The University and popular knowledge

    December, 2019

 By: Yeslando González B.

 Professor: Area: General Training: Language and Communication. South
Lake University. (UNESUR)
Posts: yeslandogonzalez778@hotmail.com: coragegonzalez@gmail.com
Orcid Registration ID: J-7444-2015
                                                        SUMMARY
                      

   The logic of the social and cultural responsibility of the university towards the
peoples and the inclusion of officially unaccepted knowledge is due to the ability
to respond to society as a whole. Universities should contribute to reducing the
structural inequalities of a social, economic and political nature that impede the
development of communities. But it will not be enough to try to do it from the
classrooms, it will be necessary to do it from the town and with the people, strip
it of the veil of lies and make it the real protagonist of its destiny. The author
uses the dialectical-critical technique of the comprehensive method as
sustenance and tries through a broad theoretical repertoire to open the avenues
for the coordination of the different underlying positions in the following essay.
Keywords: social responsibility. Inclusion, knowledge, inequality.

1. Introduction.
A true discussion within the university classrooms about their role and popular
knowledge, every day, becomes more important because it is before the
dimensions of the human, the protection of the original cultures, of the water
resources, the subsoil, nature and the preservation of life on the planet, among
other reasons for the decentrations that from the theoretical perspectives of
community analysis, integration, participation and the way in which university
work moves away from reality to dive into the scenario of dialectical speculation
and politics.

