Socio-affective

According to Dialoguing Pedagogy, we think about value development in terms of the tensions between the individual and the group, between inclusion and exclusion, between autonomy and dependence, and between the individual's actions and the actions of the environment. These tensions are resolved differently in each school year (Andrade, G, 2009).

Human beings are exposed to multiple tensions of varying nature, magnitude, and dimension, conscious and unconscious, social and individual (Fromm, 1994 and Andrade, 2009). Thus, for example, someone who supports a Free Trade Agreement between an underdeveloped country and a world power must decide whether all products, services, and economic activities should be included in such trade agreements. Resolving this issue involves addressing various complex cognitive dilemmas, but also—and to a greater extent—facing ethical and value-based dilemmas. What one knows and thinks in one's cognitive dimension—as Flavell (1985: 14) points out—undoubtedly interacts with what one feels (affective dimension). As an example, let's look at some of the multiple evaluative aspects involved in the decision of whether so-called "generic" drugs should be included in a Free Trade Agreement.

As is well known, a "generic" drug uses the research that a pharmaceutical company has previously conducted. The complex aspect of making the decision is that two essential values ​​are at stake, and a choice must be made between them. One value at stake, evidently, is the multinational's right to have the world's states protect its economic activity and defend its economic interests, and in doing so, control attempts by other laboratories to "use its own research." This is clearly research conducted by a specific company and laboratory that other companies and laboratories want to use. However, the tension becomes more complex when we realize that the protection they provide for their commercial and economic rights violates another value: the right to life and the right to health. Thousands of children and young people in developing countries suffer from multiple illnesses, some of which can be fatal if they don't have access to the right drug at the right time. Should the right to economic profit of the laboratories that hold the patent take precedence over the right to life and health of Latin American, Asian, or African children and young people? This is so, given that, as is evident, the value of a generic drug can be up to ten times lower in the case of some drugs for which the laboratory that invented it lacks legal jurisdiction. These abysmal economic differences explain why access to a "generic" drug is significantly more likely in medium- or low-income societies worldwide, and especially in lower-income sectors of both types of societies. The aforementioned tension is inherent to an individual's political, aesthetic, ethical, and ideological definition. Our values ​​are shaped around these tensions. Therefore, we will formulate five tensions that most Latin American citizens have been facing in recent times. It should be understood that these tensions are multiple, daily, and involve not just two, but three, five, or more. Strictly speaking, they are evaluative dilemmas, trilemmas, or multilemmas:

• We've already posed the first dilemma, and now we summarize it: In a Free Trade Agreement, should the rights of the laboratories that conducted the original research prevail, or, on the contrary, should the right to health and life of children and young people prevail? And, consequently, should generic drugs be excluded from Free Trade Agreements? Which position do you share?


• Should services such as education and culture be included in a Free Trade Agreement? Can these services be classified as goods? Should education and culture be treated as goods? Or, conversely, should intangible assets that are part of a nation's historical heritage, cultural reserve assets, or educational processes and services be excluded from a Free Trade Agreement? Some countries have considered this to be the case, which is why Chile included a cultural reservation in the agreement it signed a few years ago with the United States and other Asian and European countries (Rey, 2003). Would you, as Minister of Foreign Trade, also have included a reservation, or would you have considered culture and education similarly to other goods and services?


• Should the economic rights of a publisher and an author prevail over the right of a population to receive the productions of human knowledge? And in the case of music, should the rights of record labels and singer-songwriters prevail, or the right of large populations to listen to the music of their choice completely freely and without payment? Which of the two rights should prevail for a population without adequate wages, as is the case for nearly half the population of a country like Colombia and somewhat more in Latin America? Should the rights of authors and companies prevail, or those of the majority populations? If so, what have you chosen so far? And what should you choose in the future?


• Should a raped woman, a woman carrying a fetus with genetic defects, or another woman whose life is at risk if she continues with the pregnancy have the right to terminate her pregnancy? Which right should prevail: that of the unborn child or that of the mother to decide whether she wants that child to come into the world? If in the three previous cases, the woman we are discussing were to become your own daughter, what would you advise her in the first, second, or third case? What would happen and what position would you take if your daughter told you she wanted an abortion because the child she was carrying was the product of a mistaken sexual relationship, she doesn't love the father, and she believes she lacks the maturity or emotional or socioeconomic stability to guarantee him a dignified life?


