Learning from Pain

Abstract

The interest in the pandemic goes beyond the health professionals’ area of expertise due to repercussions in all areas of life, particularly in education. At the same time that it brings the foreign, what is threatening, destabilizing the current order, the painful experience mobilizes our capacity to feel and learn. From this learning through pain, it is already possible to take the first lessons of the pandemic: the recognition of the vulnerability of the human condition, the importance of truth to face problems, and solidarity with others. The article concludes that the learning and broader knowledge resulting from these lessons have a transformative force, which constitutes a kind of overcoming, not in the sense of naive sentimentality, but something that arises from the painful situation itself, because, as Hölderlin realizes, precisely where there is danger, salvation thrives.