**Education in Confessional Schools According to the Speech of his Students Speech of his Students**

**Education in Confessional Schools According to the** 

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.72497

Diana Marcela Pedraza Díaz Diana Marcela Pedraza Díaz Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.72497

#### **Abstract**

This article comes from the research project "Representations of formal and private education in students of Catholic schools in the metropolitan area." The research analyzed a series of oral speeches, about education in the Catholic school, in students who have been educated for over 9 years in these institutions. The analysis identified representations that young people had built with their learning environment and the values that revolve around his education in schools guided by principles of a religion. A qualitative method was used with ethnographic-semiotic approach that guided the collection of oral statements, through semi-structured interviews and focus groups, analyzed from theories and methods of the pedagogy and semiotics. Thus, an approach was made to the constituent elements (values) of educational practices one of the many training projects and certainly the oldest counts in Latin America in general. It was possible to find answers about the valuation of these phenomena, showing a dichotomy between educating "a good person" to the confessional way and educating a citizen. With these results, it aims to promote reflection about the educational phenomenon from the perspective of the learner, while the theoretical and practical relationship between pedagogy and semiotics is strengthened.

**Keywords:** training, axiology, culture, lifestyles, Catholic education

### **1. Introduction**

The present article analyzes some axiologies on the formal education and the school that the students of Catholic schools in the metropolitan area of Bucaramanga (Colombia) show their imaginary, through oral discourses. This imaginary was constructed from the personal experience that the subjects have had in private confessional institutions, in which they have spent almost all their school life. Hence, the recognition of this value load in the directors involved

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in this educational process, students, starts from a symbolic universe acquired in the world of the life of these centers of formation. This symbolic universe is a set of schemes of interpretation and meaning that are socially institutionalized and recognized by each participant; to be internalized determines the visions of the world of each social subject, their orientation in the context, and finally condition of their actions in everyday life.

teaching and learning today, in which the diversity of concrete cases is assumed as a system of educational alternatives and not as a paradigm that excludes "the educational" from "the noneducational," because in reality, all the training paths, such as the one studied here, are part of the educational in the country, in the pedagogical history of a community, with all its

Education in Confessional Schools According to the Speech of his Students

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.72497

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From different disciplines, the term axiology with the constant convergent around a theory of the systems of moral, logical, and esthetic values has been considered. Therefore, we will not try to retake a reflection around research, studies, current state, or main exponents from the various areas that contribute to the concept; we will return only the relation of the term in the semiotic perspective since it was the basis for the analysis of the discourse of the students. In this way, we must start with the Greimasian conception of the Paris School which rises "the name of axiology to the paradigmatic mode of existence of values … it can be considered that every semantic category is susceptible to be axiologized, due to the thymic category euphoria/dysphoria" [6]. From the above, it can be affirmed that all discourse presents a series of modalizations that contain information about the subject that is enunciating and of the subjects that are enunciated; that is to say, they allow glimpsing what the subject thinks and believes, the judgments of value, and the values that guide their being, doing, thinking, and feeling. These structures comprise systems of values belonging to deep levels of analysis in the semiotics; these are the main constituents of the ideologies and consequently of the stereotypes assumed by different social, religious, or cultural groups. So, it is suggested that "once someone assumes an option on the valuation of a semantic content (a term, such as: life, death, masculine, feminine, wealth, poverty, etc.), have an axiological structure to an ideological structure" [7]. These positions are those that the student formed in the confessional way allows seeing in his discourse around the education that receives and that is the object was the object of study of this investigation.

**3. Catholic formal education in Colombia as a text that activates the** 

Education in Colombia is a cultural phenomenon that has several conceptions, due to the institutional autonomy established by the Colombian educational law. Therefore, the country has to be particular in individual education processes to train young people in each school at the national level. In other words, individual school has a curriculum that meets the basic minimum required by law, but the entire educational project is aimed at a particular mission and vision of the institution. An example of the above is the student profile; each school has its own different profile. However, these autonomous educational practices aim to converge on a cultural community project established in the general law of education of 1994 [8]. This cultural project in terms of semiotics could be considered as elements that correspond to the

differences and particularities.

**2. Approach to the concept of axiology**

**cultural and social life of our country**

In order to arrive at the identification of the axiology that orient and enrich the world of senses of the students in the confessional formation, the investigation started with discursive data provided by youths of the 9th and 11th grade, during the year 2014. The students belonged to three schools who share the Catholic faith but who belong to different orders or congregations. The oral discourses were obtained from the use of an ethnographic methodology for the collection of statements. The research used semi-structured interview techniques and focus groups. The choice of these techniques was based on the principle that say oral discourses obtained with this process, without doubt, manifest forms of life and systems of values of the participants. Also, it shows a series of sanctions one-self and others that let evaluating intersubjective relations they have with others and with the environment. These were built during a period that ranges from 4 to 12 years of experience in these educational institutions by the case of the informants. The subsequent analysis of this data started from theories and pedagogical proposals from different authors such as Mélich in his book "Del extraño al cómplice" [1], Botero with his work "La formación de valores en la historia de la educación colombiana" [2] and semiotic proposals that involve education like as is the case of Cárdenas in "Hacia una semiótica de la educación" [3], Hamón in "Texto e ideología: para una poética de la norma" [4], and Bourdieu with "Cultural capital, school and social space" [5].

The analysis of the information collected led to the recognition of a series of recurrences about the concepts of formal education and Catholic school. That allowed the researcher to identify a series of axiologies present in the formation of these young people and undoubtedly it is influencing their being, thinking, feelings, their coexistence and even their actions inside and outside the educational classrooms. In other words, this is a guide of this religious model. The general result generated a comprehensive report that touches on several constituent points of the field of education and of the senses that the young are building around current educational actions in specific groups in charge of training in a small territory of Colombia, as it is Bucaramanga. The resulted topics analyzed the concept of teaching, acquired skills, objectives, and identity in the process of learning and teaching in these institutions; their teachers and the pedagogical discourses that they used to guide their practices; and the educational institution, its methods, and curricular and extracurricular actions up to the impact of the training on the life of the interviewees. With the above, it was possible to constitute a general and reflective view of the theory about the circulation of meanings that converges in some axiologies proper to an educational model that in Colombia is generating tensions between public education and private education, secular education in comparison with the religious education, and dynamics for the construction of an identity as learners that belong to a culture loaded with sacred ideology.

The research proposes that the results of the analysis of religious educational practices, shared in this chapter, be looked at starting from an effort to construct a general theory of the ways of teaching and learning today, in which the diversity of concrete cases is assumed as a system of educational alternatives and not as a paradigm that excludes "the educational" from "the noneducational," because in reality, all the training paths, such as the one studied here, are part of the educational in the country, in the pedagogical history of a community, with all its differences and particularities.
