The ideals of a humanistic education (bildung) and the meaning of school experience

Abstract

The feeling that the school institution is experiencing a deep crisis is quite widespread, especially among intellectuals and school professionals. The consensus about its existence, however, does not imply any agreement as far as its causes or current features are concerned. The hypothesis that guides the present reflections associates the notion of a crisis in education to one aspect that usually remains hidden in most critical discourses of contemporary education: the fading of a political and existential meaning for the school experience. In order to develop this hypothesis, the text focuses on the range of possible meanings of the term crisis, rejecting those that connect it immediately to notions of decay or decline of any sort. From the writings of Arendt and Koselleck, the notion of crisis is applied in its original Greek meaning: the emergence of a crucial moment that requires reflection and decision. Therefore, what I try to accomplish is an exercise of thought that refuses the functional and economic approaches of the school system, searching for an intrinsic meaning for school experience: the initiation of the new comers (children) in symbolic heritages capable of offering intelligibility to human experience and durability to our common world. An initiation whose meaning transcends any external functionality of the school experience in favor of a process whose final result is not a functional being, but an active subject.