Antonio Xavier Tomo

The Paradoxes of Democratic Identity in Education Antonio Xavier Tomo

The fundamental issue addressed in the book concerns the possibility of educating the modern child to freedom by forcing him or her to be educated in a school, i.e. through compulsory schooling. To answer this question, we turned to Emilio de Rousseau and discovered that there is a certain re-encounter of freedom and equality of man in the civil state. A reunion marked in the Social Contract in which the general will is respected. Man is obliged by the contract to replace instinct with justice in his behaviour and attributes morality to his actions. And as a result of the impact of Rousseau's ideas, we have Renaut who plays the critical and continuing role of Rousseau. In fact, he is critical of the idea that children need autonomy, the capacity to govern themselves and therefore should not belong to the adult world. This thought, according to Renaut, has put an end to the imprisonment of minors, that is to say, to the tyranny of his group. Moreover, deprived of the possibility, which could open, on the one hand, their intelligence and, on the other, their originality, to escape to any other world.