School in the register of fantasy

Abstract

The fantasy of the perfect school has boosted the modern school since its beginnings, resulting in several school figures. The article focuses on some of these figures, starting with the one that appears as a school-machine and that, later, when human nature emerges as a limit to what is related to the machine, it gives rise to new school figures. It is argued that the ideal of the perfect school present in the pedagogical discourses resulted in diverse ways of thinking and making schooling effective, without necessarily making the school unfeasible for its role in the transmission of a certain cultural legacy and as a socializing agency of the new generations. However, in the last decades, there has been an important change, perceptible in Brazil since the 1990s, when quantitative evaluations started to be used to clearly and precisely define the degree of perfection of the school, thus tending to make school education unfeasible itself. Since then, what has become more pronounced is the tendency to negate the necessary distance from that ideal and, therefore, the more the school seeks to achieve this consummated school, with no faults, the more it weakens itself and is consumed.