Pedagogical relevance of the concept of alienation

Komar, Zvonimir. (2012). Pedagogical relevance of the concept of alienation. Pedagogijska istraživanja, 9(1/2). pp. 25-42. ISSN 1334-7888

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Abstract

Contemporary pedagogy oft en uncritically accepts positivistic, alienated concepts, implied by educational reforms, of the absolute reproduction of the actual. Th e central characteristic of alienation is a separation of the cognitive subject and the cognitive object with the ontological absolutisation of the object, where the closed, „frozen”, ahistorical reality becomes the measure for all purposes, goals and „needs”. The subject can then in principle only „respond” to those needs, re-producing the same. In other words, its alienated creation in return, objectively and by the authority of the „reality”, determines the entire being. The forms of such alienation are today primarily found in the technologised science, operationalised scientific language transcending the science itself and becoming a specific „social behaviourism” (Marcuse, 1989), in the culture industry and capitalism, containing in its logic all these forms of alienated human pseudo-practice. The educational and pedagogical way of overcoming this difficulty lies in the re-establishment of subject-objectness in the theory of education, didactics, methodology and all branches of pedagogy on appropriate specific levels which – in order to correspond to the idea of pedagogy – would have to become anti-positivistic, dialectical, historical and developmental

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