School and educational policies: uncertain places of childhood and citizenship

Abstract

In recent years, various reports with diagnoses and recommendations presented by international agencies have exercised tremendous influence on educational policies in various countries. In Portugal, the very notion of reform has come to be abandoned, and considered incongruent with the urgency and agility of the decision making processes that seek to counter the “backwardness” described by these reports. This has caused the implementation of quick measures, based on a logic of rationalization, particularly the closing of small schools located in rural areas and the Full Time School Program, which reveal the dominance of a logic of client satisfaction in detriment to a logic of citizens’ rights. This article maintains that these measures have denied citizenship rights to rural populations and in particular to children, because, upon intensifying the traditional school mode, the children tend to be seen only as students and future citizens and not as children and citizens in the present. That is, the school tends to be seen as the educational space for citizenship and not as the space for citizenship itself.