Marti´s Ethics in Professional Pedagogical Training

Introduction

The social role of education and pedagogues in a general sense, have the mission of training the new generations comprehensively, based on agreement with the code of ethics. Ethics is a philosophical science that studies nature, the laws of moral development in society and the internal world of the individual.

It constitutes a tool for human improvement when moral values, transformed into universal human ideals and personal convictions, mark the personal qualities of individuals, their meaning and life project in correlation with the social in their sense of progress and human development.

Pedagogical ethics studies the particularities of the development of moral demands that originate from the characteristics of pedagogical work and which are manifested in the interrelationships of the teacher and students, teachers and parents, teachers and the community, Conceptual Paper as well as those that are formed in the pedagogical group and whose determining condition is constituted by the personal and professional qualities of the teacher. For example, Fidel Castro has thought a lot about the role of ethics, since ethical values ​are essential, because without ethical values ​there are no revolutionary values ​ [1].

Pedagogical ethics is a means of moral regulation of educational work, which is formed in society, from pedagogical morality. Pedagogical morality is the system of principles, norms and evaluative judgments that regulates the behavior of the teacher. It is a form of concrete manifestation of the prevailing morality in a given society, which is applied to the conditions and characteristics of teacher’s activity.

In this sense, Sánchez H. argues the importance of the ethical, axiological and humanistic approach for the improvement of pedagogical professional performance, but limited to teachers [2]. While Chacon N. analyzes pedagogical professionalism, based on the content of the professional ethics of teachers [3]. In addition to the place and role of morality in people’s lives and in their relationship with material life and the values ​of society. Emphasis is placed on the morality of the pedagogical profession and its contribution to the ideological formation of the student. The criteria set out go beyond the narrow conception that professional pedagogical ethics only contributes the normative aspect of teacher´s behavior.

Ethics from Marti’s approach. Approximations

To carry out an ethical analysis of José Marti’s labor, the general features that characterize teacher’s work and personality must be taken into account as a moment of continuity, as well as rupture, in the integration of the process students live in. As his political and moral postulates are an essential part of the project of social achievements, they remain highly valid in the current conditions in society.

It is important to analyze the content and significance of his ethics by highlighting the essential ideas, such as moral principles, they are present in all of José Marti’s work associated with the humanist ethical content and as the foundation of all his revolutionary project and strategy. The main methodological value that the understanding of Marti’s ethics contributes to the educational ideological work with young people in the present is in its axiological component, which reveals as its nucleus the different forms of social conscience and is projected on the ideological, emotional and behavioral, for revolutionary action. The moral convictions referred to are respect for other people, selfless help, and altruism, among others.

Years ago there were ideas and theories of philosophers and pedagogues, who argued that the teacher should have certain qualities that were not necessary in other professions, such as having a high education, broad general culture, wisdom, tact, love to children, among others. During those stages of society, they believed that they should manifest themselves as true communists in order to undertake educational work, since a good revolutionary must be human, in order to be able to train in the people around him the humanistic sense that characterizes socialist society. Another exponent of these ideas was A.S. Makarenko, who expressed the importance of collectivism, the relationships between pedagogues, with students and parents.

In Cuba, the historical roots of ethics are found in the advanced pedagogical thought of the 19th century, generated by the greatest exponents of ethics: Father Félix Varela, José de la Luz y Caballero, Rafael Maria de Mendive, Enrique Jose Varona and Jose Marti. In their works and actions, they formulated the essential concepts that expressed the process of shaping Cuban nationality and the gradual formation of national consciousness.

They showed the elements that typify the modes of action of teachers from the humanistic point of view, from which they are modified, enriched, strengthened in the same way that society is transformed. They have made it clear that society imposes the manifestations of men and within them the pedagogues. In the late nineteenth century, Jose Marti developed an arsenal of ideas that constitute a high peak of the political and ethical thought of his time. The founding audacities of his conceptions, which in many cases deserve a singular originality, endorse the permanent validity of his work in our time. The aspiration is to form the personality of the teacher, based on a broad general, polytechnic, labor and sentiment culture, with a scientific foundation and social moral norms with a socialist ideology that rejects the capitalist society model for being antagonistic to the interests and authentic rights of the humble and working masses.

For Marti, the training and modes of action of the students who are today at university and graduated teachers must have a humanistic basis, because it is important for the teacher to be aware his job is to train, educate and achieve from his students, behaviors that encourage love and respect for those around them, help each other disinterestedly, it must be characterized for altruism, concern for the common good, knowing how to listen to others, and self-control manifestations of aggressiveness. About all these, the he proclaimed that by coming to earth, every man has the right to be educated, and later, in return, the duty to contribute to the education of others [4].

