Escritos entre 1913 e 1932, os ensaios reunidos neste volume condensam o essencial do pensamento de Walter Benjamin no tocante à educação, foco de inquietações que atravessaram toda sua obra. Com lucidez extraordinária, o autor discorre sobre aspectos da vida universitária, o ensino de moral, o aprendizado da leitura, a prática do teatro, os brinquedos, jogos, livros infantis e, ainda, os contrastes entre a educação burguesa e os desafios de uma pedagogia revolucionária. Produtos de uma aliança extremamente rara entre inteligência, sensibilidade e a postura radical de "não vender a alma à burguesia", estes textos mantêm-se profundamente atuais, porque - como observa Flávio Di Giorgi no posfácio - Benjamin é um crítico que "não fala sobre a dialética, mas constrói seu texto dialeticamente".
Author
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem. As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated the Tableaux Parisiens edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal as well as Proust's In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Influenced by Bachofen, Benjamin gave the name "auratic perception" to the aesthetic faculty through which civilization would recover a lost appreciation of myth.
