Educação e crítica da modernidade: um encontro entre Rousseau e Hokheimer

Abstract

The objective of the present dissertation is presenting the relation between education and modernity, in its aspects of crisis and critic, using Rousseau’s and Horkheimer’s thoughts in what they have in common, that is, the production of a critic directed to modern science, which is commanded by instrumental rationality. We sought in Rousseau the germ of modernity critic, as it was thought by Horkheimer, and produced in Discourse of Science and Arts, award winner of Dijon Academy in 1750. There is an intrinsic and preponderant relation between education, reason and science which is still effective nowadays. Involved by the triangle modernity-sciencecrisis, we can find current educational pattern, whose roots lay in antiquity, as long as philosophy uprising. In the first chapter of the dissertation, education was theorized in its general aspects, as a constitutive element of human formation. Having been exposed its definition and its primate objectives, we built a historical landscape from the sharing between education and rationality as it was presented in Antique Greek. The Master Thesis discusses, with an emphasis to the uprising of Modernity, the predominant educational scenery at that time and underlines the circundant debate up to rousseaunian critic and its resemblance with Horkheimer’s thought. In the second chapter, we broached the subject modernity critic based on Rousseau and Horkheimer’s theories. With the assistance of philosophy history, we brought the origin of rationality, as it is understood in present days. Again, starting from Antique Greek, we arrived in Modern Age, Rousseau’s time, from the point where is established the triangulation’s critic in what education is associated. Drawing parallelisms between Rousseau and Horkheimer, we ascertained that there are convergent points. Critical Theory’s analysis about education is sufficiently contemporary and contributes to education improvement.