In the Cuban hero’s reflection, man was constituted as an object and subject of education, the latter was a right that society granted to each citizen, which at the same time was translated as a moral obligation, acquiring the connotation of duty for any individual. Every good man, who boasts of being so, will act as an educator. Education was projected in Marti´s work as a crusade for human redemption. This implied a special repercussion on the teachers as direct managers, who were required to have a high sense of professional ethics, which is why he affirmed that the teacher should not be a mold where the students cast their intelligence and character, to go out with their little wolves. and humps, but an honest guide, who teaches in good faith what to see, and explains his pro as well as that of his enemies, so that student’s character of man is strengthened, which is the flower that is not going to get dried in the herbarium of universities in which no metaphysics has to be taught, neither that of ideology, nor that of science [5].

Instruction and education lead, complemented, to the happy projection of the existence of men and peoples.

But happiness in Marti only crystallizes in the presence of freedom. The cornerstone of such a relationship is morality. In short, he stated that being good is the only way to be happy; being cultured is the only way to be free, but, in common human nature, you need to be prosperous to be happy [6].

By associating prosperity with goodness, Marti explained that his path was opened in the knowledge and use of the inexhaustible elements of nature, object of human work and source of satisfaction of his needs. The infinite approach of man in his dominance over nature implied knowing it through science and this would also result in a triumph over jealousy, envy, hatred, fear and other moral defects.

In society, Marti’s reflection acquires definitive echoes that are why he believed that the best way to defend people´s rights is to know them well. This is how you have faith and strength; every nation will be unhappy as long as it does not educate all its children. A people of educated men will always be people of free men. That education is the only way to save oneself from slavery; so repugnant are people who are the slave of men of another people, as the slave of men of it-self [7].

The teacher must be an example; this means representing a moral model for his students as a citizen committed to the society; a professional model, so that it occurs in young people, before whom it can be a paradigm, a development of the personality that is synonymous of personal growth and deployment of their potentialities, self-acceptance, personal authenticity, autonomy, independence, security, flexibility, the ability to relate to others from the possibility of analyzing, respecting their opinions, where personal development must be understood and promoted as a process of intense dynamism and where the figure of the teacher is decisive.

The level of moral training of pedagogical training in the Cuban society guarantees the spiritual and human growth of individuals. That is why teacher training requires rigorous attention to the humanistic component, as the essence of pedagogical professionalism, which is to educate the new generations of Cubans.

The professional of education requires a deep improvement, preparation of the role that it plays in this process, for this it is essential to incorporate the humanistic elements to it, giving rise to a developer education in individuals. Human dignity is the main category of the Marti´s theoretical reflection on morals. For him, morality rested on the dialectical relationship between man and society.

The correlation between personal and collective projections of dignity leads him to enunciate it as an ethical category that, starting from the individual, overflows its limits to become socially the first law of the republic in such a way that society, in all its multifaceted set, would generate the highest moral values ​and human rights, at the same time, would be consolidated as their greatest safeguard. With his philosophical concept of balance, Marti projected himself towards the qualitative essence of the relationships between the objects of reality and that the great thinker used a lot in politics, it is also wielded in ethics.

The lack of decorum in some or many men must be compensated with greater decorum in the personal sphere; that is why he pointed out that virtue, distributed equitably throughout the Universe, whenever in a given space or locality it is lacking in many, it is collected in only one, so that the balance is not altered. Hence, in decorous times of freedom and peace, the number of extraordinary men is less, or less perceptible, because they are distributed among all the conditions that, when it is costly to possess them, are found in sublime spirits, as in the storm a flag on its pole [8].

José Marti, in literature; everything he touches turns into poetry. For that reason, despite the time the message from him still moves. The image of the blow to the cheek is recurrent, updating, elevating it to a higher plane, the Christian lesson. The Cuban Apostle does not offer his cheek but points out that the human race has only one cheek: wherever a man receives a blow on the cheek from him, all other men receive it! [9].

It is transcendental that dignity for Marti was due to the entire character of the republic descendants, to the habit of working with their own hands, the exercise of thinking for themselves, and the full exercise of oneself and respect, as a family honor, for the full exercise of others. The integrity of his character constitutes as a measure of merit, in his struggle to act in accordance with virtue, for his development in the setbacks and struggle of life, unlike the talent and intelligence that is displayed by individuality in solitude.

On the other hand, the secondary or resigned character constitutes “the womb of humanity” since it puts before any virtue the excessive desire for one’s own well-being. These “half men” only have “common character”, they are the “Men mouth”. In a specific individual there can be manifestations of the two members of the dichotomy, so that human improvement would consist, then, in making virtues prevail over moral defects.

