O problema da modernidade em Walter Benjamin: uma abordagem sobre a infância e a educação

Abstract

Walter Benjamin dedicated himself to the study of various issues that encompass modern society, including childhood, education and children's imagination. It is possible to identify in his writings how, for him, modernity interferes and influences the children's universe. This influence concerns the force that the capitalist mode of production exerts on the modern world and which causes the loss of experience that mainly affects adults, standardizing their perception of the world. Children, unlike adults, find pleasure in repetition and their imagination is not yet fully domesticated by capitalist culture. Given the breadth of Benjamin's texts, we also believe that this work is inseparable from a critical debate on society and contemporary education, since childhood was only a topic for this author in the opportunity to understand modernity. The German philosopher's works are permeated by different styles of writing, such as: allegories, prose, aphorisms, quotes and fragments of his own childhood memories. Another characteristic of Benjamin's writing was his special attention to the way he presented his objects of study. Considering this, we want to understand how and why Walter Benjamin was concerned about the direction that education and society were taking in the modern world, which turns our attention to how he analyzed the particularities of childhood. To this end, we developed this study based on his texts Childhood in Berlin (1932), Experience (1913), The life of students (1915), Old and forgotten children's books (1924), Vision of the children's book (1926), Old toys (1928), Cultural History of Toys (1928), A Communist Pedagogy (1929), Pestalozzi in Yverdon (1932), Experience and Poverty (1933) and also Freudian itineraries present in the writer's works. It is important to highlight that the philosophical text is the written representation of the reflection carried out by the author and that it is linked to its social context. The philosopher's work expresses his social, cultural, political, economic and educational relationships during the period in which the intellectual produced it.