Latin American Education and Its Labyrinths: About Resistances, Insurgencies and Utopias

Abstract

In this article, the labyrinth is used as a metaphor to characterize the Latin American educational reality in its current complexity and its historical conditionings. The objective is to understand these labyrinths' intricacies and contribute to the search for possibilities to construct alternatives that point out ways. The first part of the text references works from literature, the social sciences, and education that reveal the various facets and dimensions of the labyrinth. In the second part, there are identified tasks to help deal with the challenges of the labyrinth: popular education as a place of resistance and the creation of untested feasibilities; the discovery of forgotten and silenced protagonists; education for a critical and solidary cosmopolitanism. The conclusion points to three ingredients of a utopian vision for education: the imagination that affirms the possibility of rising above the possible and seeing the mazes, not as a fatality; the condition of creating projects through which one can act on reality immediately and mediate; and acting with a certain degree of certainty.