The essential is visible to the eyes
Children drawing the economy
Preface
Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky
The drawings published in this book show psychic suffering due to the effects of an economic system of exclusion and poverty, which hits in a differential way certain groups in a situation of greater vulnerability, such as children. The lack of access to basic goods and services, extreme inequalities, a State that does not
fulfill the responsibilities assigned by the constitution and human rights treaties, pollution, the commercialization of practically all aspects of life, all of which are reflected in the drawings, are the result of a system of ideas (neoliberalism) that is rampant in Argentina and the world. So are the individualism and lack of empathy that emerge from some of the drawings. However, the exhibition of
drawings also brings the seeds of change, inclusion and solidarity. They not only express what the children know (a lot) and feel (suffer), but also what they want: a community in which they help each other. In this way, through their artistic creations, the children devise a future with the potential to open the presentist and immobilizing cage that produces dehumanization and destruction of the planet.
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Foreword
Elizabeth Jelin
This book is very special, original and necessary. Produced at a time of crisis in the country, it approaches a topic that is hardly thought about or discussed. In the public space, we are permanently inundated and impacted by data regarding the
social reality of the crisis: growth of poverty and indigence. The painful fact of the higher incidence of poverty among children is highlighted. What never appears in the public sphere is the other side, the voice and expression of the children themselves about this situation or their knowledge, ideas and beliefs about the economy in more general terms.
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Presentation
The drawings’ transcendence
Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky
The questions posed to the children, which structured this project, are the following: what do they identify as “economy”? How do the children see, think and feel the socio-economic context? Do they perceive it as a crisis? Which actors of the economy do they identify? How does the economic context affect them in their daily lives, and if so, in what way? Would they change anything? In this way, this book seeks to reconstruct, systematize and interpret children's graphic representations of a specific (and invisibilized) aspect of their lives: how the economy affects their lives.
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Postface
Children and the economy; expression and listening
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel
The so-called “Economic Sciences” are fluctuating, uncertain, and politically favor the powerful; they generate greater social inequality, exacerbate poverty and the exclusion of the most impoverished sectors. In the street, today the economy is reduced to having the money to survive, to bring the family something to eat, to cover immediate needs such as clothing, shelter, food and housing. This is an “economic fact” as simple as it is powerful and cruel. We have been accompanying children at social risk for many years and we see that they have diverse behaviors and, despite the shortages they experience due to lack of economic resources, they develop priceless values such as friendship, solidarity, sharing bread with other equals. This can also be seen in the book’s drawings. In any case, childhood is still a pending topic of
discussion in our society.
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Methodological foundations of the project
Soledad Vercellino, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky y Daniela Sánchez
The decision was made to include fourth-grade elementary school students was taken in the first place to meet a homogeneity criterion (students of approximate age and attending the same year). Second, choosing this cohort takes into account the findings on the psychogenetic and social processes involved in the construction of knowledge about the social world in children, as well as the selection and organization of knowledge about the social space and in particular the economic issue raised by the provincial curricular design. The work was developed within the context of the schools themselves, in groups and under the coordination of the teachers of the students participating in the study. A total of 159 fourth grade students from nine elementary schools, selected on the basis of heterogeneity and representativeness criteria, participated in this project: rural and urban schools, state and “private” (socially managed), secular and religious, part-day and full-day, and from households with different income levels and located in different cities of the area known as the Alto Valle del Río Negro.
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The work kitchen in schools
Soledad Vercellino
This experience shows us the power of the school and the teacher´s intervention as an opportunity not only for the transmission but also for the production of knowledge, since they can guarantee our children conditions (unusual in these times) for the promotion of thought, the expression of opinions and also the revision of what is thought, the subjective enrichment from the meeting of meanings that takes place in this collective, common space.
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The right of children to have and express opinions on economic issues
Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky
The State must ensure the means for children to access, receive and disseminate information and opinions related to the economy, either through the oral or written means, and/or through artistic expression, according to the interests and capacities of each age group to exercise their rights to have and express opinions.
