142 Education and the Tragedy of Culture: Pedagogical Notes on the Rationalization of Knowledge Silvia M. Grinberg Universidad Nacional de San Martin We usually think of education as a space within a culture, but a space that would be outside or beyond the contradictions inherent to culture. However, to what degree is the promise of modem pedagogy still possible? Up to what point do the ideals and meanings of modem culture and education bring with them their impossibility? To address these questions, we consider it essential to reflect on the junction produced between the vast field of culture and the processes attached to its transmission. Education, we propose, cannot be thought of as a sphere separate from social life, nor could it exist were it not embedded in historical clay. It is from these questions that is important for us to revisit classical cultural philosophy and sociology authors such as Simmel, Weber, and Benjamin. Through the Simmelian notion of the tragedy of culture, we propose to update the problems implied in the rationalization of knowledge and its transmission. From our point of view, classic works have not lost their relevance, but constitute key points from which to consider problems related to the rationalization of culture and, regarding this work, related to education, and its contradictions and tensions. Through the notion of the tragedy of culture we try to update this debate by stressing the forces related to cultural production and transmission, without looking for some Eden that could give us back lost completeness. We believe this task is essential to delineate, paraphrasing Benjamin, the pedagogy of the future. The disenchantment of the world, intrinsic to that tragedy, should not necessarily mean that culture in general and the processes involved with its transmission should become merchandise, per se, such as has happened before and continues to happen in many of the teaching strategies today. From here, we understand that it is possible to open new roads that allow us to escape the logic of instrumental learning so cherished by many of the educational reforms implemented during the last decades of the twentieth century. In that respect, it is important to clarify that, although the debate we propose is character- istic of capitalist societies, we carry out our thinking in and from the specificity of Latin American and, especially, the southern cone and Argentina. 2 ABOUT THE TRAGEDY OF CULTURE As Simmel described, culture is elevated through a paradox, in which, as it grows, we need to achieve our ends by roads that become increasingly complicated and have more stops and roundabout ways. Man is an indirect being, and the more cultured, the more indirect he is .... The multiplicity and increasing complications brought about by elevated lifestyles do not allow the series desire, means, and end. They transform the intermediary element into a plurality, in which the effective means is produced by another means, and this one, in turn, by another, until that incalculable complication appears: the shackling of practical activities in which individuals of mature cultures live. 3 PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 2006