Education crisis as a crisis of public reason

Abstract

The text questions whether the crisis of education (that is, of the educational pact, in the formulation given by the pontifical magisterium) should be considered as a constitutive aspect of the crisis of tradition that characterizes, in general, contemporary mass societies. No sectoral response of an exclusively pedagogical nature, however well-intentioned and reflexively well-designed, can overcome the impasse in the process of transgenerational transmission of cultural codes - ethical and symbolic - that has been increasingly occurring throughout the world. world. To find a solution, it is first necessary to identify the causes of the current widespread crisis of public reason, that is, the causes of distrust in the normative power of rationality, and work towards its reconstruction, seeking to highlight and correct the culturally distorting role of functional primacy of technical-productive rationality, inherent to modernity itself as a tradition that is still predominant at a global level. The discontinuity with the self-contradictions of modernity thus becomes the condition to save its normative core and, from the educational sphere, rehabilitate a public reason, an intersubjectively binding reason of meaning, without which there can be no free, fair and peaceful coexistence. peaceful.