How the School Historically Builds Freedom with Discipline. A Way to Think about the Relationship between Peace and Education

Abstract

In this article three school scenes in Colombia from different time periods are presented: the first decades of the nineteenth century, the second decade of the twentieth century, and the present. Although in the first one is dominated by punishment, the second portrays an incipient student emancipation, and the third represents a violent school, the fact is that all three school scenes show excesses that make it impossible to perceive their underlying reality: they are not the denial of an ideal freedom, but they are evidence of the construction of the kind of freedom that liberalism requires to maintain its validity as a general form of power. The final discussion is more theoretical: if the school has built freedom in practices such as punishment in the past, it can also build peace despite being conflictive, violent and homophobic in the present. It acknowledges that "school does little, but it does something" and if, because of that, the school has built freedoms that are increasingly visible and even overflowing, it will also generate practices and discourses to support better forms of peace. This peremptory question for peace leads the article to conclude with the invitation to embark on a history of education as "exercise" for peace should be the exercise that produces the ability to be peaceful.