• Do countries like Panama, Switzerland, Luxembourg, or the Cayman Islands have the right to maintain bank reserves so that those who carry the money have the protection and security that the amounts held will not be revealed? What happens if this money is the product of drug trafficking, kidnappings, money laundering, or tax evasion operations? Should the right to privacy prevail, or should the right of other countries to investigate drug trafficking, money laundering, or tax evasion operations prevail? Which of the two rights should be protected? Which should prevail? The right of the countries that, in order to attract the money, promised to maintain bank reserves, or the right of the countries that initiated investigations into illegal activities by one of their clients accused of evasion, money laundering, or drug trafficking?

The essential aspect, as can be seen, is the tension between different values ​​that arises in everyday life and in the definition of our ideological, religious, aesthetic, value-based, or political positions. And from the perspective of the topic we are working on, the most important thing is that the value characterization carried out in the last decade at the Institution also allows us to speak in parallel of four value-based cycles in the development of a student in an educational institution: first, understanding of the self; second, understanding of others; third, understanding of the environment; and fourth, understanding of transcendence. Each one reworks and reorganizes what has been previously achieved.

Values—following Alice Miller (1985)—thus have an emergent character, which reaffirms their social and historical nature and, at the same time, explains why they vary depending on the context in which they appear (Fromn, 1996). Hence the predominance of a profoundly collectivist and supportive society in Eastern cultures, while at the same time there is a profound cult of individualism in the West. Values, says Miller (1985), should not be understood as moral categories, but as consequences of a benign destiny free from emotional deprivation.

The above allowed us to characterize and delve deeper into the value dimension, as that which develops through the resolution of the various tensions expressed between the individual, group, society, and culture. It is tension that drives the individual in one direction or another; and school in our midst is one of the few institutions that could ensure that tensions do not favor the individualism and egocentrism promoted by Western culture, which has led to extremes that have even threatened the very survival of human beings as a species, as García Márquez (1998) masterfully recalled in commemorating the anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped on the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima more than half a century earlier.

On the contrary, many of today's schools and families reinforce individualistic attitudes and competitiveness. They teach children that "only the strong triumph," that "the world belongs to the living," and that "the important thing is not to win, but to make others lose." As a result, education abandons its essentially countercultural and humanistic role; and instead of educating the "new man" and fostering the "modern humanism" referred to by Merani (1965: 131), it ends up forming self-centered individuals who, by thinking excessively about their own benefit, reproduce a social system based on the pursuit of individual gain. This vision of the social system was at the origins of economic liberalism, but has now been reconceptualized in various ways by theorists such as John Maynards Keynes and John Nash.

The excessive individualism and egocentrism that characterizes Western culture is culturally bred, endorsed by families and the media, and has generally been little addressed by educational institutions. In response, schools have a countercultural role, focused on ensuring human development rather than the reproduction of a particular society. In the West, schools should promote inclusion while society promotes exclusion. Schools should foster altruism and solidarity when society favors individual-centered views and attitudes; they should make the group and the other visible when society and culture tend to make them invisible (Andrade, 2009).

Value development is expressed in the level of individual autonomy attained at the cognitive, sensory-affective, and executive levels, three dimensions of attitude that occur within a given cultural and social context. Hence, autonomy is the clearest expression to characterize an individual's value development at a given time. In everyday language, grandmothers have long said that two grandchildren of the same chronological age could present very different levels of maturity; and their idea is very powerful on a psychological level, since what they are really saying is that their levels of autonomy are different, and that they are because, due to various factors in the cultural, social, family, and school environment, one of them has reached a higher level of development in their autonomy. This greater development of an individual's autonomy also expresses greater value development and, consequently, a greater age of development.

The value tensions between the individual, group, society, culture, and species are resolved at the school level in four different areas, which allows us to speak of four evolutionary periods or four value cycles in the individual: self-understanding (Exploratory, or first cycle), understanding of others (Conceptual or second cycle), understanding of the environment (Contextual or third cycle), and the nature and understanding of the human species or transcendence (Projective or fourth cycle). Four moments in the value development of the individual, which configure four educational cycles.