Redeeming education- Luckesi

Biography

Carlos Cipriano Luckesi, born in February 23, 1943 (age 80 years), Charqueada, São Paulo, Brazil, is a
recognized author in the field of educational assessment. Several of his works are references on the
subject of learning assessment. Luckesi has a degree in Philosophy, a bachelor's degree in Theology, a
Master's degree in Social Sciences, from the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences, from the
Federal University of Bahia and a PhD in Education: Philosophy and History of Education, from the
Catholic University of São Paulo. He is currently a post-retired Professor at the Postgraduate Program at
the Faculty of Education (FACED) at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).

Published books

Among the various works published, those on the topic of assessment stand out: Teaching practice and
assessment (1990), Assessment of school learning (1995), Assessment of learning at school (2003),
Assessment of learning: component of the pedagogical act ( 2011). In addition to the topic of evaluation,
the author has other publications focusing on Philosophy, Philosophy of Education and Research
Methodology1. The biggest challenge facing educational systems today is fulfilling their social role of
integrating the subject into the society of which they are a part. This task is increasingly difficult to
become a reality, as the culture of educational teaching and assessment practices is still predominantly
based on models that end up favoring a system of classification and measurements, without focusing on
the teaching and learning process.

Education as the redemption of society

The redemptive tendency conceives society as a set of human beings who live and survive in an organic
and harmonious whole, with deviations from groups and individuals who remain on the margins of this
whole, that is, society is naturally composed of all its elements, integrating the new elements, which are
found at its margin, as it maintains and conserves society, integrating the individual into the social
whole.

Education as a social instance that is focused on shaping the personality of individuals, developing their
skills and conveying the ethical values necessary for social coexistence, harmoniously integrating
individuals into the social body. Education would thus be an instance almost external to society, as, from
outside of it, it contributes to its permanent order and balance.

Education in this sense has as its meaning and purpose the adaptation of the individual to society. It
must reinforce social ties, promoting social cohesion and ensuring the integration of all individuals into
the social body. In this context, education assumes a significant margin of autonomy, as it must
configure and maintain the conformation of the social body. Instead of receiving interference from
society, it is society that interferes, almost absolutely, in the destinies of everything social, curing its ills,
this is a way of understanding the relationship between education and society.Education could be at the
service of a project to liberate the majority within society; Within capitalist society, it will not be simple
for teachers and educators to carry out this project.

It only reproduces the model of society it serves, the current model; ideology “stuffs” the masses with
the role they must play in class society: exploited, agent of exploitation, agent of repression or
professionals of ideology;

Education as a dialectical instance, which serves a project, an ideal of society; Education must guarantee
workers the best quality education possible.v

Non-critical theory of education, according to Demerval Saviani, as it does not take into account the
critical contextualization of education within the society of which it is part; Representative: Comenius,
“Didática Magna” (1657) - “through the education of children and young people, education will be
redeemed”

Conception of evaluation beyond authoritarianism

Assessment of school learning is a means and not an end in itself. The predominant school practice
today takes place within a model that presupposes education as a mechanism for the conservation and
reproduction of society, with authoritarianism being a necessary element to guarantee this social model,
using the practice of evaluation manifested in an authoritarian way. Conversely, it is essential to position
evaluation at the service of a methodology that understands and is concerned with education as a
mechanism for social transformation.

We live under the bourgeois model of society, in which power is centralized and hierarchical. The exams
are classificatory, that is, they classify students as passed or failed and exclude a large proportion of
students, establishing a grading scale from zero to ten. It is a selective and exclusionary method. In this
sense, what Luckesi states:

The current practice of school assessment stipulates the function of the act of evaluating the
classification and not the diagnosis, as it should be constitutively. In other words, the value judgment
about the evaluated object now has the static function of classifying an object or a historical human
being in a definitively determined pattern. From the point of view of school learning, it could definitely
be classified as lower, average or higher. These classifications are recorded and can be transformed into
numbers and therefore have the possibility of being added and divided into averages (Luckesi, 1999, p.
34).

From this point of view, it is from this perspective that education can redeem society if it invests in new
generations, forming children and young people through teaching, thus achieving an ideal society. This
utopian idea of education as redemption is called “non-critical theory of education”, due to the fact that
it does not take into account the critical contextualization of education. Such an ideological tendency to
redeem education has existed for many centuries, influencing the encyclopedists of the French
revolution and persisting to the present day. In “education as reproduction of society” the author
discusses critical-reproductivist theory, in which it is idealized that education is part of society and
reproduces it. In this trend, education is an element created by society and determined by its economic,
social and political conditions with the aim of building a state-based society focused on the development
and functioning of the capitalist mode of production. The author emphasizes that this trend is not
concerned with offering a proposal for changing society but rather with explaining how it works. This
perception of education considers Marxist assumptions to explain that the school is a state apparatus
that serves to convey the dominant ideology and reproduce it. The focus of reproductive education
would be the constant preparation of generations, as they are the strength of work, thus allowing the
production of the capitalist system not to be affected and to continue functioning. In this way, the new
generations would be educated with a “reproductive culture”, which would become a “social family
inheritance”. Therefore, children of the proletariat are educated to behave to be future workers and
against the background children of the ruling class would be the future privileged bourgeoisie. The
culture and education of this society would also serve to manipulate the working class into accepting
their place and social function, contenting themselves with little and poverty. The school would offer
those from the lower class the possibility of reading, writing and counting with the aim of qualifying
them for work in the means of production.

Other philosophers who pioneered redemptive philosophy.

Pestalozzi

He understood that learning was a complex task that depended on internal - psychological - factors of
the child. According to Soëtard (2010, p. 73), Pestalozzi stated that: “I try to psychologize human
instruction; I try to put it in accordance with the nature of my spirit and with that of my situation and my
circumstances.”

The look at the child's individualism comes from the philosophical influences that guided Pestalozzi's
work. Cambi (1999, p. 414, emphasis added) draws attention to the period of revolutions (end of the
18th century and 19th century) with a focus on the cultural revolution “[...] which clearly contrasts with
18th century culture due to its reference to individual and feeling, history, nation, tradition, and the
irrational, against the predominance of 'criticism' and 'reason.'

”According to him, Romanticism “[...] was considered a truly European movement and deeply influenced
every area of culture: even pedagogy
: “CORTEZ Editora. Sobre notas escolares - distorções e possibilidades - Cipriano Luckesi. 2015.
Disponível em: <http://www.cortezeditora.com.br/sobre-notas-escolares-distorcoes-e-possibilidades-
1457.aspx/p>. Acesso em: 7 jun. 2016.

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soc-educacao/filosofia-da-educacao-luckesi/5955935