Critical education theory – minimized subjects

What do the Bologna process, PISA studies, anti-Semitic university protests and German recovery have in common? They are all symptoms of what Theodor W. Adorno diagnosed decades ago as “half formation” – an education that does not develop people independently, reflected, but turns them into functioning cogs in social gearbox. At a time when education is increasingly reduced to its economic usability and at the same time strengthening authoritarian movements in Europe, the rediscovery of Adorno’s critical education theory could hardly be more urgent.

The editors Sebastian Gräber et al. In the anthology “Half Education – Critical Theory of Pedagogy” as an opportunity to update Adorno’s theory of education. While Germany dreams of upgrading again and national submission logics become socially acceptable, it turns out: The subject criticized by Adorno, characterized by half -formation, continues to exist. The editors explicitly refer to the anti -Semitic incidents at German universities after October 7, 2023 – for them no surprise in a society in which the thinking of “narcissistic self -assurance” would be replaced. This diagnosis is provocative, but not to be dismissed by hand: where critical thinking is replaced by self -confirmation, barbarism thrives.

The difficulty is already about: “Education” means pulling out or pulling in a certain direction. This “pulling” amounts to a nudge, whereby tries to subordinate individual fantasies and instincts of social order or at least often contradict. The child is brought up to be socially acceptable. It is a complex interrelation that Theodor W. Adorno refers to in his essay “Theory of Half Education”. Society is vital for survival, although this is a massive sink and thus a steady imposition for the individual, its drive and its fantasies. This imposition makes an analysis of the social education and educational ideals and its concrete implementation in reality, which significantly form the individual.

Education for adjustability

This question is more current than ever. Education systems are under pressure to produce “employerability” – work capable, adapted subjects that fit smoothly into capitalist exploitation logic. What is left behind is exactly what Adorno understood as an emancipatory potential of education: the ability to criticize, recognize and endure contradictions, to reflect on one’s own living conditions.

Patrick Viol provides a particularly strong analysis in the volume and concrete the abstract mechanisms of social discipline. It shows how capitalist production methods degrade people through the radical equalization under the logic of production and work ability to interchangeable objects. Under such conditions, individuals have the traumatic experience that their personality is void and therefore interchangeable. The result? A desperate hunger for belonging that drives people into the arms of false collectives. Whether Nazi Germany or modern consumer society-the pattern remains similar: Those who experience themselves as socially superfluous will seek a strong leader figure as a narcissistic replacement.

The alternative would be an education that names social contradictions and enables people to endure them.

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Viol’s analysis is so convincing because he takes the psychoanalytic foundations of Adorno’s social criticism seriously. The “drive economy of destruction”, of which Adorno speaks, is not a metaphor, but describes a real mental process in which negated human individuality develops in destructive impulses-against others and against itself. Viol’s appeal to “non-M and a wake-up call is declared virtue again in conformity.

Anna-Josepha Stahl takes this analysis based on concrete educational institutions and exposes the hypocrisy of the current education system. While schools claim to produce critical thinkers, they actually produce conformist, work -compatible individuals. Stahl shows how the school itself becomes a place of contradictions: on the one hand, it announces emancipatory ideals, on the other hand it works as a reimbursement institution for the labor market. Stahl’s analysis of the bourgeois cold, which is in apparently harmless educational practices, is particularly interesting. The permanent assessment, the standardization of learning processes, the economization of knowledge – all of this helps students learn to understand themselves as human capital. Stahl shows: The school is less educational location than the factory for social adaptation.

Criticism of identity

THASSILO Polcik takes up Adorno’s criticism of identity thinking in an impressive way. This apparently abstract theory turns out to be highly political, because it is enough for the roots of authoritarian thinking. Identity thinking pretends to fully record and control complex realities. It is the deceptive certainty to be able to grasp as it is “really”. But if you press complex realities into simple categories, you blindly make yourself blind – and thus manipulable. Polcik’s merit is not only to make this difficult theory understandable, but also to work out its pedagogical relevance. Because education that assumes everything to the coercion of categorization educates people who cannot endure ambivalences for clear answers and become susceptible to simple worldviews. The alternative to this would be an education that names social contradictions and enables people to endure it – and understand the resulting uncertainty as a productive force for open thinking.

Michael Schüßler continues to lead us to the developmental psychological beginnings of these processes. His analysis of drive, body and socialization shows that the earliest childhood development is already a mediation between a nature of man and society. It makes it clear that the tension between nature and culture cannot simply be dissolved. Schüßler’s concept of the child’s “misconduct” playing seems particularly valuable, which even contains a mode of critical consciousness, since the use of productivity in the game can be an emphatic turn to the subject.

Unlocked and redundancies

Despite the helpful access that the anthology delivers, criticism of the current state of pedagogy and upbringing, the question sometimes arises as to who this anthology is actually addressed. Should it be a criticism of the common training of pedagogy or educational science or is it a more general societyscriticism? This question remains unanswered in the tape. Also, the hanger is hardly taken up with October 7 and the protests on the universities in the essays, which means that the promised dealing with this high -top topic is not redeemed.

On the one hand, the fact that the book explicitly refers to the work on education and education at Adorno is the strength of the band, since they are both a thread and the topicality of its education theory. At the same time, this also becomes a weakness of the volume when the contributions are initiated for the fifth time with a quote from Adorno, in order to formulate its criticism of society again. Nevertheless: The authors impressively show how currently Adorno’s warnings have remained of the risk of deceptive half -education. Anyone who wants to understand why our education systems produce authoritarian characters instead of critical spirits find important answers here.

Sebastian Gräber, Henning Gutfleisch, Tarek Probst, Anna-Josepha Stahl, Patrick Viol, Max Wevelsiep (ed.): Half Education-Critical Theory of Pedagogy. Criminal publisher, 280 pages, Br., € 20.