Amilkar A. Brunal
When asked by REMO journal in 2012:
"Is it valid that a magazine specializing in the dissemination of educational issues is also dedicated to the treatment of social and economic problems? Is REMO a means of political analysis?"
I took advantage of this academic provocation at the time to assert what I do not know if many people share in the academic world of Guidance:
"Of course we must as Guidance professionals, dedicate ourselves to the study and treatment of the social and economic problems of our time which not only our students and Counselors experience, but ourselves, not only as social beings, but as professionals that we face day by day in our daily work, the effects of the models of social development in what we live.
An Guidance devoid of this level of analysis would be no more than a technical discipline in which the naive and intuitive counseling is applied in a tone of popular wisdom that our grandmothers, with the best intention, have historically performed.
I consider that the study of the Subject-Society-School relations (which is obviously not exclusive to sociology), cannot simply be an important chapter of our work, but the fundamental philosophical-praxiological essence for the understanding of situations as complex as the construction of life projects in this contemporary society [called by some "Modern or postmodern" and by others with whom I share their position (Ulrichk Beck) risk society or society in which the second, third and fourth industrialization are juxtaposed] in the that the overwhelming and impoverishing neoliberal policy is increasingly accepted, implemented through the normalization of hourly job insecurity, reflected in the multiple poverty (Max-Neef) of the families of most of our public or official school students, translated into precarious living conditions and probable futures.
It is for all this that an Guidance model that is called "Latin American", cannot evade the component of community life, as a fundamental axis of interaction with the educational community it serves. However, political approaches of the self-called socialist-communist left are NOT proposed here, which has shown in sister countries such as Cuba and Venezuela that the people reject any hyper-controlling totalitarian intervention of social life and equally radical and overwhelming of freedoms and human rights.
Nor could we make an apology for the savage capitalism that we suffer in most of our countries. Much less does one go to the principles of liberation theology that at the time gave their answers to the problems of depressed societies such as those we know in our daily work.
We have proclaimed several times in “OrientAcción” journal, the search for humanizing and communitarian, communalist, or community models, without any other weapon than transcendental human action in our field, which allows us to work from critical pedagogies, a construction of meaning of life in community, such as models such as “Ubuntu” of pan-Africanist movements and the well-known Abya-Yala model, or Suma Kuamsay (Good Living) proclaim: Live in harmony with the nature to which we belong and on which we depend to be able to build a life social in community (although it seems redundant), transversalized in the micro social, at least by the principles of Empathic Leadership and Alterity-Assertive (proposed in the glossary of our journal “OrientAcción”) and in the social mezzo, by principles of ethically economics- sustainable (fair trade), aesthetic (harmonious), supportive and synergistic, determined by the community, giving priority to respectful, fair production , rational and autochthonous, a principle widely explained by the economists of the "Human Scale Development" theory.
Transcendental Human Action in Educational Guidance
But what corresponds to us beyond individual commitment as citizens? What actions are typical of our professional work? Obviously the welfare position of distributing food, giving away used clothes, etc., which can be very appropriate for voluntary, merciful or empathetic citizens, No Governmental Organizations(N.G.O.s) or other types of social foundation-type organizations (which somehow try to close the social gaps that states have stopped covering, many times due to political corruption and / or mismanagement of public resources, without discounting the brutal weight of the external debt of our countries, in many cases immoral and unpayable), it may continue to be necessary and relevant in our communities, however obviously, that cannot be our role.
Social mobilization, in these cases, we leave it to those who correspond: the social and union leaders to whom we deeply appreciate the working conditions obtained after decades of joint struggle in public squares and in the streets. Nor do I think that is the role of Educational Guidance. This is not the invitation presented here, nor is this the invitation to interfere in the houses, returning old models badly imported from social work and badly implemented in the Guidance of the 80s and 90s, supplanting the work of the official entities that correspond to intervene or mediate in the domestic-family sphere. Guidance in other cases has also supplanted clinical psychology, (incidentally, playing a rather mediocre role by the way), in the search for its own identity. The same has happened with pedagogy, when the Counselor replaces the teacher in his classroom with no better results.
I propose here to work mainly and in a decisive way for the empowerment and psychosocial strengthening of the families with whom we work, from an intersectorial and inter-institutional perspective, critical (recognizing that the individualistic perspective in educational guidance is necessary but insufficient), which facilitates them generate social awareness, understood all this as the recognition of themselves, as social beings capable of transforming and transforming their circumstances transitionally, in an ethical-sustainable, synergistic-supportive, resilient and anti-fragile way, regardless of their difficult basic living conditions . It is this, the work that we consider transcendental in Guidance since it obviously affects from the individual to all known forms and levels of society
These are the reasons why, in this edition, in the midst of the greatest pandemic in recent times, we bet on various Reflection-Action articles, presented by colleagues of the highest academic and human level, who make us proud and exalt the field by demonstrate that their proposals in the areas of General Guidance, Vocational / professional and professional Guidance, Family Guidance, are not reflected in a distant desk, but in the heart of the work committed to the communities to which we we must to serve.
This is the right moment to thank and acknowledge the totally selfless and voluntary work of all of us who make this means of expression and dissemination possible. Thanks a lot
Amilkar A. Brunal
