Distance education: extending the reach of social criticism

Abstract

From an analysis of the Habermasian argumentation carried out in his work “Knowledge and Interest” of 1968, which we worked on from the 1987 translation; and anchored in the works of the Brazilian philosophers Durão, published in his book “A crítica de Habermas à dedução transcendental de Kant” of 1996 and Hansen, in his article published in Revista Crítica, entitled “Os riscos da crítica da sociedade” of 1998, we reflect, in this article, about how Habermas rescues the Theory of Knowledge from the distorted way behaved by Comtean positivism, passing through Freud and Marx to recover it as a Critical Theory of Society. We present the advent of the Information Age and the accompanying communication facilities to present the model of Distance Education as an effective way of extending the reach of Social Criticism as a self-reflection that makes the knowledge as a critical instrument not only for the individual but also of society.