Urban Education Dystopia, 2050: A Response from Latin America

Any reflection about the future of the city and urban education needs to be supported by a diagnosis of the present time. Such diagnosis about the major lines of force that draw the space of the city and about the corresponding urban education will allow the imagination of the future to be an exercise of working on the consequences of the elements that have been diagnosed. To what extent do the space of the city and education preserve the hopes of the past, enabling individual development to take place in tension between the past, present and future? Or, to say this in another way, to what extent do the spaces of socialization and education stimulate the coming of a “unidimensional man” (Marcuse, 1964), pointing to a man/woman immediately glued to the present and reality, unable to keep the tension between what s/he is and what s/he should be? Here, I would like to utilize criteria found in some classic texts to make such a diagnostic: in particular, texts on education which focus on its subversive element, due to its characteristic of keeping remembrances, hopes and memory that may serve to destabilize the present state of affairs.