The concept of Democracy tensioned between Libertarian Pedagogy and Democratic School Management

Abstract

This article aims to understand the displacements of meanings of Democracy between the concepts of Libertarian Pedagogy and Democratic School Management. The first is set within critical and anarchist studies and the second is based on a liberal-capitalist paradigm. The incompatibility between such constructs becomes surmountable from the emergence of the notion of Social Management. Thus, a literature review of academic materials available on Google Scholar with “libertarian pedagogy” and “social management” parameters was conducted. As a result, it was realized that the theoretical construction on the pillars of libertarian pedagogy and the criticism of Democratic School Management through Social Management involve the reconfiguration of the concept of democracy in its three main aspects: freedom, equality and fraternity. In the most common sense of Democratic School Management, democracy has a bourgeois and liberal character, consisting of freedom for exploitation, equality by standardization and fraternity between equals. Democracy proposed by Libertarian Pedagogy, by contrast, understands freedom with spontaneity, social equality with respect to individual differences and collective solidarity with shared resources.