Basic human and social rights and the democratic school on the European (semi)periphery

Abstract

This article¹ is part of a recently published case study of a school (with youth from 10 to 16 years of age) located in the Northern Coastal region of Portugal. The title of this case study is Escola e Aprendizagem para o Trabalho num Pais da (Semi)periferia Europeia (Stoer & Araújo, 1992). On the basis of 4 years of participative school-based research, carrying out what one author has termed «critical ethnography» (Anderson, 1989), it is argued in this study that mass schooling in Portugal is simultaneously in the process of consolidation and crisis. In this article one defends the idea that this fact (by promoting within the school other attitudes, values and beliefs than those normally identified with mass schooling) may provide the basis for promoting educational change in Portugal.

^{1 Paper presented at the VIII World Congress of Comparative Education, Prague, Czechoslovakia, July 8-14, 1992.}