Topics for sociology of contemporary education in Adorno and Sartre: childhood, thought, dialetics

Abstract

This theoretical work analyzes fragments of the writings of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and highlights reflections for sociological research in the field of Education, considering the inflection that both propose in “towards the subject”. More specifically, we review how each author reflected on his own childhood and education, seeking to articulate the autobiographical reflection that each one makes, in different ways, to the hard core of their theoretical conceptions. As we observe how each author, as an adult, systematically recalls (in philosophy or literature) his own childhood, reflecting, among other aspects, on the social condition of their families and the bourgeois class, the relationship with adults and with the artefacts (cultural and technological) of his time, including schooling, we can also perceive elements of his theoretical conceptions about subjectivity and his analysis of the vicissitudes of the subject in the contemporary. Whereas, for Sartre, childhood emerges in the context of a restorative conception of narrative as a mediator of experience, in an ever-open process of transformation of existence, for Adorno, the recollection of his childhood is linked to the themes of the homeland (not as a territory, but as humanity) and of utopia and is posed as a possibility of rereading the singularities of children's experiences as a way of confronting and updating the promises contained in the past.