The society of repression: pedagogy between pain, fragility and expectation of recognition

Abstract

Our society is constantly committed to removing pain, as well as death and suffer, estranging so the sense of life and his possible beautiful. This suppression is accompanied by a language that alienates fragility and weakness, recognizing, on the contrary, force, arrogance, violence and oppression as constituents of a new (?) anthropological model that marks the human, political and social relations and can inspire the new generations. Traces of this anthropological model are constantly present in everyday life, rooted in the fear of death and in the tragic observation of the fragility of life and human finitude. This misunderstanding of fragility, however, entails the risk of the impossibility of an authentic life and of a truly human realization that can only take place from the assumption of vulnerability as the foundation of one's own making. Fragility, in fact, is an ontological connotation of the human being without which it is not possible to admit any process of authentication and humanization: thus the human being awaits the recognition of this fragility as the essence of pedagogical discourse and language. Pedagogy must respond to this expectation that involves the assumption of a complex idea of fragility that includes its different facets. In this contribution, we ask ourselves if it is possible to think of a pedagogy that is capable of promoting an anthropology of human fragility as a starting point for the construction of a horizon of human and social hope, as a way for the creation of a society that makes the difference instead of generating indifference. This path starts from the awareness that it is itself a fragile perspective, both because it fragilizes pedagogy itself, putting it in crisis, and because it may already appear defeated by the most arrogant pedagogy of force, of “virility”.