Education in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Notes on Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This essay explores Benjamin’s considerations on youth and childhood in conjunction with those on radio and film, today referred to as mass media. Benjamin analyzes the era of the rising Culture Industry, understanding how the media were changing the human gaze and mind down to its optic unconscious. The mechanical reproduction of art transformed not only the meaning of art, but also that of life and social relations and, therefore, of education itself. Benjamin’s ideas on pedagogy are few and scattered but nonetheless point in a specific political direction, namely, that of changing and overcoming the religion of capitalism and its exploitative relations. Benjamin analyzes the decline of play and the educational power of objects due to the rise of fetishistic and capitalist religion. Stateless messianism describes education as the attempt to transmit the most human remains in dehumanized modernity; the stateless person perceives extinction together with humanity or, more specifically, messianism. Education thus becomes a generational task of becoming human, of perpetuating what is most valuable in the past in order to renew the world and redeem the vanquished in the future. The tradition of preservation is challenged by the hidden tradition of the vanquished; bourgeois pedagogy is challenged by a proletarian and revolutionary pedagogy which empowers new generations to radically renew the world.