Evaluative Reason/Punitive Reason: Relations and Complicities (or Two Sides of Pedagogical Coloniality)

Abstract

The inquiry raised here attempts to highlight the links and complicities between two types of rationality that we understand as two faces of pedagogical coloniality: the evaluative reason and the punitive reason. As we think about this matter, it is difficult to understand one without the other operating in some way more or less visible depending on the case. Therefore, exploring these links in some educational discourses of the twentieth century will provide strong elements of analysis that will show how far they are related and they cross our present. Thus, we can observe how the punitive reason is part of the evaluative reason that not only judicializes pedagogical links within educational instances, but that different forms of violence, cruelty, and punishment also mark its inclusive desire. This also invites us to think about the importance of interrupting the synonymy installed by modernity/coloniality between education and evaluation, as the main mode of resistance to pedagogical regimes that proto-criminalize the considered “abnormal”, condemn error and judge every power of otherness. Finally, there is a defense of error as a constitutive part of who we are and as an attempt to think of a justice (pedagogical) of otherness.