Towards An American Critical Aesthetic Pedagogy After Auschwitz

This paper aims to critically rethink the logic of education in order to highlight its totalitarian potential. It proposes an understanding of the internal nature of conflicts present in education governed by “reason”; the same reason that had its most finished symbol in Auschwitz and that continues to distort the humanist project. Reason feeds the State, bureaucracy, technological instrumentalization, and mechanical precision, in a word: the triumph of death over hope. Critical education is an act of resistance in the construction of a society where horror and meaninglessness cannot be repeated. It is necessary to start from a social and sociological perspective of education and pedagogy37, addressing the critical study of human relations with a particular sensitivity towards the question of the human. Beyond quantitatively analyzing the prevailing educational models of today, studying macrostructural standards and guidelines of pedagogy, we must consider or recover the idea of education as an ideology, as a human project, and consider it in turn as a personalization of power, typical of a logic of domination. This approach would allow us to conceptually address the problems of American critical pedagogy from a more canonical socio-anthropological and philosophical study.