THE CONTRADITORY NATURE OF SCHOOL EDUCATION: HISTORICAL TENSION BETWEEN HUMANIZATION AND ALIENATION

Abstract

The article aims to promote reflections about pedagogical theories in their historical and contradictory character, analyzing the implications of this process for contemporary education. It identifies that the neoliberal project, in view of this restructuring, requires a new type of worker: Flexible, adaptable, with entrepreneurial capacity, etc. This attributes certain value to knowledge for capital, that is, to maintain and expand the very existence of the capitalist mode of production. In this way, it subjugates the formation of the worker to the semiformation, under conditions of precarization, exploitation and alienation. In this sense, we observe that school education has not, to this day, been a weapon for the working class that could be used for its emancipation. We thus find the contradiction between the humanizing possibility, here identified with the maximum development of the consciousness of individuals and alienation, which is a representative of the processes that separate the subjects of the human generic conquests, and among them, the access to the knowledge able to unveil reality. Thus, for school education to operate at the service of humanization and against alienation, one must affirm it by the quality of the knowledge it conveys and by the defense of the act of teaching them.