Intellectual emancipation and democracy: toward a critical philosophy of education from Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire

Abstract

The aim is to propose, through the joint reading of Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire, a philosophy of education capable of orienting us in a critique of the current neoliberal society. Having such a goal in view, I first state how equality can appear as a principle to guide our educational practices. With the affirmation of the power proper to the intelligence is an entire anthropological understanding of the man who is drawn, understanding that affirms the human being as an entity that has in learning a privileged way of relating and existing in the world. In a second moment, I argue that such a principle of equality finds an important complementarity with the dialectic between oppressors and oppressed developed by Paulo Freire, explaining the political character of the principle of equality of intelligences and its necessary social mediation within a history marked by the relations of inequality. From this, we can propose an idea of ​​education not based on the strategy of investing in human capital - a presupposition of the rationality of contemporary capitalism - but in the normativity proper to a democratic and emancipatory anthropology and philosophy of history.