Educação, política e transformação social: contribuições a partir da teoria crítica

Abstract

The present article aims to retake a few aspects of the contributions that relate education, politics, and democracy, with a desire for social transformation, such as presented by critical theory, most notably in Karl Marx‘s, Theodor W. Adorno‘s, and Max Horkheimer‘s texts. In this sense, it passes through elements brought forward specifically in the work of Marx concerning educational and formative processes in the context of capital-labour relationship in order to, afterwards, briefly trace the manners under which repressive forms of education and their relations to the bourgeois ideal of formation (Bildung) present themselves in texts and interventions of Adorno, performed during the decades of 1950 and 1960, in Germany. Finally, it concludes by articulating these reflections with those presented by Max Horkheimer, during the same period, both developed under the light of the German process of reconstruction and re-democratization following national-socialism. That way, it is considered possible to identify chief contributions to think about educational processes, most notably regarding some of its contradictions, emphasizing the relevance of education for resistance, while, at the same time, indicating the explicit relationship exposed both in Horkheimer and Adorno concerning the pursuing of democracy. Their reflections are heavily marked by the totalitarian forms of government that disseminated themselves in Europe, especially during the first half of the XXth century, and can, as far as we understand it, offer instigating impulses for contemporary reflections, mostly when the reawakening of signs of political, religious, and identity intolerance and persecution in a wider sense is considered.