Abstract
Our scope is to show how democracy has been trivialized as a concept and, more worryingly, as a mystified practice of consented servitude, which supposedly would bring to its very end. In fact, for the emblematic occidental societies, democracy has, at the best, been reduced to a consumerist way of life, under the capitalist liberal order, and the facade of a 'spectacularized' electoral process. Overall, the word 'democracy' is currently used to mask different forms of authoritarianism, from which nor even western societies escape. In such context, as to the promises of democracy for schools' systems, we see nothing but a bureaucratic centralization, allowing no more than an instrumental autonomy of power of execution through which the players only enjoy a 'voluntary servitude' to the neoliberal naturalized ideology of efficiency, competitiveness and pseudo meritocracy. We thus conclude by suggesting possibilities of resistance and the empowerment of the subject.
Highlights
In a recent chronicle, José Gil (2014), a very wary of our times Portuguese philosopher, exposes how democracy has been trivialized as a concept and, more worryingly, as a practice, which means that it has come to an “end”
Regarding the emblematic occidental democracies, at the best, democracy has been reduced to a “spectularized” electoral process, within which problems and arguments are replaced by the performative mediatic exercise of politicians
How right was Fukuyama (1992), when he predicted the “End of History” and the coming of the last man corresponding to the triumph of western liberal democracy and liberal economic capitalism? Regarding the “End of History”, as such, the quoted author understood it as the achievement of mankind’s end point of ideological evolution with the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government
Summary
José Gil (2014), a very wary of our times Portuguese philosopher, exposes how democracy has been trivialized as a concept and, more worryingly, as a practice, which means that it has come to an “end”. We can watch a blatant bureaucratic centralization, corresponding to: a) an instrumental autonomy of execution and b) a voluntary servitude to performativity and competitiveness without regard to the dense complexity of a successful education In this scenario that makes imperative the subordination of the political dimension to the very laws of the market, the neoliberal model promotes a new training schedule for schools that could render measurable and comparable their productivity results, in order to justify the investments made in the education sector. The author comes to figure out that the emergence of cyberspace as an alternative public sphere could mean growing "depoliticization" perpetrated by the neoliberal economistic rationality that sets the digital space, while conditioning its use Do we accept it or not, the fact is that new technologies have the operational capability of “pre-formating” the modalities of access to information, making falsely spontaneous the vision of the social world. If these modalities can be a potential space for a collective expression, and operationalize a hermeneutic of democratic significance, they can cannibalize collective projects, reinforcing the multiple devices and propellers of voluntary servitude
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