2. Development

According to Albán (2006) such discussions allow and propose a review of

social research and theories that support it on how popular knowledge could
represent a way to humanize universities in Venezuela and Latin America.
However, the role that different political visions have placed in play on the
continent should be highlighted, manipulating conceptions about what traditions
and cultures mean in detriment of the customs and identity of the original
peoples.
However, studies on complexity, interdisciplinarity and Multiversity, as well as
the contradictions that arose in the application of the theology of liberation Boff
(2009) in contrast to Latin American socialism Dieterich, (2006) of recent years
offer resistance and generate tensions regarding the opening of interpretive
frameworks to perform analyzes from multiple realities that become increasingly
complex every day. The distinction established between individual identity and
collective identification has a lot to do with an organization of diversity in which it
is not possible to attribute to groups, even metaphorically, characteristics that
only people possess.
On the other hand, the recognition of the different ways of thinking that are
considered emergent, form a wide space for discussion. Silenced communities
appear that raise their voices, historically forgotten throughout Latin America
and considered social minorities for their customs, knowledge, gender,
generational options that need recognition and positioning as participating
social subjects.
 Obviously, the processes of globalization subject most of the original peoples
to the dispossession of their knowledge, diversity, products and work and then
exclude them as the people of Apatzingán (Mexico); the Mapuches (Southern
Chile); and, the Yanomamis (Amazonas, Venezuela), the Wayuu (Zulia,
Venezuela) at the same time that the representatives of shifts of the states,
seem to tolerate these forms of dispossession, scarce interests generate ways
of respect and criminalize them (Albán, opus. cit.), in pursuit of a culture of
capitalist, consumerist and developmentalist production. These processes keep
groups of researchers, analysts, militants and citizens in general adrift, since
the field of power relations and their permanent re-configurations make the
political scene a disputed space, in different orders that do not they are reduced
merely to the electoral fact.
 In this way, the production of knowledge assigned to educational institutions,
particularly universities, is in crisis due to the emergence of structures of human
thought and emptiness that challenge the scientific method of testing by trial
and error. Other ways of conceiving and accessing knowledge come into play
when it comes to finding the way in which today's society wishes to transgress
them, the resistance of the original communities begins that, due to fear or
suspicion, refuse to include productive systems because to contradict their
nature, they refuse to exploit the environment without measuring
consequences, ecological costs or destruction that lead to a planetary
catastrophe of unimagined magnitudes (Amazon case between Brazil, Ecuador,
Bolivia, Colombia and Mining Arc in Venezuela).
 For this reason, the theoretical aspects that make up the sustenance of the
following writing are oriented according to the phenomenon of study and the
general purposes that are pursued by what is considered its relevance with
respect to popular knowledge, theory and pedagogy of liberation, the complexity
studies of Edgar Morín. Complex thinking, inter-disciplinarity, trans-disciplinarity,
the conception of Multiversity and studies on university transformation that are
carried out worldwide by the United Nations Organization for Science and
Culture (UNESCO) and the Economic Commission for the Americas Latin and
the Caribbean (CEPAL). According to Spanish acronyms.
The world lives in a moment of perplexity and confusion, wrapped in a
rationalism that ignores beings, subjectivity, affectivity, life is irrational. Morin
(1999). Likewise, the conceptions about knowledge and knowledge that have so
far been handled by universities and science. The University is often the scene
of analysis of the great problems of the world. A university that in the American
continent must sit down to review what it teaches and what it is taught for. How
far their responsibility goes to the internal spine of society.
In their classrooms, theories and schools of thought are dismantled, the know-
how of science and technology is transmitted, and how to make and reconstruct
engineering and mechanics. But very rarely the object of study is the same
university and its interrelations with the knowledge of the peoples that exert in
one way or another a force of transformation for a particular way of seeing the
university institution, despite the fact that it is the place in that these phenomena
happen and others remain invisible around them.
Arbeláez (2015) argues that with more than nine centuries of existence, the
university is one of the oldest institutions in the world, its presence has
contributed to the most relevant social transformations, the conservation of
medieval collections and was almost exclusively owned by the intellectuals who
prevented the knowledge of the time from disintegrating into obscurantism; the
advent of the Renaissance was not possible without the humanists who were
born from the cloisters, the arrival of civil society and democratic regimes was
created in the elucidations of the thinkers who were imbricated with it.
But what has happened inside the university classrooms? Why the sanchization
of the universities and the quixotization of the peoples? ... You are questioning,
in accordance with the psychological aspects of the two characters painted by
Don Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote (2005 version) and, related to the way
how higher education institutions behave in Latin America.
he University has a close relationship with the generation of science and
technology, with culture and with ethical reflections. However, in the dichotomy
between professional knowledge and popular knowledge, such reflections are
generated that the capacity for contextualization and historical-spatial location
has been lost.
 Academic credentialism represents the achievement of a degree, which acts to
the detriment of a humanistic formation that is supposed to be the property of
professional training cycles, it is not only expected that qualified professionals
will graduate from the classrooms but also citizens with the capacity to analyze
and discernment, symbolic analysts with adaptation to change and able to learn
without the magistracy of the teacher but who at the same time do not seek to
move away from a true relational behavior with their peers and lose the human
essence of placing themselves in the footwear of the other.
Espinosa (2015) in Open knowledge to the complexity of life, presented as a
textbook in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, highlights within its lines the importance of
approaching problems of our immediate environment from different
perspectives, the importance of opening knowledge to multiple knowledge,
since each knowledge contributes to the resolution of problems. Their
conclusions try to develop a conception about university education that tends
towards human freedom rather than the market, with a vision of
transdiciplinarity, complexity and eco-formation, creating groups of dialogues
and reflection, always in interaction between disciplines, popular knowledge and
knowledge. Traditional
In addition to this, Torres (2015), in the message of opening of the conference
and regional meeting of UNESCO Chairs The social responsibility of
universities: implications for Latin America and the Caribbean spoke on the
need for response from universities regarding its immediate environment,
convulsed by national emergencies and changes in the international sphere,
and therefore considers that socio-economic, cultural and knowledge problems
cannot escape from globalization and cannot be solved with unique models that
indicate how they should be 21st century universities. He suggests later that
universities should permanently take the social pulse, meet again and be
flexible to modify before more critical, distrustful and knowledgeable societies of
their rights.
The sometimes misguided visions of higher education institutions could largely
be the result of an outdated perpetuation, specifically of Western origin and
type, from its very creation, the ways in which encounters and disagreements
occur, although already globalized, on which human beings must conquer and
control phenomena, nature, technologically eliminate the noise barrier, alterity,
aspects that bother with a reducing vision that could allow individuals to achieve
safety, well-being and pleasure.
However, this is nothing more than a presumption that, according to Rodríguez
(2008), “… within the globalization of banalities it seems to be predominant. We
are threatened by the generation of "informed idiots" (p.66). The human is
internally destroyed, but the market vision is growing (Oppenheimer, 2010,
p.21). When will be the right time to build dialogic, inclusive and transcendent
relationships in the universe of diversities. According to (Velasco, 2013):

