The Pedagogy of Overcoming for everyone means that everyone has the right to overcome the challenges inherent to life on earth. This is the initial foundation of my thesis presented for the doctorate in education *1. This is the “Principle of Overcoming”. This point comes from an intimate force inherent to life itself and needs to receive support, encouragement, and systems of education leadership.
The overcoming principle must be followed by a “plan”. which establishes a connection between “Sources of Happiness”.
This means that, no matter what the situation is, it will be essential to connect the moments of the present with perspectives of happiness, creating these moments, that is, happy moments, within the circumstances experienced.
I remember going through tough times, being admitted to public hospitals and undergoing surgeries every three weeks.
So, over seven months, I was able to experience happy moments playing with paper airplanes and observing their flights from the windows of the 9th-floor hospital; I also played button football games on a small table in the ward and always listened to exciting programs through a portable radio that gave me access to lively radio stations that brought me positive waves.
And it was each and every day, listening to leading radio broadcasters of the time, such as Barros de Alencar and Vicente Leporace, among others, active in the 60s. Through the plan, I developed “Strategic Content” for overcoming challenges.
So, through it, we can create the Games of Life and participate in them applying the Four Sacred letters which come into play here: L.L.E.A which stands for – Love, Labor, Ethics and Aesthetics, vital elements of the arts in general, Music, Poems, Science that allow transformation of life into visible fruits of Labor with ethics and aesthetics. It´s quite factual that where the love that can be extracted from within, brings us the powerful dignity of self-esteem. This step leads to the next factor which´s “Overcoming Procedures”: Learning, Believing, Creating, Inspiring /admiring.
The main role of educators, resides in form of Friendships, Neighbors, Philanthropy Organisations, Communities, and artists.
We are inspired by special human beings, who make us forecast what we can be one day, I mean, targets of the world’s admiration.
At this point, the value that leads to transform moments, each act into real “attitudes”, where we replace Victim by Protagonists, where we rescue the pure sources of our Inner Children and the curiosity of being able to create a life where the circumstances could have exterminated it.
Enlightened beings like Edgard Morin´s words guide us: “We need to be educated towards uncertainties”.
Paulo Freire, from his part, teaches us the “Pedagogy of Hope” and Victor Frankl says that “Human beings can overcome all challenging conditions, if they find a meaning where “ life that is worth living for”.
Boris Cirulnik, in turn, points that around 35% of children are born with relationship difficulties and 5% under other huge difficulties.
Overcoming which of these difficulties, requires education from birth, involving “Candor, Inclusion, Confirmation and Presence”.
While facing traumatic aspects, catastrophes, tragedies and accidents, we need to consider five conscious areas of leadership in the processes, which are: Rescue, Welcome, Re- educate, Reinsert and Release.
Rescue is what has to be done within the tragic situation experienced and should be followed by Reception, two exemplary aspects about the recent tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul, and many others examples experienced.
From then on, it´s mandatory the re-education for the New Life, accepting that nothing will be the same as before.
Re-education needs to lead the person or society towards reinsertion into the works to be carried out and, once having Re-Insertion well carried out, it needs to be freed so that allows to create and live new lives after all life adaptations. Suffering, as an initial shock, should lead us to the inner transformation with affection.
Creative power manifests itself as an art where we can visualise a new wealth where there was only pain;
I´m relating to people who bring us meaning to the world, to the life. Therefore, it is the core of the Overcoming Educator the guidance based on combined metrics offering rationality to progress. And as always, in all processes of overcoming, there are extreme needs for liberation so that dependence aren´t established and doesn´t impede each individual’s leadership over themselves, as well as overcoming endless repetitive historical suffering.
Therefore, It´s important to diagnose, under a ken eye, the objective of Pedagogy of Overcoming, the “values” with which the person acts in the world, or in a particular society.
Overcoming is based on the principle of its possibility, hand in hand with the aesthetic and ethical creative forces, as well defined by the philosopher Makiguchi: “The Good, the Beautiful and the Useful”.
Understanding this scale and hierarchy of values, alongside the diagnosis of “human skills x attitudes”, will serve as illumination for a trajectory that will be beyond physical and material reconstructions, I mean, after Rescue and Reception.
Re-education, to be successful, will require the above points. I´d exemplify what maestro João Carlos Martins told me: “When I abandoned the gift that God gave me, nothing else worked; After trying other areas, I returned to my gift as a pianist and became a conductor. Music won!”.
In this way, Overcoming takes on powerful proportions when we create the awareness that there is a “viable unprecedented thing to be accomplished and that we need to do right now what, if is not done at the moment, won´t done in the future” (Paulo Freire).
This powerful awareness emerges with I call “Limit Act” that means: When it becomes unacceptable under any circumstances, it´s the time the situation needs to be overcome.
In my life experience, at the age of 15, still a teenager, I decided on my own Limit Act: I would never return to hospitals to undergo lots of corrective face plastic surgery. My Limit Act was to definitively accept my burnt face as it had been after a domestic accident.
From that moment on, Music, studies, true friends, Literature, and Work took over my destiny. I call it in English “Myself Turni9ng Point”).
Overcoming can and should be taught. It must be the key target of Pedagogy, and the more: we need to prepare children, even at a young age, for the inexorable future struggles of life, the better way we´ll be developing human society.
We need Overcoming Educators, not only in schools, but also in companies, associations, politics, towns, neighbourhoods, communities, media, national and world leaders. and, without a doubt, within each family, where the “Uterine Intimate” is established.”
And, if there´s a lack of it, may the “Intimate of the Neighborhood ” or the “Intimate of the community” be present, where, one day, we´ll transform the Earth into a Single Source of Love for everyone, just because the act of loving means perfecting forever.
*1 (Doctoral thesis: For a “Pedagogy of Overcoming” presented at the Advanced Education Program of the Universidad de la Empresa.
Read the full thesis here.
