Abstract
The downward revision of certain citizenry rights, such as social and labor rights, in contexts of structural adjustment and economic crisis, is rekindling the struggles for recognition, not exactly as cultural or identity recognition as one has observed with intensity in the last two decades, but in terms of legal recognition, that is, the respect for the expectations that can be met because they are legally protected. Education, faithful to its vocation to defend the integrity of the human person, at least since the Enlightment statement of such value, cannot be unaware of such fights for legal recognition. It certainly has a role to play in these disputes, but which one and how? This is the subject of the this investigation which leads us to demand three objectives: the first one consists of associating education with the fights for recognition, calling for that effect the “moral grammar of the social conflicts” by Honneth; the second, linking education to empowerment, seeks to show that the latter, notwithstanding interpretative dissentions, may be interesting to define the involvement of education in the struggles for legal recognition; the third and final objective consists of outlining the main articulations of such role in terms of empowerment. The research, by combining Honneth´s framework with the review of the literature on diagnostics of “legal recession” that we have been going through in several contexts, namely in the European countries more strongly affected by the austerity policies as a model or paradigm to respond to the crisis of Euro, of the public debt and the of welfare State, leads us to conclude that the “era of rights” is under threat and that education, by means of those well-defined practices of empowerment, may be strategic in potentiating individual and social reactions to the revival of this kind of threat.
Education; Empowerment; Recognition; Struggles