Curriculum and emancipating educative action: political and epistemological implications

Abstract

This essay aims to look into the conditions of possibility to the emergence and feasibility of counter-hegemonic educative actions, within public sector, in occidental representative democracies. Since Durkheim’s anti-individual epistemological intuitions, which oppose itself to the modern dichotomy State-Market and disqualify the structuring potential of state sphere as well as the private one, we stand for, in a dialogue with Michael Apple, that the school environment, to be seen as a “sui-generis life source” (Durkheim), must denaturalize the functional relations of the public sector has with the mentioned spheres. Such a perception has effects on the curricular matter since, requesting the establishment of alternative relational chains, opens the school environment to collective popular interests and knowledge (not having in the individual the receptive unity of educational action). Dialoguing, in opposition to the rationalist project, with Ernesto Laclau e Rui Canário, we defend that the curriculum must not have pre-fixed aims, but, on the contrary, contingent ones, which come from the vicissitudes of educative action.