Abstract
This study develops a concept of the Good Enough School inspired by Freire’s (1997) Liberating Education and Dussel’s (1977) Philosophy of Liberation in response to policies and practices that reduce the focus of education to a mere performance on national and international tests, and the search for first places on rankings. We criticize educational models that minimize important educational dimensions, such as qualification (learning of formal knowledge), humanization, democratization and transcendentalism, that are essential to the construction of another model of social and economic development. The Good Enough School is based on the ethics of otherness and assumes the importance of decolonization processes in the ways of being, thinking and acting. It is oriented towards dealing with personal, social, local and global challenges through potential spaces (Winnicott, 1975) that ensure the care of children and young people who were not socialized in a good enough environment, and spaces of appearance (Arendt, 2007), which ensure the political exercise of citizenship and democracy to the school community.
Highlights
School inequality in Brazil has decreased in the last years, but it still constitutes an obstacle to sustainable development and equality promotion
There is the understanding that empty spaces are a fundamental part of education as they allow for the participation of the school community in experiences of humanization, democratization, qualification; and transcendentalism
The Good Enough School has an important place in the lives of children and youth, since it offers, simultaneously, spaces that encourage the political exercise of citizenship
Summary
School inequality in Brazil has decreased in the last years, but it still constitutes an obstacle to sustainable development and equality promotion. Students’ performance goals have been used to measure the pedagogical work of schools and the quality of the educational process without This type of thinking emphasizes the idea that state schools are incompetent in teaching, whereas private schools are places of good, efficient teaching. It helps create a climate favourable to projects associated with the privatization of education, central to neoliberal educational policies In this context, this paper addresses the following question: Instead of aiming at the first places in national and international rankings, in a tireless and blind search for being the best school or the perfect school, would it not be more desirable for a school to be just good enough? The participation in spaces of management at both local and national levels has emphasized the urge to put schools closer to the real world and to real life: to fight neoliberal educational policies that produce maladies and teachers’ and students’ alienation; demoralization of public schools; the emphasis on the importance and role of teachers in the fight for privileged spaces of education by practising their teaching in the classroom, and getting involved, themselves, in arenas of school governance
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