At present we have access to extensive and varied information from numerous towns,
worldviews, cultures and civilizations. The moment is conducive so that instead of
globalization and its hegemonic discourse that subordinates, marginalizes and
impoverishes, we build dialogic relationships ... For the university, traditionally specialized
in separating, in fragmenting, in graduating technicians and professionals conditioned to
act each one by their side, in creating antagonisms between the different, this supposes a
radical rupture prone to the confluence of the academy with popular, objective, subjective,
 material, ecological, biological, psychological, spiritual, individual and collective
knowledge. (p.47).

 There are countless multilateral organizations, some of them old and others
very recent, that since the Cordoba Reform (1918) established the basic
elements for the defense of academic freedoms and university autonomy. They
strengthened the fights against dictatorships as a phenomenon of Latin America
in almost the entire 20th century and the French May (1968) in their observation
of climatic, social, human changes, the proliferation of endemic diseases,
hunger, misery, weapons of mass destruction, drug trafficking, school dropout,
marginalization growth; of course, the effort to achieve peace and respect for
minorities discussed in the World Conferences on Higher Education in 1998 and
in 2009.
Without neglecting that both occurred in Paris and are cited in all the documents
of the United Nations, in which the democratization of knowledge has been
attempted by institutions such as UNESCO, ECLAC, the Center for Latin
American Studies Romulo Gallegos (CELARG), the Institute of Higher
Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC), the United Nations
Organization (UN), the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences FLACSO, the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and The United Nations Children's
Fund (UNICEF), to try to achieve the much desired transformation of
universities in Latin America and the world.
Never before has it been so urgent to direct the dialectical imagination towards
the emergence of a counterculture in favor of new institutions to delimit the
functions of the State, politics, economy, society and education; On the other
hand, Ayuso and Santos (2008) consider that the university as a system is not
alone in the capacity to make decisions about what is necessary to respond, or
attend, in our societies:

Not at least uniquely and exclusively. Therefore, it is important that the university itself
promotes the appropriate conditions and channels that are required so that also an active
and critical citizenship, social networks, or organizations that treasure the voice of those
who have no voice in our societies can form part of those processes in which it is decided
where a university should be present. These groups are the ones that can help the
university to identify and define social problems and to specify what is needed to solve
them together. Therefore, all those elements of promotion of a network culture and
cooperation with all significant agents of society, including, of course, business
organizations (although not uniquely), are also part of the content of the responsibility of a
company. college. (p.47).