It is important to note that for Marti, the men who stood out the most in the service of their peoples were national men, that is why they were scarce, like the mountains, they are the men who know how to look from them, and feel with the heart of the nation or of humanity. And there remains, after exchanging hands with one of them, the interior cleanliness that should remain after winning, in a just cause, a good fight [10].

Thus, in Marti’s ethics, the humanistic content of work is unquestionable since it embellishes and morally elevates the personality. Not in vain did the apostle reserve, in a symbolic way, for those who made a living from someone else’s work, the punishment with which thieves were punished in ancient times: burning their hands. The peoples would be degraded or ennobled in direct accordance with the position they adopted, as a society, with respect to creative work.

Independence becomes dignified when it is adjusted to the welfare of community. The great work of human redemption cannot be guided by thought if of the past and the present, there is only a legacy of dogmas. Truly, culture as an inheritance has to be assumed as a seedbed of orientations whose fundamental concern was, individually, respect for the free capacity of each man, and socially, the adjustment of thought to the real demands of each person people and every age.

That is why Marti advised the graft of the most progressive had to continue to be ours. The assimilation of the universal, in an autochthonous thought, to be worthy, had to be done not with tracing but with creation. The correspondence between both dimensions is offered by the patriotic sentiment, because for Marti patriotism is, of all that are known to date, the best yeast of all human virtues [11].

The concept of homeland, the most complete and mature that Marti reflected in his works, can be analyzed at the theoretical, political and ethical levels. Humanity as a homeland exists in that town in which man is born or in that one that is closest to him, which are the human portions over which he can exert the greatest influence. In an ethical sense, acting humanism is described. Man has the moral obligation to give guarantees in the human portion in which he lives to the universally valid principle of full dignity.

For such reasoning, the patriotic feeling is expressed in Marti’s ethics as a duty of humanity, a fundamental category of its deontology, which links the tight bundle of patriotism with what, in contemporary times, we call internationalism. Marti confessed to having faith in human improvement, in future life, in the usefulness of virtue [12].

With that confession to his son, who heads one of the most beautiful collections of poems in the Spanish language, Jose Marti encrypted in words intimate feelings that animated him from the moment he found the best synonym of teaching, that of creation. Generational symbol of the new “Ismaelillo” was the embodiment of the object of his noble task of educating him. Along these lines, it is worth noting that the most mature ideas about education are generated by the him throughout the 80s, fundamentally, when he was responsible for the direction of the magazine The America, in New York, where he premiered as a form of expression, a dialogue with readers, which he called didacticism. This reflection of several years is the prelude to his most complete pedagogical project: The Golden Age.

When analyzing our peoples, Marti advanced the concept of the new man and the need for the new school that he conceived as a continuous and ascending education system, based on science and useful, that is, responding directly to the concrete reality of each country and each era; mobile and flexible as science itself would be a guarantee of development, where the usefulness of education would rest on its universalization. In these years when Latin American pedagogy made its way into the elitist concept of progress, raised by positivism, Marti defines that true progress is that which penetrates the popular masses. Without roots there are no fruits. At such a juncture the new Latin American generation had to be a flower and not a sterile product.

Marti knew how to discern the dialectic between education and popular revolution. The education of the new man would constitute, together with the revolutionary practice, a sure vehicle through which the great masses would seize progress, becoming its effective protagonists.

Marti’s educational project has an ethical root that fixes it to the object that we have just pointed out. By defining that moral qualities go up in price when they are enhanced by intelligent qualities [13]. He distinguished the complementary spheres of instruction as an illustration of thought and education as a guide to feelings.

The greatest happiness of a people would lie, then, in the promotion of both for all their children, that is why Marti thought that a virtuous people will live happier and richer than another full of vices, and will better defend themselves from all attacks [14]. The inclusion of the concept of happiness in Marti’s argumentation leads to the analysis of its correlation at the individual and social levels. For Marti, a man achieves happiness on a personal level when he thinks the beautiful, feels the great, loves the woman, serves the country, speaks its language or writes a book.

But all of this is morally legitimated if with present satisfactions he falls in love and sings gratefully the good form and the good use of existence. He stated that in the social arena the general happiness of people rests on the individual independence of its inhabitants. A free nation is the result of its free settlers [15].

Conclusions

The ethical and professional training of the teacher from a Marti vision, allows preparing the graduates for the fulfillment of their work, with a humanistic essence of the profession.

Marti’s reflection acquires singular axiological significance, which is evidenced in both educational ideals, apart from dissimilar historical junctures and disparate contexts, similar essentialities of his ethical-pedagogical projects.

The fundamental edge of Marti’s vision is constituted by his integrating conception of ethics in the education of the new generations and therefore in the professional education, where both complement each other, assuming as the only condition, his political commitment to the student to achieve their rights.