Valores culminantes: Educação para a morte / Educação para a vida

Abstract

Both the needs for an axiological education and for a hierarchy of values, due to the absence of a theoretical framework, lead to the search of an existential and universal criterion that defi nes “culminant” values. In other words, values put into a sovereign place and that once concretised provide feelings of completion allowing one to get over internal and external diffi culties developing a progressive consciousness of self-identity and of the nature of the links that connect one to the others. It is proposed death, the permanent end of all functions of life in an organism, as a criterion that allows for the defi nition of two ways of interpreting education: the education for the death and the education for the life. Life as an option is a “culminant” value and belongs to a meta-rational perspective of education. Such a perspective demands a relation, in the field of Theory of Education, between a rational organisation of educational concepts and the educator’s explicit basic believes.