The Education and its Deformations in the Contemporary Culture: a Contribution to the Actuality Theodor W. Adorno’s Theory of Half-education

Abstract

In the article are regarded some social and cultural contexts of the development and reception Adorno’s theory of half-education with a spread application of the biographical method, which makes it possible to show the intentionality of this theory through the recalling prism of students and colleagues. It is proposed an argumentative verification of the statement made by Habermas about the splitting in theorization of Adorno. The interpretative schemes of the concept of “Bildung” (education, culture, forming), developed in the German idealism, are analyzed, where the semantic of the forming is the dominated one and the pathologies of this process are conceptualized accordingly as deformation and back-forming in the various manifestations of half-education. The theory of half-educationis at first a diagnostic of conditions in the contemporary societies, where through the instruments of the mass culture are always producing pathologies such as aliens and mass psychoses. This makes possible also the tendency of re-feudalization, which, on its part, can be considered also as the symptomatic of the spiritual crisis of the Postmodernity. One of the crises appearancesis the whole oppositions to education, namely: anti-educationas the consequenceof refusing of educational practices the humanistic idea of education. Overcoming from that crises is needed a critical reflection not only above half- and anti-education, but else above the idea of education itself.