Que Universidade?

Por vezes, as minhas reflexões parecerão um pouco crípticas. Frequentemente, limito-me à citação, sem explicar o que a mesma me suscita em termos de reflexão pessoal. Também me cruzo com textos de uma clareza extrema, aquilo que em bom português se pode designar por "chamar os bois pelos nomes". Um desses autores é Neil Postman. O acaso fez-me vir à mão um dos seus livros ("Amusing ourselves to death") e acabei por estar a ler presentemente um outro, cuja referência estará no fim da entrada. Postman usa uma linguagem simples, mas clara, para identificar erros educativos comuns, um pouco à maneira de quem vê de fora uma actividade que, de facto, desenvolveu toda a sua vida. Algumas das suas intuições são auto-evidentes, naquele estilo do "como é que não pensei nisto antes?". Mas ele destaca, em geral, que o "comboio" educativo tem uma inércia imensa e que é muito difícil desviá-lo do rumo, mesmo quando a evidência dos resultados indica que o rumo está errado.
Podemos concordar ou não com Postman. Não acho que possamos ficar indiferentes aos desafios que nos coloca.

[...]
How could such schools be created? Any plan would, of necessity, have its origin in a new way of educating teachers, because it would require a refocusing of the purpose of teaching. As things stand now, teachers are apt to think of themselves as truth tellers who hope to extend the intelligence of students by revealing to them, or having them discover, incontrovertible truths and enduring ideas. I would suggest a different metaphor: teachers as error detectors who hope to extend the intelligence of students by helping them reduce the mistakes in their knowledge and skills. In this way, if I may put it crudely, teachers become less interested in making students smart, more interested in making students less dumb. This is not a question of semantics. Or, if it is, it is not "mere" semantics. It is, in fact, the point of view taken by those who practice medicine and law. Physicians do, of course, have a conception of what is good health, but their expertise resides in their ability to identify ill health and to provide remedies for it. That is why, upon being consulted, their first and most important question is, What's wrong?
The same may be said of lawyers, whose expertise resides in their ability to identify injustice and to pursue methods to eliminate it. In fact, to be realistic about the matter, for most physicians, good health is defined as the absence of illness; for most lawyers, justice is defined as the absence of injustice. Physicians and lawyers, we might say, function as painkillers. The good ones know how to relieve us of illness and injustice. I am suggesting the role of painkiller for teachers whose purpose would be to relieve students of the burdens of error—in their facts, their inferences, their opinions, their skills, their prejudices.
[...]
(op. cit., pp. 120-121)

Neil Postman (1996). The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. Vintage Books, Nova Yorque (209 pp.)