In education, pragmatism has become widely spread and it pervades everything from teacher training to the definitions of what and how to teach. We seek to highlight Adorno's contributions to face this philosophical trend. The vitality of his analyses rests in the fact he addresses the core of the pragmatic tradition. He denounced how, in the administered society, the cultural formation has become semi-formation. The pragmatic spirit establishes the same" rationality in the relationship between subject and object, theory and practice, and feeds the phenomenon of aversion to theory, characterised by the atrophy of the autonomous thinking and the poverty of practice. However Adorno sees the possibility of a resistance thinking that does not renounce to the objective referent and objective value of truth but is opposed to the collapse of reason. The reflexive experience in / on the educational work cannot depart from this thinking.
Adorno; Critical theory and education; Pragmatic tradition; Relation theory and practice