Teacher authority in schooling society

Abstract

In this article we aim to examine how schooling, a kind of mental space, is related to the failure of school. We begin presenting a brief characterization of the historical moment of school’s birth about eight hundred years ago. Then we move to the industrialization era which began approximately two hundred years ago and in which was born a kind of mentality called schooling. After a brief characterization of schooling mentality, we present arguments in order to demonstrate how it contributed to school failure by collapsing teacher’s authority. The death of teacher’s authority, in its turn, creates the possibility of emergence of militarized school. It is concluded that perseverance in the myth of schooling, carried out by spreading the idea that the education crisis is of a technical nature, leads to initiatives to intensify forms of evaluation of the teaching-learning process and the militarization of schools as a way to contain violence. The myth of schooling is an important ally of the ideal of social control of learning.