ABSTRACT
Discussions about the place of authority in the educational process have mobilized intellectuals, teachers and policy makers. In general the discourses have alternated between complaint and lament; between the rejection of school relations founded on authority and the restoration of a supposed lost authority. This paper seeks to emphasize that, despite the theoretical and programmatic differences between these two trends of educational discourses, both have a common feature: they do not distinguish obedience produced by a relationship of authority - always founded on trust - from those that emerge as a result of violence, coercion or mere attachment to legality. Thus, the debate about the dilemmas and predicaments linked to decline of authority in educational relationships in the modern world requires an understanding of the specificity of this type of relationship and the temporal regimes that govern the relationships that societies establish between present, past and future.
KEYWORDS:
philosophy of education; authority; Hannah Arendt; ethics and education