Persuasion

Photo: Bruna Carvalho
Faculdade de Medicina da UFMG

Versão em português

Of course, if we think about the population of Brazil, what I’m going to say here is about people from middle class or wealthier social classes. Unfortunately, few poor people reach high levels of study and few can afford it because they have a difficult real life with bills to pay; unless they have a scholarship, which is not very common.

I was talking to a friend who has been many times postgraduate in the area of Human Sciences, and I found interesting what she said about Brazilian students who become addicted to studying, perpetuating their stay in the university. They seem to be on an insatiable quest for something they often don’t know what it is about. She gave her own example, some years ago, and wonders if it would not be the academic environment that would have bewitched her for so long, more than the interest in expanding her knowledge. She confessed she found irresistible to keep dialogues and debates with people with the same kind of thoughts.

Maybe she was feeling insecure about getting into the labour market in a world that works in a way she did not agree with. She was not even attracted to work as a teacher, because she instinctively sensed this entire trend to be somewhat useless, precisely because there was a discrepancy between the academic world and the outside world. Until the day she decided to untie the umbilical cord that bound her to the embryonic student state and went to live her life. And she didn’t want to get involved with students or teachers in the same way, anymore.

This academic closure, in my view, looks very much like religious people in a cloistered convent. Inside, everything is sacred. In this isolation from the rest of the world, they cultivate ideas considered elevated and supposedly not understood by the human mass circulating outside... for whom the bell tolls, however.

But what impressed me most in her self-analysis was the fascination she showed for some teachers, which led me to the conclusion that she has not yet completely freed herself from those ties. I know there are brilliant and admirable teachers – I've had many – but the way she talks about them made me see an adolescent enchanted with her idols. I don’t know what this means in the psychological sphere, I will not dare to give my opinion in a field I don’t know.

Now, I'd like to tell you my own experience in the university environment, and this includes a tribute to one of my sisters-in-law, as a classmate. We did not study in the area of the Humanities, that is to say, "humanities" also, but in another approach: we were classmates in the Faculty of Medicine. I will write a text to honor her and my other sisters-in-law too, in the family. We have a very interesting life trajectory that is worth remembering. But what I write here is very specific; I don’t want to mix things up.

At that time, we were under Brazilian military dictatorship and the planet was surviving under the yoke of the “Cold War”; most people avoided talking about matters of ideology, on either side. There was fear in the air. Even so, sometimes a teacher dared to insinuate something, tried to exert influence on the students, in the way he thought.

I had my own thoughts, difficult to be influenced by others, I didn’t argue with unknown people, I was very quiet, introverted and timid, when I was young – since getting older, I am speaking too much. So, I could deeply disagree with opinions in discussion in the university environment, and I would not say anything if I was not invited to speak. The result is that it was very difficult for anyone to exert any kind of influence on me. I was always wary.

But my dear friend, who later became my sister-in-law, she did not overlook things that bothered her. If she thought the subject was out of place, or if she did not agree with the imposition of an idea, she would say what she was thinking without any reverential awe. Sometimes I was afraid of the consequences that frankness might bring to her, but nowadays I admire her very much for that. She was right. Being and acting like that, we do not run the risk of being hypnotized (literally) and, at the same time, it prevents others more susceptible at that moment, from being influenced; it triggers an alarm.

The mental power of the authority that holds the speech, as it is the case with teachers, is not negligible. They act daily. Usually, students enter the university still very young and with the determination to undergo an apprenticeship, so they are unarmed, they have lowered their guard regarding knowledge assimilation. They switch to the configuration vulnerable to influences "by default". They are, therefore, more subject to suggestion and psychological cooptation; once initiated at the very outset, effects may last for long time.

Not only people who didn’t study are vulnerable to psychological cooptation. Everybody is!

It is always good to keep on a certain degree of “spirit of contradiction”. And I’m not saying this just for the students. We must be attentive in all environments, especially nowadays, with social networks, where there are people who have the talent of forming opinions, attracting and even recruiting followers. Danger is everywhere.