Abstract

VINIEGRA-VELAZQUEZ, Leonardo. Education and liberating knowledge. Bol. Med. Hosp. Infant. Mex. [online]. 2023, vol.80, n.1, pp.15-28.  Epub Feb 27, 2023. ISSN 1665-1146.  https://doi.org/10.24875/bmhim.22000090.

This essay begins with an aphorism on education: "forger of the liberating forces towards the progress of the human condition", in its spiritual, intellectual, moral and convivial connotation in harmony with the planetary ecosystem (dignifying progress). It highlights the coincidence of the highest historical levels of professional education with the extreme degradation of Western culture, which reveals the role of education that favors passivity in the face of knowledge and the prevailing order. The characteristics of passive education are contrasted with those of participatory education based on the development of critical thinking. Critical thinking is defined and the type of educational environment that stimulates and channels it is argued, in particular the complex and integrative thinking alluding to the self projected to who we are and where we are, absent in reductionist science. Liberating knowledge is specified and its purpose defined as "to understand ourselves as fraternal humanity and to find our place in harmony with the infinitely diverse concert of the living world". The theoretical revolutions -now dismissed- being seeds of liberating knowledge that revealed anthropocentrism and ethnocentrisms as "prisons of the spirit" are synthesized. It is concluded that liberating knowledge fulfills the utopian role of signaling the endless walking towards dignifying human progress.

Keywords : Liberating knowledge; Civilizing collapse; Dignifying progress; Critical thinking; Participatory education; Anthropocentrism.