A study of Juergen Habermas's communicative rationality: An educational interpretation

The purpose of this study is to find an educational basis of the conception of rationality from the perspective based on Jurgen Habermas's idea of communicative rationality. The study starts from a critical review of the instrumental aspect of rationality first conceptualized by Max Weber's analysis of modern Western society's rationalization process and continues to criticize Weber's framework from Habermas's standpoint presented in his linguistic reconstruction of the Enlightenment rationality. Habermas's criticism of Weber's view reflected on the thesis of societal rationalization is concentrated on the point that Weber's construction of the rationalization process shows the rationalization process of modern society only at its institutional level without giving as much attention to the rationalization process of people's communicative action at the level of their ordinary life-world and for this reason it eventually narrows down the meaning of rationality into a conceptually incomplete form. Based on this view, the study suggests to take Habermas's notion of communicative rationality as a reference point from which to organize educational activities and evaluate their "being educational" in classroom situation. The interactions between teachers and students dealing with the school curriculum can be understood as communicative actions in the sense that they are all forms of argumentation claiming certain types of validity regarding the knowledge under consideration and that the success of such interactions depends on the rational understanding of those validity claims by both sides of the participants. The notion of communicative rationality also provides a normative basis upon which those interactions can be judged as being educational or not; if the interactions between teachers and students are to be educational the only purpose they aim to achieve should be the mutual understanding of the bodies of knowledge being taught and learned only from the viewpoint of how well and relevantly the arguments are made, not with a view to certain external goals that can only be contingently accomplished by instrumentalizing the communicative understanding of the knowledge.