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Poverty and human rights
A view from the children’s perspective
Paola García Rey
The artistic creations illustrate a notion of poverty conceived from a perspective of inequality and injustice, reflected through images that contrast those who can access certain goods and those who cannot. The colors, lighting and shadows of the strokes also reflect the darker and grayer dimension of poverty. Recurring social practices emerge from the illustrations: just as we find situations of invisibilization and contempt, strategies and practices of solidarity emerge at the same time, which highlight the inspiring dynamics of redistribution and cooperation.
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Children paint it clearly.
Human rights must matter in economic affairs
Volker Türk
We must take children’s interest and concerns about the workings of the economy and its impact on living conditions more seriously. The impact of economic and social crises on children is not just an economic issue; it is fundamentally a question of their rights. Rights that are often overlooked when economic policies are debated and implemented. The Convention on the Rights of the Child underlines the obligation of States Parties to ensure the right of the child to a standard of living adequate for the child´s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development (Article 27), and the right to be heard and to participate in matters affecting the child’s life (Article 12).
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Drawings that compel, work agenda
Sebastián Waisgrais y Carolina Aulicino
The country has been going through difficult periods, cycles of lights and shadows. As a society we are used to many cracks. But there is a consensus that should overcome them: economic policy should have as its central objective to generate the conditions to significantly reduce poverty among children and, fundamentally, to eradicate something that shames us daily: extreme poverty. Approximately 2.5 million children live in households where food expenses are not covered, and one million boys and girls skip at least one meal a day (UNICEF, 2024).
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Art and Education
How children express themselves through visual arts
María Fernanda Zwenger y Elías Rolando Schnaidler
There is no doubt that art is part of a specific culture, and that children are not only spectators, but also part of it, they accept or reject it, they enjoy it, they build it, inside and outside school. This means recognizing children as bearers of aesthetic values, who produce modifications and actively participate in their immediate world in the first instance, and, at the same time, are part of the changes and reproductions of our cultural universe (that is, as producers and audiences), which invites us to think in terms of “social practices of aestheticization (…). The location of these phenomena within the aesthetic is possible as long as the aesthetic is not conceived as reduced to the artistic” (Milstein, 2017, p. 9). Rather, the children are active participants of the processes of formation of sensibilities in our culture.
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Back to “Contributions from the field of aesthetics”
They are children...what can they know about economics?!
Reflections on the relationship with knowledge
Soledad Vercellino
Faced with a conception of knowledge understood as a product, as a set ofinventoried, accumulated knowledge, external to the subject, we are interested inemphasizing the processes of appropriation and reconstruction of knowledge of which humans are capable. We are condemned to the search for meanings; no person can avoid the effort of thinking, of constructing meanings, even when the environment offers crumbs and mixtures of meaning. This is nothing other than the work of thought, it is the work of the link between the known and the unknown. Here we emphasize the knowledge that is produced from reflection. In the etymological sense of the term, reflection as refolding. That is: to open a space where knowledge can become an object of thought. To open a place that allows us to make visible what we call knowledge and what constitutes us in our innermost being.
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Concept of economy and subjective visualizations
Interpretation and analysis of graphic representation of 9 – 10 year-old children
Silvia Schlemenson y María Victoria Rego
Looking at the graphic representations collected in this research, we ask ourselves: what is the figurability of the material and symbolic deprivations of the children represented in this collection? What interpretations do they receive, for example, from the daily difficulties, or the dissatisfactions of adults? Where do their life goals, ideals, and what they understand as within the realm of the possible or impossible circulate? What is the concept and place of sameness, in the recognition of their own otherness? How are the inequality of opportunities, the differences, the lack of guarantees for the realization of rights addressed? What convergences and recurrences are found in the drawings of these 9 and 10 year-old boys and girls? What similarities (apparent and/or contradictory) could be reflected in the creations?
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What is and what should economics be?
