ABSTRACT
Education is a political act. Its non-neutrality demands from educators that they take it on as a political act and that they consistently live their progressive and democratic or authoritarian and reactionary past or also their spontaneous, uncritical choice, that they define themselves by being democratic or authoritarian. Permissiveness, which at times gives the impression of leaning toward freedom, ends up working against it. The authoritarianism of the minister, of the president, of the general, of the school principal, or of the university professor is the same as the authoritarianism of the worker, of the lieutenant or the sergeant, or of the doorman of the building. Any ten centimeters of power between people easily becomes a thousand meters of power and of arbitrary judgment. The democratic school, progressively postmodern and not postmodernly traditional and reactionary, has a great role to play in present-day Brazil.
