The loss of the experience of cultivation in the contemporary university

Abstract

The text aims to show, based on a commentary of Adorno's points of view on the goals of education, that the history of modernity, seen as process for the constitution of the hegemony of instrumental reason, has removed an essencial feature from education: the formation of a consciousness for freedom, an aspect that is involved in the relationship between experience, truth and happiness, which constitute the humanist ideal of knowledge and emancipation. Civilizing progress can be seen as a progressive loss of the ideal of formation, substituted by the procedures of adaptive rationalization of the individual to the alienating conditions that are peculiar to the managed world. In the event of an impossibility to reinstall the favourable conditions to the cultivating education experience, we are left, from a critical education perspective, with an attempt to oppose the instrumentalization of subjectivity by means of an effort to recuperate the negativity as a counterpoint to the blind adhesion to the historical present.