Educators and the uses of concepts:

articulations between education, law, politics and language

Abstract

This article envisages the hypothesis that educators behave as inventors of the future. This happens because they systematize knowledge to be able to profess it and, in this way, build connections between past, present and future in a creative way. To explain this proposal, the article seeks to understand how educators use concepts as interpreters/observers to explain and apply them to the temporal contexts they belong. They actions are effectively creative in making sense of the past, in a posture very close to what Hayden White visualized from his theory of metahistory. And this phenomenon is the effect of the inexorable cognitive partiality of any interpreter. The article analyses, the conditions between the possibility of using concepts, revealing that any concept, to be recreated in a new temporal dimension, will suffer interference from subjectivities added by its interpreters, always interested, always politically active. Contrary to what common sense postulates, concepts do not come from the past, but are recreated, gaining specific conjunctural autonomy from the moment they are reinserted into a practical political life. If educational practice is based on subjectivities, beliefs, expectations of world, it is sustainable that its effects are very close to the effects derived from rights, as rights also creates social expectations. If the production of subjectivities depends on language, it is up to educators, as observers/interpreters of social values, to select, interpret and make rhetorical use of semantic memories, that is, of concepts. This is because for the systems theory, second Raffaele de Giorgi, memory is considered a function and not something that could be keep or that would be expected somewhere to be accessed. The article used a speculative critical methodology based on a bibliographical review.