EDUCATION, CHILD REARING AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Abstract

Health professionals often teach about child rearing based on traditional and transmissionist educational models that prescribe knowledge and meanings without considering whether families have the means to carry out the type of child rearing they value. This article discusses the meanings that child rearing has for a group of caregivers in a settlement inhabited mainly by people forcibly displaced by the armed conflict in Colombia as a way to go forward in understanding child rearing education. This work is a partial product of an action research and education project based on the strategy of thematic investigation circles. The analysis of the findings from the perspective of justice identified three areas of injustice that caregivers face as they undertake child rearing: structural-material, symbolic and cognitive. Addressing health education initiatives, including child rearing education, from a social justice perspective, entails helping people to overcome the unjust conditions faced by the subaltern population. It is also essential that health professionals learn from the students with whom they interact in order to develop more relevant education that aims to promote individual and social transformation.