Subjectivity, Freedom and Education. Reflections from a Situated Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to make a critical reflection on the notions of subjectivity and freedom from a situated as well as a pedagogical-ontological and political perspective.
What subjectivity can take place in Argentine and Latin American classrooms, schools and institutions, and what kind of freedom can be imagined are questions that require an imaginative effort, and therefore, a certain conceptualization.
The issue of freedom is approached here with the warning that it is usually associated with a welfare that can be described as mere access to employment, consumption, comfort and the exercise of individual rather than collective rights.
In fact, this way of associating freedom and welfare can be understood as part of an uncritical instituted way of making society and of creating a particular anthropological type of individual. The latter, in the current historical-social conditions, finds himself diminished in his possibilities of creating and defining his own welfare. That is to say, a well-being that is the product of the deliberation/decision of the community as a more autonomous and situated social collective, capable of defining its own values, needs and life orientations.
When prevented from creating and questioning their own creations, a supposedly democratic society and individual do not take long to express subjectively and culturally the discontent caused by the impossibility of incarnating and fructifying the seeds of autonomy, orienting them significantly towards a certain libidization of positive freedom as a socio-educational significance.
As a result of this, we consider pertinent to reflect on the discomfort which takes place within the processes of socialization and education, in terms of encounters and real instances which can be understood in their tensions. What happens at the institutional level shapes —and operates in— an educational subjectivity and a language which are both subordinated to a colonial imaginary and individuation, that can be questioned from a situated education that does not split individuals from society or inhibit their powers of creation.