Carlos Francisco de Sousa Reis, Maria das Dores Formosinho (Coimbra/Portugal)#
Reconstructing Pedagogical Reason within a Contemporary Reading of Enlightenment#
We start by discuss the educational project in the framework of Modernity, Enlightenment and Bildung, while trying to present a critical characterization of its historical emergence, along with the underlying of the innovative contributions and eventual shortcomings. In particular we refer to the substantialist, a priori, solipsistic, and supposedly transcendent conception of the subject, which gave way to a set of insularizing and denaturalizing illusions, along with the monological metanarratives that cloister education. On the positive side, we stress the proposal of autonomous reasoning, free from all tutelage, understood as expressive and conditional of human intrinsic dignity, which leads to a new understanding of the educational process and the foreseeing of a society proactively conjugating human beings as entitled to be considered as “ends in themselves”. It follows an analysis of the postmodern deconstruction by identifying its points of impact, namely, the concepts of reason, truth, discourse and the teleological reading of education. After discussing Postmodernity contributions regarding the appreciation of difference and multiculturalism, along with the refusal of any kind of absolutizing procedures, we also debunk the perplexities and dead ends it has brought forth. After referring to postmodern approaches that rely on the simple parodies of “traditional” philosophy, as well as to the argumentative weakness discovered behind the opaque language of sensationalist effect and the simple unreasonable nature of some of its approaches, we focus on: the tendency to refuse all kind of aims and objectives for education; the proposal of a non-identity pedagogy; the dismissal of imparting all kind of predefined knowledge corpus through education; aside with the discard of what is called the “novel of self-formation”, supposedly constructed by Enlightenment to define education as a normative process aimed at propitiating an spurious autonomy at the price of accepting certain social limitations. We conclude by pointing out towards a new Enlightenment or Metamodernity, which could rely on a participatory reason (Herrerías, 2009a) in order to give way to the critical, dialogic and intersubjective reconstruction of the Pedagogical Reason (Gonzálvez, 2010).