Desafios culturais da comunicação à educação

Abstract

This article deals with Jesús Martín-Barbero's concerns on the lack of understanding of the Colombian policy elaboration, on how the communications field can perform when confronted with the challenges Education has to confront to form free citizens that are capable of performing autonomously in society. He discusses the difficulties and, most especially, the inability the school has in order to change its relationship with the production and acquisition of knowledge. The predominant communication model in school is vertical and authoritarian in the teacher-student relationship, while linear and sequential in learning, something that does not allowing it to be open in order to be enriched by the new means of communication languages. He also discards the school's merely acquiring equipment and technologies for the illustrative transposition of contents. The author stresses that the school needs to change the way it relates to the young people, to knowledge and to the society as a whole. These changes involve understanding the centrality the communication processes have - which he denominated as the communicative ecosystem - to capacitate the young people to have a critical mentality, so they can read the world as participant citizens.