Pedagogical criticism and anthropopedagogy: towards a new problematization of the State

Abstract

If we assume power as a technique of control over life, the landscape around possibilities for the deployment of life and its power seems to be increasingly uncertain, especially since the capacity of codification and registration by the State has been technified to such an extent, that it is not even possible to establish a limit that separates the State from the civilian population; it is no longer possible to understand the State in the ways we had taken it in the West in earlier times; it is in all of us and completely determines all our relationships, it is not an “outside” but not an “inside”, it is a “between.”. Now, if there is something that resists power and its control techniques, it is life itself, but such resistance decreases (without disappearing) as control techniques are installed in each human and for this reason, philosophical attention must, inevitably, focus much on childhood and how their education processes occur; that is, how the animal is expelled from the body and the citizen installed in it, which inevitably leads to the questioning of the relationship between philosophy and education. All of this given, we may not have taken the third transformation of the spirit seriously enough. Now, pedagogy as institutional knowledge, which historically seems to have taken more from psychology than from philosophy, is completely incapable of making an analysis outside the limits imposed by the institutional framework and therefore, the emergency of a pedagogical critique that is critical of pedagogy in terms of institutional knowledge, is necessary. One that is capable of analyzing the counterface of the school institution; that is, the configuration of war machines that resist such a school and create another, the school war machine, which is nothing other than resistance and ruptures in the face of institutionality, and which in turn becomes a new questioning of the State. To do this, it must use anthropopedagogy, which overcomes the classic question of anthropology about what is man? and poses a questioning of another type, how does an animal become human?