 Thus, the logic of the social and cultural responsibility of the university towards
the peoples and the inclusion of officially unaccepted knowledge, obeys the
ability to respond to society as a whole. Universities should contribute to
reducing the structural inequalities of a social, economic and political nature that
impede the development of communities. But it will not be enough to try to do it
from the classrooms, it will be necessary to do it from the town and with the
people, strip it of the veil of lies and make it the real protagonist of its destiny.
Respecting the aspect of group, communal and community interrelations,
resizing what is really defined as social responsibility. Thinking about the
university social transformation from within the town, its knowledge and beliefs
does not represent the undervaluation of the university as an institution, much
less as a straitjacket to force it out of the established norms and standards, but
at least it could be a way out of the population for the demand of changes in the
ways of thinking and acting of the positivist scientific foundations, the scientific
and technicalities that today more than ever are latent in the alma mater.
    It becomes evident, to try to eradicate the fragmentary structure, to assume
that the knowledge generated within the universities is incomplete, weak,
splinter, refractory and that there must necessarily be a reunion and enrichment
of the knowledge that exists and is created outside of they. In this way, concrete
responses to local, regional and national needs can be given.
    Similarly, regarding the scheme of universities that are known about the three
fundamental axes of teaching, research and extension without leaving aside the
proposal elaborated in the Framework of the World Declaration on Higher
Education for the 21st century, organized by UNESCO and that took place in
Paris 1998 in which the one that included a fourth axis: management, a
dynamic relationship between the university and society is a priority, the
permanent dialogue, without isolation with respect to cultures, the complexity of
ideas, social problems, community, political and universities themselves
globally.
It is necessary to integrate the perspectives of the other, to achieve
intersections that allow a holistic understanding of social, cultural, scientific,
technological phenomena with solutions that contemplate the different
dimensions of the problems with the integrating force of humanism and its
demands. (Jiménez, 2008).
Since the 1960s, innovative models have emerged, especially in the West,
about how universities should function in terms of the demands of an
increasingly complex and changing world. The term "Multiversity" is coined with
Clark Kerr to refer to a pluralistic, welfare and beauty institution, where the
diversity of cultures, landscapes, plants and animals is celebrated. Diversity
common in everything. (Castillo, Session IX. 2008).
Based on this conception, “The Franciscan Multiversity of Latin America”
(MFAL) was created in 1989, in the city of Montevideo (Uruguay), where
science is nurtured and taught from the popular and respect for gender diversity
and of life. In 1994 in Penan (Malaysia), the term Multiversity was used again to
try to question the academic dependence and knowledge forms of the West. In
Hermosillo (Mexico) the creation of the Multiversity Mundo Real Edgar Morín
was approved, a private institution that fosters the atmosphere of learning
based on the principles of entrepreneurship, productivity, trans-disciplinarity,
new management methods, organization and institutional administration,
respect and defense, innovation, complexity and transformation based on
human understanding (Castillo. Opus., cit. 2008). In any case, the multiversity
are shown as hopeful institutions with new openings, but they do not depart
much from the positivist, antagonistic projects or their western cultural
structures. De Sousa Santos (2010) in his work Decolonizing knowledge,
reinventing power mentions:

To investigate the possibility of an intercultural conception of human rights that includes a

radical critique of cultural imperialism and creates a possibility of resistance and counter-
hegemonic alternatives. The objective is twofold: to establish a new dynamic equilibrium
relationship between the principle of recognition of difference, and to show the potential of
intercultural translation to create alliances based on the idea that the understanding of the
world is much broader than the Western understanding of the world and that social
emancipation must be rethought with the same attitude. (p.9).

Consequently, the Latin American university needs transgression, and in the

words of Pacheco (cited by Colado and Porter, 2012). “… It needs to transgress
the scientific method recognizing other forms of knowledge” (p. 12), interpreting,
understanding, looking at dialogue with the new subjects, crossing the borders
of the incommunicability that they have internalized, that they carry, to
recognize the life projects that announce, articulating knowledge with
transformative practices.
Finally, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is mentioned where the political
character seems to have dislocated the foundations of education in all aspects
because to try to change the mentality of the Venezuelan you will have to
change your education. Yes, Venezuela, the country of the Latin American
dream, but also that of the inventions of the liberators who, immersed in
delusions of greatness and freedom, end up consumed by disenchantment.
Country from which you want to keep more than half of society subject, like it or
not, to the socialism of the 21st century, (Dieterich, 2006). From where the
same leader who came to power sitting in the speech of integration and respect
for the diversity of the peoples (Hugo Chávez Frías) ended up educating the
people with the intention of including him and making him a participant in his
socialist project, in the processes political, educational, reformers, economic,
cultural and social, in such a way, that it demoralized and dehistorized the
nation.
They were created in less than 15 years on the basis of the empowerment of
the people, more than 40 institutions of university education for example, some
are cited because even the current president Nicolás Maduro Moros continues
to expand institutions, all mired in his revolution: The National Experimental
University of the Armed Forces (UNEFA, 1999), The Universidad Sur del Lago
(UNESUR, 2000), The Bolivarian University of Venezuela, (UBV, 2003), The
Bolivarian Military University of Venezuela (UMBV, 2010), The National
Experimental University of the Communes (UNEC, 2014), in addition the
National Training Programs (PNF) were adopted seeking a curricular change in
the universities of the country reproducing and accentuating, differences and
inequalities with the discourse and the facts.

