N. 37 - Mythographies of education

Myth is generally considered a fantastic narrative that, in its transmissibility, proposes a multiplicity of interpretations of the event, always referring - this is one of its characteristics - to elements that are constantly repeated.

Far from considering myth as a predominantly 'negative' discourse ('myth rests in itself', as Karoly Kerényi used to repeat), there is a temporal permanence of some focal points which, in their explicit or implicit dialectics, generate a constellation of interpretations, often left to the 'fashions of the time'.

There are, therefore, different 'mythologies' that have created symbolic imaginations that, in turn, have been stratified in what was once called the 'collective imaginary', and that provide an almost static reception of the “cultural objects' with which one deals in everyday life. In this case, the boundary between myth and ideology becomes so blurred that the stratification of meaning of interpretation seems to become impregnable, while the very experience of what remains (the mythical figure in its representative multiplicity, precisely) goes through the symbolic transformation of social meanings.

Why the 'myth' in education, or rather the identification of certain mythographies on which education has fed and continues to feed?

Because there is, on the one hand, a permanence of mythographic structures in education, through the constant repetition over time of themes and topics. On the other hand, education lives on (and through) its myths and the mythologies of its "schools", its discourses and its protagonists, which becomes (also) the reproposition of a past often in clear contrast with the reality of things.

 

Key words: repetition, permanence, imagination, cultural object, ideology

 

Publication: beginning of May 2023
Submissions deadline: December 10th 2022
Journal approval: within January 10th 2023
First peer review’s outcome: within February 20th 2023