Simón Rodríguez and listening at the edge of emptiness:: ontological readings of the school

Abstract

imon Rodriguez created in 1826 a completely new school in the city of Chuquisaca. For the first time in Latin América boys and girls of different castes were included in the same classroom as equals. Throughout his work, Rodríguez refers to this unprecedented school in America under the name of popular education. This school was marked by the deployment of an axiomatic egalitarian principle. Unlike other Latin American school projects whose ultimate goal was, at best, to create certain conditions for equality among the school population, Rodriguez’s school regards equality as its condition of possibility.This paper attempts to think of a particular component of the popular school: the teacher. To do this, the paper is divided in three parts. In the first part, an analysis of the ontological and metaontological categories of Alain Badiou is developed. In this section, the paper briefly discusses the categories of situation, state of affairs, void, and event. In the second part, the reappropriation of these categories by Alejandro Cerletti is presented. This author rereads of Badiou’s categories from an educational perspective. The last part of this paper presents the analysis of the concept of teacher implicit in Simon Rodriguez’s popular school in accordance with the categories discussed in the first two sections. The purpose of this section is to show that the popular teacher is the one who accompanies children in a process of attention focused on listening at the edge of the void.