Schools, pandemic, and conversation: notes on useless education

Abstract

This text shares ideas and concerns about the possibility of thinking about education as a community and conversation, the experience of living and thinking about differences (and in it), the power to re-invent yourself, the other, and the world from an ecological perspective and investigative experiences lived in Brazil and Argentina. The narratives produced by teachers from different disciplines and levels of education in an investigative context of conversation trigger reflections on different ways of thinking and giving existence to the educational, as well as some ideas that are almost transparent, of habitual, that diminish the transforming power of the school. We advocate listening as an educational principle alongside uselessness, here thought of as suspending acceleration and the need for unbridled production. The text inquires about the context of the experienced pandemic and its implications for our educational processes, underlining the need to relearn how to think about the school from life and the desire that emerge and take shape inside it, minusculately, through political gestures.