Ensino de filosofia e razão comunicativa: por uma construção emancipadora da ação educativa

Abstract

The present work aims to discuss the contributions of the thinking of the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1929-) to school education through the teaching of philosophy as an emancipated formation of the subject. To this end, we have used as a base text for the development of this reflection the work Theory of Communicative Action (Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns) published in 1981, in which the German author establishes the paradigm of language as a medium in an interaction between social actors aiming at mutual understanding. Thus, the notion of emancipation, that is, as a process of conquest and maintenance of autonomy, will be directly linked to the use of language in mediating between social individuals in search of consensus, that is, as a form of intersubjective agreement and decision making between a group of social subjects, in which thoughts, speeches, opinions, etc. can be validated. Thus, to approximate the theory of the Frankfurtian thinker to school education, it is necessary to undertake pedagogical action as a situation that favors the formation of autonomous subjects and able to maintain interactive ties between them based on the use of the best argument that can be heard, criticized, accepted or distorted from a rational and open dialogue. However, it is worth emphasizing that Habermas identifies in the late capitalist society the influence of instrumental reason in the world of life (Lebenswelt). Reason is itself what the German thinker termed as "World of systems," in which the influence of the a-communicative means power and money, representatives of the political and economic subsystems, respectively, dictate the social guidelines, making the means to achieve ends. Starting from this observation, it is exactly where we will situate the problematic of the present work, that is, to what extent education is put at the service of the world of the systems, in such a way that the pedagogical actions begin to be ordered by the instrumental rationality aiming the money and the power? Or, it would leave the school education to share the presuppositions of formation, creation and intersubjective relation of social actors in search of consensus to the molds of the communicative reason and, consequently, to an emancipated life, to share a socio-educational paradigm that aims the own interests and hegemonic? In addition, we can understand that school education is the occasion in which the individual builds his humanity from rational presuppositions, which aim, therefore, at emancipation according to the potentiality of restoring free communication of domination in the world of life. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that school and pedagogical mechanisms from this perspective would be in a privileged place in the formation of rational and autonomous social actors, and it is in this context that school education could approach a communicative rationality.