Teaching in the era of technical reproduction: regression of thought, barbarism and the possibilities of experience in human formation

Abstract

This text addresses the relationship between teaching and the increasingly accentuated difficulties in conceptualizing what human formation is, in a world marked by the broad and globalizing development of economics, technique and technologies, which, far from providing, on the same scale, social development, pronounce the distances between possessors and dispossessed. Furthermore, they indicate a rupture that has been felt by critical theorists of society of different epistemological hues, since the 1950s, between a humanistic culture based on the common good and another, more instrumental and related to the masses, oriented towards an existence with a hedonistic, immediatist bias and voluntarily submitted to the will of the market, Capital, consumption and entertainment itself. The regression and decline of thought and, in particular, of thought that criticizes what is not true about it, as well as the barbarism that is characteristic of these moments of cultural life, are discussed based on authors such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, who dared to address what is conventionally considered the ultimate truth in history. It is argued that human formation and humanity itself lack another formative model, precisely the one that takes the experience of criticism as the only one capable of overcoming the serious ethical-political and environmental crisis that the planet faces, perhaps the first that will, in fact, lead humanity to extinction because of itself and its action on the world.