ABSTRACT
This chapter recognizes that we cannot understand education apart from what happens in other sectors of our world and our society, with which it is inextricably linked. We adopt a broad framework to identify what threatens education itself as an ethical-political platform of society and that underlie the discourse not only of great politics, but also the subjectivities, daily life of education and schools. We identified four major real threats. The practice of managerialization that is translated in the school by emphasizing the mechanisms of control and management. The conversion of education and schools, through financialization into merchandise. The reduction of educational processes to mere learnification and the profound simplification of the complexity of every pedagogical and educational act, through the double mechanism of standardization and quantification. We conclude by trying to answer, briefly, the old question, already formulated by Lenin, “What to do?” emphasizing that education is inevitably a political (and not a technical) act, that education must insist on being the public space of compulsory associativity, that schools have to put life and care at the center of pedagogy, defending inclusive citizenship and cultural transformation. All this, we point out, will only be possible through a radical pedagogy.
