The Need to Slow Down Higher Education: Beyond a Centrifugal Entertainment University

Abstract

The birth of the liberal system of education in the Roman Empire and its expansion, after the French revolution through pedagogical naturalism along the paths of Western education, its diversification through the new school movement means the installation from the conjunctural to the structural of a soft pedagogy that, with the emergence of emotional intelligences, infantilises education from the devaluation of discipline, effort and study as an arduous and slow process. To this, after the pandemic, online education intensifies and algorithms appear as agile solutions to accelerate and simplify the teaching-learning processes. The desire to make education profitable means the viralisation and hegemony of neoliberal budgets at all levels of education systems, progressively transforming higher education into theme parks at the service of transnationals where gamification replaces pedagogy and didactics replaces epistemologies, emptying universities of knowledge to turn them into higher institutions of entertainment. Re-reading memory not in order to commune with the past, but to analyse the intentions that founded universities as institutions that hosted slow pedagogies, based on study and discipline to dissolve the discourses ascribed to power and to be sources of contextualised and problematic truths, capable of disputing authoritarianisms' status quo through a dialogue of knowledge necessary for the construction of the imaginary of the community.