3. Reflections
A country corrupted by the force of arms and political power with a rhetoric
contrary to capitalism and the USA; in pursuit of a new society and a new man
under the Marxist conception. The script of Cuba-Castro-Soviet is repeated now
under participatory and leading democracy, collective interest, honesty, legality,
accountability, effectiveness, efficiency government, complementarity, cultural
diversity, social duty, defense and environmental protection.
Messianism and political paranoia, a speech to penetrate the fiber of the
people, impoverishes education, a fair where quotas are granted to enter
universities, the people in power and a bus driver driving. (Albornoz, Pgs. 5, 6,
2013).
 No consequences are measured or perfection is sought. The town is included,
but uneducated to make him a prisoner. A way to dominate. In no way does the
author intend to change the conception for what the universities were created,
but if he intends to transform the vision of man, of education for life, try to make
it more liveable, to regain respect for others and for true inclusion.

Venezuela, december 2019

4.Biliographic references.

Albán, A. (2006). Texiendo Textos y Saberes: cinco hilos para pensar los
estudios culturales, la colonialidad y la interculturalidad. Universidad del
Cauca. Estudios interculturales.
Albornoz, O. (2013). La universidad ¿Reforma o Experimento? El discurso
Académico contemporáneo según las perspectivas de los organismos
internacionales: los aprendizajes para la universidad venezolana.
Caracas.IESALC-UNESCO.
Arbeláez, J. (2015). Contexto Universidad: Historias y Relatos. Universidad
NacionaldeColombia.Manizales,Caldas.Colombia.Enwww.Manizales.Una
l.edu.co/index.php/informaciónacadémica/electivas.id=3508#temática.
Revisado Mayo/2015
Castillo D Imperio. O (2010). Experiencias en transformación Universitaria: un
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Latinoamericana en Discusión. Coord. por José María Cadenas. UCV-
UNESCO-IESALC. Caracas. Disponible en: www.iesalc.unesco.org.ve.
De Sousa Santos, B. (2010). Descolonizar el saber, reinventar el poder.
Montevideo. Trilce.
Dieterich, H. (2006). El destino Superior de los Pueblos Latinoamericanos. D.F.
México. Jorale.
Ibarra, E y Porter. L. (2012). El libro de la Universidad Imaginada. Hacia una
universidad situada entre el buen lugar y ningún lugar. México.UAM-
Cuajimalpa/ Juan Pablos Editor.
Jiménez, M. (2008). ¿Cómo medir la percepción de la Responsabilidad Social
en los diversos estamentos de la Universidad: una experiencia
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La Reforma de Córdoba. (1918). Documento preliminar. Redactado
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Oppenheimer, A. (2010) Basta de Historias. México. Ramdon House.
Torres, M. (2015). La Responsabilidad Social de las Universidades:
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UNESCO. San Juan. Puerto Rico. Disponible en: http://www.iesalc-
unesco.org.ve
Velasco, F. (2013). El sentido de la transformación universitaria en una
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N° 1. págs. 45-57. Mercosur. Educativo. Mercosur.