Poner en el centro de la educación inicial la pedagogía y la política

Abstract

Conservative/neoliberal policies have tried, throughout the history of the initial level, to depoli­ticize it and to empty it of the philosophical, politi­cal and pedagogical debates that have gone through it since its inception. Sometimes, putting the garden in the place of the caretaker and the teacher as the caretaker, giving the teacher as a gardener an aseptic function, considering that the best teacher would be the one who knows very well the stages of child de­velopment and carries out actions so that it is carried out as close as possible to “normality”. This perspec­tive produced a psychologization of the teaching task and the intensification of the neutrality and apolitici­sm of the teaching role, sharpening the dissociation between theory and practice. On the other hand, at times, the focus has been on classroom teaching, re­ducing it exclusively to the technical-instrumentalist dimension of didactics, centralizing the discussions from the initial level to the classroom work modali­ty, necessary and important aspects but not excluding other dimensions such as the political, pedagogical, social and ethical.

In the development of this article we will raise the need to recover the political dimension of the teaching role and the pedagogization of the initial level, under­standing that education is a practice that cannot be neutral: its actions, its methods, its objectives always obey a vision of social subject crossed by its context. In other words, we start from the recognition that all institutional and classroom decisions are based on pedagogical assumptions that are in turn the product of social, cultural and ideological determinants.

We believe it is relevant to address this issue in ho­mage to Dr. Miguel Ángel Zabalza since he has been a reference point in the field of Early Education Peda­gogy, being significant for our own training and the current training of new generations of teachers.