Education as an anthropo-technique against human wildening: paradoxes and complications for modern pedagogical thinking

Abstract

Based on some of the ideas by classic pedagogy and education thinkers, this article analyzes the consequences of understanding education with the perspective of modernity as well as the tensions, contradictions and incoherencies that it implies. Special attention is paid to the issue of education as a possibility of achieving perfection. The supposed anthropological contingency and the likelihood of forming the human become the object of a series of intentioned interventions in which “human nature” is perceived as a threat but also as the possibility of a new human being—of a post-human perfection—. In this context, and with a projection into the future, the dream of pedagogy turns at the same time into a permanent and real nightmare, consisting on the obsession for reaching a state of perfection —an optimum state— and therefore achieving “the best”. This article shows how as education/ eugenics borders become blurred, the practice of education turns into a subtle eugenics anthropo-technique, within the historical limits in which the human imperative of being better each day becomes stronger, and that part of human beings that cannot be improved becomes obsolete.