat went viral. This was a rupture point with what was possible in a military school. From there, the compossible realities of this space multiplied. Because of that, fabulation made itself immediate and necessary to our writing. Because of that, it has been demanded of us an unparalleled severity. Never ever we would be allowed to simply tell a story, however, at the same time, we would never allow ourselves to fall into the scientism of an apathetic language. We fight the militarization of life, be them bureaucratic, economic, be them theoretical. We proceed with methodological severity to produce a writing that is closer to literature. We contradict the forms of power, and that is why we play with Deodoro da Fonseca and the teacher Bháskara - the teacher that complimented the drumming - in their stories of affective bodies, in their school wanderings. We live these characters and, however, have nothing to do with them. We give them life without ever turning them into our biographies - we have nothing to do with this militarized school space but our willingness to fight (Roseiro, 2019). And we will fight.

Germinal Fights

The goal is evident: to expand the limits of militarization, to make the servitude reach another apex until then unimaginable. Decree 9.465, of January 2, 2019, proposes, to the letter, that the apex of education would coincide with its maximum militarization. Through effect of the strongest surfactants, we would be good teachers and good students only to the point that, clearly, we say Yes, Sir. Could be, effectively, that this education project succeed; could be, to their delight, that civil schools really do collapse faced by the nefarious educational policies, faced by the oddly relevant budget cuts that befell only on the teaching institutions; could be, to our misfortune, that we all have to migrate to the logic of Yes, Sir.

And, if that is the case, we will migrate. We have no shame of saying this: we will migrate as expected. But only that.

Once within that space, our strategies will be others. As did the young Deodoro, the teacher Bháskara and every other misfit and insurgent, we will make of our Yes, Sir a way of laughing, mocking and caring for the other.

In this short period of govern, the announced scene is of a post-apocalyptical recovery, as if we had survived the end of times and, now, a messiah would guide us to a guided life. What they cannot see are the non-messianic escapes, the bodies that, faced by the herd, play sheep only to teach other ways of bleating. That is, perhaps, the prelude of our fight.

If the goal of such an emphatic legislation about the militarization of education is to multiply the servile life - the life taken by a shepherd -, our strategies cannot move away too far from the own herd order. If those schools are created and the surfactants applied that strongly, it is needed that we occupy those spaces. It is not our intent, but perhaps it is our duty.

It is needed to remember that there is no life without fight. And, as teachers from all over Brazil have remembered throughout this year, to us, military becomes to militate. As such, we fight.

If, until May, 2019, 38,3% of the murders registered, that year, in Rio de Janeiro were committed by policemen (Centelha, 2019), it would be naïve of us to assume there isn’t a declared war. The war declaration was such that, in the limit, the minister of Justice and Public Security had the audacity of proposing an alteration to the penal code known as anticrime package, in which security officers could be exempted from punishment in case they reacted from “[…] fear, surprise or violent emotion” (STF, 2019, own translation).

There is and there has always been in the air an ideal of peace that opposes the logic of life itself. The “[…] establishment of an era of peace and sterile abundance where it would no longer be afraid of anything, where the contradictions would finally be resolved and the negative, reabsorbed” (Comitê Invisível, 2016, p. 44, own translation) is naught but another idea of an anesthetized life. A body only agrees entirely with another if neither of them has life. There is and there will always be tension between bodies.

And the tensions can only be solved through clashes, conversations, disputes, discussions, that is, between exchange of affections and ways of producing life. We cannot expect peace because peace does not please us. We expect, instead, being capable of entering a dispute without risking death.

As such, we should prepare ourselves. When the time comes, we will enter the civic-military schools and occupy their corridors, classrooms, courtyards and their pedagogies. Perhaps, being there, we work on the meaning of transforming the insurrections into power, we transform peace into clatter, into ruptures.

In the end, we wish only that the soldiers keep on marching, forever crying out their Yes, Sir! to whoever needs to hear it, giving the more varying tones to their way of answering the world. Because we know that, instead of surfactants, we have surfaced-tones in the schools due to the misfit mil-acting-actions, because it is worth it to invest in the force of error. We speak in our conditions as practitioners of a school where things are never where we think they should be. In school, the sound that echoes through classrooms, corridors, courtyards, courts, kitchens and libraries is an owner-less sound, which creates the beat that inspires the more open bodies to the musicality of life, the Fonseca-bodies, Bháskara-bodies, misfit-bodies.

Marcha soldado, cabeça de papel quem não marchar direito vai preso no quartel o quartel pegou fogo a polícia deu sinal acode, acode, acode a bandeira nacional⁵.

A song of time-close, created out of schools thought of as quarters that, until recently, we thought had been burned by the forces of democracy. We thought, until now, to have cried a sonorous no! to a project of meritocratic society masked by the slogan of Order and Progress. Memories of school, demilitarized lives.

The fire that burned the quarter and saved the national flag did not destroy the obsession of those who did not support the insurrectional force of those that are born here and now. The schools, the students, the misfit teachers say Yes, Sir!, unsaying everything they say. Living beings of these spaces full of life manipulate lyrics and make echo words, silences and whispers uncatchable to those that believe they hold the power of deciding, prescribing, threatening, frightening and punishing. We know how to trick… how to choke and make collective sounds that cannot be comprehended. Sounds of life.

Referências

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• CAFARDO, Renata. MEC Manda E-Mail para Escolas Pedindo que Cantem o Hino e Leiam Slogan da Campanha. Estadão, São Paulo, 25 fev. 2019a. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://educacao.estadao.com.br/blogs/blog-renata-cafardo/mec-manda-email-para-escolas-pedindo-que-cantem-o-hino-nacional-e-filmem-as-criancas/ >. Acesso em: 19 maio 2019.
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• CARAM, Bernardo. PEC de Guedes Desobriga Poder Público de Construir Escolas. Folha de S. Paulo, São Paulo, 14 nov. 2019. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2019/11/pec-de-bolsonaro-e-guedes-desobriga-poder-publico-de-construir-escolas.shtml >. Acesso em: 14 nov. 2019.
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• 1
  The Escola sem Partido bill was presented by the then capixaba senator Magno Malta. In the project, the proposal is based in the detachment of every ideological bias from the pedagogical work. However, in an attentive reading, it is possible to see that this detachment befalls only on the pedagogical work associated with the left-wing, the process of multiplication of cultures and minority religions and any kind of humanist agenda.
• 2
  The mugentsukuyomi is a type of illusion created by a millennial sage that used the Moonlight as a source of his illusory art. Like this, once the illusion were completed, there would be no way for the people around the world to escape his ability.
• 3
  Own free translation of the song: March little soldier with the paper head / if you don’t march in line, you will be locked in the quarters / the quarters are on fire / the police has signaled / help, help, help / the national flag.
• Editor-in-charge: Beatriz Vargas Dorneles

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  19 Oct 2020
• Date of issue
  2020

History

• Received
  23 Nov 2019
• Accepted
  08 July 2020