ABSTRACT
The prior two chapters have shown how education can transform society, but in very different directions. In Chapter 6, I described some of the ways in which the neoliberal agenda, coupled with neoconservative and populist religious impulses, creatively connects education to a very conservative vision of society. Here students, educational institutions, churches, and communities are indeed mobilized. But the transformations that occur actually support policies that are less than progressive to say the least. However, in Chapter 5, Luis Armando Gandin and I also detailed a very different reality. In this reality, the aims and processes of educational democratization are closely connected to a project of democratization in the larger society. This had substantial effects on the norms and values that permeated the institutions, on people’s identities, on the knowledge that was considered legitimate and that was taught, on the role of schools as class, race, and gender sorting devices, on the formation of policies and the governance of the school, on the role of the state, on community mobilizations, and on the role of the teacher as both teacher and taught. Affective equality joined with structural transformations. Even with the changes of governing parties in Porto Alegre, much remains that is progressive.
