Liberating Education: The Dissident Voice of a Good Enough School

Abstract

This study develops a concept of the Good Enough School inspired by Freire’s (1997) Liberating Education and Dussel’s (1977) Philosophy of Liberation in response to policies and practices that reduce the focus of education to a mere performance on national and international tests, and the search for first places on rankings. We criticize educational models that minimize important educational dimensions, such as qualification (learning of formal knowledge), humanization, democratization and transcendentalism, that are essential to the construction of another model of social and economic development. The Good Enough School is based on the ethics of otherness and assumes the importance of decolonization processes in the ways of being, thinking and acting. It is oriented towards dealing with personal, social, local and global challenges through potential spaces (Winnicott, 1975) that ensure the care of children and young people who were not socialized in a good enough environment, and spaces of appearance (Arendt, 2007), which ensure the political exercise of citizenship and democracy to the school community.