SCHOOL, DIALOGUE GLOBAL COMPACT OF EDUCATION
Alejandro Alberto Mesa Mejía
Starting today, we will publish weekly a series of reflections that enrich the pedagogical literature on the Global Education Pact. Its authors are the students of the on-line course that is being carried out in the Pious Schools of America.
Pope Francis’ proposal for a Global Education Compact is based on recognizing that no education is without dialogue. If anything enhances the school as an essential institution in the contemporary world, it is its dialogical character. This reality is lived and should be lived at the micro level (within each classroom) and the macro level (within the framework of institutional relations).
But what are we talking about when we use “dialogue”? It is a faculty of human beings that allows them to be in “permanent interaction with their peers through language understood as an ethical act, as action, as dynamic communication, as energeia” (Bubnova, 2006, p. 100). Dialogue implies the exchange of meanings by several subjects on an equal footing and naturally assumes their own differences. All subjects who participate in a dialogue deploy and concretize a specific condition (ethical, social, cultural, among others), find an open space to express what they are and what they embody, and participate in the possibility of building agreements or even welcoming the other amid dissent.
The school is a privileged space for dialogue, as we said before. Pope Francis, with the call of the Global Education Pact, proposes to schools to integrate their educational communities around seven fundamental commitments: Put the person at the center, listen to the younger generations, Promote women, Make the family responsible, Open to welcome, Renew the economy and politics, Care for the typical home (Congregatio de Institutione Catholica, 2019). In this sense, in addition to the importance of these seven commitments, there is the opportunity to recover the school as a dynamic and pluralistic institution and as the place where the diverse discourses of the people who are part of it converge. It is up to the school to activate its convening capacity to become a genuine network of wills that leads all educational community members to feel co-responsible for its mission, sharing experiences, resources, purposes, and good practices.
This implies transcending sporadic meetings or spontaneous talks between protagonists. The magnitude of the task Pope Francis has called implies deploying all the characteristics and conditions of an actual institutional dialogue. The subject of conversation is the Global Education Pact; now, it only remains for each school to guarantee and foster the necessary conditions to activate dialogue: give voice to the interlocutors, open spaces for encounter, motivate the free, transparent, and respectful exchange of meaning, welcome differences and manage agreements, train the participants and guide them to action.
A dialogue of such scope is only possible through organized action, hence the importance of proposing a dialogical educational project within the school that facilitates the creation of the necessary conditions for the members of the communities to appropriate the charism and enrich it with their participation, define common objectives, generously make available the resources that their role implies and make the decision to walk together in the mission of educating.
Putting the person at the center, listening to the younger generations, promoting women, giving responsibility to the family, opening up to welcoming, renewing the economy and politics, and caring for the typical home are areas of formation in which the school can contribute much to society.
For this to happen, they must be assumed not as just another content to be transmitted through the teacher’s discourse but as existential components that are alive and active in the relationships established within the school. The Global Education Pact is a way to transform reality, and a dialogic school can play a central role in making the Pact socially and culturally relevant in our countries.
