Abrindo os portões da escola: a participação efetiva da comunidade no ambiente escolar

Abstract

The aim of this research is to analyse whether there is any community participation in public schools, bearing in mind the principles of democratic administration and education for citizenship. We assume that the participation of the community in the school is part of the notion of the right to and exercise of citizenship itself, and is one of the basic conditions for the development of a democratic society. To carry out this analysis, our initial approach was the conception of democracy and citizenship in the world of capital and that of the State as a general institution which controls the ideology of domination, so as to establish links between education and politics. The second step was to attempt to place Brazil at the centre of the discussion, trying to understand how the Brazilian State was formed and how Brazil decided to modernise itself in the 1990s within the neo-liberal paradigm. Finally we present the founding principles of the proposal of democratic administration in the dialectics between the legal determinations and the basis of democratic administration originating in social movements in defence of public schools, discussing the concepts of democracy, citizenship and participation, in counterpart to the proposals of administration by management. To this end, research was carried out in two public schools in the municipal network of Juiz de Fora – MG from 2009 to 2010. The analysis of the content of the documentation of the schools, together with the observations and the analysis of the content of the interviews carried out with the subjects, formed the basis of our research. The instruments that were pointed to as the most important in the democratisation of administration were the direct election of school principals and the presence of school councils as the highest representative and deliberative organs at school level. Apart from these mechanisms, the others pointed to were the practices of dialogue and participation in the day-to-day running of the school, from the micro-space (within the classroom) to wider spaces (outside the classroom).