Against the olympus of understanding

hesitating certainties with Martin Kohan

Abstract

The present text consists of a conversation with Martín Kohan within the framework of a philosophical meeting on education. The quotation, in its literary power, starts from addressing the pedagogical question of the future as an opening of the imagination without it being reduced to a prolongation of the present. Thus the question of the avant–garde emerges and the pedagogies that can accommodate amidst the tensions between equality and intelligibility. In this way, a critical attitude towards total understanding, the seat of underestimation, is woven, while at the same time understanding something is vindicated as the key to educational praxis. The educative–conversational itinerary enhances the power of pleasure in the effort, in what concerns reading and writing, without neglecting the ethical–political problems involved in its protocolization based on «correctness». In this key, the questioning of the group and its tension with the solipsism that prevents the corrosion of structures is opened, as a way of destabilizing certainties and inhabiting not knowing. Towards the end, the political–educational power of failure is explored, as a way of disrupting dichotomies and visualizing that it is with tradition that pedagogical invention can take place.