Ontology and axiology drawn
Francisco Cantamutto
Although it may seem obvious, it must be said: economics is a social science. It tries to understand social phenomena, and it does so on the basis of categories that arise from social practice itself. People build a practical knowledge, which science tries to order, test and specify. Children are not on the fringes of these daily economic activities, nor of the conversations that take place about them (or even about other more abstract ones that also affect them). Here we seek to readin the drawings on the economy these traces of continuity between science and lay knowledge, of which the children themselves are an active part. The first section presents some epistemological foundations of the gaze, which are related to the drawings in the second section.
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Familiarization with the dollar
Children’s rights and monetary imaginaries
Ariel Wilkis
In the light of the drawings analyzed here, we can go one step further: familiarization with the dollar reaches an extreme degree of generalization when it is incorporated into the ordinary economic knowledge of boys and girls. In Argentina, concerns about the value of the U.S. currency cross the entire social and age range. They are part of an early informal monetary pedagogy: even children are interested in the currency. Their familiarization with the dollar takes place in multiple scenarios: the home, the public space, social networks. And, clearly, the school. The meanings about the dollar represented in the drawings analyzed here are the sedimentation of a long-term process re-appropriated by their authors to make sense of a context marked by high inflation, economic stagnation and increasing poverty.
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Economics and rights in schools
Isabelino Siede
If the educational system does not incorporate economic conditions as a concern and these create dialogues about these views, it runs the risk of weakening or cutting the thread that links its educational goals with the realities of the children it seeks to educate. From the point of view of schools, inequality is, first of all, part of daily work, because the social pain caused by poverty reaches the classroom before the statistics are compiled; it demands from answers from teaching teams that they are not always able to give. In this inhospitable world, which degrades the educational processes of childhood and youth, the classroom can be an alternative where modes of subjectivation can be found, where everyone can broaden their cultural horizons and find the raw material to develop life goals that refute the inexorability of children’s destinies. It is often at school that students become aware of the inequalities and shortcomings that affect their environment.
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Children´s graphic representations of the economy.
Coordinates for curricular analysis in Río Negro
Noelia De Grossi, Cecilia Ferrarino, Julieta Santos y Daniela Sánchez
The authors of this chapter -who work in different areas involved in teacher training in Río Negro (teaching in primary education, coordination of initial training, research and extension in teacher training, under the Ministry of Education)- consider that it is necessary to contemplate in he design of teaching practices the meanings that those who receive them have about the issues that affect their daily lives, because only by making room for these views can learning become meaningful.
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Book Review
Pablo Bernasconi - Illustrator, writer and children's book designer.
The untranslatable, the unspeakable, the cryptic.
Poetry shakes words up and transforms impossibility into an occasion. It condenses and
assumes a message that others avoid, because they are incredulous.
And the visual poetry in this book becomes urgent. It strikes down to the bones and makes
blood boil. A rare mixture of anger and hope meet like distant relatives. One of the most
exquisite powers of sincerity is to bring together simplicity and naturalness in an alchemical act.
What we hear resonates with and completes us, what we see absorbs and moves us.
The drawings of childhood navigate these waters with ease and precision, they describe a
hypnotic promise that exists because it reduces in cheap crayon lines an exasperating
cosmogony.
We cannot remain the same after traversing this gaze suspended in time. In the words of Dylan
Thomas, “The ball I threw in the park as a kid still hasn't hit the ground.”
Looking at the past forces us to face the present, because the future is theirs.
Discover the drawings and where the experiences took place
Click below and see the galleries from each school
School 167 “La Amparo”
School 265 “Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires”
School 105 “Monseñor Nicolás Esandi”
School 70 “Dr. Julio Rey Pastor”
School 361 “Delfín Zaragozi”
School 90 “Mar Abierto”
School 85 “Italia”
School 143 “Ángel Vicente Peñaloza”
School 136 “Instituto Antártida Argentina”
The essential is visible to the eyes
-Children drawing the economy-
The essential is visible to the eyes
-Children drawing the economy-
