Una filosofía de la relación educativa: mediación existencial, transmisión y testimonio

Abstract

This paper proposes a philosophical reflection on education understood as the encounter and experience of a transmission between generations in the filiation of time. From a pedagogical point of view, such an encounter implies both an act of presence between adults and young people and the transmission of something from one place to another on a generational scale. The thesis of this paper is that presence and transmission are today in a crisis that affects the very notion of education, what it means to educate and to be educated. In a world like ours, with a growing sensitivity towards what is called inclusion or inclusiveness, the great excluded, from the point of view of a certain philosophical and theoretical reflection —something that is proposed in these pages—, is precisely that relationship of presence between adults and young people. For the educational task consists in transmitting responsibility as a central element of the adult condition, one that entails assuming certain limits. This transmission is an internalization of the legacy of previous generations and becomes possible when there is the possibility of an encounter, a conversation and a kind of moral transaction between them. Adults transmit to children and adolescents -such is their responsibility- the experience accumulated over time and of which they are, as adults and educators, depositaries and witnesses, although not its owners, and in this act, they put the newcomers in contact with their predecessors more than the previous generations. We will call this a testimonial covenant.