FROM INSTRUMENTAL REASON TO NEOLIBERAL RATIONALITY: THE RECONFIGURATION OF THE ENDS OF CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between neoliberalism and education based on the hypothesis that its impact on the educational field is not restricted to the introduction of market-oriented or managerial mechanisms, but reaches the very rationality through which the purposes of education and formation are determined. Through bibliographic research of a theoretical-conceptual nature, the article revisits the contributions of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno concerning the atrophy of reason under the predominance of its instrumental dimension, articulating them with Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s analyses of neoliberal rationality. It argues that the generalization of competition as a norm of conduct and of the enterprise as a model of subjectivation radicalizes tendencies of instrumental rationality by producing the entrepreneurial subject, responsible for the continuous management and valorization of their own human capital. In the educational field, this movement reconfigures categories such as autonomy, protagonism, lifelong learning and formation, progressively subordinating them to the imperatives of adaptation, performance, employability and self-management. It concludes that the central problem does not lie in the absence of educational purposes, but in the naturalization of socially determined ends that tend to identify formation with efficient adaptation to existing reality.