Neither critical nor post-critical: For a pedagogy without attributes

Abstract

The present document constitutes a response to the Manfiesto for a Post-critical Pedagogy of Hodgson, Vlieghe and Zamojski. Part of the recognition of points of coincidence with the works that some Latin American authors have developed in this regard but points out that the manifesto fails to identify the central problem of critical pedagogies. In this direction, the text argues that the central problem of these tendencies is that their conception of power is limited to what Foucault called the war and repressive hypotheses of power. Such a way of understanding power, as confrontation or repression, makes education conceived as a political action and, in this way, its fundamentally anthropological character (or in terms of Sloterdijk, anthropotechnical) is invisible. One of the most significant consequences of this fact is that education and pedagogy have been undergoing a process of politicization against which a «criticism» of the «critical tendencies» based on the conceptual horizon of pedagogy is necessary and urgent, and whose effect is its update and reconceptualization. Such an exercise would allow the production of new tools that help to understand the functioning of education as a modernity project. Criticism of the critical tendencies arises from the concepts of government (Foucault) and anthropotechnics (Sloterdijk) that applied to the analysis of the constitution of the modern concept of education lead to propose, following the analysis of Antelo and Serra, a pedagogy without attributes, that is, neither criticism nor post-criticism.