Trabalho, educação e democracia: tendências do debate sobre democratização da política educacional brasileira nos últimos trinta anos

Abstract

The general objective of this study is to perform a critical review of the literature on the democratization of education policy in Brazil, from the transition period of the Constituent Assembly in the 1980s to the present day. And, specifically, to identify the theoretical-political tendencies that are orienting the reflections on the educational democratic management. The productions of the main authors of this theme in the country – dating from the mentioned period – are analysed. The chosen authors are the most used in the research of the Brazilian postgraduate in the last five years, with emphasis in the education area. The basis of this thesis is Karl Marx's social theory. Being the categories work, education and democracy form a central dialectical unit to research. For the analysis of how the concentration of political power occurs historically in education policy in Brazil, other theoretical elements gain importance, such as: social question, consensus and coercion, hegemony, neoliberalism, social policy, state and social classes. Considering the ontology of social being, the study deals with the main socio-historical processes that contemporaneously conform both liberal-bourgeois democracy and school-based education in the country, mediated by the capitalist mode of production. This is the general framework that sustains the reflections on the notion of educational democratic management. And that, from the dialectical method, made possible the elaboration of the thesis of radical democratic management. The results indicate the existence of four tendencies. On the one hand is the characteristic of business management reason and, at the opposite extreme, the commitment to the counter-hegemonic rupture in education. The conclusion indicates the need for further deepening in the process of solidification of an antagonistic educational project, articulated with the movement of overcoming the capitalist order.