The courage to read and write in Brazilian schools

Abstract

Do we need courage to read and write in Brazilian schools today? What are the effects of reading and writing at school, in relation to managing the conducts in times when schools, teachers, and books have been under attack? Based on such problematization, considering the Foucauldian studies on the genealogy of subjectivation, this article, as a theoretical essay, starts from the perspective that ethos is the point of articulation between telling the truth and conducting oneself and the others. Inspired mainly by Foucault’s ‘The Courage of Truth’, a thematic approach has been taken to ask about the ways of reading and writing in school today. To this end, I think about the modes of veridiction that operate in the present when associated with reading and writing practices, as well as about the strength of the other that crosses us when we read and write at school. Without searching for any easy or anachronistic application, I reflect upon the composition and strength of teaching in the present intertwined by some specific characteristics of parrhesia, by taking such an analytical tool, and still considering reading and writing practices and the figure of the master as an act of courage. This point of view is connected to a critique in our present, advocating to democratize the access to and the exercise of such practices as possible exercises of a certain care of the self.