The New Social Contract: A Brief Map for Educators

Abstract

We have sought to show how education is part of this scenario in which life is developed in a double manner: it is conditioned by the power relations and makes this world work by training people to occupy various places in society, but it also carries a tradition of creating different scenarios. This dimension is often forgotten. Thus, for example, the theory of the tabula rasa of Locke or of the natural goodness of man, of Rousseau, is studied as individual attributes of the children, without any relationship with the visions and political projects that were at play at the time and that cause impacts still in our days. With this, education loses its power as political action.

Well, if I am not mistaken, if I am not incapable of adding two and two, then, among so many other necessary and indispensable discussions, it is urgent, before it becomes too late, to promote a world wide debate about democracy and the couses of its decadence, about the intervention of citizens in political and social life, about the relations between the States and world financial economic power, about that which affirms and negates democracy, about the right to happiness and to a dignified existence, about the miseries and the hopes of humanity, or speaking with less rhetoric, of the simple human beings which make it up, one by one and all together. There is no worse deceit than when one deceives oneself. And this is the way we are living.

—José Saramago, “Da justiça à democracia, passando pelos sinos” [From Justice to Democracy, Passing through the Bells”—article written for the closing of the II World Social Forum