Description: The text presents considerations of Condorcet and Adorno about the themes emancipation, majority and autonomy; it argues that these matters proceed from preoccupations alike and are important in order to think about present educational matters. It's about discussing with these authors with the aim of answer the following questions: how to think, in a broad way, the objectives and possibilities of education? What conditions must be assured so that the education is not turned into a way of domination? Why did the totalitarian regimes produce, in a supposed enlightened society, the degrees of ideological domination and violence, which delineates them? In which terms can the education contribute, in constitutional democratic societies, to the expansion and the consolidation of notions and political ideals of liberty, equality and enlightenment in all aspects of human life? Methodology: This text discusses, from Condorcet and Adorno, political-philosophical issues which are related to educational matters in contemporary societies. Conclusions: For Condorcet the public instruction may favour the progresses of the human mind, assure the freedom and avoid those losses caused by the subservience and intolerance among men; the freedom of mind offers conditions to a real improvement of the men, an alleviation of their customs, to what opposes to all that causes unfair suffering and destruction. The philosopher emphasises the importance of a rational determination of aims from moral and ethic foundations. The illuminist tradition, despite undesired historical developments in the last two centuries, hasn't lost its sense. Adorno notably strengthens this in his lectures in defence of an education towards emancipation. The critic thinking demands one to take sides of liberty even though this seems "impotent" in face of the great historical march. The hope printed in the light principles is fundamental to the political-philosophical discourse that advocates conditions of dignity to human life in the world. For Adorno, the main demand of education is to stop the repetition of events of intolerance and extermination; the education must favour a critical posture, which establish spaces to reflection; the only effective power against terror comes from autonomy (power to reflection and self-determination). Condorcet and Adorno bet in an education preoccupied with a critical transforming thinking, with the knowledge and practise of the rights (citizenship), with freedom and equality, with contradiction and resistance. At last, like Kant, understand that the education must assure spaces in which the human reason can be practised in a broad way aiming at the equal capability that all humans have of thinking and relating politically under meanings that are not the ones of domination. Spaces, these, that spread values such as tolerance, respect to autonomy and the physical-psychological integrity of mankind, recognizing such values like central elements of the contemporary sociability.