Education and Democracy:

the challenges of Public Universities

Abstract

The article exposes some scenarios of current societies regarding the universalization of the capitalist system through the imposition of a monocultural and productivist model (Vandana Shiva; Claude Levi-Strauss; Isabelle Stengers). Within this process, formal education and academic management of knowledge and science have distanced themselves from their noblest ideals as regards the integral formation of citizens: the culture of intelligence and creativity to imagine and build a fairer world happen and marked by the diversity of ways of being and living. Only by rejecting the business-productivist model, that compromises the radical imagination (Nuccio Ordine; Norval Baitello Júnior), public universities will be able to find the place that distinguishes them from university-companies. Public universities can and must overcome the exclusively technical-scientific process of market formation that leads to a regression of democracy (Edgar Morin).