Deconstruction: An Educational Strategy

Scientific and technical transformations, founded on an intensification of technology and on the use of this knowledge in processes of production, have brought change of an unaccustomed speed to the end of this century. If we want to ensure that development figures amongst these many and varied changes, we find ourselves faced with the task of redefining both nature-culture relationship and the social relationships that human beings construct.

The globalisation that has reorganised the world and its understandings has made obsolete explanations that for a long time have formed part of the framework of society as "scientific truths." This process of making explanations relative - official explanations and thought, as well as critical ones - has created a vacuum of action, comprehension and practice that calls for a revitalisation of human thought and work. Above all, it calls for the creation of processes that allow all of us (those who are in favor of globalisation and those who are not) to be able to change in the midst of change.

To this end, this text offers a reflection on a strategy that has been taking shape in Latin America, in educational processes of the widest scope: amongst teachers, youth, women, monks and nuns, and community leaders. This strategy carries on the critical tradition of popular education on our continent and unites it with the experience of deconstruction, which came about in other geographical environments and disciplines, creating a hybrid that hopes to arrive at a reconstruction of thought and critical action in these times of neoliberal globalisation.