Entre a Educação e a Organização

Problematizando a Burocracia Escolar

Abstract

This theoretical essay aims to bring some reflections arising from the daily routine of school management, prioritizing the dialogue with some categories that emerged from the study of a classic, such as Merton (1978), especially in his book “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality”. Although Education is a rational social action oriented towards values, the gradual institutionalization of mass schools required that educational action become an instrumental action, more linked to technical-functional rationality. As a result, schools – and their employees – also became bureaucratized and brought some tensions into the educational goals, that, in the text, are analyzed based on some significant cases. As a result, we draw attention to the need to rethink school bureaucracy, seeking to reorient school action towards educational purposes, in order to make the school a space where democratic values ​​can be experienced by all.