Jürgen Habermas, Paulo Freire e a crítica à cidadania como horizonte educacional : uma proposta de revivificação da educação popular ancorada no conceito de sujeito social

Abstract

This thesis is characterized as a bibliographic work that approaches the work of Paulo Freire and Jürgen Habermas, where the differentiated force which is offered by them for discussions around Popular Education is sized and put in evidence. It concerns the analysis of both authors¿ thoughts, with emphasis on its ideals of society, and showing them in terms of social reformation or transformation. Evidenced, their social utopias are compared with liberation ontological presuppositions when, by investigating and problematizing the concept of citizen, the demonstration its insufficiency as a paradigm of liberating education action is searched. The aim still is to define and propose the concept of social subject as the strong horizon of formation of Popular Education. This thesis is configured from the criticism about the citizen and his assumption as formative ideal, saying that he is the social subject, a concept from Paulo Freire¿s thought, and not the citizen, purpose of Jürgen Habermas theory of society, which composes the horizon of formation of the Popular Education, by coherence with its base principles. The investigation of its horizon of formation from the theoretical and practical counterpoint of Freire and Habermas¿ proposals is due to the strong influence that both exert on several fields of human activity, such as education, politics and sociology. In education, the presence of Freire is highly recognized not only in Brazil, where Popular Education is explicitly based on his teaching, but also in all over the world. Hebermas, in his turn, has been considered a thinker whose influence transcends the sociological and philosophical means, reaching the Brazilian educational thought with considerable force. One of the reasons which oriented this research consists in the suspicion that the Habermasian social theory, given its basic characteristics, leads to reformation (cultural change), and not to structural transformation (radical change in the cultural, economic and political fields) of the society. This one would represent a fundamental difference between Freire and Habermas, to be considered for a liberating education. As Habermas stipulates a "community of ideal speech", shared by linguistically competent people, and deliberates, free of coactions on polemized conventions in the historical transformations, Freire deals with a very distant reality in terms of social justice from what the German thinker idealizes: illiterates and semiilliterates in oppression and social miserability situations, victimed by a legacy of a colonial and predatory culture, in process since the fifteenth century. A huge gap separates and distinguishes individuals¿ immediate interest, determined by the urgency and the degree of needs in each context. Such urgencies are well identified by the individuals¿ unequal competences and concrete realities which condition them. Although they share a similar ideal, Freire and Habermas are involved with situations that, transcending to space-time variations, require punctually different responses.