MICHAEL WALZER'S COMMUNITARIANISM AND THE INTERFACES WITH EDUCATION

In pedagogic research, it is common for the articulation between philosophy and education to happen from broad conceptual assumptions, which is usually called ideal of education. In this sense, other areas should be given the responsibility of investigating subjects related to school education, such as curriculum or evaluation. This Thesis aims at putting into question that assumption, dealing with the idea of a philosophy arising from school, a connected philosophy. For this, the communitarian philosophy of Michael Walzer is used as a theoretical support. Communitarianism, as a political philosophy, opposes to philosophical liberalism, as it sets that good life should be put into perspective in every specific context, and from one’s everyday practice. However, communitarian philosophy does not have a unified doctrinal body, for attaining the aims of this text (an articulation between the school and philosophy) Walzer’s work was used along with his several concepts to support the idea of a good school based on democratic citizenship, participation and protagonism of children and teenagers. Walzer’s communitarianism is advocated as having as its paradigm the concept of practical philosophy, and in this sense all other subjects explored by the author, such as pluralism, civil society, tolerance, distributive justice, community, social criticism and morality, are all based on the ideal of a reality-focused philosophy. That basic perception is therefore adopted for the formulation of twenty propositions that consolidate an idea of communitarianism as focused on education or – more appropriately – as focused on the school, aiming at offering alternatives to an ever-growing scenario of community detachment (specially urban)