DIGITALS: NOTES ON LOVE, CHARACTER, AND TEACHING

ABSTRACT: This article arises from a statement and a narrative. The former, posted by the CEO of OpenAI, a technology company from the US responsible for creating ChatGPT, is that teachers will soon become obsolete due to advances in artificial intelligence. The latter is presented to us by Mia Couto and it brings to the scene a memory from this Mozambican author: when he was a child, one of his teachers asked a specific task for the class and sat down among the children so that he could do it too. The two events show contrasting meanings for teaching: on one hand, a perception that links it to efficiency and productivity; on the other hand, a teaching practice that is justified by sharing the experience of a human being with the world, a loving and character-building experience involving the teacher in question, an experience which offers the students the possibility to witness a subject who, in his relation with the school subject he is responsible for, is also making himself. In that regard, this article attempted to depart from the first perception, with the recognition that it may not be so far from what other technical lines in pedagogy have already proposed, and approach Mia Couto’s report as an example for a teaching based on love, as conceived by Masschlein and Simons, and on character, as understood by Jorge Larrosa. Our intention with that is to advocate for a self-aware and, thus, irreplaceable teaching practice.