"Education is a way to change the world". This phrase, written on the walls of a school, reflects how teaching can change social reality. However, throughout the history of this area, multiple challenges and mechanized ways of learning were established, which were confused with students' true interests. In contemporary times, with the digital age and the emergence of new problems, the youth protagonism emerged as a propeller for improving education and training more socially conscious citizens, deviating from the previously established pattern.
By: Fernando Cafe
Before, whiteboard, paper, pen, silence, and obedience made the school an environment hostile to individualities. Thus, the thinking was neglected and replaced by repeating information, especially in countries with low educational investments. Currently, repeating information does not become so attractive amid technology; therefore, new ways of teaching have emerged. Student unions, robotics, debate, proactivity, and, especially, innovation re-signify the role of the school student and make teaching something cyclic, non-linear, or robotic.
In Brazil, where education is systematically neglected, teacher Paulo Freire's pedagogy has focused on a new form of teaching to revolutionize part of the country's schools. One example is the Pernambucano Gymnasium (Recife, Brazil), whose educational indexes expanded after the establishment of practices of youth protagonism. Thus, a protagonist school becomes an open environment for innovation and the construction of responses amid the adversity that is imposed today. That is, it promotes a space in which one teaches to think and to question and, from this, build answers.
In the last decade, actions like these have expanded worldwide and should be encouraged to build a more active and conscious society of its role in reality. In this sense, the door that education opened may have found a practical and revolutionary key as its main component in protagonism.