Paulo Freire and his legacy for democratic education: a dialogic analysis of the stolen portrait of brazilian educators

Abstract

Currently, the word democracy is masked through depoliticized meanings faced by market demands and the contemporary geopolitical conjuncture, involving actions of social coercion being operationalized through mechanisms by which state disciplinary power is exercised. Thus, it is necessary to inquire about how it acts in the sense of building “truths”, “myths”, correlating them to the problem of knowledge construction. In this sense, it is evident that Freire's thought becomes current, in view of his cry for a fair, conscious and democratic society. In view of this, following political and socioeconomic transformations arising from a globalized productive paradigm, Brazilian educators find it difficult to understand the relationship between education and economy. In this environment, questions about the school's attributions and the functions performed by the teacher come into force. Furthermore, it can be said that in Brazil, teacher representations are constructed from voices and discourses that do not emanate from educators, but come from other professionals, such as journalists, economists and politicians. This means that society is immersed in a process of globalization that tends to adopt an educational policy by the parameters of neoliberal capitalist ideology, which makes Paulo Freire's thought essential, in his legacy for a democratic education and in his dialogic pedagogy, reiterating its importance due to the attacks it has suffered in the face of the policy of intolerance that has devastated the country, and which intensified after the 2018 elections.