The history of the modern public school, its contemporary configuration and social function

Abstract

Public education is not an invention of modern times, but the school as we conceive it today – universal, secular, unpaid and obligatory – is a recent institution, with its principles discussed and/or redefined initially during the period of the French Revolution, consolidating later in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when some countries reorganized and implemented their national education systems. From the historical notion of the development and constitution of the public school that we currently have, we think about the conception of public school that we understand. That is, understanding the meaning of the "public" that characterizes the school as such and how it has developed historically. The school, as we know it, is the result of a settling of accounts: with the absolute power of the State; with the dominant ideology centered on the metaphysical view of the world; and finally, with the conception of human inequality as something determined by nature. Even though, at various moments, resistance movements have claimed and claim the development of a popular public school in fact, this confrontation is still necessary to create a public, secular, free, obligatory, high quality and disinterested school. From Gramsci we emphasize the importance of an intellectual movement that diffuses new world conceptions capable of raising the civil conscience of the population and producing new behaviors that not submit to the direction of the capitalist State.