Decalogue of the school as a space for social protection: consolidating the social function of the school as a democratizing space

Abstract

The paper systematizes structuring elements of school as an environment strengthened as a space for rights protection and diversity appreciation, which reveals such understanding is a condition of its own constitution as a formative space towards empowerment of children and teenagers, and how it allows their transformation into subjects of rights and protagonists of their own stories. The text aims to reaffirm the premise of human rights education as a condition for strengthening of social relations based on social inclusion and participative democracy, as it is a process which gives a new meaning the school secular social function, based on the rationalization of hegemonic formative contents which are suitable to leading interests. The paper results from document analysis of the main normative references of Brazilian educational research post-Constitution, as well as bibliographic analysis which considers authors who have researched about and argued for human values, social inclusion as political democracy, authors such as Touraine (1992; 1994; 1996; 1998), Estévão (2004), Cury (2005) e Freire (1992). The analyzes carried out allow a thesis defense according which the school is taken as a political and contradictory institution, due to even more contradictories reproducing accounts, therefore the same school may be placed in a privileged spot for all this dynamic, since it forms people universally for occupying political spaces and for bringing up to the State their plural demands as the very content of public policies.