Education Before Auschwitz
In 1966 Adorno gave a radio lecture called “Education After Auschwitz” in which he considered the primary task of young peoples’ education as one of forestalling the always-potential recurrence of such a catastrophe. Anticolonial, antiracist, and communist intellectuals in the 1920s-30s interwar epoch prefigured Adorno’s line of thinking as they imagined theories and practices of education to undo and avert the imperialist destructiveness of artificial epistemic underdevelopment, subalternization, and “capitalist psychology.” Elaborating on arguments in his current book Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism (Columbia, 2019), Ben Baer will discuss the intertwined complexities and promises of these dreams for a new education.