In its article “Escuela y Subjetividad”, Álvarez Uría takes some aspects of the biography of Albert Camus to think about the role of school in the construction of possible alternatives before destinies that seem to be inevitable.
The education path of Albert Camus that we introduce shall allow to establish that, under certain institutional strategies and with high expectations of the teacher, the school is an space that opens new vital horizons. Let’s remember that Albert Camus came to become a very famous writer. He comes from a very poor home, of an illiterate family, practically fatherless since very young. In spite of these specifying objectives, he was able to open his path in the world of letters and words. The question that we ask is: How this very poor boy was able to exceed his own material conditionings and turned them into an opportunity? The answer, at least the most part of it, has to be searched in the symbolic role that the school had, and in particular, in the hope of a future that a teacher had in their students of the primary level to which Camus himself attended.
We need to leave the explanations that may mean that an exceptional intelligence of the nature of Camus was the one that took him to exceed in his social path, what was denied due to his vital conditionings of socio-familiar origin. It is not an exceptional intelligence, but an incredible big effort what explains that Camus challenged his destiny of failure, but also in this case, a committed school, represented in the figure of a known education teacher with the companion of the family of the student, which generates the conditions for an alternative path to be developed.
When the school gets democratic, the teacher teaches more to the ones that have less, he trusts in the ones that have the least self-consciousness as a consequence of the social discredit to which they are object to. Precisely, it is the school experience that some schools activate, which better explains how, in not all the cases of education paths, they are re-statements of the starting points.
To think the school as the constructor of subjectivities, and the potential place of the teachers in that, means to identify some sort of possibility of improving the conditions in which the students are developing their paths. The objective aims to confirm one of the most negative consequences of our times: the exclusion and the impossibility generated thereby. Acknowledging the other as the transmission of the voice, offering a mirror through which you can look and from which each one can be active in the search of new horizons, being recognized as a subject holder of expectations,
feelings, with security in the middle of so much uncertainty: That there in no nature in the differences and in the social and education exclusion.
The truth is that for some children of middle classes, there is a continuity between family and school. For the students of common sectors, the school is a different space than the daily life, a place that opens the door to the unknown, to a new world that has been ignored up to that moment, by them as well as by their families. For Camus, school represents a different world than the familiar one, a world of letters and words.
The autobiographic writing of Albert Camus in El primer hombre shows how the
school, under certain institutional circumstances and strategies of subjectivity on
be half of the teachers, can become a creative space. To this respect, writes Camus
over his school: Not only the avoidance of the family life featured by poverty was offered
but also the fact that in the class of Mr. Bernard, his teacher with capital letters, the school
imposed in them a more essential hunger, for the child than for the man, that is the hunger
for search. In the class of this teacher (Mr. Bernard) they felt for the first time that they
existed and that they were object of the highest consideration: They were judged to be
liable to discover the world. In front of an apparently insignificant life, the students
gained importance at school. The teacher named them, gave them voice.
The difference between a teacher and a professional officer of
education cannot be better defined than in the words of Camus. The
professional transmits knowledge, involved and in series, while the teacher
communicates everything about an implication in the search of the truth.
Camus very well states, that the class with Mr. Bernard was always
interesting for the only reason that the students recognized that he
passionately loved his work.A poor school, located in a poor town, and to
which the children of the
poor attended. It had a teacher capable of encouraging the hunger to
discover. Camus was
perfectly aware that, after his time at school, nothing was going to be the same. The teacher threw him to the world, when he made all the efforts for his family to send him to
the Liceo, undertaking at the same time the responsibility of being away from home to
even make more important discoveries. For the children like Albert Camus, the Liceo was
something denied, since it was expected that after the school, they have to directly come to
begin working, to the tasks related to the family support.
This teacher, in spite of this family self-exclusion against the continuity of the
studies, insisted with the grandmother, and at the same time, devoted many hours and
days out of the normal school schedule, to prepare these children for the Liceo.
Albert Camus cannot be more specific over the place that represented the school
and this teacher that encouraged him, before the material misery that he had in his life: At
school, the children of popular sectors found «[...] what they did not find at home, where
poverty and ignorance turned life tougher, more isolated, more closed in itself, misery is a
place of strength with no elevated bridge.»
If there was something transmitted by this teacher to the students, was the idea that
they were worthy of discovering the world, this other world, different than the one of their
daily life.
There was no magical form to pass on the passion for knowledge. Each teacher
builds his own formulae in the interpersonal gathering that is produced in the classroom.
Between the famous and well known “El primer hombre” by Albert Camus and the little
Albert that comes to school, there is with no doubt a long distance, but in the passage
between the famous intelligence and the fascinated child by the snow he finds at
school and with that, his teacher and friend.
Thus, Camus writes in November of 1957 to Mr. Bernard, after receiving the
Nobel: «I have received a very big honor, that I have not searched for nor asked for.
However, when I heard the news, I thought first in my mother and then in you. Without
you, without your kind help to the poor boy I was, without your teaching and example,
nothing of this would have happened. It is not that he gives too much importance to an
honor of this type. But at least it offers the opportunity to tell you that what you have been
and continue being for me, and to confirm your efforts, your work and the generous heart that you devoted to, continue with life and always alive in one of your
little scholars, that, in spite of the years, has not ceased to be your thankful student. »
The biographical narration of Camus acquires a specially emotive vibration when
he reaches the abandonment of school. It reads over the visit of the teacher to the family
of the young Camus to convince the grandmother of the child that he should take the
selection exam that was the entrance to the Liceo. Again, we found the teacher in the
morning of the exam before the door of the Liceo, closed yet, surrounded by his four little
scared students. Together with the previous recommendations to the exam, Mr. Bernard
stated: «Please do not be nervous —repeated the teacher—. Read very carefully the
statement of the problem and the subject of the writing. Read it many times. You have
time». In this stage of transition, the teacher was also playing a role of his own destiny as
a guide of followers.
However, the entrance to the Liceo meant the farewell to the town and the school,
the farewell of the teacher and the friend, the fact of being far away from the protective
world of the family: «[...] with this success, he has just been removed from the innocent
and warm world of the poor, a world closed in itself like an island in the society, but in
which misery is the family and the solidarity, to be ready to be thrown to a non known
world that it wasn’t his, in which he could not believe that the teachers were wiser
than his teacher of his own heart that knew it all, and from that moment onwards he was
going to learn, understand with no help, become a man without the help of the only man
that helped him, he had to grow and study alone, to the highest price.» In fact, the scholar
success meant a point of no return. (Extracted article: "La experiencia escolar inclusiva como respuesta a la exclusión", Carina kaplan)
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