El Ciudadano
Original article: Crítica al esencialismo moral: La violencia escolar como señal del sistema
By Fernando Astudillo Becerra
I must respectfully disagree with Cardinal Chomalí’s recent comments regarding violence in schools.
His message on social media, while appealing to the morals and emotions of society, is ultimately oversimplified.
By attributing the root of conflict solely to the «devaluation of the family» and the «degradation of authority,» the Cardinal engages in a methodological individualism that overlooks the material and systemic roots of social crisis.
His brief analysis, though concise, reveals a limited perspective that fails to offer a comprehensive solution, while ignoring the social sin and structural violence inherent in the current neoliberal capitalist model.
The Cardinal’s viewpoint frames violence as an issue of individual will or failures within the private sphere (the family). However, scholars like Slavoj Žižek, in his book On Violence, differentiate between «subjective» violence, such as what is currently seen in schools, and «objective» or systemic violence.
The latter represents invisible violence that is embedded in the functioning of the economic and social system, creating conditions of precariousness, exclusion, and relentless competition that eventually explode within schools.
School violence is not a mere «loss of values» in a vacuum; it is a symptom of a fractured society driven by a system that prioritizes accumulation over human dignity.
Cardinal Chomalí’s text mentions the promotion of «material goods» at the expense of «spiritual» values, yet he fails to address the root cause: the capitalist system.
This issue reflects more than a shift in cultural preferences; it is a system that forces families into survival mode with work schedules that hinder home presence, subjecting individuals to chronic stress.
From the Frankfurt School’s perspective, particularly through Herbert Marcuse’s critique, advanced capitalism generates a «one-dimensional society» where individuals are reduced to mere consumers. Violence in schools reflects a society that teaches that others are competitors for scarce resources, not brothers. The «degradation of authority» condemned by the Cardinal is merely the collapse of social intermediaries in the face of the absolute power of the market.
Respectfully, I believe one of the Cardinal’s major oversights is the commodification of education. In Chile and much of the neoliberal world, education has ceased to be a social right and has become a consumer product. When schooling is viewed as a service to be bought and sold, the formative process loses its ethical and community character.
This is where Paulo Freire’s ideas become essential and glaringly absent from Cardinal Chomalí’s proposal.
According to Freire, education is not a vertical transfer of authority (the «banking model» that seemingly appeals to him as he calls for more authority for parents and teachers), but rather an act of liberation. School violence is also a reaction to an educational paradigm that fails to engage with the realities of the oppressed. If education is merely a means to obtain a qualification for labor market insertion, it forfeits the development of critical and compassionate subjects.
He asserts that «childhood is the residence where one dwells for a lifetime,» a poetic phrase that, in context, reinforces the notion that all is resolved behind closed doors, in the home. This perspective absolves the State and the social fabric of responsibility.
Against this individualistic outlook, critical pedagogy advocates that education is a collective societal commitment. Families cannot be solely responsible for confronting structural violence.
As Frantz Fanon noted, in contexts of systemic oppression, violence is often the tool used by the system to maintain order, which inevitably turns inward on the community when there are no pathways for political transformation.
The critique offered by Cardinal Chomalí is nostalgic and moralizing. By focusing on authority and the traditional family, he sidesteps the fundamental debate: violence is the language of a society that prioritizes capital over life.
A Christian and humanist perspective should demand not just «more authority» but the end of unjust structures that compromise childhood well before they enter the classroom.
School peace will not arise from a restoration of lost hierarchies but from the construction of a community where education is an exercise in freedom and not just another cog in the market machinery.
Fernando Astudillo Becerra
La entrada Critique of Moral Essentialism: School Violence as a Reflection of Systemic Issues se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.
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