Schooling for Democracy: Toward a Critical Utopianism

Abstract

ions; to living together in harmony rather than gregariousness; to dialogue rather than mutism; to praxis rather than law and order; to men who organize themselves reflectively for action rather than men who are organized for passivity; to creative and communicative language rather than prescriptive signals; to reflective challenges rather than domesticating slogans; and to values that are lived rather than myths that are imposed. (cited in Giroux and McLaren 1997: 150) What unifies Bloch and Freire in their difficult challenge of transforming schools into more democratic spaces is their active refusal to link hope to a past eschatological event or to a finite historical moment. Hope for changes, improvements, solidarity, and social justice is the guiding force, a force that is grasped a pulsating latency of possibility contained in the unity of the immanent and transcendent. As such, hope is to be conscripted by social agents in order to contest the gangsterism of the spirit so common in this era of consumer capitalism, and to fill the empty space of postmodern nihilism (Giroux and McLaren 1997: 157). We understand utopias, after Freire and Bloch, as providing the conceptual horizon for the development of democratic schooling. This horizon of possibility could also be described as a educational In the next section we examine a recent educational reform effort in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, read against this concept of critical educational utopia. Critical Educational Utopias of the Concrete: Porto Alegre, Brazil: EscoLa