Si cambiamos US por Perú, vamos a tener un buen panorama de lo que sucede también aquí, donde los programas para la educación “en valores” o de competencias “socio-emocionales” o “blandas”, como los llaman generalmente, suelen ser superficiales y estar desligados de la reflexión profunda que les da sentido. El nombrecito de “blandas” a mi me saca de quicio.

El párrafo de abajo lo tomé de Ann Higgings D’ Alessandro, quien, para mi mucha suerte, fue mi asesora de tesis doctoral, mentora durante todo mi doctorado, y es una de las mejores especialistas en educación moral que conozco. Su texto se llama:  Lawrence Kohlberg’s Legacy: Radicalizing the Educational Mainstream, y es el capítulo dos del libro Kohlberg Revisited, al que me he referido aquí.

Una trata de que esto se entienda, pero estamos demasiado acostumbrados a recetas, programas empaquetados, desarrollo de habilidades superficiales tipo entrenamiento y etc., y por eso resulta, como bien dice Ann, tan difícil de entender una propuesta radical como la de Kohlberg. Aquí el párrafo que quería compartir:

In the US today the myriad prosocial educational interventions, for example, especially those using character and social-emotional learning approaches, have implicit goals of making a better or more mature person; however, a person does not mature or become good without reflective practice. While many of these programs engage students in prosocial activities from conflict resolution to service learning, they do not critically offer moral and value frameworks, thus students do not develop social and political views of social action informed by more fundamental moral thinking. Not teaching critical thinking regarding right from wrong and good from bad while being involved in helping to address solve social ills with others easily leads to confused thinking and emotional responses that alienate students from those they are helping. […] very few prosocial educations theories or programs explicitly consider reasoning as an essential component of prosocial, or even self, development. They focus instead on promoting attitudes and social skills. Even though developing reasoning is a primary learning and curricular goal, the fact that many prosocial approaches do not theoretically tie it formally into their goals reveals a dangerous gap between learning and prosocial goals. This gap perpetuates the split that Kohlberg sought to heal by focusing on development, encompassing learning, as the goal of education. It is not easy for schools to adapt Kohlberg’s radical view that all education is moral education.